Too Hot to Handle

We spend most of our lives either at work or at home. So it shouldn't be a surprise that so many curious stories come from those locations.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Benky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is
full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book,
all of these amazing tales are right there on display,
just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet

(00:27):
of Curiosities. There are plenty of places on Earth where
the word hot doesn't go far enough to describe the temperature.
Death Valley National Park in California, for example, can reach
more than one degrees fahrenheit on summer days. The park

(00:49):
advises visitors not to hike after ten am for fear
of heat related illnesses. To Billy, Tunisia hit a record
setting one degrees in July of nineteen thirty one, making
it one of the hottest locations on the planet. And
then there's kuber Petty. Kuber Petty is a small town
in southern Australia. It's home to several aboriginal groups, including

(01:11):
the Arabana and the Cocata. However, it got its name
due to the activities of the miners who took over
the area there in the early twenty century. Kuber Petty
you see is derived from the Cocafa language and translates
to white man's holes. Around nineteen fifteen, a man had
come to cuber Petty to prospect for gold. However, it

(01:31):
was his teenage son who found something precious one day,
and what he discovered changed everything. A boy had stumbled
upon Opal, a perlscent stone that had been coveted by
ancient cultures for thousands of years. Once World War One ended,
soldiers returning home ventured out into the Australian desert to
try their hand at Opal mining. Europeans soon followed suit,

(01:52):
and what had started with a bit of dumb luck
turned into a full fledged industry that transformed the landscape.
Kuber Petty is known today as the Opal capital of
the world, and it has over two hundred and fifty
thousand mine shafts to prove it. There are signs everywhere
warning miners and visitors alike to watch their steps, don't
walk backwards, and certainly don't run, not unless they want

(02:14):
to plummet several hundred feet to their depths. With so
many people flocking to the region to hunt for Opal,
it was only natural for them to also make their
homes there, and once the homes were built, residents needed
more to live, like food and recreational activities. Soon enough,
a whole town sprouted up. Bars, grocery stores, a hair salon, bookstore,

(02:37):
and even three separate churches were built to accommodate the
growing population. The hotels they're even had opals embedded in
their walls as reminders of what made the town so famous.
Of course, none of the food in the grocery store
was grown locally. The area was incapable of sustaining life.
In fact, the first tree ever planted in town wasn't

(02:57):
planted at all. It was made from scrap iron and
someone had welded together. One reason for a lack of
flora was due to the extreme heat, which often reached
into the triple digits even in the shade. The other
reason the lack of rain. Given such extreme conditions, one
must wonder how miners and their families were able to
survive at all. Well, they didn't build their homes, you see,

(03:20):
nor their public buildings out in the open. At least,
they went underground. Half of the town's sevent hundred residents
lived in homes that were dug into hillsides with the
same tools used to mind. For opal they were called dugouts,
and because they resided below ground, they almost never got
hotter than seventy five degrees fahrenheit. Built in temperature regulation

(03:42):
also meant air conditioning wasn't necessary. These weren't one or
two room studio apartments either. The homes included full kitchens,
living areas, bedrooms, and bathrooms. Many were outfitted with tile
floors and carpeting. Families hung pictures on the walls and
placed coffee tables in their living room. Starting in the
nineteen sixties, modern amenities like landline telephones made their way

(04:04):
to Cooper Petty Dwellings. TV service arrived in nineteen eighty,
and cell phones became usable there in the nineties. Today,
the only distinction between the dugouts above ground counterpart is
the temperature difference, well that in the stone walls. All
underground buildings there must adhere to local regulations and be
equipped with proper ventilation, emergency lighting, and a sturdy ceiling

(04:27):
that's at least two point five meters thick. The town
may have started out as a vast expanse of open space,
but over the last hundred years it's become a bustling metropolis.
Tourists can visit the Opal Capital of the World right
under the bright Australian sun before heading underground to cool off.
As the old saying goes, if you can't stand the heat,
get out of the kitchen. Well, whoever said that probably

(04:50):
didn't know that in the Opal Capital of the World,
the kitchen maybe the coolest place to go. They say
imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but that may

(05:12):
be true for actors and musicians, but I doubt Immanuel
Ninger's imitations were considered equally as flattering. Emmanuel was born
around eighteen forty six in Germany. Not much as known
about his childhood, but it's probably safe to say that
he took an early interest in art. When he was
thirty five years old, though he moved to Hoboken, New
Jersey with his wife and two thousand dollars to their name.

(05:35):
He found work painting signs, something he had developed quite
a skillful, and soon bought a farm in the small
town of Westfield, New Jersey. Emmanuel's life was on a
path toward good fortune, not necessarily as a sign painter,
but as a good husband and a neighbor. Unfortunately, his
fortune ran short, his two thousand dollars only got him
so far, and painting signs wasn't the road to riches

(05:58):
he had hoped for, so he decided it to use
his artistic talents in another way. Emmanuel reached out to
a paper manufacturer called Crane and Company. He bought some
of the finest paper they made. Crane and Company were
renowned for two reasons. One, they sold high quality stationary
and to their biggest client happened to be the United
States government. In two, all the currency in America was

(06:22):
printed on Crane and Company paper. Emmanuel Ninger could have
used his skill to sketch portraits, or paint murals, or
make anything really. Instead, he chose to make money, like
literally make money. This, of course, was before the days
of photocopiers. When it came to currency, this artist did
things the hard way. He copied the bills by hand.

(06:45):
Is he Emmanuel had a bit of an ego. He
was very confident in his work and didn't just believe
his notes to be museum worthy. He thought that they
were better than the money being mass produced by the governments,
and therefore worth more than the denominations printed on them.
Using the paper that he bought from Crane and Company.
Emmanuel cut it down to size, matching it to the

(07:05):
size of a bill he was copying. He then took
the empty sheets and soaked it in coffee to give
it an aged look. With a paper still wet and pliable,
he then dropped it on top of the real bill
and lined up the edges before putting both pieces of
paper on a pane of glass. The coffee stained bond
was practically transparent, giving a manual a perfect look at
the currency underneath. Pencil in hand, he traced the image

(07:28):
onto the blank sheet. Once the coffee had dried, he
switched to pen and ink to finish the drawing. What
he had created was a work of art people would
carry around in their pockets. Now. The bills weren't perfect.
There were some words and phrases on real American currency
which he didn't transcribe onto his own versions, but nobody
looked that closely. If they were carrying one of his bills,

(07:51):
they then believed that they were carrying something that had
come directly from Washington, d c. Emmanuel is believed to
have drawn somewhere in the realm of a few hundred
dollars worth of bills per month, more than enough to
live on. He became so successful he was able to
move off the farm in Westfield to a newer, larger
farm in Flagtown, New Jersey. He kept up his operation
for over a decade and even had it reviewed favorably

(08:14):
in the New York Times. Yet he couldn't stop using
the bills out in public, probably because he felt the
people accepting them were getting a better deal than they realized.
After all, they now owned true art. One night in
March of eight, Immanuel went out to buy beer and
other spirits. He asked the bar keep to change out
a fifty dollar bill. The man agreed and gave himmanual

(08:36):
forty dollars in notes and ten dollars worth of silver.
The artist thanked him and left with his bottles in tow.
As the bar keep picked up the bill, he noticed
how wet it was and the ink on one side
was running. Realizing that he had been duped, he called
on his assistant to chase after emmanual and get his
money back. The assistant headed into the streets and flagged

(08:57):
the police officer down to help. Together, they cornered a
manual at the Fairy Landing waiting to board a boat home,
he confessed to everything. Stories about Emmanuel were published in
all the New York newspapers, though they referred to him
as Jim the Penman, a catchy name that endeared him
to the public. He faced a sentence of fifteen years
for counterfeiting, but the judge only gave him six. Emmanuel

(09:21):
was forced to pay a fine of one dollar. After
serving about four years, he was released and he returned
to his wife. Emmanuel Neinger learned a very valuable lesson
in prison. It doesn't matter how hard you try, some
compulsions can't be ignored. After some time at home, he
felt the urge to create once again and went right

(09:41):
back to making fake money by hand. He turned his attention,
this time to British pound notes, which were larger than
American currency and mostly colored in black and white. Despite
going back to his old ways, Emmanuel was never caught
again during the remainder of his life, and you could
take that fact straight to the bank. I hope you've

(10:04):
enjoyed today's 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 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

(10:26):
learn all about it over at the World of Lore
dot com. And until next time, stay curious.