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Wildcat · Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities

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  Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Menkey'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. From the mid nineteen fifties to nine, the
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  Speaker 1: United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in a
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  Speaker 1: major conflict. Not a literal battle, mind you, but a
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  Speaker 1: figurative one. It was a race for the stars, for
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  Speaker 1: the moon, and for technological superiority. A space race led
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  Speaker 1: to countless discoveries. Both the Americans and the Russians launched
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  Speaker 1: unmanned satellites, planetary probes, and sent astronauts into orbit. Soviet
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  Speaker 1: pilot Yuri Gagarin was the first human to enter outer
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  Speaker 1: space in April of nineteen sixty one, but the United
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  Speaker 1: States wasn't far behind. One month later, Alan Shephard did
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  Speaker 1: his country proud and became the first American in space.
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  Speaker 1: In the years following Shepherd's launched, NASA worked on a
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  Speaker 1: second human powered space flight called Mercury Redstone. Four engineers
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  Speaker 1: developed a small spacecraft they dubbed the Liberty Bell seven,
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  Speaker 1: to be steered by Air Force pilots and astronaut Virgil
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  Speaker 1: Gus Grissom. The craft was designed to be carried by
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  Speaker 1: the rocket with Grissom inside, before breaking off on its own.
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  Speaker 1: It was a true feat of engineering and sported several
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  Speaker 1: technological advances of the time. For example, it featured a
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  Speaker 1: new rate stabilization system which allowed Grisom to reorient the
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  Speaker 1: capsule using a handheld controller. Corning glass Works, the same
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  Speaker 1: company behind the popular bakeware, made the window of the
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  Speaker 1: Liberty Bell seven out of a type of glass capable
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  Speaker 1: of withstanding temperatures as high as eighteen hundred degrees fahrenheit.
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  Speaker 1: But perhaps the most impressed of component of the spacecraft
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  Speaker 1: was the explosive hatch NASET, designed to get Grissom out
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  Speaker 1: in case of an emergency. In previous iterations, the hatch
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  Speaker 1: was secured with seventy bolts To evacuate the capsule and
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  Speaker 1: astronaut would have to climb through an antenna compartment. It
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  Speaker 1: was a tight fit for even the slimmest astronauts that
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  Speaker 1: if the person inside had suffered an injury or fallen unconscious,
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  Speaker 1: there would be no way for someone on the outside
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  Speaker 1: to get them free. To trigger the detonation of the
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  Speaker 1: new hatch, the person inside had to remove a pin
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  Speaker 1: and then pressed down on a plunger. It could also
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  Speaker 1: be done by someone on the outside, though by pulling
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  Speaker 1: on a rip cord, as if they were deploying the parachute.
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  Speaker 1: On the day of the launch, Grissom boarded the red
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  Speaker 1: Stone rocket and settled into the Liberty Bell seven module.
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  Speaker 1: It took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on July one, nineteen,
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  Speaker 1: ascending towards the heavens and zooming through the sky for
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  Speaker 1: over two minutes. When the rocket reached its desired altitude,
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  Speaker 1: the engines died and the capsule separated. Grissom was now
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  Speaker 1: on his own, gazing down at Cape can Avril and
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  Speaker 1: the surrounding area from over one miles up. He floated
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  Speaker 1: among the stars, taking in the view from the top
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  Speaker 1: of the world, before reorienting the Liberty Bell seven for
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  Speaker 1: re entry. His time in orbit had been short but breathtaking.
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  Speaker 1: Grissom fired up the retro rockets and aimed the craft
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  Speaker 1: back toward the Earth, picking up speed on his way down.
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  Speaker 1: As sunlight poured through the glass windows, obscuring his view
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  Speaker 1: a feet his drugue parachute deployed to slow his descent.
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  Speaker 1: At twelve thousand feets, his main parachute fired and he
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  Speaker 1: eased into a splash down in the North Atlantic Ocean.
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  Speaker 1: His rescue team was on their way by helicopter, but
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  Speaker 1: Grissom needed to get some information first. He quickly gathered
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  Speaker 1: his bearings and recorded the data from the instruments in
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  Speaker 1: the cabin, then pulled the pin out of the detonator
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  Speaker 1: attached to the hatch door. Now he had no intention
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  Speaker 1: of exiting the spacecraft so soon, so he didn't push
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  Speaker 1: the plunger. The hatch had other plans, though. It blew
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  Speaker 1: open on its own and the capsule started to flood.
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  Speaker 1: Grissom refus used to go down with the ship. He
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  Speaker 1: swam out on his own and bobbed in the water,
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  Speaker 1: waiting for his team to come get him. They got
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  Speaker 1: there just in time. His space suit had begun losing
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  Speaker 1: its buoyancy due to an air leak in the neck.
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  Speaker 1: If he'd waited much longer, the weight of the suit
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  Speaker 1: would have dragged him down with it. Gus Grissom was
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  Speaker 1: saved that day However, he criticized the design of the hatch,
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  Speaker 1: which he claimed had popped off on its own as
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  Speaker 1: a result of the doors unpredictable behavior. It was changed
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  Speaker 1: by NASA for the Apollo one launch six years later.
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  Speaker 1: The Apollo one mission saw the return of Gus Grissom,
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  Speaker 1: now joined by two new astronauts named Ed White and
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  Speaker 1: Roger Chaffey. NASA's engineers had taken Grissom's complaints about the
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  Speaker 1: original hatch door to heart. The Apollo one command module
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  Speaker 1: now featured a more secure plug door design, which opened
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  Speaker 1: from the inside and used air pressure inside the cabin
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  Speaker 1: to keep it closed. On January nineteen sixty seven, Jeffy
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  Speaker 1: White and Grissom were strapped into the command module to
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  Speaker 1: perform a launch simulation test. The cabin was pressurized and
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  Speaker 1: the air inside was replaced with pure oxygen. Minutes after
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  Speaker 1: they began their test, a spark in the wiring caused
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  Speaker 1: a fire which grew in seconds. It was fueled by
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  Speaker 1: the oxygen being pumped into the cabin. White tried to
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  Speaker 1: open the door, but the internal pressure had risen too high.
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  Speaker 1: It wouldn't open. It couldn't. Tragically, Chaffee, White and Grisom
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  Speaker 1: died that day, all because the hatch had worked exactly
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  Speaker 1: as it was supposed to. They called it wildcatting. I'm
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  Speaker 1: not talking about the college football formation that came years
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  Speaker 1: later in earlier times, and we're talking about the first
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  Speaker 1: decades of the eighteen hundreds. Here there was new American
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  Speaker 1: slang for the business world, but it wasn't used much
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  Speaker 1: until that is the oil boom, especially with the discovery
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  Speaker 1: of oil in western Pennsylvania. And what did it mean. Well,
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  Speaker 1: even in the early days, the oil industry was controlled
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  Speaker 1: by a few powerful players, I think J. D. Rockefeller's
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  Speaker 1: Standard Oil Company, but there were lots of independent oilman too.
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  Speaker 1: Because the more people wanted to buy oil, the more
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  Speaker 1: it was an opportunity for people with small fortunes to
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  Speaker 1: turn them into big ones. Those were the wildcats, and
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  Speaker 1: as more and more people decided to take their shot
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  Speaker 1: at a rich and undiscovered oil deposits, the more well
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  Speaker 1: known wildcatting became. For instance, take John He was a
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  Speaker 1: successful actor whose celebrity and powerful performance has made him
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  Speaker 1: popular and brought him a good living. The newspapers called
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  Speaker 1: him a star of the first magnitude and the youngest
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  Speaker 1: star in the world and the most handsome man on
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  Speaker 1: the American stage. There were even some who would look
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  Speaker 1: at him as quite rich, especially because he was just
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  Speaker 1: twenty four years old, and John agreed, my goose does
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  Speaker 1: indeed hang high. He wrote to a friend. He had
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  Speaker 1: made a tidy sum from his stage performances and general handsomeness,
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  Speaker 1: But the outfits people saw him wear, the velvet, the
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  Speaker 1: fur lined royal coats, the silver buckles and gold embroidery,
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  Speaker 1: those belonged to his characters like Richard the Third. And
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  Speaker 1: when chronic bronchitis made John's throat titan, he started to
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  Speaker 1: lose his voice, and he wondered if he would be
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  Speaker 1: better off finding a way to turn his earnings into
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  Speaker 1: a new stream of revenue. So he put on flannel
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  Speaker 1: and overalls and traveled inland to the Allegheny Mountains in
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  Speaker 1: western Pennsylvania. In eighteen fifty nine, an inventor named Edwin
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  Speaker 1: Drake kicked off Pennsylvania's oil boom when he drilled the
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  Speaker 1: first commercial oil well in titus Pville, Pennsylvania, and shot
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  Speaker 1: a hole down into the ground to get below the
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  Speaker 1: seepage on the surface and really suck out the good
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  Speaker 1: stuff and under a year, there were five hundred wells
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  Speaker 1: dotting the countryside. And it was five years later that
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  Speaker 1: John wanted in on that game, and he brought along
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  Speaker 1: a few pals from his theater days. They came from
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  Speaker 1: Cleveland and Boston and threw in their lot together to
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  Speaker 1: create what they called the Dramatic Oil Company. When they
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  Speaker 1: were looking for the right land to strike it rich,
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  Speaker 1: John met with one local driller who reached out to
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  Speaker 1: shake his hand and then apologized his palm was covered
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  Speaker 1: in oil. Never mind, John replied, that's what we're after.
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  Speaker 1: He hired the man, hoping it would grease his palms too.
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  Speaker 1: John also convinced his sister Rosalie to buy into the
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  Speaker 1: industry and gave her some money to spend. She took
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  Speaker 1: one thousand dollars and invested in a different wildcat. Maybe
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  Speaker 1: John should have taken that as a sign, but John
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  Speaker 1: and his partners thought they found the right spot. They
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  Speaker 1: bought an oil lease on three and a half acres
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  Speaker 1: of a farm outside Franklin, Pennsylvania, and dropped a well
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  Speaker 1: into the ground. To live up to their company title.
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  Speaker 1: They gave the well a name Wilhelmina, after one of
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  Speaker 1: their wives. In the summer of eighteen sixty four, they
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  Speaker 1: started drilling, and then they waited. John traveled back and
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  Speaker 1: forth from his frontier oil operation to his ordinary hangouts
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  Speaker 1: on the coast, places like New York in Washington, d c.
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  Speaker 1: Where he had friends. He was a wildcatter, sure, but
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  Speaker 1: a half hearted one. Even when he was in Franklin,
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  Speaker 1: he spent more time in taverns than he did trying
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  Speaker 1: to find ways for his oil investments to pay out.
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  Speaker 1: He was more interested in watching the progress of the
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  Speaker 1: Civil War and chatting politics with his city pals than
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  Speaker 1: in doing oil business. It needed his attention, though Wilhelmina.
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  Speaker 1: The oil well wasn't working out. Yes, the Dramatic Oil
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  Speaker 1: Company got a few barrels a day, but it was
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  Speaker 1: nothing like what they hoped for, and John found that
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  Speaker 1: one of his Cleveland partners was spending the company money
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  Speaker 1: on hats and watches. The two men got into a
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  Speaker 1: knife fight, and John came away with bleeding wounds. Dramatic
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  Speaker 1: Oil Company indeed to sort out the well, John took
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  Speaker 1: advice from other oil hunters and tried a new method,
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  Speaker 1: dropping charges of black powder down into a dry hole.
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  Speaker 1: The idea was that if pockets of oil were just
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  Speaker 1: close enough to the shaft, the explosion would burst it
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  Speaker 1: open and the oil would come flowing into the well.
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  Speaker 1: It was an early version of fray called shooting the well.
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  Speaker 1: Of course, digging the well in the first place was expensive.
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  Speaker 1: John threw lots of his stage money at the project.
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  Speaker 1: When it came time to buy some explosives. Well, between
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  Speaker 1: the oil boom and the war powder wasn't cheap. Naturally,
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  Speaker 1: the money for that black powder came out of John's pocket.
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  Speaker 1: The thing was, John's shooting turned a bad situation worse.
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  Speaker 1: Instead of bringing more oil into the well, black powder
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  Speaker 1: explosion made a collapse. One partner's son said that the
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  Speaker 1: blast utterly ruined the whole, and the well never yielded
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  Speaker 1: another drop. Despite his enthusiasm, John's plans pulled his partners
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  Speaker 1: into a mess. In an ironic twist, John's sister Rosalie
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  Speaker 1: made good on her investment outside Franklin. Her well brought
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  Speaker 1: thousands of barrels of oil out of the ground, But
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  Speaker 1: John's dramatic oil company was a dramatic failure. He had
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  Speaker 1: dropped more than five thousand dollars into the efforts, Almost
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  Speaker 1: one hundred thousand dollars in today's money. His fortunes followed
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  Speaker 1: the explosives underground, in a very real example of the
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  Speaker 1: phrase sunk costs, shooting the barren earth just through good
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  Speaker 1: money after bad. But it was far from the most
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  Speaker 1: desperate thing that John would do, nor was it the
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  Speaker 1: darkest mark on his legacy. For that we turned to
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  Speaker 1: eighteen sixty five. Seething with disappointment, John retreated from Pennsylvania.
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  Speaker 1: When someone asked him where he was going, John only answered,
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  Speaker 1: I AM going to Hell. It wasn't his only disappointments either,
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  Speaker 1: because John was a Southern sympathizer, so he was also
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  Speaker 1: gushing with rage about the South's defeat and the Civil War.
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  Speaker 1: In Baltimore, he pulled together childhood friends and former Confederate
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  Speaker 1: soldiers to hatch a new and even more dramatic plot.
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  Speaker 1: By now, you probably see it coming, although Abraham Lincoln
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  Speaker 1: and the nation did not, Because that actor turned failed
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  Speaker 1: oilman would channel his anger into a loaded pistol and
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  Speaker 1: shoot the President. The next hunt would be for him,
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  Speaker 1: as the call went out for the country to unearth
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  Speaker 1: an assassin, a wildcat oilman named John Wilkes Booth I
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  Speaker 1: hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities,
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  Speaker 1: subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about
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  Speaker 1: the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show
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  Speaker 1: was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how
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  Speaker 1: Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore,
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  Speaker 1: which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and
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  Speaker 1: you can learn all about it over at the World
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  Speaker 1: of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.
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  Speaker 1: Ye