Sometimes our tour through the Cabinet introduces us to tales of loss and letting go. Other times, we encounter events that are are simply too amazing to be true. This is one of those tours.
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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. Few rulers stick out from the pages of history like Queen Victoria. She was almost larger than life, so much so that the time period she lived in took on her own name, the Victorian Era, and what a time it was. During her sixty two year reign, the world changed dramatically. The British Empire expanded around the globe, and the modern constitutional monarchy as we know it today took shape and matured. The world saw the first powered flight, the invention of the telephone, and went from paintings and restrawn carriages to photography and automobiles. Queen Victoria impacted Europe in a very particular way too. She and Prince Albert had nine children and between them were forty two grandchildren, and that family tree spread wide Today. Five European countries have monarchs that are descended from Victoria, including Queen Elizabeth the Second. Clearly, she left her mark on the world. Victoria and Albert were a beloved couple, and it was hard to blame the public for that. Prince Albert was a man that leaned toward the progressive side of the political scale. He helped influence reforms in the areas of welfare, slavery, and education, along with the ever expanding world of manufacturing. And of course, what royal family would be complete without multiple palatial homes to live in. There was Kensington, of course, and everyone knows Buckingham Palace. But in eighteen fifty one the Queen added one more house to that list, down on the northern tip of the Isle of Wight. They called it the Osborne House, and it served as a summer home, but summer turned to winter. In eighteen sixty two, at the age of just forty two, Prince Albert died, leaving Victoria all alone. What happened over the next four decades has sometimes been described as the birth of a culture of death. She wore the black of mourning for the rest of her life and made sure that the servants never stopped taking care of Albert's daily needs, even though he was no longer alive or even in the house. When her children eventually married, each of them posed for wedding photographs that included a bust of Albert. She never slept in a bed that didn't have a photo of him beside it, and kept a plaster cast of his hand so that she could hold it. In fact, when she passed away in nineteen o one, that hand was placed inside her coffin. It's fair to say that Albert's death altered her completely, and not in a healthy way. The most interesting obsession of her later years, though, was not discovered until after her death, when Osborne House fell into the hands of her son and heir, King Edward the Seventh. He explored the areas of the house that had been off limits to anyone other than his mother, and there, behind locked doors, he found an unusual display hundreds of photographs that covered generations of people Victoria had known, portraits of people who had been important to her, right there in the house, where she could visit whenever she wanted. Despite the fact that these photographs spanned decades and each one showed the face of a different friend or family member, there was one common feature tying them all together. None of the subjects were alive. Queen Victoria's secret gallery was a morbid tour of the most haunting and final moment months of each person's life their funeral. Transatlantic ocean liners have been around since the early nineteenth century. Back in those days, they were powered by steam. It was the steamship S S. Savannah that made the first steam powered Atlantic crossing in eighteen nineteen, reaching Liverpool in just twenty seven days. The trouble was they only used the steam engine for about seventy two hours, managing the majority of the crossing with their sales. In eighteen thirty three, the Royal Edward used steam power for seventy of their crossing, but it wasn't until four years later when the S. S Serious tried to top the record. They made the crossing in just eighteen days, which was amazing, but they used up all of their coal in the process. In fact, they ran out before they reached New York and had to break up wooden furniture to burn to keep the engine running. All of these were relatively small ships. They carried passengers, just not a lot of them. But as the decades ticked by, everything advanced the engines, the passenger capacity, even the communication technology. By the eighteen seventies, companies like the White Star Line were building massive ocean liners. That's about the time when crossing the ocean became a luxury trip. To those first white star liners were decked out with first class cabins, running water, electricity, you name it. And yet while there was a lot of promise and hope for these growing palaces of the waves, there was also a lot of risk. Oceans were unpredictable and temperamental. After all, a lot could go wrong somewhere along the way. They built the big One. Now I'm going to give you some numbers so you can put it into perspective. This ship was eight hundred feet long and had a displacement of forty five tons. Those who bragged about her said that she was unsinkable. And I get the hint behind a claim like that. It's meant to give future passengers ease of mind. But it's certainly smacks of hubrists, doesn't it. I mean, no ship is truly unsinkable, maybe because of oversight, or perhaps because of that grand claim of unsinkable nous builders didn't outfit the ship with enough lifeboats. And that's the sort of thing you do if you want to tempt fate, isn't it. So it's going to come as no surprise when I inform you that this unsinkable ship didn't survive her maiden voyage. On a cold April night, about four hundred miles off the coast of Newfoundland, the ship was cruising through the dark Atlantic waters at about twenty knots when it struck an iceberg. The massive block of ice tore a hole in the side of the ship, and then the unthinkable happened to the unsinkable It sank. The loss of life was devastating, perhaps made even more painful in light of that prideful claim about the ship's safety. But that wasn't the most surprising thing about this nautical tragedy. No, that mantle falls to one other piece of information that will, pardon the pun, sink your expectations. You see, this event never happened in real life. That is because this ocean liner was nothing more than the setting for a novella written by an American author named Morgan Robertson, which probably fooled you, didn't it, because you were assuming I was talking about the Titanic this entire time. You know, the unsinkable ocean liner that struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sunk to the bottom of the ocean in April of nineteen twelve. Nope, and now I fooled you with the bit of fiction. But there's more, and it's less funny than it is bizarre, because you need to know two other things about Robertson's fictional ocean liner. First, it was named the titan Crazy right. Second, though, and most amazingly of all, his story was published in fourteen years before the tragedy of the real ship called the Titanic. I know it's cliche, but every now and then, even the worst cliche proves itself true. Sometimes life really does imitate art. 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, is end television show and you can learn all about it over at the World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious. H