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For today's tour of the Cabinet, listeners will hear the shocking story of one man's exploration of the past, while another person manages to leave a legacy that has hung around ever since.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history
is an open book, all of these amazing tales right
there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome
to the Cabinet of Curiosities. Most of us grew up

(00:29):
with the story of Benjamin Franklin and his kite. It's
that stereotypical Eureka moment, practically an American legend. At this point,
Franklin tied a key to the kite and let the
whole contraption fly up into the stormy sky. The string
was wet with rain, the key was made of metal,
and the lightning well it sent some sparks and a

(00:51):
tingle down to Franklin's hand. It's a lovely story. It
might very well be true. If the modern world has
a beating heart, we might be able to point to
electricity as the force that powers it. After Benjamin Franklin's experiment,
the wheels of science spun quickly. Luigi Galvani experimented with

(01:12):
the power of electricity to cause dead bodies to twitch.
Alessandro Volta, one of Galvani's competitors, invented the voltaic pile
in eighteen hundred, which was essentially a battery. Twenty years later,
Michael Faraday invented the electric motor, and in the decades
that followed, those same forces powered the invention of the telephone,

(01:32):
the light bulb, and eventually the modern personal computer. It's shocking,
I know, but we owe a lot of thanks to electricity. Still.
It isn't a complex or challenging technology when you boil
it down to its basic elements. Back in a German name,
Arnie Eggbrecht managed to prove just that. He built a

(01:55):
battery out of nothing more than a small jar, a
copper tube, and an iron rod. When filled with an
acidic liquid like vinegar or lemon juice, the copper and
iron react to produce an electric current. Like I said,
it's pretty simple with very few ingredients. It wasn't his idea, though,
egg Brecht had an earlier example to follow. Not something

(02:19):
built by Galvani or even Volta, not something drawn up
by Franklin or Thomas Edison. No, his template was much
older and came from a land far far away from
Europe and America. It was a battery discovered in Iraq
from a time well outside our modern expectations over two

(02:42):
thousand years ago. He was a philosopher by trade, which
gave him the tools he needed to be an extraordinary
social reformer. Jeremy Bentham was born in London in seventeen

(03:06):
forty eight and graduated with his Masters from the Queen's College,
Oxford at the young age of just eighteen, and he
seems like a progressive personality born well ahead of his time.
Bentham was an advocate for the separation of church and state,
for equal rights for women, and for the abolition of slavery.
He fought to put an end to corporal punishment and

(03:27):
the death penalty, and called for the fair treatment of animals.
And on top of all of that, he's considered one
of the spiritual founders of University College London and is
still remembered fondly there today. He also lived in an
age when it was difficult to find enough corpses for
medical study. Back then, only executed criminals were acceptable subjects

(03:48):
for dissection by medical students, unless, of course, a generous
individual chose to donate their body willingly, which at the
age of twenty one is exactly what Bentham promised to do.
He lived a long and fruitful life after that. Don't worry.
He made contributions to the fields of economics, legal reform,
gender studies, and he also published extensively. But I think

(04:11):
you get it. Bentham was a smart guy who did
a lot of great things. A lot of people still
look back with respect and admiration for what he accomplished.
Got it good because then he died. People saw it coming.
Of course. He was eighty four when it happened, which
was impressive for the eighteen thirties. But in the month

(04:31):
prior to his death he set about putting two connected
projects into action. The first was the donation of his
body to science that he had promised over sixty years before,
and sure enough, two days after his death, a group
of friends and students gathered to watch Dr Thomas Southward
Smith conduct the procedure. Afterwards, bentham skeleton was preserved and

(04:54):
set aside for the next step, except his head, with
flesh and hair and teeth all intact and untouched. Smith
used a procedure to mummify Bentham's head and freeze the decay,
but something went wrong and the dead man's head was
left a bit too dark and taught for most people's tastes.
In the end, they were forced to make a wax replica.

(05:17):
When they were ready, they brought all of Bentham's parts
over to his second project, a cabinet. It had been
built prior to his death and set aside for this
very moment. It's a large wooden display case that sort
of resembles a really nice phone booth, complete with doors
that open and lovely dark paneling inside, and it's big

(05:38):
enough for a grown man to sit inside comfortably. One
of Bentham's favorite chairs was placed inside the cabinet, and
then his skeleton was dressed in his own clothing. They
stuffed Hay inside it to flesh it out, so to speak,
and then sat the whole thing down in the chair
with that wax head on top. They even added his
walking cane for good measure. His real head caused a

(06:02):
lot more trouble than people expected, if you'd care to know.
Other than the fact that it's just a bit too
gruesome to look at, it's also been stolen a few
times by university students. These days, it's locked away and
safely out of sight and out of reach as well.
All these years later, you can still visit Jeremy Bentham.

(06:22):
His wooden cabinet is typically on display in the main
building of the University College London, although on rare occasions
his body has been removed from its cabinet so that
he can sit in on important gatherings of the College Council.
They even record his presence in the meeting minutes his
status present but not voting. I hope you've enjoyed today's

(06:51):
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 Mankey 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

(07:13):
about it over at the World of Lore dot com.
And until next time, stay curious.