STBYM Live: Weird Science in the Windy City

Robert, Christian and Joe transport you back to the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893, when the neoclassical architecture of Daniel Burnham’s White City loomed on the shores of Lake Michigan, Nikola Tesla’s alternating current powered thousands of decorative incandescent lamps, and the original Ferris Wheel gave visitors from all around the world a view from the top. Join them for a live C2E2 2017 discussion on the great wheel, the Parliament of World Religions and the H. H. Holmes Murder Castle.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, and we have a special
episode for you today. Uh. This is a live recording
from C to E two the Chicago Comics and Entertainment Expo.

(00:25):
We were just there a couple of weeks ago. We
presented this a wonderful talk where we talked about the UH,
the the Columbian Exposition there in Chicago. We talked about
the UH, the origins of the Ferris Wheel, the Parliament
of World Religions, and of course the H. H. Holmes
murder House. Now, just a word of warning, the audio
is a little crisp here because this is a live recording.
But the the episode is great that the discussion is wonderful,

(00:48):
so we definitely wanted to share it with you. But
if it's not your cup of tea, don't fret. The
next episode we'll be back to the studio recording process
as usually usual. Alright, so without further ado, let's go
to the live show. All right. Well, hey, welcome to

(01:12):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb,
and I'm Christian Saga and I'm Joe McCormick, and we
are the hosts of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a
podcast about science, culture, the human mind, and the weirdness
of reality. So I want to start off with a question.
How many people here are from out of town not
from Chicago? Okay, So we've got a good amount of people,

(01:33):
all right, like maybe half. We're gonna keep you in
mind for later. This is going to be important because
we're gonna be talking about Chicago's hotel past. Well when
we're honored to be here at C two e two
and they asked us, they said, hey, maybe you could
put something together that's a little bit Chicago theme. So
we thought about it, and uh, you know, we decided, well, okay,

(01:56):
Chicago World Fair, that's gonna that's gonna be what we
want to focus in on here. And uh, we decided
that to really dive into this topic, though, we need
to take a paleo futurist journey into the past of
this city. Right, So I guess we need to start
by thinking about Chicago as a city. Um, and I
want to put forward that the history of American population

(02:17):
growth as this country has increased in numbers over the
centuries is a history of urbanization um and that rapidly
accelerated in the eighteen hundreds. For example, in eighteen forty,
the U. S population was about seventeen million people. About
eighty nine percent of those people at that time were rural,
living out in the country on farms, not in cities.

(02:38):
Only about ten percent we're living in cities. Just about
fifty years later, in nine the U. S population sixty
three million, and by then thirty five percent of Americans
are living in cities. So over the course of the
century we see a rapid uptick in the way people
are are moving in to crowd into dense quarters and
come to where a lot of the new jobs are

(03:00):
the new jobs made available by technology and manufacturing and
by transportation like steam power. But Chicago is a particularly
crucial part of this urbanization story. I want to go
back to those years eighteen forty and eighteen nine, eighteen forty.
Anybody want to guess what the population of Chicago was, Uh,
ten thousand people. Let the people guess. Shout him out,

(03:25):
Let the people speak one point five million. We've heard
it was. Chicago in eighteen forty had forty people in it.
Wrigley Field as a seating capacity of about forty one thousand,
so it could fit about nine eighteen forty Chicago's in it.
Or to give you, to give you like a context,

(03:47):
that's here and now, right now at C two E two,
there's between twenty and forty thousand people in this building.
So we've got eighteen forty Chicago beat. By eighteen eighty,
population of Chicago is up to five thousand. By eighteen
ninety it's up to one million. And you have to
imagine what it does to a place when the population

(04:10):
and the population density increases that rapidly. But by eighteen nineties,
Chicago would become the second biggest city in America, finally
beating out Philadelphia, but still behind New York. And by god,
Chicago wanted to be number one. Those of you from Chicago,
do you do you have New York hatred? Do you
have New York? Yeah? Like do you hate your piece? Uh?

(04:38):
And so I want to put forward that stepping into
Chicago in the eighteen nineties, if you were, say a
country farmer coming out of the rural areas and stepping
into Chicago in the eighteen nineties would have been kind
of like walking into the city or if we were
to walk into the city in Blade Runner. Uh. The
so part of this population explosion in the nineteen century

(05:00):
was fueled by immigration from all over Europe. So you
have Chicago flooded with people of diverse ethnic origins. Um
and this this may be very alien to people who had,
you know, never met people from all over Europe. Then
also you've got to think about technology. I would say
that Chicago at this time was a sort of techno
punk hallucination where you had this steam powered transport hub

(05:24):
and most importantly a center of industrialized meat production. So
so so was it like Blade Runner in that you
could buy like cloned animals on the street. Wouldn't that
be great? You know, we were talking on the way
over here. Another aspect of it is the sort of
layers of the city. How you see this vertical depth
in Blade Runner. This is more apparent in Chicago of today.

(05:45):
But like with the L train and UH and and
the way, when you're downtown, you you can almost feel
like you're inside when you're outside. Yeah, I think it's
it's more prevalent here than about any other city I
can think of off off in my head that I've
been to. Yeah, and in the Blade Runner analogy I
think is especially apt when anytime we're looking back in

(06:06):
time and we're trying to especially the last couple of centuries,
and trying to figure out what it was like, uh
to live in in that day, you you have to
think of it almost in sci fi terms, because the
only way to really get a handle on the fact that, yeah,
this was the this is the bleeding age, this was
this was this was this was the modern age. It

(06:26):
was it was the bleeding edge, literally and that it
was covered in pig blood um because it was the
city where hogs were slaughtered in process, but it was
also covered in cold dust, smog, steam, uh and rapidly electrifying.
I mean, this is a time when electricity is going
from a sort of rarefied novelty to being dispersed all
over urban areas. And so this is going to be

(06:48):
a crucial part of the story we tell today about
the World's Fair. But another thing is that Eastern cities
at the time would have looked back on Chicago in
the eighteen nineties as a sort of effed up backwater
like there there was there was a very snooty attitude
towards Chicago. That's like looking at it like like it

(07:10):
was just pumped up, like ban on technology and cash
and and pig blood and all of that great stuff,
but that it didn't really have the refined character and
culture makes an American city great. Bin with a backpack
full of pig blood just being injected into his body,
that sounds great. This is not the brain you carn't understand.

(07:31):
It's the it's the old band with the getting pumped up.
Uh So, rapid urbanization had factors that people found both
alluring and repulsive. And I want to explore one of
the people who found it repulsive. So in eighteen ninety three,
the French writer and publisher Octavouzon wrote a letter to
the periodical The American Architect and Building News, and he

(07:53):
was reporting on a recent visit he made to Chicago.
He'd actually been visiting the eighteen nine World's Fair that
we're gonna be talking about. And in talking about Chicago,
he he was writing about the prospect of leaving the city.
And this is an abridged quote. Built upon a mud
flat on the shore of a somber verdure less lake.
It was the noisy, furious, impulsive, brutal life which their

(08:17):
maneuvers its battalions, a life without soul and ideal business
business business. Is this not the real burden of the
raven and Pose poem? I don't believe it is. I think,
I think, probably think that he died in the street. Yeah, Baltimore, though,

(08:40):
Baltimore is a city with character. It's got old school class,
or at least they thought. But continuing us, quote, he's
on the train leaving Chicago, and he's very happy to
be leaving, he says. The next morning, raising the shade
of my compartment, I saw behind the glass a smiling
country unroll itself before nature, thus peaceful in sight of
the light mists, these mosses, these flowers opening in the sun.

(09:04):
I forgot the frightful nightmare of the departure from Chicago.
That Gordian city, so excessive, so satanic, so so yeah,
this was like hell raiser for this guy from France,
basically Chicago. Yeah, pin Head lived here. I really like
Gordian City. I don't. I don't. I think you guys
should embrace that here in the same way that a

(09:24):
lot of take it back, a lot of people from
Atlanta embraced Terminus, as is our alternate title. I think
that's only after the Walking Dead. But yeah, I don't
know if that actually works out that well, because to
be Gordian, I would think it would be hard to navigate.
So far, I found Chicago much easier to navigate than
most cities. Right, y'all, this is smart. Y'all have a grid.
Guys have great public transportation. We're from Atlanta. Try to

(09:47):
find your way around in Atlanta. Yet, well, they're all
little cattle trails that got convert anyway. I'm just saying
it's a great name. I'm that's not saying you're gonna
get lost. Okay, we got to make it to the fair. Okay. So,
as cities gathering, urbanization cities gathering, they tend to grow
up because where you're going to fit all those people, right,
You've got to expand into three dimensions. So uh so

(10:09):
driving into three dimensions. The urbanization trend was also tightly
linked to the development of high rise architecture and and
this new class of architects to design these tall buildings
that would pack in all these people in the new cities.
And this new class of architects included the people Daniel
Burnham and John Wellborn Route, who were also responsible for

(10:30):
buildings like the twenty one story Masonic Temple building in
Chicago pretty good name Satanic, Yeah, and the Rookery Building,
which is still standing today. I went and saw it yesterday. Robert,
you saw it, Christian? Did you see it yet? I
haven't been yet. I'm gonna try to go tomorrow. Well,
it's if you're in town. It's beautiful. You should go
in there. Take a look at the lobby. It's got
this non representative artistry on the architecture inside the lobby

(10:53):
that makes it look kind of like a mosque. It's
very beautiful. I love it. Um But anyway, so they
were designing these new type types of buildings, buildings that
went up into the sky, stuff people have never seen before.
And being a high rise architect in Chicago was a
difficult job because I don't know if anybody here has
ever tried to build in Chicago. Apparently the soil here
is just junk. It's uh, it's like a mud flat

(11:17):
that sinks down, and when you try to build, your
buildings will sink into the mud and shift. So they
had to come up with new technologies to build new
types of foundations that would anchor these buildings. They didn't
start leaning over halfway through construction. Um, so this really
is It's we don't often think about buildings as technological
organisms today, but they really are. These high rise buildings

(11:38):
were a monstrous achievement of science and technology. So we
get to eighteen ninety, we're getting to the fair. The
US Congress votes to host a World's Fair in eighteen
it's in celebration of does anybody want to guess Columbus
that guy because it's the Columbian right, Yes, So it

(12:01):
would be the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus's landing in
the New World. And who's going to get to host
the city? There's a big competition between cities. You have
New York wants to host it. All these cities want
to host I think St. Louis did, but wouldn't you
know it, Chicago, this satanic building building, the satanic city

(12:22):
built on quicksand gets to host the fair. And that,
I mean that's pretty cool to imagine, like, oh, this
city all these people thought was just a hellhole. Um,
and now we're going to bring the entire world there
and show them what's up. Show them what America can do.
So this is probably a good place to acknowledge one

(12:43):
of our key resources in researching this episode, which is
Eric Larson's excellent two thousand three nonfiction book White City.
So yeah, you haven't read it. That is a great book,
absolutely fabulous and one of one of the Mikey resources
and working in this And one of the points Eric
Larson made is that it's hard for us today, even
we got some cheers earlier for hating New York, but um,

(13:06):
it's hard for us today to understand the depth of
location based pride in the eighteen nineties that people, when
the reputation of their city was on the line, they
took that so seriously. And so fair is coming, you
gotta make it good. So there was an absolutely frantic
design and construction phase, and the fair opened finally in

(13:29):
May one. It began with a horrible flot because it
coincided almost perfectly with the panic of eighteen ninety three.
So imagine starting this World's Fair where you want to
bring everybody and show what your country can do, and
right then you get a depression. It's like if you're
at C two E two in two thousand eight, in
the economy. It is completely plummeted, and you couldn't buy

(13:49):
cosplay costumes right or worse, maybe worse. So in a
lot of ways, you could look at the fair as
kind of a financial failure, but in other ways, I
think we should look at it as one of the
coolest and most important events in American history. It was
this romantic, ecumenical, insane, science fiction assemblage of the spirit

(14:10):
of the American city, especially the soul of Chicago and
everything that Chicago embodied, everything angelic, everything satanic, And I mean,
how cool is this? They built a city within a city.
They built a city within a city on the shore
of Lake Michigan, and it lived for a year. It
was throughout the summer season while people came to the fair,

(14:30):
and then it disappeared into history, you know. And we've
been talking about this amongst ourselves as we've been researching it. Like,
I'm wondering, those of you who are from Illinois, did
you learn about the White City as you're growing up?
Was this like a point of pride from the various
places that we grew up in. I didn't hear about
it until I was until I read double in the

(14:51):
White City and this is this amazing thing in American
history that seems to get glossed over. Yeah, I feel
like you tend to learn more about your own states
world thing, right, Yeah, then you do about the about
You know, everyone wants to celebrate their own party, not
the great party of it. For me, it was the
tea party, but the old one. Uh, for us growing

(15:15):
up in Tennessee, what did we learn more like the
mini versatile uses of corn chips. Well, and of course
in Knox Fill we have the big golden globe with
the wigs in it. Yeah, with the wig tower. Was
that real? Or was that just the Simpsons? That? What?
The wig tower? There, wigs in it, the buildings there,
you have ruined reality for me. Okay, So each of

(15:38):
the three of us is going to focus on one
major aspect of the fair that we want to talk
about that we found especially interesting. But before we get
into that, we just wanted to give you a little
bit of the texture of the fair so you can
know what all is going on there. There's absolutely no
way we could explore everything that was happening at the
fair because it was I mean, it was the the
whole world in a in a in a single place,

(15:59):
it would be a possible, but to try to give
you a quick picture, one of the first things you'd
notice if you walk into the fair is probably the architecture. Now,
they had landscape architecture right from Frederick Law Olmstead, the
guy who designed Central Park in New York and a
lot of I mean a lot of times. If you
go to a city and you find a beautiful park
with greens and nice sloping contours and uh tastefully selected

(16:23):
plants and all that, you look it up designed by Olmstead. Yeah,
so are our big park back in our hometown of Atlanta.
Piedmont Park is an Olmstead park. That's pretty cool. It
is pretty cool. It's best when it's full of dogs,
exactly when they get away from their owners and they
come and get your hot dog. I'm not speaking from experience,

(16:44):
I don't, but yeah, but also building architecture, so um.
The person who is selected to head up the fair,
to be the czar of the fair and control all
of its machinations was Daniel Burnham. The architect I mentioned
earlier was responsible for the rookery uh, and he also
wanted the fair to be about building architecture. And this

(17:06):
is what led to the White City. We had the
image up earlier. It seems to be gone now, uh,
But this was this was a city built on the shore.
It was in Jackson Park on the shore of Lake Michigan,
and he invited architects from all over the place, all
the best architects in the country to come together and
build a city in the neo classical architecture style. So

(17:27):
if you're trying to picture that, think I think like
ancient Rome. Think columns and cornices and sort of like
the design you would find in the US capital, uh
and things like that. It suggests stateliness, power, pride, empire
uh and other various beautiful and evil things all wrapped
into one. But because they were on a really tight schedule,

(17:49):
they've been thinking about what are we going to paint
all the buildings that they just went all white, just
everything white. It just painted all white. Basically, it's like
they put the primer on it. It's like they got
their miniatures ready for the big game and they had
time for the primer, but not to really paint the army.
But hey, you know, you gotta that's a game. You
got a game that's a good way to think about
the White City, like a big game of Warhammer. Warhammer,

(18:13):
I guess it would. It's the future. The future is
those the emphasis here, right. Okay, So you've got the
White City and you're walking in there, and you try
to imagine going to this on like a hot summer
day with the sun beating down and all these white
buildings and then the sun reflecting off the lake. It
would be not only beautiful but probably literally hurt your eyes. Uh,

(18:34):
just all this is all this light, but you're so bright.
You gotta wear shades. Man, oh man, I'm like that
was the slogan at my college graduation. No way they
made us wear sunglasses. It was real silly. Anyway, who
embarrassing personal history? We don't do that enough. Anyway. By night,

(18:56):
you would you would witness another one of the fairest marvels,
which is electric lighting. Now, electric lighting was had already
existed at this point, but it wasn't fully adopted everywhere,
and so they had enormous amounts of electric light going
on at this fair more than a hundred and twenty
thousand incandescent electric lamps, seven thousand arc lights. George Westinghouse

(19:16):
the guy who held the rights to Nicola Tesla's Alternating
Current was the one who got the contract to electrify
the Fair, and this actually played a big role in
getting Alternating Current AC accepted as the new standard over
Edison's d C. I'm sure y'all we got fans of
the current wars out here. Yeah, we have. We have
a couple of episodes about that stuff. These guys in particular,

(19:37):
did a really great episode about the uh, the religious
aspects of electricity. Yeah, if you want to go check
that out in our back catalog. What is it called
Early Days of Electricity. It's about how a lot of
people used to think electricity was magic and holy and
they wrote poems about it and then it got really boring.
Around the same time they started electrocuting people in the
electric chair. So the Fairy used three times as much

(20:02):
electricity as the entire city of Chicago. This is definitely
a technological revolution. Um. More random curiosities from the Fair.
I just want to mention a few real quick. The
future of weaponry. The largest artillery gun ever built up
to that time, by the Fritz, by the Fritz, by
the German gun. Yeah, while he was the Fritz. He

(20:23):
was Fritz Krupp, the German gun god who made artillery weapons.
So this was the biggest one, every twenty seven tons.
It was capable of shooting a one ton shell. Krupp
claimed up to a range of sixteen miles, and people
nicknamed it Krup's baby or Crup's monster. And I think

(20:44):
this is interesting because you get a kind of preview
of some of the carnage that's going to come with
the changing technological world. And just I guess with twenty
five years from then, once we get to World War One,
the first really true artillery campaign. So this is like
the moat up of their time, the what the moab?
The mo Yeah pretty much. Yeah. And then didn't they

(21:05):
like that you told me this. They would fire the
shells at targets here in Chicago, right, so they could
demonstrate its power. Thankfully, they did not try to fire
the gun inside the city. They had these destroyed targets.
It was almost like warnings. They had these destroyed targets
to be these sheets of eighteen inch thick steel that
are just blown to smithereens by the gun. Uh, they

(21:26):
claimed the gun had done this. No nobody really saw it. Happen.
I guess we have to assume it worked. But the
fair had a Hall of Electricity. Apparently there was just
an ungodly noise inside. Can you imagine all this nineteenth
century electricity uh display? So Nicola Tesla had all these
devices there to show off how electricity worked, induction motors, um,

(21:47):
you know. Can you imagine the whirring and the clattering
and the static discharge crashing like there's lightning and screaming
all in the building. I'm sure it would have been cool.
It sounds like here kind of Also about the hall
of like tricity, they had a Benjamin Franklin statue in
Michael Angeloyd glory, except he was clothed boring. What was

(22:08):
he wearing standard Benjamin Franklin crap? I don't know even
they shared that coat with the spectacles. Think he had
his spectacles on. But to go for the real thing,
they should have had him nude, like the David with
the arm back holding a kite. Yeah. One last thing

(22:31):
I want to mention is the cultural displays of the fair.
So the fair had a midway with these international cultural
displays from all over the world. For example, the Street
of Cairo where they would recreate the architecture of Egypt.
So they had like a mosque because they had a
mosque rebuilt there. Uh. They had the replica of the
luxe Or Temple, and supposedly one of the obelisks in

(22:52):
their replica luxe Or Temple I have read had Grover
Cleveland's name President Grover Cleveland inscribed in hyrid affix. Who
knows if that's true? How would you even spell that?
Did they anyway? Um? But then also uh, to to
pair with the futurists, been to the fair. Westinghouse put
together a second Egyptian temple, except this one was an

(23:13):
electrical temple with electrified lights, almost just to mess with
people like, oh you saw that other Egyptian temple. Huh,
how about one that will shock you? And they had
mummies there, Oh yeah, wax mummies. They had replicas of mummies.
Wouldn't it be great if they had real mummies? Electric
electric electric mummies. That's a good that's a good band name.

(23:34):
You can imagine Tesla and Westinghouse would like come up
with the machine. A machine makes sixteen mummies an hour. Um.
But one more thing about the street of Cairo was
the street itself, and this was actually the more popular
aspect of the the international things. In the Midway. You
would have things like donkey rides for the kids. People
actually came from places all around the world to show

(23:57):
off what their culture looked like. Now we don't know
always how acurate it would have looked as depicted at
the fair, but they'd have, you know, a street that's
supposed to be filled with people from Cairo showing what
they do in Cairo, having a donkey and camel rides
for the kids, and coffee and Egyptian exotic dancers for
mom and dad, and that this is like the Epcot
center of it. It's hard not to think of of

(24:19):
Disney World. Yea, when when when when? When thinking how
much cosplay was going on there, that is a good question.
I don't know if that had caught on yet, but
like so you'd have people from Chicago or maybe from
rural Illinois showing up dressing as the street of Cairo
or mummies as Yeah. Uh so when I think about this,

(24:41):
I think about like the cultural display is coming together.
I think it's confounding because I sense different different spirits
in the interest people had in this. In one sense,
I sense a kind of crass orientalism, right, like Americans
just wanting to look at what those backward foreigners are,
like a kind of puerile curiosity, maybe also hoping there
might be some nudity and seeing some foreign dances. But

(25:04):
on the other hand, I also since there there's a
layer of genuine, admirable interest in other cultures, and that's
a cool thing to see too in the eighteen nineties,
and I think should help transition to what you wanted
to talk about, right, Robert, Yes, this really interesting thing
that we're seeing during the World's Fair, this like idea
of embracing diversity, and so that included religion, right, Yeah,

(25:27):
So this was the the auxiliary was in charge of
all cultural matters because you know, this is not only
a celebration of of what we are, you know, and
what what cult where culture was at the time, but
it was about history where how far had we come?
And uh, and there was this really cool thing that
was going on there the the Parliament of World Religions. Now,

(25:51):
I know what what you're gonna ask you. You want
to know is how funky is it? No, it's not.
I wanted to know if it's a literal parliament, like
they bring God in for question time and they can
you fill a buster? The Presbyterians say, where wigs? Now,
maybe that's where all those wigs from Tennessee went. Yeah,
it could be. Basically, the idea of the Parliament of

(26:12):
World Religions was, let's let's send out these invites to
all of these these major religions. And yes, most of
them are gonna end up being English speaking Protestant religions,
but let's have everybody come in. We'll celebrate what we
have in common. We'll give everyone a chance to not
so much to to boast about the religion and push
down other faiths, but rather to to say, hey, this

(26:32):
is what we have worked out. This is how we
bring out the best men people, and this is how
we can address the concerns of our world. Right, because,
as Joe is mentioning, you had all these pressures converging
on not just Chicago but America at the time, right, industrialism, immigration,
people were freaked out. Yeah, and it's with all of this,

(26:53):
really every aspect of the of the of the fair here.
You I mean, you look at it and you know
what's going to happen in the twentieth century. You know
about the revolutions, the civil wars, the nationalism, the world wars,
the Great Depression, the Holocaust, nuclear weapons though, the whole
nine yards, so stuff everybody's I don't know, but the thing.

(27:19):
But at the same at the same time, you know,
we we did have a lot of really positive stuff
to come out of the twentieth century. I mean, civil
rights movements, triumph of non violent protests, human space exploration,
and large extent I'm sorry, Lade Runner, well, of course
the Blade runner um, but to a to a large extent,

(27:39):
there was a lot of effort that was made to
to understand other religions, to promote religious tolerance. And we
can really look back to the Parliament of World Religions
in ere and see sort of a beginning there. So
you could say that in the eighteen nineties this was
something that was also very needed, right, Yes, So what

(28:00):
I'm gonna explain it describe now, and I'm very much
jumping off of what Joe said earlier. A lot of
this is gonna sound hauntingly familiar. Okay, so we have
to go back to the climate of eighteen nineties America
and uh, an author by the name of Catherine Marshall.
She wrote a wonderful piece in the Interfaith Observer in
tiften and she she did a great job driving home

(28:21):
some of the key areas where religious and cultural tensions
were were brewing. So a flood of mostly poor immigrants,
many of them Jewish refugees from Russia, were entering the
country and as a result, you had this surge in
xenophobic and nativist attitudes, and this inspired the founding of

(28:43):
the Immigration Restriction League, as well as anti immigrant laws
such as eighteen eighty two's China Exclusion Act. And on
top of that, you had changes in immigration policies that
that favored educated Northern European immigrants over pretty much everybody else. Yes,
this sounds scarily familiar. Yeah, but again you have to

(29:06):
you have to look at this this world. You see
what's going on and on in in in In addition
to all the immigration, you have these globalizing elements that
were taking place, right you had you had this surge
and technological achievement. So this is where again the the
the World Religious Parliament comes into play. One of the

(29:27):
key individuals here and uh and I'm going to go
into detail about him because it's kind of interesting to
to look at him. Is one of the roots of
it here. Um. His name was Charles Carroll Bonnie, and
he was a Chicago lawyer, a judge, a teacher, president
of the World's Congress Auxiliary. They're the ones who did
a lot of the cultural and religious stuff for this celebration.

(29:50):
And he was charged with highlighting the intellectual and more
moral progress of the civilized world. And uh, he was
also a member of a new religious movement known as
the sweden Borgian Church. Oh boy, how many of you
have heard of the Swedenborgian Church before? Okay, I see,
like four hands, all right, there's a fifth. We may
even have some Swedenborgians in the audience, maybe any Swedenborgians.

(30:14):
Well okay, maybe not, but we got one maybe. Al right,
well all right, well hope this is named after a person, right, yeah, yeah,
this is named after an individual by the name of
Emmanuel Swedenborg. What a name. Okay, hold on a second.
This guy is Swedish and his name is sweden Borg.
So that'd be like if my name was Christian America Borg.

(30:37):
You should consider it. I mean, I think that's the one.
Heck of mind. Yeah, maybe I'll change it for the show.
That's the name of a project deep under the ground
in the Pentagon Christian American. It's an electric mummy. So
I'm gonna talk a little more about the Swedenborgians in
just a second. But first, new religious movements. What is
a new religious movement, Robert, be straight with me. It

(31:00):
is the same thing as a cult. All right, This
is the way I listen to this pause, Well, okay,
this is the way I like to look at it.
You have cults over here, and there's a certain certain
list of criteria for cults, and you have a new
religious movements over here, and there are certain criteria. Sometimes
these two things overlap. I think you can sort of

(31:20):
look at like like any young religion is kind of
like a like a teenager. You know, they're they're just
figuring out who they are and uh, maybe they're a
little impulsive. They have a lot of growing up to do, uh,
and that will come in time if they survive. And
they don't always get invited to world parliaments like teenagers.

(31:41):
So another way to look at it at new religious movements,
very much in keeping with the fair, is that these
are they're almost always rooted in ancient religious traditions, but
it's someone has taken those religious traditions, or rather picked
up the shards of them and reform them into something
that appeals to modern believers. That that it tackles modern problems.

(32:06):
It's been it's something that's taken the old and remade
it into something new. This is the principle of syncretism.
In fact, this is how we get I would say,
most religions that exist in the world you can see
as being sort of built out of the pieces of
older religions. Yeah, if you've ever listened to our podcast before,
this actually comes up quite a bit, and sometimes we
refer to it as the lunch tray method of religion,

(32:26):
where you can just pick different versions that will be
your meal. Yeah, though generally at this time you're talking
about someone else saying, all right, here is your new meal.
I've I've picked up what you don't need anymore. I've
decided that we're just having corn. That's sort of thing.
But it's corner of the ky what or it's corn
with the quor. You know, it's interesting to talk about

(32:47):
religion while we're we're here it's E two E two
because we we have passed episodes where we talked about
hyper real religions, the idea that a lot in many
cases fandoms and various five properties. Fantasy properties like these
can take on the power of religion for modern people.
And we have some examples where people tend to take

(33:08):
that to a literal extent, such as Jedi is um
any jedi Ists in here or jedis there. There are
people who literally claim to have Jedi as their religions.
Consider the one way were wondering about was postapharianism. Yeah,
if there are any of those folks here, we'll think
about all of this religious in some places. So as

(33:29):
we continue, Yeah, if you're having trouble connecting to the
religious idea, just replace the religion with with whatever your
favorite fandom happens to be. Now, as far as real
um a new religious movements, just a two quick examples
because these will come into play. That you had eighteen
thirty the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints.
That's a perfect example of not only a new religious movement,

(33:51):
but a frontier and new religious movement, one that was
was very much coming out of a place and time
and the needs of the people there and deeply American
in character. And then you also had the Christian Scientist
eighteen seventy nine. They were both founded prior to the
Colombian Exposition, but only one of them was invited. And

(34:12):
I'll touch that on that in a minute. You're not
gonna tell us which one, Okay, I'll go ahead, and
all right, you can try and figure it out. But
more recent examples, of course, would be like Rastafari scientology
and follow him gong. Okay, so we've we've established that Swedenborgianism,
or rather the New Church Swedenborgian Church. This was basically

(34:34):
the idea that the Second Coming had occurred and we're
all living in the New Jerusalem and uh, and we
need to focus on making the world a better place.
That's that's just a very brief breakdown of that. Uh.
It's like later seasons of Battlestar Collector. Yeah, and it
was a pretty big deal. I mean, Johnny Appleseed was
a member of the New Church. Johnny Appleseed, Johnny Appleseed,

(34:56):
Helen Keller, William Blake, and there was one other who
was Rubber Frost. So so they were cool with cider then,
oh yeah, yeah, the American side are hard on like
the Swedenborgian Avengers. Yeah yeah, b B B b b
B one thing we didn't even say. But you've got
to have in mind thinking about the World's Fair in

(35:16):
the eighteen nineties. Behind everything, there is a rabid temperance
movement that wants influence on whatever you're doing. So anybody
who wanted to have drinks going on wherever, they were
always fighting the temperance movement. All right, So back to
this world, this Parliament of religions, how does a good
rolling Well, Bonnie appoints the first Presbyterian clergyman, John Henry Barrows,

(35:38):
to admit that minister this thing. He ends up writing
about this a lot. There's a book that you can
find of his online at archive dot org where he
just goes into exhaustive detail about the whole deal. But basically,
they send out these invitations. He and a bunch of
sixteen other people that put together these invitations send them
out three thousand copies of the preliminary address, uh to

(36:01):
religions around the world to participate. Uh So not everybody
was crazy about it. The Presbyterians didn't like it, The
Church of England, European Roman Catholics, the Sultan of Turkey,
various American even a Gelicles disapproved, but a number of
other people were really into the idea. Now, not everybody

(36:21):
got an invite. I don't want to make it sound
like this was just super inclusive. The Church of Latter
day Saints were snubbed from the event despite really uh
that they were really interested in attending, but they ended
up not taking of the controversy of polygamy at the time. Yeah,
and it just but it does just go to show

(36:42):
that there was some favoritism. Like even it's eight so
even in the name of like bringing all these religions together,
there's still some closed mindedness about about some new religious movements,
like the right kind of new religious movements, like the
Christian Scientists are invited, but but but not the Morment.
We're having a religion party. No Mormons allowed, all right,

(37:04):
So the party takes place and it is it's it's
quite a success. So talk in terms of who attended,
one fifty two out of one nine papers were English
speaking Christians, but you still saw twelve Buddhist, eleven Jewish presenters,
eight Hindu to Islamic, two Zoroastrians to Shinto to Confucians,

(37:25):
to Dallast and uh one Janus. So that's a pretty
good Amountain. You also had a Christian scientist and a theosoficet.
That sounds like a pretty good representation to me. I mean,
went the more I hear about this more, the more
I wonder, like, would this be possible today? Well, we'll
get to that. So the inaugural celebration began with an
interfaith ceremony, drawing in some four thousand people. Reported five

(37:51):
thousand assembled to hear a speech by Hindu monk Swami Vivicananda,
who's widely regarded as being the guy who introduced Hinduism
and yoga to the Western world. So if you did
yoga today, thanks Swami Vivicananda. We have our hotel has
yoga mats in the closets all thank to Swami Vivcana.
It's awful. And oh yeah, nineteen women spoke at the

(38:12):
at at the Congress as well, which I think was,
you know, pretty good for the day. So the Parliament
didn't attempt to unify religion. They again, they approached it
more as a platform for everyone to share their light.
And yet there were those who managed to throw a
few elbows into other religions to sort of talk here
and there about you know, false religions. Uh. There was

(38:34):
a few people in in particular who kind of use
battle royal darwinnus of Um language to describe it as
if this whole party was just one big battle and
at the end there can be only one. I like
the Yeah, it's like Highlander, but they're all wearing like
Japanese school girl outfits fighting over religions. Yeah, and McLeod

(38:54):
is a Presbyterian. Yeah, which one is a clancy Brown
with his leather jacket? I don't know Christian scientists Kgan.
Let's see, he's Church of England, all right. So everyone
comes together, they share stuff about the religion, and everyone's
patting themselves on the bag. But I know what you're
you're you're asking yourself. You're thinking ahead to the twentieth century,

(39:14):
you're thinking ahead to now, and you're saying, did any
of this accomplish anything? Did any good come out of it?
Or is it just kind of like those uh, you know,
those kitchens of the future that you see footage job
from the fifties and sixties where you look back and
you know you say, well, well, that's great, but we
never had flying toast. There's no one ever had a
had had a refrigerator like that. You know, they didn't

(39:36):
have the Internet of Things yet. But so wait, did
this have a continuing influence or not? Well it did,
but I mean part of it is that in the
in the era to follow, interfaith cooperation was not a priority.
You know. Um, you might say that there were a
number of different interfaith groups that sprang up right at

(40:00):
of the Parliament. Not all of them lasted, They weren't
necessarily all that focused. After the Second World War you
saw more localized focus on inter religious efforts, and eventually
you did. You did see some really major groups come
out of this, such as International Association for Religious Freedom
in nineteen hundred, the World Council of Churches in nineteen

(40:20):
forty eight. You also had groups that were not expressly religious,
but but did you know, we did entail some some
religious discussions, such as John D. Rockefeller the Thirds Asia
Society founded in nineteen fifty six. You also saw various
religious groups becoming more open at least to talking about
other religions, um, the Catholic Church, for instance. Following the

(40:44):
Second Vatican Council in the nineteen sixties. And I imagine
like anybody out there who grew up in a church,
I mean everybody's If you grew up in a church,
everybody's church upbrings a little different. But you might be
able to think back to some at least mild mid level,
you know, interfaith discussion that went on. What do you
think Mel Gibson thinks about this? Why would you go there?

(41:08):
We should probably ask him next time he's in the studio. Yeah,
well we'll have him on to talk about interfaith communication
to go get the Grengo. But a number of these
these groups are still around, and the World Parliament of
Religions lives on what what what? You're still having this?
They are They reconvened once more in so that's their
their centennial wow right here in Chicago, and they still

(41:31):
hold events every few years. Ironically enough, the most recent
US meeting took place in Salt Lake City, so they
had to invite the Mormons. Yeah, so there's some come
up in there. You know. Now we're hosting the party,
and uh, you know, you can suck it. I guess,
you know what with this kind of parliament coming together
fostering mutual understanding. It makes me think that the people

(41:52):
who would be most likely to attend are the people
who need it the least. You know. Yeah, like, you're
not going to get the Westboro Baptist Church to show
up at the Parliamental World Religions, or if they do that,
they're going to be just making a ruckus. Well, I
think it's it's kind of like any conference, right, you know.
The people who are super interested and motivated or even

(42:13):
like bound by career to it, those are the ones
that show up. But hopefully they get something, they bring
it back, they bring back the spirit of the thing,
and they share it with everyone else. I don't know,
maybe maybe everyone here plans to do the same. You're
gonna get just filled up with the spirit of your
favorite fandom. You bring it home, and you just inflicted
on everyone. That's the way. That's why they make them

(42:33):
peace bond those Hey. So all right, let's say I
have attended the Parliament of World Religions, right, and I
need to walk outside for a smoke break, and you
need a new God, yeah yeah, And so I go
outside and I look up and there's this huge gigantic
wheel in front of me. Do you start worshiping it?

(42:56):
Is this much? Exactly? Is that my new God? Yes,
of course you do, cause I want to talk about
the Colossus of Chicago as I would call it, or
Chicago's Eiffel Tower. Uh So, in eighteen ninety three, getting
ready for the fair, Chicago had what we might call
Paris envy um, and the Freudian centerpiece of Paris Envy

(43:18):
is Eiffel envy. So the Eiffel Tower was created by
the engineering company of Gustav Eiffel, and it was for
a previous World's fair, the Paris World's Fair in eighteen
eighty nine, and uh it was. It was ridiculed by
some people at the time, is what's this hideous, gigantic
iron monstrosity. It's not in keeping with the surrounding architecture whatever.
But a lot of other people looked at that and

(43:39):
they said, wow, that's really something, And a lot of
architects look at looked at it and said wow that yeah,
it's an it's a new kind of romantic modernism. It's grand,
it's inspiring, and furthermore, it ties in with the technological
change theme because it's visual evidence that France was claiming
to have edged out the United States in iron and

(44:01):
steel working, and the people of Chicago did not like that.
I'm assuming all these architects were men. Well, actually all
the main architects leading the fair weremen, but they did. Um,
they did have a women's building at the fair that
was designed by a female architect. Um. But it probably
wasn't very phallic like the Eiffel Tower. Yeah. I don't

(44:22):
know the degree in which it was phallic. Uh, alright,
we needn't measue. Yeah, we need like a scale of fellicism.
But they were trying to out Eiffel, the Eiffel Tower.
So that's literally a lot of tower designs. Yeah. So
Daniel Burnham, the tsar of the World's Fair, and his associates,
they were obsessed with this. They were obsessed with finding
an architectural centerpiece for the fair, something like a new

(44:44):
Eiffel tower. They wanted to literally, as you say, out
Eiffel Eiffel um. And they got a bunch of proposals
they solicited from architects all over the place, give us
ideas for what we could do. Uh. And these are
all documented in Larson's book as well. So one of
the purpo posals. Uh well, actually, first I should say
I think you can think about basically the proposals fall

(45:05):
into two categories. There's boring and there's insane. Eiffel himself,
the guy who designed the Eiffel Tower, offered to design
them a centerpiece, and Burnham was like, yeah, okay, let's
see what you got, and Eiffels like here, here, here,
sit down, sit down. Another Eiffel tower, a little bit
bigger than the first one. Burnham wasn't really into it.

(45:29):
He was like, no, I think we need something weirder,
more shocking. That's something that's fresh and new. So let's
look in the fresh and new category. One proposal they
got put forward by an inventor named JB. Mccomber, was
a tower that would be eight thousand, nine hundred and
forty seven ft tall. For reference, the tallest building in
the world today, the Birch Khalifa in Dubai is twenty

(45:53):
dred feet tall, So totally in this in the eight nineties,
so there might have been varying levels of taking it
seriously among the architects here. But yeah, so the top
of this tower would serve as a station for elevated
railways that would connect to major cities like New York
and Boston. Almost think about nineteenth century hyper loop where

(46:18):
when you're done at the fair, you take an elevator
up to the top of this nine thousand foot tower
and then you ride downhill all the way back to
Baltimore wherever you came from. But it's like a it's
like a sled. Yeah. I got another one that This
one's pretty good, uh. Proposal put forward by guy named
CF Ritchell of Connecticut. It was a tower with three

(46:40):
nested levels. You might think of it kind of like
a nested ziggurat, and it would have a base that's
a hundred feet tall, then a second tower nested within
the first one, and then a third tower nested within
the second, and then it would harness hydraulic power slowly
over the course of several hours, extend the tower to
full height, and then shrink it back down. Can you

(47:02):
picture this, by the way, So it just goes from
two messes to flacidity, exactly flacidity. You know, we just
recorded an episode for next week about H. R. Giger.
So every time I hear you talking about this, you
can only imagine it as designed by now that would
have been cool. But then you gotta add he this

(47:23):
is my Eiffel tower. Uh. Well, getting back to the
Freudian elements here, but yeah, they wanted to have a
restaurant by the way right at the tip um one more. Uh,
this is good. So an inventor wanted to design a
tower that would be four thousand feet tall. Remember our
Birch Khaliphs again, so this is still taller than the

(47:45):
tallest building in the world today. Uh. And at the
top there's a car that seats two hundred people. You
get into the car, it's like a train car. And
this car would be attached to the top of the
tower by a two thousand foot long rubber cable. And
you see where we're going with this. The design proposal
specifies best rubber good, none of that cheapo rubber for this.

(48:10):
And then they push you off the top of the
tower and you bungee until you come to a halt.
But but you're in a train car. Yeah, so one
would hope that the rubber is sufficiently elastic. I mean,
if it didn't stretch enough, you basically you have a
car full of soup at the yeah, right, like they
opened the doors at the bottom and everybody just spills out.

(48:31):
This just makes me think of various like Kaiju movies
where the monster picks up a train car and just
takes it until everybody is presumably liquefied inside. Right, just
that would just have to be the result of this
horrific design. It's a shame they didn't build it. I
don't know. Uh. Then we get to the very last
alternate proposal, my favorite one for lovers of Abraham Lincoln,

(48:51):
of the log cabin lore. You've got the log tower
basically Eiffel Tower rip off, except have underfeet taller, entirely
made of logs instead of iron, just logs, and at
the top there's a log cabin where you can get
some drinks and refreshment and I don't know, maybe getting

(49:12):
a camp fire with that. Yeah. I think we were
talking earlier how this would this could have been like
the first burning there. Yeah, exactly, gone for it. You
missed out all the people who misbehaved. The fair had
its own police force, by the way, so you should
think about that. The fair basically had a private army,
and so for all the people who misbehave at the fair,
they could just put him at the top of the

(49:33):
log tower and then a wicker man it up at
the end of the day. So none of these ideas
are really getting it now. They're sort of we might
call it junk um. So Daniel Burnham is not happy.
The Chicago Fair needs a colossus. You know, it's something
that's got to be this distinctive physical feature that's gonna

(49:55):
inspire wonder, not hilarity or terror um. And he was
bored with towers. So enter a young engineer from Pittsburgh
who's the proprietor of a steel inspecting company, and he'd
been sitting in on a meeting of engineers that Burnham
was heading up. Burnham standing at the top of the
room yelling at everybody, you idiots, why you can't why
can't you come up with something good? And farett. This

(50:18):
guy his name is George Ferris, and he's sitting in
the room and he's thinking, you know, we are idiots,
but I've got an idea, and this is how we
got the world's first Ferris wheel. So essentially he was like, well,
let's let's do an Eiffel tower, but let's make an
Eiffel tower that didn't move. It's a live right, perfect. Yes,

(50:40):
it's like a walking Eiffel Tower. They're like, you build
a giant iron tower. I'll make one that rolls around
the place. You can get in. It's take up their
statue of liberty and Ghostbusters too. Man. Uh. I don't
know what music played at the first Ferris Wheel. I'd
love to know if it was like that that happy
beat that makes statue dance. Yeah. Um so so Ferris

(51:03):
Wheels kind of mundane to us. Right, you get in,
you go up to the top, you spit on your friends.
Um but you have to you have to put yourself
in the mindset of an eight nine three farmer showing
up to the fair and seeing this giant revolving wheel.
I mean, this thing is huge, probably bigger than the
standard wheels you would have gotten in today. Ferris Wheels,

(51:25):
I have to think of it as something like a
steam punk creation. It's like something you'd see in one
of the BioShock games. You like, libertarian monsters on it
that are injecting themselves with with Well there may have been, okay,
so here's how to picture it. Instead. It didn't have benches.
You know you've been on the ones that have benches.

(51:46):
That's like a two person bench you go up around. No, no, no,
that that's that's small junk. Okay, this, Uh, you have
to imagine this giant spind lee steel wheel carrying thirty
six individual train cars two and sixty four ft up
into the sky and back. And it's usually reported that
each of the thirty six cars held forty passengers. But

(52:07):
actually that's I read this book by Stanley apple Bomb.
The forty passenger load is just for who could sit
in the plush chairs. Uh, that it could hold sixty
passengers in each car overall. So that's a capacity of
two thousand, one hundred and sixty passengers on this Ferris wheel,
which is more than the number of passengers who died
in the sinking of the Titanic and getting close to

(52:29):
the full capacity of the Titanic. So this is this
is a rolling Spindlee Titanic wheel spider at the fair.
The axle shaft a loan is forty five ft long
with forty six tons. At the time, it was believed
to be the biggest piece of steel ever forged in
America up to that time. Um and so the Ferris

(52:51):
wheel wasn't finished until about six weeks after the fair open,
but it ended up being arguably one of the most
successful aspects of the World's Fair, probably the most success
full aspect if you don't count Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show,
which I think is worth a mention. Buffalo Bill. You know,
Buffalo Bill Cody. He wanted to run his Wild West
show inside the fair. Uh. They wouldn't give him a pass,

(53:13):
citing incongruity, which to me reads as tackiness. Um. But
so he was like, okay, he won't let me in
the fair. Well, he bought a parcel of land right
outside the gate of the fair and caught people on
the way in. A lot of people went to the
wild West Show thinking it was the fair. Uh, and
he made a killing or like where's the wheel? Yeah,

(53:35):
it's this lasso so uh yeah, this this World's Fair
has a lot of shooting. I didn't expect so much
more exciting. It's like a fast and furious movie. But yeah.
So the Ferris Wheel opens June one, more than a
month and a half after the fair began, and it
was generally considered safe. The authority said it was safe,

(53:56):
the steel inspectors said it was fate safe. But people
look dot it and thought that doesn't look right. It
looks too frail. There's a nice mismatch between how physics
really works and our intuitive grasp of it of it
because you you looked at it, and people just thought
that thing looks like it's gonna collapse. And a wonderful
story to go along with this. When they first ran

(54:17):
it for for a test run for the press, people
got into these cars and they the wheel starts to
move for the first time. The engines are turning it
and they start going up to the top and people
start hearing hail on the roof of their car going
to the top of the ferris wheel, like, what is
it hailing outside? Now it was nuts and bolts raining

(54:40):
down on the roof of the ferris wheel car. Because
this ties into I think the way I always feel
when I get on a on a ferris wheel. Instead
I am I'm not concerned. Yeah I'm a little terrified,
but it's not because of this like epic construction. It's
about the people that they put it together, like trying
to imagine like did they sleazy car? Yeah, it's kind

(55:01):
of like the instructions aside, the island wrench doesn't fit
whatever I'm just getting in with my finger and then
and then it's just gonna fall apart when I'm up there.
So the question is would the wheel hold up? And
we actually got a pretty strong test of that. On
Sunday July nine, the Ferris wheels having a huge day.
People were climbing in. By the way, I read this

(55:21):
one great account from a guy named Rice, Luther Rice
who sent a telegram when they first opened the fair saying,
we need extra guards to keep people from like mobbing
into this thing. Can you imagine that? So it's like,
I have a new invention that will carry you hundreds
of feet into the sky, and you're like mobbing to
get inside when people are telling you not to. I
don't know, but yeah. So, so you've got all these people,

(55:44):
more than a thousand passengers in this walking Eiffel Tower
or this rolling Titanic, And sometime in the afternoon of
Sunday July nine, you start to feel the pressure dropping,
and the sky turns a little dark, and the clouds
roll in and then you spot it, a funnel cloud
coming straight at you, and you are in the Ferris

(56:07):
wheel at the top. Okay, it moves pretty slow. We
should mention. So if you're at the top, you're it's
gonna be a while before you can get out, and
the wheels continuing to turn. And there's another fact that
you told me. They put mesh over the windows so
people wouldn't jump out, right. Yeah, they were afraid people
would be like panicking and trying to jump out the windows,
which ties into something I'll get to in just a second.

(56:29):
So they had to like have this great over all
the windows to be like no suicides. Now. Um, so
there's a funnel cloud heading for the ferris wheel and
people are in it. Uh. There There was actually an
engineer who was aboard the ferris wheel who wrote to
the journal Engineering News who said that, you know, people
started to panic and it took two people to brace
the doors shut as the winds picked up. But then ultimately,

(56:52):
uh uh, this engineer riding in let's see, I'm trying
to find this well anyway, said that all the people
felt in the end was a small vibration and it
blew the wheel maybe an in chine and a half
to the side. So but they did get treated to
the image of a nearby hydrogen balloon floating out over
the lake, which was completely obliterated by the storm. Uh,

(57:15):
and so this should be this should be a testament
to what an amazing feat of steampunk engineering this wheel was.
It totally defied common sense and yet it withstood this
powerful storm. Yeah, that's one last story on this. There
was a great story about a time when a man
got in the ferris wheel. They were taking him up
to the top and he starts panicking. He's like, I

(57:36):
gotta get out. I don't know if the logic works
on that, because you're getting to the top, you're panicking.
You're like, getting out doesn't really help you. Um, but
you know, he was panicking, he wasn't wasn't being rational.
So he's like, I gotta get out, and he's trying
to open the doors and jump out, and nobody could.
People were trying to restrain him, they couldn't stop him.
And it finally was one passenger on the car with

(57:59):
him who was resourceful enough to figure out how to
stop him. It was a woman who removed her skirt
and threw it over his head and hooded him like
a horse, you know, like when you put blinders on
a horse, and that calmed him down. He couldn't see anymore,
and he made it back down to the bottom. Okay,
but but the fairs will worked, never collapsed, never turned over,
and made it to the end of the fair and

(58:20):
it was a big success. So that's one way to
calm a madman at the fair. But but now Christian's
gonna talk about another madman that was that was in play. Unfortunately,
as far as I know, no one threw a skirt
over this guy's head. I imagine many of you are
familiar with H. H. Holmes, the first American serial killer,

(58:44):
or at least recorded, as Robert likes to say, is
the first one that got caught. Yeah, I'm glad we
have some murder fans and the audience. So also disclaimer
if there's any children here, this is about to get
a little graphic. Uh So I asked you earlier, how
many of you from out of town. I imagine you're
staying in hotels, right. What if you went back to
your hotel room tonight and the door locks behind you

(59:09):
and you go to sleep, and the room fills with
gas while you're a sleeping asphyxiates you to death, and
then the home the hotel owner comes in, he takes
your body, he drops it down a shoot into the
basement and dumps it into a Vada acid. Then he
sells your skeleton to a local medical school. That's what
was going on with H. H. Holmes purportedly. Now wait, Christian,

(59:29):
did you ask what if that happened? Like, what would
what would do? What? I've been thinking about it in
our hotel. Our hotel is a little creepy. Um, it's
got these We'll tell you guys just afterwards. Yeah. Uh,
but so this is gonna be a brief look into

(59:52):
the science behind H. H. Holmes Murder Castle. Uh. At
least six people were killed there, maybe more. Dirt ring
the World Fair The Devil in the White City is
going to be a big source for us here. But actually,
there is this fantastic e book that Mysterious Chicago put
out that is called The Murder Castle of H. H. Holmes,

(01:00:12):
The Expanded Edition by Adam Seltzer, and it was incredibly
helpful because he pulled together all these primary resources from
the time about what was actually going on. Uh. So
I'm gonna do a brief intro on H. A. Holmes
for those of you who aren't familiar. But really we're
not gonna have the time to go into all of
his exploits, but mainly we're gonna talk about how he

(01:00:32):
designed this murder castle from the ground up, specifically to
dispose of victims with science. In fact, one of the
investigators involved in this case referred to Homes as a
scientific criminal, and he said he would never think of
engaging in a burglary or shooting a person in cold blood.
So there's that, you know. I think that's interesting to

(01:00:55):
think about this being the age of a scientific criminal
because right right around the same times when we got
the Jack the Ripper killings. Yeah, and in fact, a
lot of people were speculating that they were the same person.
And this might be for the scientific aspects. I mean,
Holmes himself was a physician. He was He was a doctor,
had a degree in surgery, and he operated as a pharmacist.

(01:01:17):
Uh So his actual name was Herman Webster Mudget, so
you can see why he changed it to H. H.
Holmes Henry Howard. Uh. Like I said, he was trained
as a surgeon. He changed his name when he moved
to Chicago, and he operated as a totally legitimate pharmacist
here in town. Uh Now, the question is usually how
many people did this guy kill? This is all during

(01:01:39):
the World's Fair. Supposedly he killed visitors who rented rooms
in this hotel of his, and they were especially plentiful
as people were coming into town. They're like varied numbers.
Some people say it's up to two hundred people, but
that estimate doesn't really seem to have any hard evidence
to back it up. More likely either tall tales that

(01:02:01):
are just springing out of something that's already a grizzly situation.
He admitted, however, to killing twenty seven people, but the
confession is totally dubious because some of the people he
admitted to killing killing came forward and we're like, I'm alive.
I don't know what he's talking about. Yeah, yeah, sorry,
I confuse you with that other person killed that other

(01:02:21):
person I killed. But then on the on the gallows
right before they hung him, he said, no, I only
killed two people. So it's all over the place, what
we but we know he killed more than two. Yeah, definitely,
at least in the Murder Castle, five to six people
were killed, if not more. Uh. And he was eventually
arrested in Boston for his crimes. He killed his accomplice

(01:02:41):
and three of his children. It was this part of
this insurance scam that went wrong. He was hung in
six This is something. Uh. He asked to have his
body buried in ten ft deep of concrete so nobody
could get ahold of his body and put it on
a dissection table. So yeah, he was real charmer. So
you mentioned his insurance scam. I think we got to

(01:03:04):
mention this because this is one of the most fun
things about Holmes, if anything is fun. Holmes was doing
these insurance scams his whole life. What would you do
if somebody came up to you and said, Hey, I've
got a great idea. I'm going to take out an
insurance policy, a life insurance policy on you with me
is the beneficiary. I'll give you a little bit of money. Hey,

(01:03:27):
And for a lot of the people who met Holmes
were like, yes, okay, we'll do that. So this Murder Castle,
it's in there. It was in Englewood, Illinois, just southeast Chicago,
on the corner of Wallace and sixty third Street. Apparently
the construction of the building was finished in eighteen ninety.
The blueprint plans for this building included fifty one doorways

(01:03:49):
that just opened up into brick walls and a hundred
windowless rooms. So some people go, how do you build
a how do you build something like that? Christian? I
want to build him herder castle like a pyramid. Right. Well,
during construction, he made sure that no workmen stayed on
the job for more than a week. And the way
he did this was he would just claim all their

(01:04:09):
work was second rate and he refused to pay them.
They walk off the job, they'd hire somebody else. So
he was the only one who knew the exact layout
of this building. It was three stories tall, it was
one block long. He referred to it as the World's
Fair Hotel. The idea was the World's Fair was going
to be coming to town. He would use it not,
you know, not publicly, to murder people. People would rent

(01:04:32):
rent rooms there. It was kind of like an airbnb. Uh,
it wasn't really a hotel in the modern sense either.
There wasn't like a front desk or anything like that.
It was mainly like long term rentals. Um. So here's
some features of this building. It had trap doors, secret compartments,
and hidden stairways. The halls were designed like mazes. Some

(01:04:52):
of the stairs led to nowhere, which is what our
hotel that we're staying and has in common. Uh. The
upper floor rooms were soundproofed and airtight, and they were
sealed in line with s best us and they were
hooked up to these gas lines so he could pump
in gas and either asphyxiate people or some people speculate
that he burned people of death and they're like he

(01:05:14):
would roast them. The evidence on that's a little weird.
But there were like gas valves on the other sides
of these walls. It's like a late seventies Dungeons and
Dragons module. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If only he could just
played Dungeons and Dragons, I think we could have saved
a lot. All. You could also look at it as
like a Winchester mystery house that kills you very much. Yeah.

(01:05:36):
So there were seveny one guest bedrooms. He had some
of them rigged up so they had alarms so he
would know if the occupant was trying to escape. Um
and some of the some of the reporters who investigated
this case, they like gave the rooms these fancy names.
These weren't like Holmes names for them. The Black Closet,
the Room of the three corpses, and the hanging secret chamber.

(01:05:57):
That's the room I'm staying. Um. But they were all
just made up, you know. They weren't even by people
who worked in Chicago. This is like newspapers in New York.
They would get ahold of diagrams and they'd go, oh cool,
we gotta come up with fun names for these when
And that's something to keep in mind through all of it, right,
because it's not just what happened, but it's what people
are layering over what happened exactly. Yeah. So his bathroom,

(01:06:18):
his personal bathroom, had a trap door in it that
led to a hidden stairwell down to a windowless cubicle
between the floors, and then from here there was a
shoot that dropped to the cellar. And it wasn't just
like a fun slide, it was you know, for purposes.
And he also had an exit so he could basically
like get away if something was going on. Just right
out into the street. Next to his office, there was

(01:06:39):
a vault, and when they investigated the vault, the impression
of a wounded woman's footprint was found on the inside
of the door, and it was described as being big
enough only for a person to stand in. So how
does he get rid of all these bodies? Well, this
is where the basement comes in. That shoot dimension goes
straight down to the basement. And here's some fun thing

(01:07:00):
that we're supposedly in the basement. Uh, that's of acid
quicklime pits. And there was a furnace in his office
on the upper floors. Uh. Most people have furnaces in
their office. Uh. And in the basement there was also
supposedly a dissecting table, his surgeon tools. It was also
rumored that there were these like apparatus is that looked

(01:07:21):
like medieval torture devices everywhere, but their purpose was never explained.
A lot of this is really alleged, especially like when
you read that Seltzer book, because the police at the
time that we're investigating in the journalists who are reporting
on it were really like kind of hysterical about the
whole thing, and it took on some hyperbolee. Yeah, we
gotta sell some newspapers, folks. So what's the best way

(01:07:43):
to get rid of body? How do you guys get
rid of bodies? Oh? Quicklime? Quicklime is one way, but
in a lot of people, you know, if you've read
Detective stories. You're like, oh, yeah, I've heard of alligator
lime MESSI alligators in the murder basement, pitt crabs. Yeah,
those would be great too. I just don't think he
had those as options. But there were supposedly these quicklime pits.

(01:08:09):
Now what's quicklime? We hear that and we go, oh, yeah, sure,
that's the way to get rid of a body. Quicklimes
this chemical compound known as calcium oxide. It's made through
the thermal decomposition of limestone. Uh and it basically it's
anything that contains calcium carbonate. If you heat it up
to a high temperature, it reacts uh and uh. It
reacts a CEO two specifically, so it can create heat, energy,

(01:08:30):
and light. They used to actually use it for fireworks.
That's what lime light is. Uh. So in twenties, well,
this fun group of researchers got together and they said,
let's see how well quicklime gets rid of a body.
And they took six dead pigs and they buried them
in pits of quicklime with this in Chicago, No, it
was in Europe actually, uh. And they they found that

(01:08:53):
when they recovered these pig bodies six months later, instead
of disposing of the bodies. The quicklime actually del laid
the decay of the carcasses, so it's better not to
dispose of a body or destroy it. But it it
was really used to keep putrification at bay so that
animals wouldn't be attracted to bodies. And it was historically

(01:09:14):
used in plague burials. So maybe it wasn't quicklime he
had in his basement, maybe it was live ah. Now,
in the past, Robert and I did an episode about
Hollywood acid dissolving people, and one of the things we
came to in that episode was about how you know,
if you if you want to dissolve a body, it
might be better to use a strong base rather than

(01:09:34):
a strong acid. Yeah, Lie's sodium hydroxide, and you know,
purportedly drug cartel assassins use it to dispose of bodies
in several outer hours. UM in Chicago actually is the
first instance of somebody being recorded as using it to
dispose of a body. A guy by the name of
Adolph Lutgert dumped his wife into a boiling vat of

(01:09:54):
lie in. Then they burned what was left, but the
police found the bone fragments. Uh. And a key component
here seems to be water, So you have to add
water to LIE to make it really work pretty well.
So maybe homes had these pits. He put LIE in them.
Lies really easy to get ahold of, and he filled
them up with water. We don't know. Uh. Then there's

(01:10:16):
supposedly this acid, right, how does that work? Well? A
lot of you are probably thinking about breaking bad right now. Uh,
we don't know what kind of acid he had, but
typically acid dissolves a body more completely than LIE, but
it takes way longer. And the fumes are also supposed
to be intolerable. They're really toxic. Uh. So it's easier

(01:10:36):
to get LIE. It's safer to use LIE. I mean,
it's not safe. It's like you think of fight club
when they're like putting the stuff on their hands and
burning their hands. That's basically LIE. But acids are also
monitored for bomb making nowadays, so it's not that easy
to use. But if you're thinking breaking bad, they used
hydrofluoric acid in that, and it takes silicon oxide and

(01:11:00):
types of glass and metals and plastic and just ripped
through them. That's why you've got that infamous tub scene.
Another thing they found in the basement a wooden tank
filled with strange chemicals and workman later excavating it. They
lit a match to see what was in there in
the accident, accidentally ignited it. Nineties investigation techniques, y'all, yeah,

(01:11:24):
if we set it on fire, he'll see. They never
quite figured out what was in there, but they think
it might have been like a combination of crude petroleum
and gasoline or benzene, and that might have been what
was in the vault with one of his potential victims.
So we locked her in there, placed some of the
substance in there. It suffocated her, and then the residue
was left behind from her footprint on the door. Uh.

(01:11:46):
And there's another question. This furnace. Okay, so he's got
this furnace in his office. Now, the police at the
time said, oh, yeah, we found a human rib and
a heck of long hair in the furnace, But then
like a couple of years later, they were like, oh,
actually it was some stove lining. Uh So, so it

(01:12:10):
was actually pointed out in the papers of the time.
To destroy a human torso like that in this furnace
would have been totally impossible to cremate a body. Now,
I mean, you need a furnace that can burn at
fourteen d eighteen hundred degrees and it still takes two
to three hours to burn a body at that level.
And the first modern cremation chamber wasn't presented until eighteen

(01:12:30):
seventy three in France and then eighteen seventy six here
in the US. So yeah, that was before Holmes was active,
But it's not likely that he had one of these
furnaces in his office. So the way the story ends
of the Old Murdoch Castle is it gets set on
fire a bunch of times. Holmes himself sets on fire
in eighteen ninety three, then he gets arrested, uh four

(01:12:54):
more times eight nineteen o three and nineteen o seven,
is finally officially torn down in ninety eight. Uh. Story goes.
A post office currently occupies the plot. Anybody here from
town been to this post office? Yeah yeah, yeah, I
hear they're lingering smells. There's like ghost tours. Uh oh

(01:13:16):
yeah yeah, Well actually I was reading that you can
still access homes basement. Oh you have to email yourself exactly. Yeah,
and they just dump you down the shoot the shoots
still there. Um, here's the creepy thing. And this is
what I'll leave you with. What most people who write
about H. H. Holmes don't know or fail to mention,
is that he actually owned several other properties around town,

(01:13:39):
and those weren't investigated as much as the murder Castle.
So if he had any associates in the area, they
totally could have gone in and cleaned up the evidence
while everybody was looking at this murder castle. Uh. And specifically,
he had a glass bending factory that was in an
isolated area and when the police got there, all they
found were junk, except there was a diagram showing that

(01:14:00):
a massive furnace had recently been removed from there. So
maybe there's more victims. What kind of names would they
have given these other places, like murder Hut, because you
can can't all be murder Castle, right, Yeah, murder Factory,
murder the murder pad. So that's the science of the
weird white City of Chicago. Yeah. What I love about

(01:14:24):
this is that all these examples we looked at, you
can see just these like these burning stars just gathering
mass based on all of all of what's going on
in the culture. Although the momentum of the century in
the case homes is kind of like the dark angel
of the festivities, and then we have the mechanical God,
and then we have people trying to figure out how

(01:14:44):
we all get along while talking about other gods as well.
It's really kind of the birth of the twentieth century.
You know, you've got like industrialism, psychopaths, and religious in fighting. Yeah,
all right, So there you have it. Once again, we're
stuff to blow your mind. I'm Robert I'm America Christian

(01:15:08):
Board all right. Uh, and I'm Joe McCormick. Again. You
can find it a stuff to bow your mind dot com.
We'll blow the mind on the most social media. I
think they're probably gonna kick everybody out of here, but
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come chat with us. Uh, you know, I've got nowhere
to go. Thanks everybody. All right, So there you have it,

(01:15:31):
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(01:15:55):
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(01:16:22):
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