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Calculated Discovery · Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: is an open book, all of these amazing tales right
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: to the Cabinet of Curiosities. It was just a simple advertisement,
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  Speaker 1: and for a game, no less. There was absolutely nothing
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  Speaker 1: illegal or dangerous about it, and yet here they were
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: sitting across the table from a pair of FBI agents.
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  Speaker 1: The product in question was a pretty simple dice game,
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  Speaker 1: and with the Christmas season approaching, the company had decided
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: to run a few ads in the biggest city in America,
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  Speaker 1: all of them scattered throughout one single issue of The
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  Speaker 1: New Yorker. All of them were small and square, sort
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  Speaker 1: of like an Instagram post, and each one told interest
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  Speaker 1: admirers to refer to the main advertisement on page eight six.
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  Speaker 1: The game had been created by a company called Monarch Publishing,
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  Speaker 1: and the ad had been written by one of their executives,
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  Speaker 1: a man named Roger Paul Craig. He and his wife
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  Speaker 1: had spent hours trying to craft the text of the
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  Speaker 1: main ad, which touched on the approaching holiday season and
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: all of the things people might have to do to
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  Speaker 1: be ready. The trouble wasn't in the text, though it
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: was in the artwork. At the bottom of the large
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  Speaker 1: ad on page eighty six was the big, bold title
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  Speaker 1: of the game, the Deadly Double. Beneath it was an
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  Speaker 1: emblem of a bird with outstretched wings, four talents, and
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  Speaker 1: two heads. It's what's known as an armorial device, a
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  Speaker 1: sort of coat of arms used for identifying individuals and groups.
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  Speaker 1: This particular symbol was the spitting image of the double
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  Speaker 1: eagle used by the Byzantine Empire, Ivan the Terrible and
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  Speaker 1: more recently Nazi Germany. Add in the fact that the
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  Speaker 1: title of the ad in included the German word oktung,
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: which means danger, and it was a curious pairing for sure,
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: and that's probably what drew the attention of the investigators.
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: But it certainly wasn't the only thing they were worried about.
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  Speaker 1: The bigger problem, it seems, was inside each of the
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  Speaker 1: smaller ads. Each of those were identical, and they showed
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  Speaker 1: a pair of dice in action. It's hand drawn and
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  Speaker 1: has a classy tone, but the items in the ad
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  Speaker 1: are a bit more mysterious. One of the die showed
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  Speaker 1: three sides, revealing three distinct numbers twelve and the Roman numeral.
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  Speaker 1: The other die showed the reader five zero and seven.
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  Speaker 1: So as Roger Paul Craig and his wife sat across
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  Speaker 1: the table from the FBI agents, they were starting to
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  Speaker 1: get nervous. The numbers, according to the investigators, were significant,
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  Speaker 1: and that wasn't a good thing, they said, was awfully
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  Speaker 1: close to the latitude line where Pearl Harbor sat. The
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  Speaker 1: twelve and seven looked a lot like December seven, the
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: date of that infamous attack, and the O five could
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  Speaker 1: very well have been oh five hours the original planned
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: start time of the attack on Pearl Harbor. But so
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  Speaker 1: what It wasn't illegal to place historical details in an advertisement. Yes,
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  Speaker 1: it would be in poor taste. Sure, over lives were
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: lost in the Battle of Pearl Harbor, so it's probably
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: not the best subject matter for a dice game looking
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: for gangbuster Christmas sales. But the trouble wasn't the subject matter.
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: It was the timing. You see, the ad that Monarch
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  Speaker 1: Publishing placed in The New Yorker was published in November
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  Speaker 1: on the two, in fact November of nineteen sixteen, days
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: before Pearl Harbor was attacked. It's easy to take computers
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  Speaker 1: for granted, these days, they do so much for us.
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  Speaker 1: They allow us to break barriers and create new forms
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  Speaker 1: of art and expression and take selfies with birds flying
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  Speaker 1: around our heads. Important stuff, clearly, But they haven't always
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  Speaker 1: been so small. Take the Apollo Guidance computer. It was
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  Speaker 1: built by M I. T and used by NASA in
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  Speaker 1: nineteen sixty nine for their Apollo eleven mission, and that's
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  Speaker 1: the one that put the first humans on the Moon.
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  Speaker 1: Each one weighed fifty pounds and was the size of
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  Speaker 1: a piece of carry on luggage. But they worked. We
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  Speaker 1: landed people on the freaking Moon after all. As crazy
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: as am I sound, though, the mobile phone in your
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  Speaker 1: pocket is more powerful than that NASA computer thirty two
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  Speaker 1: thousand times faster. In fact, you see, computers have a
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  Speaker 1: tendency to get smaller and more powerful over time. Go
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  Speaker 1: back far enough, and some of the earliest electrical computers
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  Speaker 1: were massive and slow. Eniac is a great example. It
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  Speaker 1: filled up an entire room, but in ninety six it
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  Speaker 1: was a supercomputer. There's another old computer worth mentioning, though
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  Speaker 1: it's not electrical. But by definition, computers are nothing more
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  Speaker 1: than machines that can be programmed to carry out specific tasks. Calculators, calendars,
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  Speaker 1: counting devices, that sort of thing. Charles Babbage is the
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  Speaker 1: big name in that field, thanks to the calculator he
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  Speaker 1: built in eighteen twenty two. It was all gears and levers,
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  Speaker 1: but it did its job nicely, and so did this
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  Speaker 1: other one. Like a lot of old computers, it's not
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  Speaker 1: in the best of shape today, but when it was
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  Speaker 1: brand spanking new, it focused on astronomy. I want to
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  Speaker 1: know when the next eclipse was going to be. This
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  Speaker 1: computer would tell you the lunar cycle you're covered. People
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  Speaker 1: could even program it to track the time between special,
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  Speaker 1: regular occurring social events. It was brilliant. But here's where
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  Speaker 1: it gets weird. This computer is older than babbage Is
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  Speaker 1: eighteen two device, and yet it's smaller than NASA's Apollo
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  Speaker 1: guidance computers, which seems to fly in the face of
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  Speaker 1: how useful and advanced it really was for at the time.
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  Speaker 1: You see, this computer wasn't crafted in the workshop of
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  Speaker 1: an English mechanic or in an M. I. T. Lab.
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  Speaker 1: It was built so long ago that we forgot about
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  Speaker 1: it in the first place. But in nineteen hundred some
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  Speaker 1: men found it and handed it over to people who
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  Speaker 1: might know what to do with such a powerful device.
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  Speaker 1: Those men were sponge divers. They found the computer underwater,
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  Speaker 1: just off the coast of the Greek island of Antikathera,
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  Speaker 1: and it hadn't been there since the eighteen hundreds or
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  Speaker 1: even the seventeen hundreds. According to the archaeologists who have
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  Speaker 1: studied it over the course of the past century, this
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  Speaker 1: computer is much older. It was built over two thousand
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  Speaker 1: years ago. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of
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  Speaker 1: the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts,
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast
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  Speaker 1: dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series,
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: and television show, and you can learn all about it
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: over at the World of Lore dot com. And until
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  Speaker 1: next time, stay curious.