Latest / Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities / Boom

Transcript

Boom · Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Menkey's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book,
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: all of these amazing tales are right there on display,
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: of Curiosities. Human psychology has been an important topic of
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: study for centuries. The ancient Greeks and Egyptians had their
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: schools of thought on it, as did the people in
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: ancient India and China. It wasn't until the nineteenth century, though,
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: when psychological research turned from the philosophical to the experimental.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: German psychologist Gustav Fechner started testing the human brains response
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: to various stimuli around eighteen thirties. From their experts such
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: as Herman Ebbinghouse went on to study other functions of
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: the mind, from memory to introspection to classical conditioning. Psychology
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: became a bustling industry of experimentation. Eventually, scientists didn't just
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: want to learn the limits of the brain. They wanted
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: to understand what made people tick. Why were some individuals
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: able to say no while others were more pleasers. Stanley
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: Milgram of Yale University tested this in his famous Milgram
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: experiment in nineteen sixty one. He invited participants to administer
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: electric shocks to someone in another room. As the shocks
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: increased in power, the screams of the unknown party got
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: louder and more intense until they stopped completely. But don't worry,
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: nobody died. The electric shocks weren't even real, but the
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: effects on the subjects pushing the buttons certainly were. Milgram
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: wanted to test how far a person would go in
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: following orders from an authority figure, even if those orders
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: involved hurting or and killing someone else. He based his
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: experiment on the actions of the Nazis during World War Two.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: The Stanford Prison Experiment of nineteen seventy one took things
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: further by placing college students in a simulated prison environment.
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: The purpose was to study how power affected one psychological state.
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: One group of students was given the title of guard,
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: while another subset was placed in the prisoner role. Three
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: guards were pulled out of the experiment early after demonstrating
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: what we're described as genuine sadistic tendencies. The prisoners also suffered.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: They were referred to by numbers rather than their names.
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: They were stripped, naked and sprayed with a hose. In short,
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: they were humiliated. The two week experiment was terminated after
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: just six days. Still, despite the prison experiments failings, researchers
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: wanted to understand how people thought and why they slid
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: into certain roles instead of others. Well. One man thought
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: that he could find the answer, and in order to
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: get there, he had to think bigger by thinking smaller.
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: John Calhoun was born in Tennessee in nineteen seventeen. He
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: spent his years in college studying rats. In nineteen forty six,
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: he started working at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore on
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: something called the rodent Ecology Project. This involved monitoring a
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: colony of rats in a ten thousand square foot pen
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: behind his house. Calhoun believed the rats with thrive, with
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: five females capable of producing up to five thousand pups
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: over the two years. Yet, as he watched over his
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: little rat metropolis, he noticed something. The numbers never got
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: that high, nowhere close. Once the population reached about two hundred,
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: they stopped reproducing. The rats soon became agitated. They fought
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: with each other and segregated themselves into dozens of colonies,
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: each comprised of twelve rats. He found that they couldn't
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: live peacefully in higher numbers. Calhoun decided to expand his operation.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: He constructed a new rat city, this time on the
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: second floor of a are and where his lab was located.
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: This new enclosure was comprised of four rooms, each ten
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: ft by fourteen feet clustered together. The rooms were then
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: subdivided further into quarters by two foot walls, and the
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: rats inside were viewable via a window in each room's ceiling.
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: These rats had much more room to move and were
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: never at a loss for food or drink, Yet they
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: still ran into the same problems as in the original experiment.
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: As populations filled the space, they inevitably collapsed. Calhoun attempted
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: one more time to see what would happen if a
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: group of rodents were given free rein over a large
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: property in night. With assistance from the National Institute of
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: Mental Health, he constructed a nine foot square habitat measuring
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: four and a half feet high. There were tunnels made
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: of wire mesh along the sides of the enclosure that
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: led to the feeding and drinking stations. As well as
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: the living quarters. He called this space universe. This time,
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: Calhoun performed his study on mice rather than rats, and
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: the results were promising. At first, every two months the
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: number of mice would double. Ten months in his initial
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: population of eight mice now totaled six hundred and twenty
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: and just as before, the faster they reproduced, the faster
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: everything spiraled downward. Older mice had trouble finding mates. They
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: also found themselves displaced in the community. Lone females occupied
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: nesting boxes by themselves, far from the rest of the group,
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: while mateless males congregated at the feeding stations. They became
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: hostile and anxious. Mouse families, on the other hand, saw
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: their neighborhoods struggling and moved their families to better areas,
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: sometimes more than once. And, just as had happened with
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: the rats, reproduction stopped, Calhoun's mouse utopia quickly devolved into
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: a full blown dystopia. The findings worried him. If rats
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: and mice couldn't handle high population density, how are humans
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: going to deal with overcrowding in their cities and towns.
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: An area with no job prospects or potential mates couldn't
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: sustain itself. But others didn't agree with his findings. Medical
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: historian and professor Edmund Ramsden noted that rats lack the
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: ability to cope the way that humans could in a
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: similar environment. Psychologist Jonathan Freedman determined that it wasn't the
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: lack of mates or social rules, but a lack of
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: personal space that had done the rodents in. Those who
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: had been able to secure their own corners of universe
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: twenty five away from everyone else hadn't turned hostile at all.
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: Regardless of Calhoun's results, there was one other important byproduct
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: of his work, a book. It was about a group
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: of rats who had learned to read and build machines
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: they'd been experimented on at the National Institute of Mental
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: Health before living free in the wild. Published in nineteen
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: seventy one, Mrs Frisbee and the Rats of Nim by
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: Robert C. O'Brien was inspired by Calhoun's research. It went
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: on to become a popular film in nineteen eighty two
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: called The Secrets of Nim. John Calhoun did his best
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: to show that rats and humans were cut for him
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: the same cloth, and in a lot of ways we
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: are in the end, though he also proved that humans
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: aren't part of a rat race. No matter what's thrown
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: at us, we often persevere, but of course we both
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: love cheese. Losing something important can throw off your whole day.
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: Misplace your keys and suddenly you're off to work ten
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: minutes later than you thought. You're stuck in traffic and
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: half an hour late for work, and a missing receipts
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: can be the difference between a refund at the store
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: and getting stuck with something that you ended up not wanting.
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: Losing a set of keys may feel like the end
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: of the world at the time, but it really isn't.
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: Losing a couple of atomic bombs, however, that might actually
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: be the end of the world, or at least the
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: Eastern Seaboard. Following the close of World War Two, the
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: nineteen fifties saw the eyes of a brand new front,
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: the Cold War. America and the Soviet Union were at
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: odds over various political and economic philosophies, putting the one
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: time allies on opposing sides. In the United States, schools
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: practiced air raid drills, and anticipation of the Big One,
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: children were told to hide under their desks, believing it
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: would protect them from a nuclear blast. Meanwhile, a nuclear
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: arms race was underway. It was fairly common for US
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: Air Force planes to carry bombs and bomb parts across
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: the ocean from one base to another, and on July
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: nineteen fifty seven, a C one four Globe Master in
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: Delaware was loaded up with three Mark five nuclear bombs
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: and one nuclear capsule. The bombs themselves were safe to fly.
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: They had been placed in c AF or complete assembly
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: for fairy condition, which meant each bomb lacked the core
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: necessary for a nuclear explosion, although they still retained a
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: significant amount of explosives inside their casings. Once the cores
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: were eventually inserted and the bombs dropped, the explode sims
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: would compress the cores and kick off a nuclear reaction.
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: The C one twenty four was also known as Old Shaky,
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: not the best name for an airplane carrying nuclear weapons.
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: Despite the humorous nickname, it was a solid vessel, weighing
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: in at one seventy five thousand pounds and powered by
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: four massive piston engines. Old Shaky took off from Dover
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: Air Force Base on a routine trip to deliver the
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: three bombs to another base in Europe. Unfortunately, it ran
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: into trouble almost immediately. Shortly after takeoff. Two of the
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: c engines failed. The other two engines were running at
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: full power, enough to prevent the plane from plummeting into
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: the ocean, but it was a losing battle. It was
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: just too heavy to stay up, and even with the
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: bombs lacking a nuclear core, there was still enough explosive
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: power inside them to cause severe damage, especially since the
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: nuclear capsule was on board with them. The crew had
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: to jettison weight fast. They most likely ejected the excess
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: fuel they would have needed for their transatlantic flight. Luckily,
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: there was a naval air station in Atlantic City, New Jersey,
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: where they could land. Yet, even with most of their
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: fuel gone, they were still too heavy. A crew in
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: such a situation might have tried making a crash landing
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: in the ocean. Had the Sea One two attempted that,
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: though it could have killed everyone on board and set
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: off the bombs, they made a drastic call and decided
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: to drop one of the Mark five bombs. It hit
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: the water from a height of forty feet, about seventy
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: five miles off the coast of New Jersey. Even that
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: wasn't enough though they jettisoned another bomb at feet the
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: plane still sinking in altitude. This last one landed fifty
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: miles offshore. Old Shaky stopped shaking that even doubts, and
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: the crew was able to maintain altitude all the way
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: to the air station. Despite dropping both bombs from significant heights,
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: neither one exploded Once word of the plane's mishap got out,
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: though recovery teams were assembled immediately to search for the
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: missing weapons, but the bombs were never found. For over
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: sixty years, they have resided just off the coast of
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: the Jersey Shore, waiting to be discovered. Residents of Atlantic
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: City weren't worried, though they'd had no idea the incident
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: had taken place at all. The military kept it under
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: wraps for over twenty years. The bombs eventually showed up
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: as line items on a list of broken arrows or
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: lost nuclear weapons published by the government in the nineteen eighties.
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: And there's an important lesson there, because when it comes
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: to unexploded nuclear weapons, no news is always good news.
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple podcasts, or learn
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com.
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: show and you can learn all about it over at
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: the World of Lore dot com. And until next time,
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: stay curious. Yeah,