Calculated Discovery

The product in question was a pretty simple dice game, and with the Christmas season approaching, the company had decided to run a few ads in the biggest city in America, all of them scattered throughout one single issue of The New Yorker. All of them were small and square, sort of like an Instagram post, and each one told interest admirers to refer to the main advertisement on page eight six.

The game had been created by a company called Monarch Publishing, and the ad had been written by one of their executives, a man named Roger Paul Craig. He and his wife had spent hours trying to craft the text of the main ad, which touched on the approaching holiday season and all of the things people might have to do to be ready. The trouble wasn't in the text, though it was in the artwork. At the bottom of the large ad on page eighty six was the big, bold title

of the game, the Deadly Double. Beneath it was an emblem of a bird with outstretched wings, four talents, and two heads. It's what's known as an armorial device, a sort of coat of arms used for identifying individuals and groups. This particular symbol was the spitting image of the double eagle used by the Byzantine Empire, Ivan the Terrible and

more recently Nazi Germany. Add in the fact that the title of the ad in included the German word oktung, which means danger, and it was a curious pairing for sure, and that's probably what drew the attention of the investigators. But it certainly wasn't the only thing they were worried about. The bigger problem, it seems, was inside each of the smaller ads. Each of those were identical, and they showed a pair of dice in action. It's hand drawn and has a classy tone, but the items in the ad

are a bit more mysterious. One of the die showed three sides, revealing three distinct numbers twelve and the Roman numeral. The other die showed the reader five zero and seven. So as Roger Paul Craig and his wife sat across the table from the FBI agents, they were starting to get nervous. The numbers, according to the investigators, were significant, and that wasn't a good thing, they said, was awfully

close to the latitude line where Pearl Harbor sat. The twelve and seven looked a lot like December seven, the date of that infamous attack, and the O five could very well have been oh five hours the original planned start time of the attack on Pearl Harbor. But so what It wasn't illegal to place historical details in an advertisement. Yes, it would be in poor taste. Sure, over lives were lost in the Battle of Pearl Harbor, so it's probably not the best subject matter for a dice game looking

for gangbuster Christmas sales. But the trouble wasn't the subject matter. It was the timing. You see, the ad that Monarch Publishing placed in The New Yorker was published in November on the two, in fact November of nineteen sixteen, days before Pearl Harbor was attacked. It's easy to take computers for granted, these days, they do so much for us. They allow us to break barriers and create new forms of art and expression and take selfies with birds flying

around our heads. Important stuff, clearly, But they haven't always been so small. Take the Apollo Guidance computer. It was built by M I. T and used by NASA in nineteen sixty nine for their Apollo eleven mission, and that's the one that put the first humans on the Moon. Each one weighed fifty pounds and was the size of a piece of carry on luggage. But they worked. We

landed people on the freaking Moon after all. As crazy as am I sound, though, the mobile phone in your pocket is more powerful than that NASA computer thirty two thousand times faster. In fact, you see, computers have a tendency to get smaller and more powerful over time. Go back far enough, and some of the earliest electrical computers were massive and slow. Eniac is a great example. It filled up an entire room, but in ninety six it

was a supercomputer. There's another old computer worth mentioning, though it's not electrical. But by definition, computers are nothing more than machines that can be programmed to carry out specific tasks. Calculators, calendars, counting devices, that sort of thing. Charles Babbage is the big name in that field, thanks to the calculator he built in eighteen twenty two. It was all gears and levers, but it did its job nicely, and so did this

other one. Like a lot of old computers, it's not in the best of shape today, but when it was brand spanking new, it focused on astronomy. I want to know when the next eclipse was going to be. This computer would tell you the lunar cycle you're covered. People could even program it to track the time between special, regular occurring social events. It was brilliant. But here's where

it gets weird. This computer is older than babbage Is eighteen two device, and yet it's smaller than NASA's Apollo guidance computers, which seems to fly in the face of how useful and advanced it really was for at the time. You see, this computer wasn't crafted in the workshop of an English mechanic or in an M. I. T. Lab. It was built so long ago that we forgot about

it in the first place. But in nineteen hundred some men found it and handed it over to people who might know what to do with such a powerful device. Those men were sponge divers. They found the computer underwater, just off the coast of the Greek island of Antikathera, and it hadn't been there since the eighteen hundreds or even the seventeen hundreds. According to the archaeologists who have studied it over the course of the past century, this

computer is much older. It was built over two thousand years ago. 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 com. And until next time, stay curious.