January 3, 2019 • 10 mins
Some people break through barriers with the power of their will, while others rise above in the more literal sense. Either way, they make great additions to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
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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. The most difficult thing is
(00:29):
the decision to act. The rest is merely tenacity. Those
aren't my words, by the way. They belong to someone
who dared to do the impossible, someone we still remember today,
Amelia Earhart. She set numerous records during her life, both
as a woman and a pilot. She was the first
woman pilot to reach fourteen thousand feet in an airplane,
(00:50):
the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean,
and the first to fly NonStop from coast to coast
across the continental US. And she would have been the
first woman to circumnavigate the globe by airplane had she
not disappeared during her final trip. But this story isn't
about her. It's about the woman who came before her,
(01:11):
the one who, in all respects, paved the way for
women like Amelia Earhart to prove their metal before the world.
Her name was Annie London Dairy, and while she was
born in Latvia in eighteen seventy. She grew up in Boston.
She was raised in a tenement along with four other siblings,
who all got married and started families of their own,
and Annie was no different. She met a man, Max Kopchovsky,
(01:36):
in and the two of them raised three children together.
Alongside her sibling families. They supported each other the way
families are supposed to, but eventually they fell on hard
times and Annie had to find a job to make
ends meet. She ended up selling ad space for several
Boston newspapers. She held that job for many years, and
(01:56):
during her career two things happened. First, bicycle became the
vehicle of choice for the independent traveler. Everywhere she went,
someone was zipping up and down the street on two wheels.
And second, a man used one of these new fangled
machines to travel around the world. Suddenly, people everywhere were
(02:17):
wondering if it had been a fluke, could anyone else
take on the daunting task of traveling around the globe
on just a bicycle? And were only men up to
such an endeavor or could a woman handle the journey too?
That was the question too rich Boston aristocrats wanted to
have answered, so they made a wager, could a woman
(02:38):
go around the world in fifteen months by bicycle. If so,
the winner of the bet would get ten thousand dollars,
and so would the cyclist. Annie, who had never ridden
a bicycle before, volunteered for the challenge. Ten grand would
certainly come in handy for her family, but Annie already
had several strikes against her in the eyes of the
(02:59):
world around her. She was a woman, she was Jewish,
and she was a mother. The idea she would be
able to set a world record for circumnavigating the globe
on a bicycle sounded laughable to most, which made her
want to do it even more. She set out on
June from the Massachusetts State House wearing a long skirt
(03:21):
and a corset, hardly comfortable for a world cyclist in summertime,
and she brought along with her only a change of
clothes and a revolver for her safety. As long as
the weather held up, she averaged almost ten miles a
day and reached Chicago by late September. The journey was
getting harder, though, snow was falling the farther west she traveled,
(03:41):
and the dress was becoming too cumbersome for her to wear,
so she switched to a men's riding outfit, a far
cry from what most considered appropriate dress for a lady
at the time, but by now I think we all
can agree that there was nothing typical about Annie. She
turned around after that and headed back east. Two months
after reaching Chicago, she arrived in New York and boarded
(04:04):
a steamship for Europe, where custom officials confiscated her bicycle
and her money, and she was lambasted in the French
press for her choice of clothing. But none of that
deterred her. She got her bike back and returned to
the road, cycling from Paris to Marseilles before boarding another
ship to Japan. Only six months remained for her to
get back to Chicago and collect her winnings. Marche saw
(04:29):
Annie's return to the United States. As she docked in
San Francisco, California. She pedaled down through Los Angeles and
the Southwest as she followed the Southern Pacific Railway tracks
back to Chicago. She arrived there on September twelve, twelve
days shy of her departure date the year before, she'd
done it. After fifteen months of harsh roads, rain, snow,
(04:52):
and a few broken bones. Annie Londonderry had traveled around
the world by bicycle and won the ten thousand dollar
placed against her. An interesting note about Annie, though London
Dairy was not her real last name, she was born
Annie Cohen. You see, Annie had become a bit of
a celebrity before her trip even started. The idea alone
(05:15):
was enough for companies to try and latch onto her attempt,
and given the public perception of Jews at the time,
it wouldn't have been safe for her to travel with
her given surname Cohen, So she made a little deal
with the London Dairy Lithia Springwater Company. She would temporarily
change her last name to boost the company's visibility, and
in return, she'd be able to travel without fear of persecution.
(05:39):
The best part of it all was the ten grand
she'd won was really just icing on the cake. Annie
had made more money from the corporate sponsorships and speaking
engagements she'd picked up on her trip, establishing herself as
an entrepreneur and one of the first true professional female athletes.
Sure there's a lot to criticize about her journey. She
(06:00):
certainly took a lot of steamships and trains, and there
was no doubt there were better bicyclists out there. She
did just about what anyone could have done. She made
the decision and she acted upon it. No Annie stood
apart from everyone else because of something else. She, more
than anyone else in her day, had the goal to
follow Amelia Earhart's advice four decades before she spoke it.
(06:24):
Annie had tenacity. People change over the course of their lives.
As they grow up, they grow in other ways. Their
(06:46):
taste change, their styles change, even the kinds of friends
they keep change. But most people tend not to change
in other ways. Oh sure, they might get a drastic
haircut or have a little work done, and some people
might hit the gym five days a week so they
can look like a superhero by beach season. But nobody
changes the way Adam did. And that's because Adam was
(07:07):
one of a kind. He was born in Austria at
the turn of the century. Ever the patriotic fellow, He
attempted to enlist in the German army during World War One,
but he was turned away, and for a very good reason.
There was no way that they were going to allow
a four ft six man on the front lines. They
didn't even make uniforms in his size, but he kept trying.
(07:30):
He felt he had a duty to serve his country,
and he wouldn't let his diminutive stature hold him back.
Adam managed to add another two inches to his frame
the following year. The army still wouldn't have it. He
came in at under five feet tall, and to the
powers that be, he proved to be more of a
liability than an asset. Oddly enough, though, there were parts
(07:51):
of Adam that had developed beyond his undersized build, namely
his hands and his feet. He was like a massive
puppy in that respect, with the shoes, eyes that had
doubled within two years, even though his height remained mostly
the same. When he reached the age of twenty one,
it was like a switch had been flipped. Adam shot
up like a redwood, almost three feet in ten years.
(08:14):
Doctors examined him thoroughly, discovering he was born with a
condition known as acromegaly, in which the pituitary gland produces
too much growth hormone. Even if you haven't heard of it,
there's no doubt you've seen it. The condition affects fewer
than twenty thousand cases per year, but some notable individuals
include celebrities like Andre the Giant from The Princess Bride
(08:35):
and Richard Keel, who played the metal mouth henchman Jaws
in several early James Bond movies. Adam's condition worsened later
in life due to a tumor on his pituitary gland.
If you were to look at pictures of him from
when he was barely twenty all the way to the
end of his life, you'd see just how stark that
transformation was. One moment, he's the picture of perfect health,
(08:56):
all of his facial features within standard proportion. The next,
his forehead has enlarged, as has his chin, and his
cheeks are puffed out like a chipmunk's. Within ten years,
Adam had gone through a sort of jeckal and Hide
transformation into some one completely different. The doctors tried to
operate and remove the tumor, but given how long he
(09:18):
had been growing, chances of curing his condition were slim.
They managed to slow down the growth rate, but unfortunately
it wasn't enough. He kept getting taller, his body contorting
and modulating to accommodate the rapid growth. He went blind
in one eye and deaf in his left ear. His
spine curve so severely he was bed ridden by his
(09:38):
late forties. Most people stopped growing by the time they
reach adulthood, and might even begin shrinking as they approach
old age, hunched over by years spent at a desk
or performing manual labor, not atam. Though by the time
he died at the age of fifty one, he'd grown
from a meager four feet six inches of his youth
(10:00):
was staggering seven ft eight inches tall. He had lived
two lives as part of two different worlds, making Adam
Rayner the only man on earth to have ever lived
as both a dwarf and a giant. I hope you've
enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe
(10:23):
for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the
show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was
created by me Aaron Manky 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 about it over at the World of Lore
(10:44):
dot com. And until next time, stay curious.
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. The most difficult thing is
(00:29):
the decision to act. The rest is merely tenacity. Those
aren't my words, by the way. They belong to someone
who dared to do the impossible, someone we still remember today,
Amelia Earhart. She set numerous records during her life, both
as a woman and a pilot. She was the first
woman pilot to reach fourteen thousand feet in an airplane,
(00:50):
the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean,
and the first to fly NonStop from coast to coast
across the continental US. And she would have been the
first woman to circumnavigate the globe by airplane had she
not disappeared during her final trip. But this story isn't
about her. It's about the woman who came before her,
(01:11):
the one who, in all respects, paved the way for
women like Amelia Earhart to prove their metal before the world.
Her name was Annie London Dairy, and while she was
born in Latvia in eighteen seventy. She grew up in Boston.
She was raised in a tenement along with four other siblings,
who all got married and started families of their own,
and Annie was no different. She met a man, Max Kopchovsky,
(01:36):
in and the two of them raised three children together.
Alongside her sibling families. They supported each other the way
families are supposed to, but eventually they fell on hard
times and Annie had to find a job to make
ends meet. She ended up selling ad space for several
Boston newspapers. She held that job for many years, and
(01:56):
during her career two things happened. First, bicycle became the
vehicle of choice for the independent traveler. Everywhere she went,
someone was zipping up and down the street on two wheels.
And second, a man used one of these new fangled
machines to travel around the world. Suddenly, people everywhere were
(02:17):
wondering if it had been a fluke, could anyone else
take on the daunting task of traveling around the globe
on just a bicycle? And were only men up to
such an endeavor or could a woman handle the journey too?
That was the question too rich Boston aristocrats wanted to
have answered, so they made a wager, could a woman
(02:38):
go around the world in fifteen months by bicycle. If so,
the winner of the bet would get ten thousand dollars,
and so would the cyclist. Annie, who had never ridden
a bicycle before, volunteered for the challenge. Ten grand would
certainly come in handy for her family, but Annie already
had several strikes against her in the eyes of the
(02:59):
world around her. She was a woman, she was Jewish,
and she was a mother. The idea she would be
able to set a world record for circumnavigating the globe
on a bicycle sounded laughable to most, which made her
want to do it even more. She set out on
June from the Massachusetts State House wearing a long skirt
(03:21):
and a corset, hardly comfortable for a world cyclist in summertime,
and she brought along with her only a change of
clothes and a revolver for her safety. As long as
the weather held up, she averaged almost ten miles a
day and reached Chicago by late September. The journey was
getting harder, though, snow was falling the farther west she traveled,
(03:41):
and the dress was becoming too cumbersome for her to wear,
so she switched to a men's riding outfit, a far
cry from what most considered appropriate dress for a lady
at the time, but by now I think we all
can agree that there was nothing typical about Annie. She
turned around after that and headed back east. Two months
after reaching Chicago, she arrived in New York and boarded
(04:04):
a steamship for Europe, where custom officials confiscated her bicycle
and her money, and she was lambasted in the French
press for her choice of clothing. But none of that
deterred her. She got her bike back and returned to
the road, cycling from Paris to Marseilles before boarding another
ship to Japan. Only six months remained for her to
get back to Chicago and collect her winnings. Marche saw
(04:29):
Annie's return to the United States. As she docked in
San Francisco, California. She pedaled down through Los Angeles and
the Southwest as she followed the Southern Pacific Railway tracks
back to Chicago. She arrived there on September twelve, twelve
days shy of her departure date the year before, she'd
done it. After fifteen months of harsh roads, rain, snow,
(04:52):
and a few broken bones. Annie Londonderry had traveled around
the world by bicycle and won the ten thousand dollar
placed against her. An interesting note about Annie, though London
Dairy was not her real last name, she was born
Annie Cohen. You see, Annie had become a bit of
a celebrity before her trip even started. The idea alone
(05:15):
was enough for companies to try and latch onto her attempt,
and given the public perception of Jews at the time,
it wouldn't have been safe for her to travel with
her given surname Cohen, So she made a little deal
with the London Dairy Lithia Springwater Company. She would temporarily
change her last name to boost the company's visibility, and
in return, she'd be able to travel without fear of persecution.
(05:39):
The best part of it all was the ten grand
she'd won was really just icing on the cake. Annie
had made more money from the corporate sponsorships and speaking
engagements she'd picked up on her trip, establishing herself as
an entrepreneur and one of the first true professional female athletes.
Sure there's a lot to criticize about her journey. She
(06:00):
certainly took a lot of steamships and trains, and there
was no doubt there were better bicyclists out there. She
did just about what anyone could have done. She made
the decision and she acted upon it. No Annie stood
apart from everyone else because of something else. She, more
than anyone else in her day, had the goal to
follow Amelia Earhart's advice four decades before she spoke it.
(06:24):
Annie had tenacity. People change over the course of their lives.
As they grow up, they grow in other ways. Their
(06:46):
taste change, their styles change, even the kinds of friends
they keep change. But most people tend not to change
in other ways. Oh sure, they might get a drastic
haircut or have a little work done, and some people
might hit the gym five days a week so they
can look like a superhero by beach season. But nobody
changes the way Adam did. And that's because Adam was
(07:07):
one of a kind. He was born in Austria at
the turn of the century. Ever the patriotic fellow, He
attempted to enlist in the German army during World War One,
but he was turned away, and for a very good reason.
There was no way that they were going to allow
a four ft six man on the front lines. They
didn't even make uniforms in his size, but he kept trying.
(07:30):
He felt he had a duty to serve his country,
and he wouldn't let his diminutive stature hold him back.
Adam managed to add another two inches to his frame
the following year. The army still wouldn't have it. He
came in at under five feet tall, and to the
powers that be, he proved to be more of a
liability than an asset. Oddly enough, though, there were parts
(07:51):
of Adam that had developed beyond his undersized build, namely
his hands and his feet. He was like a massive
puppy in that respect, with the shoes, eyes that had
doubled within two years, even though his height remained mostly
the same. When he reached the age of twenty one,
it was like a switch had been flipped. Adam shot
up like a redwood, almost three feet in ten years.
(08:14):
Doctors examined him thoroughly, discovering he was born with a
condition known as acromegaly, in which the pituitary gland produces
too much growth hormone. Even if you haven't heard of it,
there's no doubt you've seen it. The condition affects fewer
than twenty thousand cases per year, but some notable individuals
include celebrities like Andre the Giant from The Princess Bride
(08:35):
and Richard Keel, who played the metal mouth henchman Jaws
in several early James Bond movies. Adam's condition worsened later
in life due to a tumor on his pituitary gland.
If you were to look at pictures of him from
when he was barely twenty all the way to the
end of his life, you'd see just how stark that
transformation was. One moment, he's the picture of perfect health,
(08:56):
all of his facial features within standard proportion. The next,
his forehead has enlarged, as has his chin, and his
cheeks are puffed out like a chipmunk's. Within ten years,
Adam had gone through a sort of jeckal and Hide
transformation into some one completely different. The doctors tried to
operate and remove the tumor, but given how long he
(09:18):
had been growing, chances of curing his condition were slim.
They managed to slow down the growth rate, but unfortunately
it wasn't enough. He kept getting taller, his body contorting
and modulating to accommodate the rapid growth. He went blind
in one eye and deaf in his left ear. His
spine curve so severely he was bed ridden by his
(09:38):
late forties. Most people stopped growing by the time they
reach adulthood, and might even begin shrinking as they approach
old age, hunched over by years spent at a desk
or performing manual labor, not atam. Though by the time
he died at the age of fifty one, he'd grown
from a meager four feet six inches of his youth
(10:00):
was staggering seven ft eight inches tall. He had lived
two lives as part of two different worlds, making Adam
Rayner the only man on earth to have ever lived
as both a dwarf and a giant. I hope you've
enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe
(10:23):
for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the
show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was
created by me Aaron Manky 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 about it over at the World of Lore
(10:44):
dot com. And until next time, stay curious.
Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities News
Host
Aaron Mahnke
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