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ancient India and China. It wasn't until the nineteenth century, though, when psychological research turned from the philosophical to the experimental. German psychologist Gustav Fechner started testing the human brains response to various stimuli around eighteen thirties. From their experts such as Herman Ebbinghouse went on to study other functions of the mind, from memory to introspection to classical conditioning. Psychology

became a bustling industry of experimentation. Eventually, scientists didn't just want to learn the limits of the brain. They wanted to understand what made people tick. Why were some individuals able to say no while others were more pleasers. Stanley Milgram of Yale University tested this in his famous Milgram experiment in nineteen sixty one. He invited participants to administer electric shocks to someone in another room. As the shocks increased in power, the screams of the unknown party got

louder and more intense until they stopped completely. But don't worry, nobody died. The electric shocks weren't even real, but the effects on the subjects pushing the buttons certainly were. Milgram wanted to test how far a person would go in following orders from an authority figure, even if those orders involved hurting or and killing someone else. He based his experiment on the actions of the Nazis during World War Two.

The Stanford Prison Experiment of nineteen seventy one took things further by placing college students in a simulated prison environment. The purpose was to study how power affected one psychological state. One group of students was given the title of guard, while another subset was placed in the prisoner role. Three guards were pulled out of the experiment early after demonstrating what we're described as genuine sadistic tendencies. The prisoners also suffered.

They were referred to by numbers rather than their names. They were stripped, naked and sprayed with a hose. In short, they were humiliated. The two week experiment was terminated after just six days. Still, despite the prison experiments failings, researchers wanted to understand how people thought and why they slid into certain roles instead of others. Well. One man thought that he could find the answer, and in order to get there, he had to think bigger by thinking smaller.

John Calhoun was born in Tennessee in nineteen seventeen. He spent his years in college studying rats. In nineteen forty six, he started working at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore on something called the rodent Ecology Project. This involved monitoring a colony of rats in a ten thousand square foot pen behind his house. Calhoun believed the rats with thrive, with five females capable of producing up to five thousand pups over the two years. Yet, as he watched over his

little rat metropolis, he noticed something. The numbers never got that high, nowhere close. Once the population reached about two hundred, they stopped reproducing. The rats soon became agitated. They fought with each other and segregated themselves into dozens of colonies, each comprised of twelve rats. He found that they couldn't live peacefully in higher numbers. Calhoun decided to expand his operation.

He constructed a new rat city, this time on the second floor of a are and where his lab was located. This new enclosure was comprised of four rooms, each ten ft by fourteen feet clustered together. The rooms were then subdivided further into quarters by two foot walls, and the rats inside were viewable via a window in each room's ceiling. These rats had much more room to move and were never at a loss for food or drink, Yet they still ran into the same problems as in the original experiment.

As populations filled the space, they inevitably collapsed. Calhoun attempted one more time to see what would happen if a group of rodents were given free rein over a large property in night. With assistance from the National Institute of Mental Health, he constructed a nine foot square habitat measuring four and a half feet high. There were tunnels made of wire mesh along the sides of the enclosure that led to the feeding and drinking stations. As well as

the living quarters. He called this space universe. This time, Calhoun performed his study on mice rather than rats, and the results were promising. At first, every two months the number of mice would double. Ten months in his initial population of eight mice now totaled six hundred and twenty and just as before, the faster they reproduced, the faster everything spiraled downward. Older mice had trouble finding mates. They

also found themselves displaced in the community. Lone females occupied nesting boxes by themselves, far from the rest of the group, while mateless males congregated at the feeding stations. They became hostile and anxious. Mouse families, on the other hand, saw their neighborhoods struggling and moved their families to better areas, sometimes more than once. And, just as had happened with the rats, reproduction stopped, Calhoun's mouse utopia quickly devolved into

a full blown dystopia. The findings worried him. If rats and mice couldn't handle high population density, how are humans going to deal with overcrowding in their cities and towns. An area with no job prospects or potential mates couldn't sustain itself. But others didn't agree with his findings. Medical historian and professor Edmund Ramsden noted that rats lack the ability to cope the way that humans could in a

similar environment. Psychologist Jonathan Freedman determined that it wasn't the lack of mates or social rules, but a lack of personal space that had done the rodents in. Those who had been able to secure their own corners of universe twenty five away from everyone else hadn't turned hostile at all. Regardless of Calhoun's results, there was one other important byproduct

of his work, a book. It was about a group of rats who had learned to read and build machines they'd been experimented on at the National Institute of Mental Health before living free in the wild. Published in nineteen seventy one, Mrs Frisbee and the Rats of Nim by Robert C. O'Brien was inspired by Calhoun's research. It went on to become a popular film in nineteen eighty two

called The Secrets of Nim. John Calhoun did his best to show that rats and humans were cut for him the same cloth, and in a lot of ways we are in the end, though he also proved that humans aren't part of a rat race. No matter what's thrown at us, we often persevere, but of course we both love cheese. Losing something important can throw off your whole day. Misplace your keys and suddenly you're off to work ten

minutes later than you thought. You're stuck in traffic and half an hour late for work, and a missing receipts can be the difference between a refund at the store and getting stuck with something that you ended up not wanting. Losing a set of keys may feel like the end of the world at the time, but it really isn't. Losing a couple of atomic bombs, however, that might actually be the end of the world, or at least the

Eastern Seaboard. Following the close of World War Two, the nineteen fifties saw the eyes of a brand new front, the Cold War. America and the Soviet Union were at odds over various political and economic philosophies, putting the one time allies on opposing sides. In the United States, schools practiced air raid drills, and anticipation of the Big One, children were told to hide under their desks, believing it would protect them from a nuclear blast. Meanwhile, a nuclear

arms race was underway. It was fairly common for US Air Force planes to carry bombs and bomb parts across the ocean from one base to another, and on July nineteen fifty seven, a C one four Globe Master in Delaware was loaded up with three Mark five nuclear bombs and one nuclear capsule. The bombs themselves were safe to fly.

They had been placed in c AF or complete assembly for fairy condition, which meant each bomb lacked the core necessary for a nuclear explosion, although they still retained a significant amount of explosives inside their casings. Once the cores were eventually inserted and the bombs dropped, the explode sims would compress the cores and kick off a nuclear reaction. The C one twenty four was also known as Old Shaky, not the best name for an airplane carrying nuclear weapons.

Despite the humorous nickname, it was a solid vessel, weighing in at one seventy five thousand pounds and powered by four massive piston engines. Old Shaky took off from Dover Air Force Base on a routine trip to deliver the three bombs to another base in Europe. Unfortunately, it ran into trouble almost immediately. Shortly after takeoff. Two of the c engines failed. The other two engines were running at full power, enough to prevent the plane from plummeting into

the ocean, but it was a losing battle. It was just too heavy to stay up, and even with the bombs lacking a nuclear core, there was still enough explosive power inside them to cause severe damage, especially since the nuclear capsule was on board with them. The crew had to jettison weight fast. They most likely ejected the excess fuel they would have needed for their transatlantic flight. Luckily, there was a naval air station in Atlantic City, New Jersey,

where they could land. Yet, even with most of their fuel gone, they were still too heavy. A crew in such a situation might have tried making a crash landing in the ocean. Had the Sea One two attempted that, though it could have killed everyone on board and set off the bombs, they made a drastic call and decided to drop one of the Mark five bombs. It hit the water from a height of forty feet, about seventy

five miles off the coast of New Jersey. Even that wasn't enough though they jettisoned another bomb at feet the plane still sinking in altitude. This last one landed fifty miles offshore. Old Shaky stopped shaking that even doubts, and the crew was able to maintain altitude all the way to the air station. Despite dropping both bombs from significant heights, neither one exploded Once word of the plane's mishap got out, though recovery teams were assembled immediately to search for the

missing weapons, but the bombs were never found. For over sixty years, they have resided just off the coast of the Jersey Shore, waiting to be discovered. Residents of Atlantic City weren't worried, though they'd had no idea the incident had taken place at all. The military kept it under wraps for over twenty years. The bombs eventually showed up as line items on a list of broken arrows or lost nuclear weapons published by the government in the nineteen eighties.

And there's an important lesson there, because when it comes to unexploded nuclear weapons, no news is always good news. 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 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 dot com. And until next time, stay curious. Yeah,