Dream Weaver

stronger than we might think. Before a landslide of coal waste buried a school in Wales in nineteen sixty six, the students had reported dreaming about dying just days before it happened on Sixteen children and twenty eight adults were lost in that disaster. Perhaps the most famous precognitive dream occurred in eighteen sixty five. President Abraham Lincoln told his wife and some associates about a dream he'd recently had where he'd seen his own dead body laying before him

in the White House. Two weeks later, the casket holding his real corpse was placed in the exact same spot. But dreams don't always tell us when we're going to die, sometimes they can spark inspiration, likely did for Elias. How Elias's legacy is far more generous than he probably deserves. He's often described as a Civil War hero, a brilliant inventor,

and a cherished native of Connecticut. In reality, he was a Union private at the age of forty who lost credit on many of his inventions, and was actually born in Massachusetts. But he never considered himself a failure, nor did he let his shortcomings stop him from continuing to pursue his goals. One of his main focuses had been to improve the mechanical sewing machine, which had been growing

in popularity during the mid nineteenth century. Now, others before him had iterated on the device, dating all the way back to Charles Frederick Wisenthal in seventeen fifty five, and Thomas Saint, an English inventor, was said to have designed the sewing machine as we know it today, but it's

not clear if he ever built a working model. Over the years, numerous other inventors took a stab at enhancing the sewing machine, changing everything from the types of stitches they made to the variety of fabrics one could pass through them. However, Alias didn't get complacent. He innovated in his own ways and was awarded a patent in eighteen forty six for his version that used a lock stitch design. In fact, Alias's design included three additions that are still

found on sewing machines today. A shuttle that passed back and forth beneath the fabric to accomplish the lock stitch, and he also added an automatic feeder too. Then the third and final feature was a bit of a miracle that least to Alias. He'd been trying to figure out how to improve the needle of his machine, wondering where to place the eye. It's usual position at the rear of the shaft wouldn't do, so he went back to

the drawing board. Well, actually, he went to sleep. One night, Alias dreamed that he had been captured by a mysterious tribe. Their king had tasked him with building a sewing machine in the span of just twenty four hours. I guess even in his dream, he was faced with the same problem where to put the eye of the needle, except this time if he couldn't complete the machine on schedule, he'd be killed. Twenty four hours passed in his dream at least, and he'd still gotten no closer to figuring

out the needle conundrum. The king was displeased and ordered Elias to be executed. But as the inventor was being escorted to his fate, he caught a glimpse of the spears being carried by the warriors around him. All of them had holes near the spear points in his dream. Alias begged for just a little more time to finish his machine, but by then it was too late. He woke up grateful although he hadn't been killed by his captors,

he had been struck with a brilliant new idea. He immediately got out of bed and headed into his workshop. Five hours later he was done with it. Elias Howe had created a sewing machine needle with an eye in its point. Unfortunately, the dream had failed to inspire him to change his poor sales and marketing tactics. His revolutionary new machine did not perform well in the marketplace. He got caught up in defending his patent and tried charging

an exorbitant licensing fee that no one wanted to pay. Meanwhile, other inventors were moving ahead with their own sewing machine designs. Leaving Alias and his holy needle in the dust. It's possible his failure to sell his brilliant new idea hindered his future inventions as well. In eighteen fifty one, Alias filed a patent for what he called an automatic continuous clothing enclosure. It's a shame he didn't try harder to

mark at it. Had he done so, it might be his name listed as the inventor of something else we all find helpful, the zipper. We've all had a bad day. Some of us experienced days or even weeks that just feel darker and more hopeless as time goes by. It's normal, and if that's you, you're not alone. However much you might feel like that right now. I can't guarantee when it will get better, but it does. But what I can guarantee is that Willem would have sympathized with you. Why, well,

he was having a really bad time. Honestly, by our modern standards, he was pretty much a complete failure. And however depressing it might be. I want to tell you why. William was born in the early eighteen fifties and what would one day become a large family. His father was a minister, and over the years, more and more siblings were added to his daily life. Sometimes that pushes the oldest child to become a leader or at the very least dominant. Other times it forces them to retreat from

the chaos. For Willem, it was certainly the letter. His early years are a bit of a fog to historians, but we do know that he hopped around for a bit, from one school to another, and then around the age of sixteen, he landed his first job. A family connection earned him a place inside a retail business of sorts, and for a while it seemed like maybe the work would stick. The job ended up giving him a much

broader view of the world too. In eighteen seventy three he followed the work to London, and then two years later it was Paris. But Willem wasn't in love with his job. He felt a calling that his father had and began to throw himself deeper and deeper into religious studies, so deep, in fact, that he was fired from the store in eighteen seventy six. A few months later, he settled into a place in Holland and gave his religious pursuits one percent of his attention In fact, his own

sister would later describe him as daffy with piety. It seems young Willem was a bit of an outsider, although he couldn't care less about what others thought of him. In eighteen seventy eight, at the age of just twenty five, he left for a school that would train him for evangelism, certain that he had found his place in the world finally. Yet just three months later he failed out, and there he was a man who had been fired from his

job and kicked out of school. It seems that poor young Willem was really only good at one thing, failing, but his passion for religious work was a fire that couldn't be extinguished. Later on, in eighteen seventy eight, he packed up and headed to Belgium with plans to work as a lay preacher minister without the proper training, in a sense, hoping his enthusiasm would make up for his lack of education. Now, the place he headed to was

a poor coal mining area. Lie if there was rough for the people around him, and that filled his heart with compassion. He helped buy them food and clothing. And when there is an accident in one of the near my mind shortly after he arrived. Willem was one of the first people there to help, putting himself in danger to care for those who were hurt, and it was that event that earned him the acceptance of the people

around him. They had seen his compassion for them in their darkest hour, and so they decided his spiritual message was worth listening to. Despite his complete lack of training and the language barrier, he became their shepherd. But even that wouldn't last long. In July of eighteen seventy nine, just a few months after arriving and earning the trust of a community, the regional religious authority sent a representative

to see how he was doing. What they found was a young man with barely a penny to his name, dressed in rough clothing sewn from sackcloth, and when this representative asked him where all his money had gone, Willem shyly admitted that he had spent it all on the

miners around him. Furious that Willem hadn't followed the typical example of the church at the time, that is to live well and stay clean from the filth around him, he was fired from his position, and with that, I think all those years of failure finally caught up with him. Here he was just twenty six years old and a complete and total failure. It wasn't long after that, however,

when Willem saw something that inspired him. It was an old miner straining under the weight of a sack full of coal, and he felt a deep desire to capture that image. So he pulled an old envelope out of his pocket and quickly sketched out the shape and form of the laboring man. It was the first step out of darkness, and it also hearkened back to his days in retail, working as a dealer of goods for his uncle,

a dealer of art. Over the years to come, Willem would devote himself to his art with as much passion as he had his work as a preacher, and in the process he carved his name into the page is of history as one of the greatest there ever was. Of course, you know his work, but not his earliest stories. Because Willem was actually his middle name, most people both then and now, just called him Vincent Vincent van Gogh.

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. Ye