Some curiosities are serious business, while others are worth a good chuckle. Here's a matching set!
Welcomed Aaron Mankey'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. Stoicism has become a popular topic today for entertainers, executives, and people who feel out of control of their lives. Stoicism can be an anchor to help them get through the day. It teaches them to focus on what they can directly control. But it's not a new concept. In fact, stoicism dates all the way back to ancient Greece. When we think of the ancient Stoic philosophers such as Marcus Aurelius or epic Us, we imagine serious thinkers, men and women who pondered the great questions of the universe and wrote long treatises on how to navigate life. What we don't imagine is their sense of humor, and that's because they didn't write about it. Plato wrote a paragraph about humor here and there, usually in the midst of discussing another topic entirely, but he shunned laughter. He considered it, in his words, a certain kind of evil. But not everyone felt that way. In fact, one philosopher loved to laugh, maybe a bit too much. His name was Chrysippus, born in two se b C in a part of the world that is now present day Turkey. But Chrysippus didn't start out as a philosopher. You see, when he was younger, his lean frame made him a formidable long distance runner. Over time, he endured some hardships in life, such as the loss of property that he inherited from his father, which was claimed by the king. With little to his name, Chrysippus moved to Athens to study under the tutelage of Stoic philosopher Cleanthes. He be came a true student of Stoicism, learning as much as he could and even teaching the philosophy to himself. He became an expert, and upon Cleanthe's death, it was Chrysippus who took his place at the head of the Stoic school in two thirty BC. On top of his ambitious educational regimen, he also wrote at least five hundred lines of work each day Throughout his lifetime, Chrysippus authored over seven hundred texts, never afraid to play devil's advocates or occasionally plagiarized the works of his contemporaries. Sadly, very little remains of his body of work. Only about four hundred and seventy five fragments still exist, but his influence on stoicism can still be felt to this day. For example, he believed that living a happy life was the equivalent of living a virtuous life, and that vice led to unhappiness. And when it came to stoicism, the buck stopped with Chrysippus. But he wasn't just all about serious writings and debates. He also enjoyed having a good time. When he was seventy three years old, for example, Chrysippus attended the one forty three Olympiad, a four year period where athletes competed in various games of strength and skill. The Olympiad is where our modern Summer Olympics come from. At some point during this Olympiad, Chrysippus caught a donkey eating his figs. The site tickled him so much that he broke out into a laughing fit. He shouted, now give the donkey a pure wine to wash down the figs. The laughter continued until he collapsed, still laughing, after which he seized and began foaming at the mouth. By the time the incident was over, Chrysippus had died. It was believed that he had died from laughter, a strange concept, but not entirely unfounded. In the fifth century BC, another man met a similar fate. His name was Xusis, a painter from Greece who had been working on a painting of Aphrodite, the goddess of Love, except rather than depict her, as most did, a beautiful young woman, he chose to go a different route. Zusis painted Aphrodite as an old hag, an act that caused him to break out into spontaneous, uncontrollable laughter. Well. As with Chrysippus, Zeusis died mid laugh, and those who found him believe that he had been punished by the gods for what he had done. But did these men really die from laughing too hard? Well, it's possible. It's a real condition called laughter induced syncope, and it's caused by a rapid decrease in blood pressure. Usually the person merely passes out, but sometimes the patients actually dies. There was even a case of laughter induced syncope when a sixty two year old man died laughing during an episode of the TV show Seinfeld. It's certainly a scary thought that a well timed joke or a funny story could be a case of life and death. But I will say this, whoever coined the phrase laughter is the best medicine probably should have consulted a doctor first. The modern conveniences that we'd enjoyed today had to start somewhere. Automobiles, smartphones, and televisions started as clunky, complicated contraptions, but have evolved over generations in the core parts of our daily lives. However, one technology hasn't changed much over the years because two brothers in eighteenth century France got it right the first time and didn't chicken out when it mattered most. Joseph Michelle and Jacques Eetagnier Montgolfier were born in the seventeen forties, five years apart. They were two of sixteen children, all part of a family that had made its fortune manufacturing paper since the mid fifteen hundreds. Joseph, the older of the two brothers, had grand ideas for how his life should go. He was an inventor at heart, but lacked a business oriented mind. He wasn't good with money either. Jacques, on the other hand, was the opposite. He was the rational brother who had planned on becoming an architect, that is until their oldest sibling, Raymond, passed away, forcing Jacques to take over the paper company instead, and Jacques brought the company into the modern age with cutting edge advancements adapted from the Dutch, who were making serious strides in the science of paper production. Joseph, on the other hand, had his head in the clouds. Literally. When he was thirty five, the aspiring inventor made his own parachute, which he tested himself by jumping off the roof of his house. However, it was clean laundry that gave him a glimpse at what was aeronautically possible. He had been sitting in front of a fire a fresh load of laundry strung over the flames to dry, when he noticed how the warm air filled the fabrics. Catching the hot air, they filled and lifted like sails on a ship. Joseph believed that the smoke was what caused them to rise specifically a gas inside the smoke. He dubbed it the Montoulfaire gas. The side of the cloth reminded Joseph of the stories of Gibraltar, whose fortified city was all but impenetrable. Enemies approaching could not breach a single gate nor scale its walls. He imagined soldiers floating over head instead, attacking from above, hoisted by the powerful force of the Mount Goulfire gas. So Joseph set out to test his theory in seventeen two by building a three foot tall wooden box, topping it with a taffeta cover. He dropped a few pieces of crushed up paper and set them ablaze, and watched as the box floated upward on the heat. That was all he needed to see. He wrote a letter to his brother Jacques, urging him to purchase taffeta and rope in bulk. Together, the brothers produced a similar box, but three times as large as the first. They launched it into the air by igniting a pile of hay and wool that was inside the box. It drifted for some time before crash, landing a mile away by June of seventeen eighty three. Just a year later, the Mount Gulfaire Brothers had created something special. It wasn't a box anymore, but a balloon, a massive one made of sackcloth and coated with paper on the inside. Despite its rudimentary construction, the Mount Goulfire brothers version looked very similar to the hot air balloons we fly today, with a globe like shape on the top that narrowed down to a funnel towards the bottom. In front of a group of distinguished guests from all over France, the brothers demonstrated the balloon's capabilities in a maiden flight that covered a range of roughly one point two miles and reached a maximum altitude of just over six thousand feet, and it was a roaring success. Jacques started touring the country to showcase the balloon to other cities and officials, establishing the brothers as the Orville and Wilbur rights of their generation. But unmanned flights were only part of the equation. What people really wanted to see was a person piloting that balloon. After all, the true success of the invention was in whether it could transport people from one place to another, and so in September of that year, a new balloon was unveiled. This was made of tafata and covered in a chemical compound called alum, which helped it withstand the fire, and attached to the bottom was a large basket. King Louis the sixteen, unsure of whether a living creature would survive such a flight, suggested putting a few criminals inside it to test it. The brothers, though, took a different route. They instead loaded the balloon with a rooster, a duck, and a sheep. Why well, to understand it, you have to think like an eighteenth century European. The duck could already fly, so it was chosen as a control subject, while the rooster, which almost never flew, would be observed in relation to the duck, and the sheep was selected due to the belief that its physiology was similar to that of a human. On September nineteen seventy three, at the Palace of Versailles, Jacques and Joseph sent the tiny Noah's Ark soaring into the blue. An audience of thousands came to witness the event. As dead, King Louis and the Queen Marie Antoinette. They watched the balloon take off at reach an altitude of fifteen hundred feet. They drifted for almost two miles before landing somewhere in the woods eight minutes after launch. The animals were fine, although probably traumatized by the incidents, but they paid the way for hum in trials, which began a few months later. From there, the sky literally was the limit. The Montgolfier brothers changed the world of aviation, that much is clear, and they did it by betting the farm on a sheep, a duck, and a rooster. 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.