Big Fish

And although we don't know yet if life exists beyond the stars, there is a rich ecosystem of plants and animals waiting for us beneath the water surface. Or of course, sometimes the fish don't like to wait. Once in a while, they come up to see us for themselves, like what happened in the Baltic Sea in the mid four hundreds.

According to the story, a particular fish had been captured and brought to the king of Poland, Sigismund, the first Sigismund, was fascinated by the creature, and he decided to keep it. The fish was described as being large larger than any fish anyone had ever seen before, with scales all over its mid section and flippers like a man's hands. It's pointed head resembled a miter or the head dress donned by bishops in the church, earning at the nickname the

Bishop Fish. A wild animal, however, had no interest in living with the king. It longed to return to the open water where it belonged. No one quite knows how it happened, but a small group of Roman Catholic bishops managed to meet with the fish. Any records that existed regarding their interactions have been lost, or are maybe stored deep within the in archives. However, even without the official written account, one thing is clear. The Bishop fish did not want to be there. In fact, it said as

much in a way only a fish could. It may have been how it flapped its flipper hands or splashed the men with water. Whatever it did, it inspired them to go to the king and plead for the creatures released back into the wild. Sigismund, though, was unsure. After all, how could a fish, even one as strange as the Bishop fish tell them it wanted to go home? But after some time he agreed to set it free, The bishops carried it to the sea and released it into

the water. Now, most animals don't think their captors when they're released. They run or swim as fast as they can away from the perceived danger, but the Bishop fish didn't do that. Instead, it turned around and made the sign of the Cross to the men before it disappeared into the water. Almost a century later, another bishop fish was caught in the waters off the coast of Germany. It was offered food by the sailors who had captured at it, but it wouldn't eat. They kept it for

three days, hoping to coax it into eating something. Sadly, its protests ended up costing it its life, and it died in captivity. It's captors then placed its body back in the sea where they had found it. Around the time as the second Bishop fish sighting, another bizarre fish was caught, this time in the Sound between Denmark and Sweden. The creature was depicted in a sixteenth century illustration as

being half fish half man. One academic at the time, Guillonne rand Lay, described it as both a fish in a monk'st habits and a merman, giving it the name the Sea Monk or monk fish. Its face looked more human than that of the Bishop fish too. His observations were based on artist renderings of the creature that had made its way from the Holy Roman Emperor Charles the Fifth to France's Queen Marguerite of Navarre, who had in

turn gifted it to Randelais. A gift from such a prominent member of the French royalty was to be taken as confirmation that the drawing was authentic, and although Ronda was incorrect about such details as where the sea monk had been captured, the story behind his sketch only added to its mythos. French naturalist Pierre Belan elaborated on the history of the sea monk with ancient tales of other creatures,

such as sirens and Triton's. He wasn't so quick to dismiss Rondelay's opinions as wild speculation, although many others were. Since then, scientists and scholars have attempted to ground the sea monk in reality by making educated guesses as to the creature's true identity. One zoologist in the eighteen hundreds proposed the idea that it had really been a giant squid, and not some fish man hybrid. Today, marine biologists believe what Rondelay and the sailors had seen was actually an

angel shark, also known as the monkfish. Whatever it was, it's clear that the sea continues to present us with more questions than answers, and it will always leave us feeling just a little curious. A new invention doesn't just appear out of nowhere. Years of research and development go into the creation of a brand new product. In his many attempts to find the perfect filament for his incandescent light bulb, Thomas Edison famously said, I have not failed.

I've just found ten thousand ways that don't work. The inventors of the typewriter might have said the same thing. Today's modern computers can trace the roots all the way back to the mid sixteenth century, when an Italian printmaker named Francesco Rampazetto wanted an easier way to press letters into paper. Gutenberg's printing press was a massive machine that took time to set up and maintain. Rampazetto's invention would have simplified the process. Unfortunately, there is no evidence he

ever built one. Over one years later, Henry Mill in England carried the baton a little closer to the finished line. He actually built his version of an automatic typing machine and was issued a patent for it. Over the coming decades, other inventors and engineers came up with their own designs

on the typewriter. Augustino Fantoni built one in eighteen o two so his blind sister could be able to write, and William Austin Bert's eighty nine concept was so cumbersome and slow to use most people who tried it chose to write by hand instead. It wasn't until eighteen sixty eight when an early version of the typewriter as we know it today made its debut. Its creation was the work of Wisconsin residents Christopher Schulz, Frank Hall, Carlos Sklitten,

and Samuel Soul. Schulz had come to Milwaukee to take a position as the editor of a local newspaper. His job was soon made harder by a strike at the printing press, so he started investigating a workaround. However, after one failed prototype of an automatic type setting machine, Eat pivoted to building a smaller, simpler device. Rather than making newspaper printing easier, Jolls focused on books well. One specific

part of books, the page numbers. He wanted to make a machine that would stamp a number on anything made of paper, so he took his plans to Klein Stubor Machine Shop, where he and Samuel Soul began working on it. Once they had a working model, the men demonstrated it to Carlos Glidden, another inventor at the shop, who was in the midst of developing a mechanical plow. Glidden was intrigued by the numbering machine and its possibilities. He asked if it could do more than stamp numbers onto a page,

could it also make letters. Scholes set to work along with Soul. Glidden provided them with a funding they needed, earning a spot on the project as a third partner. The men built the frame for their prototype out of wood. The letters and numbers were arranged in two rows, resembling a piano, with the first row of even numbers two through eight and the letters A through M made of ivory.

The second row was made of ebony and included the odd numbers three through nine along with the letters and through Z. The numbers one and zero were left out as they would easily be replaced by the letters I and OH, respectively. The patents for shoals typewriting Machine, or typewriter as he called it, were issued in June and July of eight, and the device worked beautifully. Shoals, also the city's comptroller, used it to draft an official contract

as part of his duties. It was the first document ever typed on a typewriter. His contemporaries were more mixed in their reviews, though. A Pennsylvania businessman named James Densmore bought a quarter of the patent site unseen after receiving a letter from Shoals that had been typed using the device. After finally testing one for himself, though Densmore told them that it was useless. If they wanted to sell it commercially, they had to make it better. Stenographer James Clappin also

found flaws with the device. For one, it couldn't stand up to the intense punishment doled out by his furious fingers. He worked them so hard he destroyed several keys during his tests. The opinions of people like Densmore and Clappain were discouraged, but Shoals kept at it. In fact, their observations had shed light on another flaw of the original design, the key layout. While an alphabetical arrangement made sense at first, fast typists found that the keys would jam when common

letter combinations were typed in rapid succession. So Shoals went back to the drawing board, trying all kinds of different letter pairings to see what worked best. In one layout, the numbers were moved to a new top row with the vowels directly beneath them. The remaining continents were split across two more rows below them. For five years, Shoals toiled over the arrangement of his letters. However, it was with the help of James Densmore's brother Amos, when he

finally figured it out. Amos had done research into bigram frequency, or how often two letters appeared together in words. By the end of their collaboration, Shoals and Densmore had found the perfect way to lay out the keys for letters, numbers, and symbols. In eighteen seventy three, the manufacturing rights to the Shoals and glit Entie brighter were sold to the

rifle company E. Remington and Sons. They tweaked the key arrangement by repositioning just a few of the characters, resulting in a wholy unique layout named for the first five letters in the second row, Q W, E, R T. And why we still use this layout today, nearly a hundred and fifty years later. It can be seen on everything from computer keyboards to tablets, right down to the smartphones in our pockets, though today we call this un alphabetic arrangement of letters by a far simpler name, the

cordy keyboard. I hope you've 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 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 about it over at the World of Lore dot Come and until next time, stay curious. Yeah,