Clumpy

Some are novel, like liquid paper or the super soaker, while others change the world, like the television or the printing press. But some inventions aren't inventions at all. They're simply ingenious. Way is to use existing products, And even though nobody spent thousands of dollars building a prototype, that doesn't make these products any less useful. Perhaps no one knows the utility of a common, everyday item better than Ed Low. Low was born in nineteen twenty in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Several years later, his family up and moved everyone to Kassopolis, Michigan, just over the border from Indiana. When he was in his twenties. Low enlisted to serve in World War Two and returned home in nineteen forty six to work for his father, Henry, who owned a company that sold blocks of ice and absorbents such as sawdust to local customers. The company sold another kind of absorbent as well. It was called Fuller's Earth, a type of clay used to

clean up oil and grease. In some cases, it has been used to save people from being poisoned, as the clay is able to mop up and break down certain chemical agents in the stomach. One day in January of ninety seven, a friend of Lowe's named Cage Draper approached him with a problem. She had a roommate who went to the bathroom in a tray lined with ashes. When the roommate was finished doing their business, they tracked throughout the house, leaving footprints everywhere. She asked low for sand

to fill the pan instead. She had her own, but it had been so cold outside that her sandpile had frozen salad. It had been her reason for switching to ashes in the first place. Unfortunately, sand presented its own set of issues. It would track everywhere too, and be just as messy as the ashes that she was currently using, so instead, Low suggested that she used Fuller's Earth. The clay material was far more absorbent and wouldn't leave a

residue all over her floors. He gave her a bag of it from the trunk of his car and then didn't think anything more about it. Mrs Draper returned sometime later and asked for another bag. The first had worked, wonders her roommate no longer left her floors soot stained or sandy. You see, k Draper's roommates was a cat, and ed Lowe had just given her the first ever

bag of kitty litter. He had originally tried to market it as a type of poultry litter that was more sanitary than the usual stuff, which was made of feathers, chicken feces, excess feed, and other bedding material. Like the chickens it was meant to help. However, that product really didn't fly, but Mrs Draper saw how useful it was for her. Once low realized that he had a hit product on his hands, he bagged up more clay, wrote the words kitty litter across the front of each bag,

and took them to a local store to sell. The shop owner refused, no one was going to pay sixty five cents for a five pound bag of clay when they could spend a penny on a bag of sawdust, and said, but Low was sure that what he had was better than sawdust. He told the owner to give away the bags to his customers. It didn't take long for those same customers to come back clamoring for more, and sixty cents was just fine to them. Despite selling out at one store, Low's product was anything but an

overnight success. He didn't cross a million dollars in sales until eight years later. Eight years of trade shows, convention halls, and good old face to face marketing as a traveling salesman, but it eventually got him over that hump. He even went to cat shows and volunteered to clean the litter boxes with his own product, just to show how absorbent it was and how it killed odors. Eventually, his kitty

litter became a nationwide phenomenon. He secured hundreds of patents, trademarks, and copyrights and single handedly created an industry worth almost three billion dollars today. It may have started out as just a pile of clay, but ed Lowe managed to turn his product into the Cat's Pajamas. If you tell people that you're going to do something, it's expected that you do it. Right to try and fail means that you've at least put in the attempt, even if it

didn't turn out the way that you hoped to. Never make a try at all makes you a disappointment in the eyes of those who supported you. But to lie about your accomplishment, to make people think that you've done it, when in reality you haven't done anything at all, well you better hope they never find out. Donald Crowhurst told people that he was going to sail around the world. What actually happened it was far stranger. Crowhurst lived in British India until he was fifteen years old, when his

family left to return to England. It had been a rough childhood for him. His father died one year after returning to England, and for the next five years Crowhurst served as the apprentice to the Royal Aircraft Establishment, after which he became a pilot for the Royal Air Force. For unknown reasons, though he left the r a F to pursue a career in the army but that didn't last long either, as he was implicated in an incident

involving a stolen car. By nineteen sixty two, he had started his own electronics business and married a woman named Claire O'Leary. It seems the high jinks of his youth were behind him and he had settled down to become a family man. On the weekends, he would go sailing and build small gadgets to help him on the water. One such device was called the Navigator, which relied on radio signals to pinpoint a boat's location. Crowhurst used it on his own vessel and thought that it might be

a big seller among the wider sailing market. Unfortunately, it didn't take off the way he had hoped, and the money he desperately needed to keep himself and his business afloat just wasn't coming in. But an opportunity soon presented itself that would lip the struggling entrepreneur out of the red and into the history books. It was a race sponsored by the British Sunday Times that pits sailing experts and amateurs against each other their goal to circumnavigate the

globe single handedly. The grand prize was five thousand pounds about seventy five thousand American dollars by today's standards. Competitors had to begin their voyage anytime between June one and October thirty one of nineteen sixty. Crowhurst had a boatyard in Norfolk build his boat, a forty ftlaw trimaran dubbed the Tenmouth Electron. Sponsorship money was meager and the deadline to leave was closing in, so corners were cut to

finish the boat on time. He finally set out on the last day possible according to the rule book, but his rushing and his lack of funds meant that many of the boat's safety features just weren't completed. He departed on Halloween from the seaside town of ten Mouth in Devon, England. Right away it was clear that he was not cut out for a trip around the world, especially by himself.

His pace was dismal. He was traveling at half the speed necessary to keep up with the other contestants, and he was still fixing things as he was going, including leaks in the boat itself. Based on his logs from the event, Crowhurst believed that even then he had a fifty fifty shot at even finishing the race alive, let alone winning, he had to come up with a plan and fast, otherwise he was liable to die on board

within the next several weeks. After more than two months without any updates that left his family desperate for a glimmer of hope that he was okay, Crowhurst radioed in that he had covered two and forty three nautical miles in a single day. It was a record, just not a real one. He had come up with an elaborate ruse early in his trip, one that had him turning off his radio and hanging out in the South Atlantic

for just a few months. After some time, he would show up in England as though he had completed the whole trip. He didn't expect to win. In fact, he wanted to make sure of it, as his falsified logs wouldn't be looked at too closely if he came in at last place. But Crowhurst put about as much thought into fabricating his navigation logs as he did into the preparation for the race itself. His times and dates were all wrong, claiming that he was sailing to certain locations

much more quickly than could reasonably have been expected. But he didn't care. In one of his last transmissions, he told his family and race officials that he was near the southern tip of Africa, and then in July of nineteen sixty nine, the truth came out. His boat was discovered drifting in the mid Atlantic by another ship. Almost everything was still on board, including his maps, navigational charts, and the doctored logs that he had left behind. Crowhurst, however,

was nowhere to be found. It's believed that he took his own life at sea. His logs were filled with the words of a man who, according to some biographers, could not live with the guilt of committing fraud nor the reality of coming clean and losing everything. He wrote rambling diet tribes and imaginary arguments between himself and God, signs that his mental state was crumbling the closer he got to the end of the race. Donald crowhurst body

was never found. The last thing he said to his son before he left on that fateful day in October was look after your mother. As if he'd known all along that he wasn't coming home. He just wanted to show the world and his family that he could do what he set his mind to do. Instead, he was swallowed whole by his own stubbornness, allowing the ocean to claim one more poor soul. 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.