Sometimes you win, sometimes you don't. Either way, the important thing is to leave your mark on the world. Thankfully, both individuals on display today managed to do just that.
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Welcome to 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 right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. We don't often think about the origins of the symbols we see every day. For example, the amper sand which we use in place of the conjunction, and is comprised of the letters in the Latin word at, which translates to and in English. The AT symbol or the A with a circle around it in an email addressed today, was once used by accountants to mean at the rate of It was invented by monks centuries ago to help them transcribe books much faster by reducing the number of pen strokes. However, there are more modern symbols that have permeated our culture as well. There's the mermaid in the Starbucks cup, the Nordic letters for H and B that make up the Bluetooth logo, and another symbol with an unexpected origin. It all started with a man in Roland, Roland was born on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, in eighty two. His Quaker family could actually trace their roots back to one of the nine original English families that came to Nantucket in the mid seventeenth century, and just as his forefathers had left England to explore their freedom, so too did Roland. He set out on a whaling ship called the Emily Morgan when he was fifteen years old. He didn't like it much, though. All it took was for him to get lost at sea one time to turn him off from whaling for good. When it happened, Roland followed a single star in the night sky to help him find shore, and once safe, marked the experience by getting a tattoo on his arm. With his wailing days behind him and five dollars of hard earned money in his pocket, Roland stayed put. He took a job helping his father operate their famili's needle and thread shop in Boston. The experience taught him a lot about running a business, which came in handy after the store went bankrupt in eighteen forty four. A few years later, Roland opened his own dry goods shop in Harrol, Massachusetts. It too closed rather quickly. He made ends meet by working in a store owned by his brother in law, but decided to try his luck out west Well he and the thousands of others chasing the dream of the California gold rush. It seemed like there was a curse following Roland. Wherever he went, the stores he'd worked in and owned kept going belly up, and he didn't turn up any gold on the West coast either. Discouraged but not defeated, Roland returned to Massachusetts to join his brother in a new dry goods store in Haril. Unlike his other ventures, this shop did well before eventually closing. Like all the others, Roland's next door, however, opened up more than its doors. It opened up its eyes. To keep things fresh, he would travel to Boston and New York every two months and bring the latest trends and fashions back to his shop, and soon enough the trips made him realize that he needed to expand. New York was so different from harl It was big, it was bustling, and it was growing fast. Roland moved there in eighteen fifty eight and opened a new dry goods store on Sixth Avenue and fourteen streets. This one, however, was different than his previous businesses, as it featured a unique logo. He wanted something big, something people could look at as a beacon among all the other shops on the street, and it worked. Roland Store continued to grow over the next twenty years. It went from one employee to fifteen two hundreds. During the holidays, he started a trend by employing a store Santa Claus, to draw families inside. He also set up elaborate window displays with and themed scenes. Roland's shop went from one storefront to several, gobbling up neighboring properties, until it eventually outgrew the block in nineteen o two, twenty five years after his death. In eighteen seventy seven, the new owners of the store, Brothers Is a Door and Nathan Strauss, moved the shop to a much larger and visible spot in Harold Square. Emblazing across the front of the building was the symbol that had been inked onto Roland's own arm, a representation of the light that had guided him home from the sea and all the way to New York City, a red star, and underneath it the surname of the man who had built the biggest department store in the world, a true miracle on thirty four Street. Roland's last name Macy. John Castle was fury us someone had ripped off his invention and they were selling their knockoff in the store too. All his advertising was going to waste. His customers were buying his invention from someone else, Mr Samuel Boyd. You see, John Castle was a printer and merchant in London, and Samuel Boyd well, he was a druggist in Dublin. Somehow Mr Boyd had gotten John's recipe for a new lamp oil. After all, John had advertised the oil far and wide. That was the printer side of his business, and as creative as he was at inventing new things, it was his new ideas for printing that were really paying off for him. He would go on to pioneer the serial novel. The printed word would take over his life. Maybe that's because in the early eighteen sixties John would learn a hard lesson about the power of words. That's when he started selling his new lamp oil and advertising it in all the papers he could find. A safe, pleasant, economical, and most brilliant illuminating agent. He wrote with perfect safety from day of explosion and free from any objectionable smell. Sold by dealers throughout the Kingdom. John wanted everyone to know that his lamp oil was equally suitable for use in drawing rooms, parlors and cottages. Of course, the process for refining the new oil wasn't completely John's invention. He had learned part of it from a French chemist and acquired a new resource from America Petroleum, also known at the time as American crude. But if there was something that John knew well, it was bringing in goods from far off places and selling them to British buyers. After all, most of his work as a merchant had been convincing people to drink coffee and tea instead of liquor. American crude was only the latest product from the edges of the British Empire that was going like gangbusters when it got to London, and once John had put American crude through the French refining process, it caught on soon. He had orders flying in from all over Britain and Ireland, and especially in Ireland, the number of orders was growing and growing like he had never seen before his previous tea and coffee business had been good, but never this good. It seemed that the new lamp oil was going to keep him afloat until he would later say, those orders from Ireland fell off to a considerable degree, so fast, in fact, that it surprised John and made him suspicious too. So he started asking questions, and that's when he learned about Samuel Boyd. John learned that, along with a few other oil merchants, Samuel Boyd had begun selling what John called a spurious article, but his customers thought they were buying the original product because Samuel was using the name that John had invented for the new oil. So Irish customers had stopped ordering from John and started buying from Samuel instead. After all, they thought they were getting the authentic fuel, so why shouldn't they. So John sprang into action. He wrote a letter to Mr Boyd to set things straight, stopped selling his lamp oil and using the name that he invented, But no answer ever arrived. That wasn't going to stop John. He set sail for Dublin and headed for Mary Street, where he found the shop of Samuel Boyd. When he stepped inside, he found exactly what he expected. He asked a shop assistant for the oil, and they were only too happy to hand him a bottle. John looked down and saw that his original name for the product was printed right there on the label. But there was something else. Someone had used a pen to turn the sea on each bottle into a g As if that solved the branding problem, John Castle wasn't having it. He took Samuel Boyd to court. What followed would make any printer and inventor blow his lid. The first thing Boyd said to the accusations was that he had never sold any lamp oil with John's name on it. Then he said that he had ordered labels from a Manchester printer and they simply got it wrong. And finally Samuel said that he was the one who had been inspired by a French invention, a product that he said was called Gaza jene. It was all preposterous, and John won his day in court. The magistrate scolded Samuel Boyd. Where John Castle had fab bricaded a new and useful product, Samuel Boyd had fabricated a web of lies to cover for ripping it off. The magistrates condemned the practice of counterfeiting trademarks. In fact, he said it made the whole city of Dublin look bad. But if James Castle won his day in court, it didn't stop the counterfeit name of the new lamp oil from catching on. Samuel Boyd's knockoff name starting with a G would win out. Soon enough, lamps around the world would burn the oil. In England and then throughout Europe. It would eventually be called by a different brand name altogether coined in eight seventy petrol ironically patented by a man named Eugene Carlos in the United States, John Castle's lamp oil fueled car culture in the most confusing way because that liquid oil would eventually be called gas slang for the knockoff name of the knockoff oil. That's because the lamp oil that James Castle had invented was named after him castline and hopefully now at every time you buy gas, it's a little reminder of the time that John Castle won in court but lost the name to his new invention, gasoline. 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,