Complicated

It's a truism that is hard to believe when you're dealing with an irate person or someone who simply doesn't like you, and the saying isn't true in the literal sense. The customer is rarely actually right all the time. But the customer is the one with the money, so they're the one who must be appeased. And if you failed to do so, you may still hear from a customer for days, weeks, or months later, especially if they're not

happy with your product or your behavior. To quote one particularly irate customer complaint, what do you take me for that you treat me with such contempt. Actually, that's not something a recent customer said. That's a customer from over three thousand years ago. I like to take you back to seventeen fifty BCE to the ancient city states of Er in ancient Mesopotamia. There a man named Nanni spoke

to a merchant about purchasing some copper ingots. The merchant, whose name was a Nasir, wasn't just a copper trader. He also sold textiles and foodstuffs on occasion, but his primary specialty was copper, at least that's the impression he gave to Nanni. He assured Nani that he would provide him with copper of excellent quality as soon as he got back from del Munn. He made the trip end Upon his return, he sent word to Nanni that the

copper was ready. Nanni dispatched a servant to pick up the copper and to pay the merchant for his services. It should have been a fairly simple transaction. However, when the servant arrived, he had a far less pleasant interaction with the merchant than his master had. A Noasir set the copper before him, and the servant quickly realized that the ingots were not the right grade that Nanni had requested. When he pointed this out, Anasir told the servant that

he can take or leave the copper. If he doesn't want it, then he should get out of his sight. The servant, not knowing what else to do, paid for the copper and returned to his master. Hearing what had happened to his servants by this merchant, Nani was outraged. He wrote to a Nasir, accusing him of being rude and callous and demanding that he sent his money back as he would not accept poor quality copper from him.

And I wish that I could give you more of this dramatic story, but we know little else about it because all of the information that we have comes from the written complaint that Nanni wrote to the merchant a Nasir. It was on a clay tablet written in Akkadian Kuneiform. The tablet was unearthed between nineteen twenty two and nineteen thirty four by an expedition from the British Museum to modern day Iraq. At around three thousand, seven hundred and

seventy five years old. It's thought to be the oldest surviving customer complaint in history, and it wasn't the only one that they found there. The building they found it in contained several more tablets, also addressed to a nosir. They were all fairly irate, with some asking about the status of their orders, about undelivered orders or the copper they were promised by the merchant. Others were requests for

a batch of copper to pick from. But even if most of these dozen or so tablets were all annoyed at this one merchant, none were as thoroughly frustrated as Nani's message. Will likely never know if a nasir responded to the storm of messages and complaints and accusations. Archaeologists seemed to think that his business waned in the later years, with his house being relatively small compared to other neighboring units.

The fact that he kept all of his customer complaints implied that they were either from the latter days of his business or he had a fairly petty nature. Few of us get to choose the way that we are remembered.

Leaving behind a monument or a tomb is beyond even the wildest dreams of the ordinary person, so it's curious to think about how something like a customer complaint can preserve names across the millennia, to the point where you can read Nanni's complaint tablet yourself in the British Museum, or at least a translation of it. We know just how incensed this man was by the merchant's rudeness, making the past a little more relatable in spite of the vast gulf of time between us. It just goes to

show when you treat people rudely, they remember it. Perhaps a nasir should have remembered the Golden Rule, or well, maybe in this case we should say the Copper Rule. A man walks into a pet shop in nineteen fifty seven and stumbles upon his fortune. It sounds like the start of some vaudevillian joke, but this is a true story of a man who took the lowest of creatures and with them built an empire of novelty, before making

a strange turn that nearly tore it all down. This man was Harold von Braunhutt, born into a Jewish family of toymakers in Memphis, Tennessee. In early life he was something of a daredevil, racing motorcycles under the name the Green Hornet before taking on clients as a talent agent.

These early forays into entertainment wouldn't pan out, and so Harold changed his career path, looking for something new, and so on one fateful day, he walked into that pet shop where his eyes landed on a bucket that would change his life forever. The bucket was filled with water, and it contained thousands upon thousands of tiny, little swimmers. They were Brian shrimp, which are a type of crustacean.

Brian shrimp, whose scientific name is Artemia selina, are a species who have evolved to live inland in brine pools and other salty inland waters. They're very small, the largest of them grow only to about fifteen millimeters in length. In nature, the tiny arthropods serve an important function in their ecosystem. They eat green algae and so keep the waters clean, and then they serve as food for migrating birds.

They've remained little changed since they appeared in the Triassic period two hundred and fifty million years ago, and Harold was fascinated by the tiny creatures. But what got his imagination reeling was a curious biological trait. Their eggs are capable of survival of up to two years out of water, and are resistant to both heat and cold. This survival mechanism made them perfect for shipping long distances. Harold saw potential in these shrimp and hired a marine biologist to

breed the Brian shrimp to best endure shipping conditions. They were sold in small kits, complete with packets which included the desiccated eggs, an agent to purify the water and salt, and instructions to create the perfect environment for the shrimp to thrive. And he branded them as sea monkeys and hired well known cartoonist Joe Orlando to design all new advertisements.

These ads showed a fantastical underwater wonderland with a family of anthropomorphized pink Brian shrimp smiling up from the page. They looked nothing like the product that would arrive to eager children's doors, but that mattered very little to sales, which skyrocketed as the first ads were released in nineteen

sixty four. And as a side note, as a kid growing up in the eighties who frequented yard sales where boxes of old comic books were sold, I distinctly remembered these ads over and over again in almost every issue I read, and as you'd imagine, Sea Monkeys became a smash success, with sales rivaling ant farms and so Harold used the same type of marketing for all new inventions, selling a seemingly endless line of novelty toys, including X

ray specs, which ensnared the adolescent mind with promises of seeing through clothing, and Crazy Crabs, which were hermit crabs sold with their own small tanks. In all, he had one hundred and ninety five patents registered with the US government, although none of them ever came close to the success of Sea Monkeys. One of those patents was very unlike the others, though, It was a spring loaded baton used for defense, which was named the Kyoga Agent M five.

The baton had early success when it was used in the nineteen eighty one Burt Reynolds film Sharky's Machine. It was another success, albeit a modest one, but it uncovered and ugly truth about the inventor. Although born into a Jewish family, it turns out that von broun Hutt was a rabid white nationalist who had added the Vaughan to

broun Hut to distance himself from his own heritage. In fact, he used the proceeds from the Kyoga Agent sales initially on a legal defense fund of one Richard G. Butler, who happened at the time to be the leader of the Aryan Nations Group. When Butler included a mention of von Bronhut's donations, it caused a scandal, and further digging by national papers discovered that he was well immeshed with

white nationalist causes. He annually attended the Aryan Nations World Congress and had helped buy firearms for the KKK in Ohio. His reputation was in tatters, but he abandoned neither his ties to white nationalists nor his drive to create and market new inventions. When he died from a fall in two thousand and three, he was still working on ideas for a pet lobster and what he called an instant frog. In following years, the company would be sold, and litigation

over payments to his widow would last for years. By the end, she was destitute, although Sea Monkeys continued to sell well under the new ownership. Harold von Bronhut's legacy is a paradox, a visionary entrepreneur who turned a humble Brian shrimp egg into a cultural phenomenon, yet whose personal flaws and covert alliances cast a long, unsettling shadow over his achievements. In the end, his story serves as a

reminder that brilliance and moral blindness sometimes coexist. Harold wasn't a good man, but he made something that people loved, making him a curious example of just how complex and sometimes horrible human beings can be. 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 Worldolore dot com. And until next time, stay curious. Noo.