Everyday people doing extraordinary things. That's when the truly curious stories are born. And if that's the sort of delight you're looking for, today's tour through the Cabinet will put a smile on your face.
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Welcome to Aaron Benky'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 of Curiosities. It's the quiet ones who often surprise us, the ones with their nose in a book or their head in the clouds. They're the people who are quietly watching the world, learning how it works and what makes everything tick, People like Elizabeth Smith born in Huntington, Indiana. In Smith lived all over the country, first in Indiana before moving to Ohio to attend college for a few years. She left school to help her ailing mother in nineteen thirteen, until transferring to Hillsdale College in Michigan to finish her first degree. While in school, Smith discovered a love of language, many of them, in fact. Though she earned her degree in English literature, she also managed to squeeze in German, Latin, and Greek with a side of poetry. Smith studied works by great English authors, but it was her love of Shakespeare that earned her one of her first jobs out of college, she had gone to visit the Newbury Library in Chicago to see a collection of the Bard's first place, known as the First Folio. A librarian helping Smith noticed her fascination with a collection and knew of someone with a Shakespeare related project who could use her expertise. This man's name was George Fabian, a business owner living in Geneva, Illinois, just outside of the city. Fabian had hired another woman, Elizabeth Wells Gallop, who was hard at work cracking a seemingly impossible puzzle. Had Shakespeare's plays really been written by Sir Francis Bacon and Stead. Fabian believed the text was rife with cryptographic clues left behind that would reveal Bacon as the true Bard of Avon. Smith moved to Fabian's estates and began to work on the project. This also made his company, Riverbank Laboratories, the only place in the country performing this kind of work, which piqued the interest of a United States military about to enter World War One. Riverbank hired more analysts to handle the government's requests. They not only assisted in deciphering coded messages, but also trained military personnel to do the same and one of those crypto analysts was George Friedman, who worked closely with Smith during their time there. The two were inseparable, so much so that their partnership and eventual marriage were key to the facility success. With her ability to recognize patterns and his cryptography experience, the couple became quite adept at breaking through even the toughest ciphers. Together, they managed to break up Prohibition era smuggling operations, Chinese drug rings, and put away over six hundred criminals. They even unearthed an American spy during World War Two. Her name was Velvoe Dickinson, and she had been using her antique doll shop to funnel military secrets to the Japanese. But Elizabeth Smith now Elizabeth Friedman, didn't stop there. Some of her most important work was performed during World War Two. She cracked messages from Nazi spies who had been moving into neutral territories like South America while also infiltrating the United States. She broke several Nazi Enigma codes and dealt with messages from one of the war's most wanted spies, Johannes Siegfried Becker, who went by the nickname Sargo Sargo was based in South America and had been sending messages to his people in Berlin. His army of dozens of Nazi agents had been collecting everything they could on Allied operations, relaying the information back to Sargo's base in Argentina. He would then encrypt those messages, which numbered in the thousands, before sending them off to Germany. Friedman's efforts helped bring down Sargo's operation, as well as every other Nazi spiring in South America. Yet so few people know about Elizabeth's work today, and that was by design. Though her techniques and research helped to form the n s A as we know it, she was practically erased from the history books by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Friedman had been the one deciphering Nazi communis and teaching FBI agents how to do it as well, but when the war was over, Hoover made sure the Bureau got all the credits. It wasn't until very much later that Elizabeth and her husband received the honors they so rightly deserved. After the war, they returned to their first love, Shakespeare. One of their final acts of crypto analysis occurred in nineteen fifty five, when they published a book about George Fabian's pet project at Riverbank Laboratories. His Baconian theory, the idea that Sir Francis Bacon had been the true author of all of Shakespeare's plays, was bogus. There were no ciphers hidden in the text, after all. But Fabian's plan wasn't a total waste. After all, he brought Elizabeth and William together, and their marriage helped to win two World wars. When you stop and think about it, the variety of communication methods available to us is pretty incredible. I typed this into a document on my computer screen, but now I'm speaking it out loud for you to hear. Take a drive around town and you'll see even more methods as well, road signs, traffic lights that use color to send instructions, and even basic shapes like lines. Open your mobile device and you can send your friends all manner of memes and avatars and whatever else your heart desires, even if that's just a little cartoon heart. But back in nineteen sixty three, the options were a little less abundant, and that's the job that Harvey was asked to overcome. But that's okay, he was equipped for the job, after all. Harvey was a graphic designer. He was born in nineteen twenty one in the city of Worcester in central Massachusetts, and that's where his parents raised him, and it was clear even as a kid that he had a knack for putting basic communication ideas to paper. While most kids in high school might get a job on a lawn crew or in a fast food restaurant, Harvey worked alongside a sign painter, learning skills that would be valuable for the rest of his life. It needs to be pointed out that before computers, designers needed to create a lot of stuff by hand. Painting straight lines or the lettering for a sign above a local business wasn't for the faint of heart. I've personally watched that sort of work being done, and it's nerve racking. Before pixels and vectors and exporting p the fs, there were the steady hands and sharp brushes of trained professionals. In college, Harvey studied right there in Worcester at the Art Museum School, and then after working for other companies after graduating, he eventually started his own business, an advertising agency, in nineteen fifty nine and four years later, opportunity came knocking. It was another local business, the State Mutual Life Assurance Company, to be exact. They had recently purchased another insurance company, Guaranteed Mutual, out of Ohio, and had run into some problems. You see, few people really enjoy change, and many people find it downright annoying. And as a result of the merger, everyone under their corporate roof had felt a drop in morale. And that's where Harvey comes in. Desperate to cheer up and boost their company morale, the fine folks at the insurance company hired him to design a single iconic image that could lighten the mood and inject a bit of happiness back into their work day. They offered to pay him for his time, and so Harvey put brush to paper. I'm not going to hide the results from you until the end of this story. After all, that wouldn't make you happy. No, I think it's worth getting it out of the way now, you see. Harvey ross Ball, sign painter and freelance artist, returned to his client with a yellow circle upon which he had painted two black ovals and a long semi circular curve a smiley face. Now it could be argued that the icon of a circle containing a smile is probably not even something a person can claim they invented. Most kids, when scribbling out their first stick figure cran drawings usually top those basic bodies with a smiley face, and they do it instinctively. It's pure and simple and almost universal. But Harvey Ball was the first to see its potential as a morale booster and maybe even the first to put those black lines on a yellow background, and as insurance company clients, was even more pleased with it. They had one buttons made with the image on it and manage it. Passed the buttons out to employees whenever they noticed someone was smiling while they worked, and with that the floodgates burst wide. Because neither Harvey nor his clients ever trademarked the image, just about everyone with an ounce of entrepreneurial spirit started to make and sell all manner of merchandise with the smiley face upon it. Posters, check t shirts, check coffee mugs, you bet, and Harvey, oh, he didn't mind. Honestly, how ironic would it have been if the guy who invented the smiley face took the world to court over the use of such an iconic symbol, No, Harvey just sort of rolled with it. He sold reproductions of his original painting, he did signings at conventions, and even started a charity, the World Smile Foundation. Amazingly, even the paycheck for that original design job was less than ideal, and yet Harvey never complained. After all, his client had promised to pay him for his time and that's exact what they did for ten minutes worth of work. 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. Yeah,