The Mastermind

Published Oct 11, 2018, 9:00 AM

Today we present two stories of individuals who show us just how powerful the human spirit can be.

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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. The French have graced our streets and shores with architectural wonders for hundreds of years, from soaring Gothic spires to ornate palaces to Gustav Eiffel's towering feet of engineering in the middle of Paris. France's architectural movements have influenced the world over, which brings me to a man you might not have heard of, which is odd because for twenty five years he's been solely responsible for developing one of the largest cities in Europe. Gil Traheen had a unique childhood. From a very early age, it was clear his brain was wired in a way that escaped the adults around him. For example, he had perfect pitch and taught himself to play the bass. His innate sense of numbers and mathematics allowed him to perform calculations off the top of his head that most people needed calculators for, and he could draw too, not stick figures or superheroes, but enormous buildings, taking them from simple doodles to three D structures with incredible accuracy. Like Thomas Jefferson before him, Traheen was self educated in the principles of architecture, and his knack for learning took him to great heights. Literally, the city of Orville became the bustling metropolis it is now because of him. Boasting a population of twelve million, Orville traces its roots back to the twelfth century BC, when the city passed through the hands of the Romans to the Austro Guards, all the way up to its eventual ruling by the Kingdom of France in the seventeen hundreds. Things settled down for a long time time until the French Revolution, when the population exploded to two point eight million. Town planners needed a way to accommodate so many people in such a small area, so they built urban housing developments that still stand today. And while World War One missed Orville entirely, World War Two brought with it numerous bombings, reducing much of the city to rubble and cutting the population down by two hundred thousand. But Orville and its citizens refused to quit, and after the war, as more people felt compelled to move out of the country and into cities. Its population skyrocketed again. It continued to grow over the next forty years, and with it came taller buildings, more shops, movie theaters, and public parks, the kind of advancements seen in cities like Chicago and New York over the same period of time. Enter Traheen, master architect who single handedly created Orville's most iconic structures at the age of fifteen. An enormous glass cover, a skyscraper that seems to point toward heaven with its pyramid like top, A beautiful covered bridge spanning the river that runs down the middle of the city. A port boasting modern speedboats and historic sloops, all of it constructed by one man with a vision. Surprisingly, not much is known about Trahean. You'd think the man responsible for expanding a city from three million to twelve million would have a few books written about him, maybe an article or two in Architectural Digest. But by all accounts, Traheen is nothing more than a blip on the radar and anomaly which brings me back to Orville. If you look at a map and use a magnifying glass, you might find Orville, Ube Commune in the northeastern corner of France. It's population of one forty seven is a far cry from the cramped masses of Trehean's version of Orville. You wouldn't find glistening skyscrapers or sprawling parks either. In fact, you won't find much of anything. You see. The erville that has become the third most populated city in Europe doesn't actually exist, well, not physically. The only way to find Orville is among three hundred individual sketches by trading a French autistic savant who first imagined the city back in it's history. Its founders, and its design are all fiction, though you never know it by looking at the incredibly detailed sketches. He began his city twenty five years ago, and he's still building today. Obsession has that effect, a compulsion to complete something when we know it will never truly be finished. Cities are organic, always changing, and those of us who live within them change too. Humans, by nature, inhabit the places we call home sometimes, though places can inhabit us, even if it's just all in our head. On average, there are fewer than one airplane crashes each year. Your chance of dying in one is one in eleven million. In fact, since your odds of dying in a car accident are higher at one in five thousand, you're better off in the air than on the ground. Still, no matter how low the chances are, we hear the stories small aircraft and jumbo jets go down and people die without ever reaching their destinations. It's a sad truth about air travel, and nobody knows this better than the pilots and flight attendants who work on these planes every day. One such attendant was Vesna Vulich, born in Belgrade in nineteen fifty. Vezna loved to travel. It was her love for the Beatles that took her to London when she happened to see a friend of hers wearing a flight attendants uniform and thought, that's what I want to do, traveling to distant lands, seeing new places and meeting new people. It was the life she'd dreamed of. To satisfy her wander lust, Vesna returned to Serbia in the early nineteen seventies and joined j A T Airways, where she was hired as a flight attendant. It was a dangerous time for Yugoslavi and travel as Croatian nationalists had been carrying out terrorist attacks across the country. None of that bothered Vesna though. She had her crisp new uniform and a ticket to adventure, and things were fine for the first year as she settled into her new life. But this would not be the fairy tale she'd imagined. On the morning of January seventy two, Vesna was called into work flight three sixty seven, which would be landing in Copenhagen the next day, to pick her and the rest of the crew up before flying to her hometown of Belgrade. She'd made trips like this four, but this one seemed different. There was something in the air no pun intended. The rest of the crew could feel it too, dread, hopelessness, despair. Vesna had planned to do a little sight seeing before taking off, but decided to join the other crew members in a shopping trip instead. All of them seemed sad, like they knew what was about to happen. The captain had gone as far as to lock himself in his hotel room the previous day, not coming out until a few hours before the flight. Even the passengers felt it as they deplaned at Copenhagen Airport. One man in particular, was so frustrated he refused to get back on the plane, leaving his baggage behind. When flight three sixty seven took off a few hours later, there were twenty eight passengers and crew on board, including Vesna. She handed out drinks and snacks and attended to passengers needs as the airplane climbed higher and higher. About an hour into the trip, it's the plane had reached its maximum altitude. It happened the vague, ominous threat that had been hanging over their heads had finally found them. An explosion, which began in the baggage compartment, ripped through the plane, tearing it in half like a napkin. Vestna and the other people on board fell over thirty three thousand feet into a small check village below. Authorities determined the explosion had been caused by a briefcase bomb, allegedly left behind by that frustrated man who refused to board the plane back in Copenhagen. At least, that's who Vesna pointed out when they questioned her. You see, a villager heard screaming from inside the wreckage, not too far from his home, peering inside, he saw a woman in a flight attendants uniform covered in blood. It was Vesna, and despite her six mile fall to earth, she had lived. Vesna Voolich spent months in the hospital recovering from her wounds, which included a fractured skull and temporary paralysis, but she didn't let her injury stop her. When she finally healed, she got back on with her life, including her job at J A. T Airlines, albeit in the less exciting role of negotiating freight contracts from the safety of the ground. Many people don't bounce back after a serious injury. Athletes leave the field, writers never get back on the horse, Shark attack victims don't get back in the water. But once in a while, a person like Vesna Vulich manages to fall out of the sky and land on her feet. 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 
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