Dr. Data

area to another looking for safety. While the epidemic only lasted four years, it was known to crop up again in various cities later on. London, Vienna, Marseilles, Russia all saw recurrences of the disease throughout the sixteen and seventeen hundreds. It was during a particularly bad outbreak in sixteen thirty three when the residents of a small village in Bavaria

were struggling. The plague had been ravaging the neighboring area and the villagers of Oberammergu were terrified of its spreading to their small town, so they turned to the only one they could think of for help. God. They prayed long and hard for salvation, and in the process they made a kind of deal with God. If he would spare them from the bubonic plague that had wiped out the nearby towns, they would put on a play about the life and Death of Jesus every ten years as

a way of saying thanks. I know it might sound strange to do nothing but pray for help with such a threat looming over them. When the plague typically showed up in a town, it became a waiting game to see who would be taken next, and biotics wouldn't be developed for another three years. But the people needed help, and they had nowhere else to turn except to the one place where they had gone looking for peace so

many times before. For some faith is a light that frightens away the darkness, and a certainly described these villagers. So they decided to shed a little light on their current problem. But they needed a sign. Only one person out of every thousand died from the plague in October of sixteen thirty two, but that number rose to twenty by March of sixty three, and the disease was spreading fast. The villagers put their plan to work and prayed for guidance.

The following July, the number of deaths plummeted back down to just one out of a thousand. It seemed their prayers had been answered. Ober ahm ergu immediately went to work putting their play into production. The Passion Play, as it was called, took almost an entire day to perform all sixteen of its acts, beginning with Jesus driving the money changers from the temple and ending with his death

and resurrection. It became such a spectacle that people started coming in from all over the world to see it. In seventeen ninety, the town began charging admission, also creating package deals that combined tickets with stays at local inns and hotels. The Passion Play had become a once in

a decade event not to be missed. Through it all, the winds of rumor would often carry news to the villagers of a fresh outbreak of the plague each time it happened, though it would fade away before it ever reached their borders, and as the plague became less and less of a threat over the centuries, the need for that elaborate performance. The villager's end of the bargain so to speak became less and less over a Mergou hasn't seen the plague since the sixteen hundreds, so maybe their

idea worked. Perhaps God really did honor their agreement, or maybe it just faded away on its own. Regardless of what stopped it, the town has continued to put on the Passion Play every decade for the last three hundred and seventy seven years. Over two thousand people now work to produce the show, which spans one hundred days of live performances. The number of visitors to the village has averaged half a million since nineteen and a special theater

has even been constructed to house the production. For many, science and medicine have upstaged faith, while others believe their faith provided the best defense against the darkness. One thing is certain, though, when it comes to handling a deadly outbreak, it certainly takes a village. M NASA is known for making the impossible possible, from launching astronauts into space and landing on the Moon to sending a robot to Mars to gather data on the planet's soil. NASA is at

the forefront of space exploration. It's been that way ever since President Dwight D. Eisenhower formed the organization in with a goal of sending America's best and brightest out to explore the farthest reaches of space, and in order to perform such explorations, the people going up there were required to wear state of the art space suits to regulate pressure and temperature, allow them to communicate with mission control,

and to collect surface samples. Space suits are complicated feats of engineering that need to be tested rigorously, otherwise one flaw can spell disaster for the person wearing it, and as we all know, in space, no one can hear you scream. NASA as all sorts of ways to test a space suit. The one such method is the vacuum test, where engineers wear the suit and enter a chamber that has all the air sucked out of it. The suits are hooked up to life support systems while the engineers

monitor performance and stability. It's a great way to mimic the demands of space. Other tests are a little simpler, and they involve an astronaut simply wearing the suit and letting a team of scientists know how it feels. Can they move freely? Is there any resistance? Such a test depends on the person inside the suit and any number of factors, including how they feel on that particular day

and their state of mind. An astronaut with a pulled muscle might unintentionally cause a change to the design that could fail at the worst possible moment. NASA doesn't want anecdotal data clogging up their research. If they miscalculate based on one person's experience, the rest of the suits may be compromised, so engineers have sought more objective methods and testing their suit designs. One such method is K six

five zero one. Not really a catchy name, I know, but what else do you call a six ft tall robot designed by some of the best scientists in the world. I'm not sure a name like Phil would work in this situation. K six five zero one is a custom designed android that is able to grow from five ft five to six ft two and cover a wide range

of body types. The wires and tubes that fill its body are like our own arteries, but instead of pumping blood, they pump electricity and hydraulic fluid in order to move its aluminum skeleton. K six five zero one is more than just a glorified mannequin. Though it can shake hands, lift small objects, and balance itself without any assistance, all of which comes in pretty handy when testing the viability of a suit designed without relying on a human subject. Unfortunately,

K six five zero one has one small problem. Well, it's more like a bunch of small problems that add up to one bigger problem. He leaks. At least he did when he was first built and tested, but it's been over fifty years since then built in NASA's Android was the first victim of the materials at the time. It's hydraulic system required ten thousand pounds of fluid force

to move its arms and legs. The tubing couldn't take the pressure, and one leak had the ability to destroy a space suit that today would be worth three quarters of a million dollars. Imagine that. At a time when resources were strained as they worked to put a man on the Moon, NASA invented a metal man who could have helped them build the perfect space suit, But the risk was too great and the costs were too high,

so NASA scrapped the project. They went back to their tried and true method of testing human guinea pigs for their space suits but don't work. You can still see K six five zero one on display at the National Aeronautics and Space Museum in Washington, d C. Or you can look up. If you squint hard enough, you just might see its descendant, robinot To, assisting the humans on board the International Space Station. It runs in the family, after all, Like father, like son. 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.