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War at Home · Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities

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  Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Benky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
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  Speaker 1: I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is
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  Speaker 1: full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book,
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  Speaker 1: all of these amazing tales are right there on display,
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  Speaker 1: just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet
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  Speaker 1: of Curiosities. Giovanni Casselli wanted nothing more than to talk
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  Speaker 1: to people. His only problem is that the people he
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  Speaker 1: wanted to talk to lived very far away. Perhaps that
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  Speaker 1: was why he became a Catholic priest, so he could
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  Speaker 1: have a direct line to someone else very far away.
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  Speaker 1: Born in Seattle, Italy, in eighteen fifteen, Casselli may have
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  Speaker 1: arrived a few hundred years too late for the Renaissance,
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  Speaker 1: but he certainly grew into quite the Renaissance man. In
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  Speaker 1: addition to getting ordained in eighteen thirties six, he also
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  Speaker 1: studied history, science and literature. Casselli eventually transitioned from being
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  Speaker 1: a student to being a teacher. He tutored Italian aristocrats
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  Speaker 1: in Parma for several years before his exile to Florence
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  Speaker 1: for political activism. He soon took a job as a
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  Speaker 1: physics professor at the university. There, Casselli soon became entranced
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  Speaker 1: by the sciences. His own teacher, Leopoldo Nobili, taught him
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  Speaker 1: about subjects like electro magnetism and electro chemistry. Casselli took
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  Speaker 1: it upon himself to adapt those lessons into a journal
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  Speaker 1: he called The Recreation, which was meant to distell such
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  Speaker 1: complicated science into a more accessible form. One particular topic
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  Speaker 1: struck Casselli during his tenure at the university, electricity, specifically
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  Speaker 1: its use in transmitting signals from one place to another.
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  Speaker 1: When he wasn't teaching, Casselli was researching how to send
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  Speaker 1: messages across long distances over wire. Now, the telegram, which
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  Speaker 1: sends electrical pulses across a vast network of wires, had
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  Speaker 1: existed since the eighteen forties. Casselli didn't want to send
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  Speaker 1: beeps and blips, though, he wanted to send words and
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  Speaker 1: even pictures. Unfortunately, he was limited by the technology at
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  Speaker 1: the time. Sending messages from one location to another required
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  Speaker 1: a lot of power and a method of synchronization between
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  Speaker 1: the transmitter and the receiver. After many years, though, he
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  Speaker 1: finally cracked it in the eighteen fifties with his invention
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  Speaker 1: he called the pan telegraph. It was six ft tall,
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  Speaker 1: shaped like a giant wishbone, and was powered by massive batteries.
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  Speaker 1: On one side, two curved metal plates were situated next
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  Speaker 1: to each other, a transmission plate and a receiving plate.
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  Speaker 1: The transmission plate held the message to be sent, which
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  Speaker 1: was written in a non conductive ink. To send it,
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  Speaker 1: a stylist would travel across the plates in parallel lines
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  Speaker 1: until the message had been scanned. The information gathered from
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  Speaker 1: the conductive plate and the non conduct if inc was
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  Speaker 1: then sent over telegraph lines to another Pan telegraph set
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  Speaker 1: up elsewhere. A pen fixed over the receiver plates on
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  Speaker 1: that device would write or draw the incoming transmission on
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  Speaker 1: a new piece of paper. To solve his syncretization problem,
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  Speaker 1: Casselli used a fairly low tech solution, a pendulum clock
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  Speaker 1: known as a regulating clock. The pendulum would swing back
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  Speaker 1: and forth, completing and breaking the circuits over and over again,
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  Speaker 1: keeping both the transmitter and receiver in sync. He first
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  Speaker 1: demonstrated his device in eighteen fifty six to Leopold, the
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  Speaker 1: second Grand Duke of Tuscany. The Duke was in awe
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  Speaker 1: of what Casselli had accomplished. And provided funding for his
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  Speaker 1: other experiments and inventions for some time. Eventually, though, the
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  Speaker 1: Duke grew bored waiting for the next big thing from
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  Speaker 1: the physicist. Seeing the writing on the wall, Caselli packed
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  Speaker 1: up and headed to Paris, where he showed off his
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  Speaker 1: pan telegraph to Napoleon the Third, and like the Duke,
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  Speaker 1: Napoleon was hooked. Casselli conducted a test of his device
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  Speaker 1: between Paris and Amia, a distance of almost ninety miles.
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  Speaker 1: The machine passed without a single hiccup. Another message was
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  Speaker 1: set nearly five hundred miles from Paris to Marseilles. Napoleon
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  Speaker 1: was convinced. In eighteen sixty four, the pen telegraph became
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  Speaker 1: an official and legally authorized method of transmitting written messages
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  Speaker 1: across long distances. It didn't last long though. While impressive
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  Speaker 1: and relatively fast, the device was not the most reliable
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  Speaker 1: method of sending information from one place to another. Eventually,
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  Speaker 1: Casselli walked away from it entirely and went back to
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  Speaker 1: Italy to live out in the rest of his days.
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  Speaker 1: Eleven years later, an inventor named Alexander Graham Bell would
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  Speaker 1: receive the patent for a little device known as the telephone.
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  Speaker 1: It goes without saying that the telephone changed the way
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  Speaker 1: people communicated all over the world. But it was Giovanni
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  Speaker 1: Casselli who went down in history is the man who
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  Speaker 1: gave us something even more impressive, the very first facts machine.
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  Speaker 1: Wilmur McLean wasn't just as simple farmer. He had moved
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  Speaker 1: with his wife to her plantation near Manassas, Virginia, a
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  Speaker 1: home they called Yorkshire. Unsurprisingly, McLean was an outspoken supporter
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  Speaker 1: of the Confederacy, like most of his Virginia neighbors. That
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  Speaker 1: was probably why Confederate Brigadier General P. G. T. Beauregard
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  Speaker 1: had chosen McLean's farm to be his base of action.
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  Speaker 1: Signs of a major conflict had been evident for months,
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  Speaker 1: as more and more states seceded from the Union. Following
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  Speaker 1: the capture of Fort Sumter by South Carolina troops back
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  Speaker 1: in April, Abraham Lincoln enlisted tens of thousands of volunteer
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  Speaker 1: soldiers to prepare for war. Wilmer fled his home with
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  Speaker 1: his family on July seventeenth, eighteen sixty one. Beauregard had
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  Speaker 1: arrived that day with his staff to commandeer the land,
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  Speaker 1: the house, and the barn as his headquarters. Thirty five
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  Speaker 1: thousand Union troops had marched for two days in the
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  Speaker 1: blistering summer heat, finally arriving at bull Run, while roughly
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  Speaker 1: thirty two thousand Confederate soldiers had taken over Manassas Junction
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  Speaker 1: and the surrounding areas. On the evening of July eighth,
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  Speaker 1: Beauregard was sitting in Wilmur's home waiting for his dinner,
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  Speaker 1: when out of nowhere, a visitor came tearing through the
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  Speaker 1: front door and landed in the fireplace. It was a cannonball.
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  Speaker 1: Dinner may have been canceled, but the Battle of bull Run,
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  Speaker 1: and in a way, the Civil War itself, had officially begun.
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  Speaker 1: For four years, brother fought brother, father fought son. When
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  Speaker 1: the fighting had finally stopped, seven hundred and fifty thousand
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  Speaker 1: souls had been lost, about two point five percent of
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  Speaker 1: the country's population, and almost half of the bodies were
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  Speaker 1: never identified. Wilmer had been too old for the front lines. However,
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  Speaker 1: he did find ways to support the South. He made
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  Speaker 1: money as a sugar broker and smuggler, bringing it to
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  Speaker 1: the Confederate Army through Union black aides. A year after
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  Speaker 1: Beauregard had taken control of his home and turned his
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  Speaker 1: barn into a field hospital. Wilmer came back to the
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  Speaker 1: plantation to help out in other ways. The house had
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  Speaker 1: seemed quite a bit in his absence. As you might imagine,
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  Speaker 1: the wood had splintered where cannon fire and bullets had
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  Speaker 1: gone through its walls. It was no longer the place
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  Speaker 1: where he and his wife had hoped to raise their family.
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  Speaker 1: It had become a war torn shell of its former self.
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  Speaker 1: Even so, this had been his home, and Wilmur chose
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  Speaker 1: to stay for the winter as a quartermaster to support
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  Speaker 1: the troops. When the snow started to melt and budding
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  Speaker 1: flowers blossomed, the fighting between the North and the South
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  Speaker 1: grew more heated as well. Wilmer decided that he'd had enough.
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  Speaker 1: He and his family traveled over a hundred miles away
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  Speaker 1: to another tiny village in Virginia, far from the blood
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  Speaker 1: stained fields and air choked with gunpowder. He used his
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  Speaker 1: money to buy a new house, a converted tavern that
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  Speaker 1: had been built in eighteen forty eight by a man
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  Speaker 1: named Charles Rain. Rain's family sold it to Wilmer in
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  Speaker 1: eighteen sixty three, and the one time farmer breathed a
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  Speaker 1: sigh of relief, believing that he had left the violence
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  Speaker 1: of war of his previous home in the past. Unfortunately,
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  Speaker 1: he would not be so lucky. On April nine of
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  Speaker 1: eighteen sixty five, Wilmer was greeted on the street by
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  Speaker 1: Charles Marshall, a Confederate colonel who randomly stopped the first
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  Speaker 1: man he saw to ask a simple question. Was there
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  Speaker 1: a home nearby where General Ulysses S. Grant of the
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  Speaker 1: Union Army could meet peacefully with Confederate commander General Robert E. Lee.
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  Speaker 1: Wilmer took Marshall on a tour of an old brick
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  Speaker 1: house he thought might work, but Marshall told him no,
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  Speaker 1: it had to be nicer, somewhere quiet and respectable, where
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  Speaker 1: the two men could sit down and talk things out.
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  Speaker 1: Wilmer hesitated before eventually suggesting his own home as a
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  Speaker 1: possible meeting place right there in the village of Appomattox
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  Speaker 1: Courthouse and Marshall accepted. Lee and Grant sat across from
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  Speaker 1: each other in Wilmer's lavish parlor as the Confederate general
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  Speaker 1: through in the town. The war was over and the
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  Speaker 1: South had lost the Union officers and attendance, hooted and hollered,
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  Speaker 1: getting downright rampunctious as they tore the house up, looking
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  Speaker 1: for any and all souvenirs to mark the momentous occasion.
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  Speaker 1: They cut strips of fabric out of Wilmer's furniture. They
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  Speaker 1: took silverware and candlesticks, and even a doll belonging to
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  Speaker 1: his young daughter. They paid for the damage with money
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  Speaker 1: they practically forced into the man's pockets before leaving with
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  Speaker 1: their keepsakes, and Wilmur McLean became the only man in
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  Speaker 1: history with the right to say that the Civil War
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  Speaker 1: had started in his backyard and ended in his front parlor.
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  Speaker 1: I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet
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  Speaker 1: of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn
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  Speaker 1: more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com.
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  Speaker 1: The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership
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  Speaker 1: with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show
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  Speaker 1: called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show,
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  Speaker 1: and you can learn all about it over at the
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  Speaker 1: World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah h