Sometimes you can find what you're looking for, and sometimes you can't. Either way, the process can be a little curious.
Welcomed Aaron Manky'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. There is so much about our world we still have yet to understand. The oceans of this planet, for example, remain mostly unexplored, at least eighty percent of them, and there are artifacts that have been discovered throughout history that continue to defy explanation. The anti Cathera mechanism, which has been called the oldest analog computing device ever found, was discovered in an ancient shipwreck off the coast of the Greek island of the same name. That isn't anything else like it, especially from the era in which it was made. There are also the Drop of Stones, ten thousand year old discs found in Chinese caves in night. They were analyzed and experimented on by experts from all over the world, but no conclusion was ever drawn as to the reason for their being there. But some unexplained phenomena hit a little closer to home, like Dighton Rock. Dighton Rocks existence was first recorded by Reverend John dan Fourth back in sixteen eighty. Dan Fourth was a colonist who sketched the carvings he found on the side of the rock. The carvings, known as petroglyphs, were comprised various lines and geometric shapes, although dan Forth's interpretation wasn't too accurate when compared with other descriptions of the rock from the same time period. Dighton Rock was a forty ton sandstone boulder, measuring nine and a half feet wide by eleven feet long and five feet tall. When it was first discovered, the flat side bearing the petroglyphs had been turned out towards the water, as if the symbols had been intended as a greeting or maybe a warning for ships sailing towards the shore. In the years since its discovery, numerous theories about the symbols have been proposed for one who wrote them in the first place. Petroglyphs had been found carved onto the side of rocks and stone walls by the indigenous peoples of the area before, so it was assumed that they had done the same here. Meanwhile, Brown University co founder Ezra Styles suggested in seventeen eighty three that perhaps the ancient Phoenicians had come to America and left behind a trace of their culture in the form of carvings on the side of this rock, and even as recently as two thousand and two, another theory suggested that the Chinese had arrived in America before Columbus and had carved the symbols into Dighton Rock. However, it was Carl Christian Raffine of Denmark who put forth a theory that stuck with the stone for nearly a hundred years. Carl was a historian who had built his career on the study of Norse culture and language. Like others, Carl believed that someone else had beaten Columbus to the New World, except that it wasn't the Chinese, it was the vikings. Other scholars added on to his work in the following years, helping to confirm and perpetuate Karl's theory as the truth. Unfortunately, the whole premise fell apart in nineteen sixteen when Brown University professor Edmund de la Bar examined the rock for himself with the help of a camera. He photographed it in different lighting scenarios to get a comprehensive view of all the markings, especially those that had been hard to see. He discovered the year fifteen eleven had been carved underneath some of the other etchings, as well as the letters M, I, G and you. Through careful analysis of the surroundings symbols, De la Bar was able to make out the name mcguel Courtoreal. Miguel had come from Portugal to North America to search for his missing brother gas Bar. Neither man returned home, but according to de la Bar, Miguel had arrived in Massachusetts and carved his name into Dighton Rock. He had also carved a bit of Latin, which translated to the will of God, leader of the Indians. According to Reverend John dan Forth, that first person to mention the rock and recorded history, the indigenous people had told stories about men from a far away land who had killed their chief. They very well could have been talking about Portuguese explorers like mcguel and gas Bar. Of course, even such a thorough and thoughtful analysis would eventually find its way to the debuncdal list. Journalist and historian Douglas Hunter tore apart Delabar's theory in a book he published in two thousand seventeen. So what's the truth behind Dighton Rock? Who put it there? Who carved the symbols into its side? The truth is nobody has the answer. All they have our ideas and theories. But if anyone wants to check it out for themselves, all they have to do is head over to Berkeley, Massachusetts and the Dighton Rock State Park. The boulder was moved from its original home on the Taunton River to a tiny museum in the park in nineteen sixty three. Today the public can view the petroglyphs up close while they speculate to their hearts content. And you know, rock out Inventors are no stranger to malfunction. Edison famously told a reporter once that he didn't fail ten thousand times in the creation of the light bulb. He merely found ten thousand ways that it didn't work. The act of invention is one of trial and error and takes extensive planning and testing before the final product is ready to be received by the public. But sometimes no amount of testing can prepare an invention for the real world, and nobody learned that lesson harder than Alexander Graham Bell. Bell had started inventing when he was still a child growing up in Scotland. He built a d husking machine for a neighbor's flour mill when he was only twelve years old, followed by a way to communicate with his deaf mother using a series of finger taps and gestures. It was actually his mother's loss of hearing that influenced his later work in studying the travel of sound and ultimately the creation of the telephone. But while Belle is known today for helping to connect people by voice all over the world, he also invented early versions of some pretty powerful tools, one of which was put to use. In eighteen eighty one, during a rough time in American political history, a man by the name of Charles had made a name for himself as a terrible lawyer and a thief. After being chased out of Chicago for stealing from his clients and not paying his bills, he settled down in New York City with his wife, where he started focusing on national politics. There he got involved with the Democratic Party and supported candidate Horace Greeley over the current Republican President Ulysseses Grant, but his support came at a price. Charles started believing strange things throughout the campaign, like how if Greeley was elected, that he would make Charles the ambassador to Chile. Things only got weirder from there. Charles published a just text, much of which was plagiarized from the work of radical American preacher John Humphrey Noyse. He was the founder of a utopian commune called the Oneida Community, of which Charles had been a follower. After that, Charles spent years traveling and preaching, going from Boston to Washington, d c. Until finally winding up back in New York. And as the Republican Party began to split into two in eighteen eighty, Charles chose to back the Stalwarts, conservative minded Republicans who supported the civil rights of African Americans against the moderate liberals on the other side of the party. The Stalwarts wanted Grant to be the Republican nominee, and Charles threw his full support behind him, a stark change from his backing of the Democratic candidates just ten years prior. However, the Republicans wound up nominating someone else, James Garfield, and so Charles shifted his support to the new nominee almost immediately, and Garfield won the election, and Charles believed that he had been responsible for the man's success. He moved to Washington and started writing letters to the President demanding a consuleship position in Paris. Unfortunately, Garfield ignored his pleas Charles was nobody and the new president had more important things to do than entertain the wild fancies of one of his more troublesome constituents. Well, Charles didn't like that. He felt that without his help, Garfield would have lost, and the more he thought about it, the more he found issue with several of Garfield's policies. As a result, his adoration of the man turned into animosity. He thought the country would be better off if Vice President Chester A. Arthur was president instead, and so on July two one, Charles Guiteau waited for Garfield to arrive at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad station in Washington, d C. The President was headed out for a summer trip when Charles stepped out of the shadows and shot him twice in the back. He was arrested immediately on his way out of the station, and Garfield was transported to the White House for care. Doctors were summoned, as was inventor Alexander Graham Bell, who was living in Washington and had invented a new kind of device to locate the bullet. It had come about as part of his development of the telephone. Bell had been trying to eliminate static in the device when he noticed that the closer he brought a metal object to the receiver, the louder the buzz it created. Bell's new invention utilized some fairly simple materials too, one coil connected to a battery and a buzzer, while another coil was fastened to an earpiece. As he passed one coil over Garfield's body, Bell would listen for the clicking in the earpiece, indicating that one of the metal bullets had been located. Unfortunately, he ran into a few problems. For one, the new addition to the machine that was meant to improve performance actually resulted in even more interference than before. He took the whole thing back to his lab and made a few adjustments before returning to the White House to try again. It failed a second time, though Dr Willard Bliss, the president's personal physician, swore that the bullets was on the right side of Garfield's body, a point that he kept impressing upon Bell, so that's where the inventor focused all of his efforts. He heard the clicks in his earpiece, a sure sign that he had found something, but there was nothing there. The presidents eventually succumbed to infections caused by his wounds two months later, on September nineteenth one. What Bell didn't know at the time, though, was that his machine had worked perfectly. There had been metal on the right side of Garfield's body, but not inside him. Rather, it had been underneath him. Bell was detecting the bedsprings. The bullets, on the other hand, was found during the late President's autopsy on his left hand side, not his right, as the doctor had insisted. In order to help the twentie President of the United States, Alexander Graham, Bell had whipped up a little thing called a metal detector. Sadly, even after two attempts, Bell couldn't get it to do what he had hoped, and so he had to bite the bullet and accept his loss. But his creation would eventually go on to help soldiers locate land mines during wartime and assist beachgoers in their search for buried treasure. So it wasn't a complete failure. It was simply a bellweather of what was to come. 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.