Diagnosis

Published Feb 26, 2019, 10:00 AM

Two amazing individuals are on display in the Cabinet today, and both are know for amazing claims that had unexpected endings. Buckle up for a curious ride.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. Anna Kingsford was an iconoclass in eighteen eighties England, an activist, an independent spirit even, one of the first women in the country to obtain her medical degree, and she was also a spiritualist of sorts. Once, while on a fox hunt, Anna had a vision that allowed her to see the world through the eyes of the fox. Soon after, she became a fierce advocate for animal rights as well as a vegetarian. Her experience also influenced her opinion of the popular medical practice known as vivisection. Teachers and medical researchers would often cut open living animals for research purposes. They believed it was a necessary evil to advance medical progress, and Anna hated it. In fact, she didn't just hate it, she fought against it. She first encountered it in Paris, where physiologist Claude Bernard would operate on live dogs in front of his students. He wanted to better understand the inner workings of the body and what better way to do it than to look at it up close. Despite the growing backlash against it from the public, vivisection was seen within the medical community as the only way to truly understand how the body functioned, and though Bernard's own wife divorced him after using the family pet as a test subject, the school supported his work without question. Anna, however, knew that something had to be done and decided to tackle the practice head on. She enrolled as a student in Bernard's class, something that once again set her apart from the crowd. She was derided and humiliated daily to the male students as well as Bernard. Women didn't belong in medicine. Sometimes he wouldn't even acknowledge her presence as a student, But she continued to attend classes and wrote articles about the horrors being perpetrated for newspapers back home. The screams and cries coming from the labs would haunt her at night. She'd recall her memory of the fox, how she'd felt so helpless and scared, and that empathy would turn to anger, Anger for the animals savaged in the name of science, Anger toward the doctors who had sworn to do no harm. Anger toward Claude Bernard and his relentless pursuit of the truth by any means necessary. During one particularly brutal session, Dr Bernard was performing painful experiments on live animals as a way to study body heat. Anna leapt from her chair and screamed at him, calling him a murderer. That night, she prayed for his death to spare all the innocent animals at the university. When the time came for her to attend her next class, she arrived at the medical building to find a note fastened to the locked gate. Claude Bernard had passed away. Anna felt an odd combination of shock and joy at the man's demise. His reign of terror was finally over. But more importantly, her prayers had been answered. Although prayer might be the wrong word here, Anna didn't ask God to smite her professor for his misdeeds. She took up the task herself. According to a biography written by a close friend, Edward Maitland, Anna Kingsford had tapped into her supernatural powers from childhood. She had summoned what she called a spiritual thunderbolt to strike the man down. In fact, one year later she would do it again when Paul Burt, another staunch vivisectionist, would drop dead at her psychic insistence. This happened to occur at a time when interest in the occult and mysticism were at their highest levels. Mediums had regular seances at the homes of wealthy elites looking to speak to dead loved ones. Books on spiritualism in life after death flew off of bookstore shelves, not literally, mind you, but Anna's own titles managed to find their way into the hands of influential figures such as Mahatma Gandhi, who had also followed her work as a vegetarian. Years later, her superability to kill men with her mind would lead her to the lab of a scientist revered today for his work in extending the shelf life of our favorite foods, Louis Pasteur. He was known throughout Paris as a prominent supporter of vivisection and someone that Anna had come to loathe. She never got a chance to avenge her furry friends, though. On her way to his laboratory, she was caught in a rainstorm and soon developed pneumonia. She passed away a short time later from complications from the illness, and at the same time, her legacy to medicine, animal rights, and women's rights were lost. Today, modern history, using her biography as the primary source, has stripped her of all the good she's done, and that's because of her friend, Edward Maitland, who resented her for rejecting his advances during the time that he knew her. As such. He used the letters, books, articles, and research that she'd written to paint a wholly different picture of a woman who revolutionized medical education, and once the damage was done, he burned all the evidence to the contrary. Yeah, what a gem. As for her powerful mind, experts believe it was only used to heal the sick and advance the medical profession. Paul Birds had apparently died of dysentery he had contracted while visiting Vietnam, and Claude Bernard had never been known to be a well man. His poor health had finally caught up with him. Anna's vision of a spiritual thunderbolt being an unfortunate coincidence. Although there's much we don't know about the spiritual world, is it possible to communicate with the dead? Can a human be so empathetic that they can see the world from an animal's point of view, can one person kill another simply by imagining it? Sadly we may never know. Of course, if anyone at the time had been interested in testing her powers, there was always one simple way to find out. All they had to do was pick up a scalpel. One thing reinventor knows is that the status quo doesn't stay that way for long. There's always something better, simpler, more efficient way to accomplish the thing that we've been doing for a long time. The steam engine was used to power machinery and various modes of transportation for hundreds of years before the internal combustion engine made its debut. The first functioning submarine appeared during the Civil War, and as technology progressed, it was able to dive deeper and carry more passengers. Such innovations further advanced how wars were fought all over the world. I mentioned these two inventions for a very specific reason, because one man also saw a way to carry the hot technology of his day into the future. His name was Joseph Papp, and he had a vision. Born in Hungary in the nineteen thirties, it's unclear when he first came to America, but he had no problem making a name for himself in the world of theoretical physics. Joseph had ideas ideas he believed so much in that he secured several United States patents for them in the nineteen sixties, one of which was for a new type of engine. The internal combustion engine of the time relied on gasoline to trigger tiny explosions to power motor vehicles and large machines. Joseph, however, saw a different way, a less expensive way. Rather than gasoline, Joseph's engine ran on a mixture of noble gases, including helium, neon, and argon. His engine claimed to run at only fifteen cents per hour and generated no heat, negating the need for fuel lines, carburetors, spark plugs, and any other equipment that the more limited combustion engines still required. They produced twice as much power at half the size. He spent years developing his engine at the California Institute of Technology before finally showing it off for his fellow colleagues include Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman. Feynman and several others looked on as Joseph fired up his new engine for the first time. However, what should have been a Eureka moment for the optimistic engineer quickly turned into tragedy. The engine didn't work, that much was clear. What's worse is that it exploded, killing one bystander in the lab Instantly. The university fired Joseph and settled with him out of court for the accidental death of his colleague, but that didn't stop the reckless inventor from pursuing his dreams. He eventually ceased work on the Path engine to focus his efforts on another project, one that would take him deeper than his noble gas engine ever would. Literally. In the mid nineteen sixties, Joseph pap built a submarine in his garage, capable of carrying one passenger across great distances using very little fuel. It was conical like a torpedo, which allowed a layer of air to form between the water and the sub The pilot would lay on his back and look up through a periscope to see where he was going. Path had estimated the craft's top speed at three hundred miles per hour, achieved using an underwater jet engine that he had designed himself. Nobody ever saw the submarine he obsessively kept all plans and prototypes under wraps away from prying eyes. Many didn't even believe that it existed. After the debacle with the Path engine, Feynman labeled Joseph of fraud, claiming the engine was never intended to work. But Joseph was determined to prove his former colleagues all wrong. Perhaps it was out of desperation or maybe guilt, but in August of nineteen sixty six, Joseph took his cone shaped submarine out for its made in voyage, using himself as a guinea pig. Thirteen hours after launching from the shores of Canada, he was picked up by a fishing boat off the coast of France. They found Joseph bobbing in the water, decked out in a flight suit, complete with helmet and goggles. Barely able to speak, he told them his name was Joseph pap and that he just completed a journey across the Atlantic in a submarine of his own design. Due to a malfunction, he had been forced to eject and let the submarine sink into the depths below. Joseph's story captivated the media, and he used his newfound celebrity to write a book about his journey, titled The Fastest Submarine. It detailed how he built the water craft and completed his trek from the Canadian coast all the way to Europe in under a day, and not a single person believed him. The media weren't captivated as much as they were skeptical. They ripped him apart in the newspapers and called him a fraud. It didn't help that his submarine was never found. Folks just didn't believe his story, and rightly so. It turns out that when the fishing boat had pulled him out of the water, they found two plane tickets in his pocket, one for his trip to France and one for the return home. It seems that Richard Feynman had been right all along. In the end, Joseph's career had been nothing but a load of pap. 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 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.

Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities

From the creator of the hit podcast Lore comes a new, bite-sized storytelling experience. Each twice 
Social links
Follow podcast
Recent clips
Browse 702 clip(s)