Float On

so easily. They know what they've seen. The problem is while everyone is looking up, they miss what's going on down below them. You see not all unidentified objects. Why. In eighteen oh three, Japanese fishermen off the coast of Hitachi Province notice something floating adrift in the ocean. It was a ship of some kind, though it didn't resemble any ship they'd ever seen before. It was about eleven feet tall and eighteen feet wide. It resembled a giant

wooden pot more than a boat. It was also fitted with rectangular crystal windows around its rosewood top half. The bottom half was coated in copper plates. The fisherman hooked it and brought it to shore, with them. Now that they could get close enough, they were able to peek inside. Strange writing had been scribbled on the inner walls of the vessel. There were also bedsheets, some meat, a bit of cake, and a bottle of water. And there was

also a woman. She was around twenty years old, they said, pale and small, just under five feet tall, with long red hair. Within her hair, she had weaved streaks of white fur, and she wore long, flowing clothes, unlike anything the fisherman had ever seen before. The woman looked up at them through the window and spoke, but her language was foreign to them, and she could not understand them either. She emerged from the vessel clutching a box roughly twenty

four inches in size. No one else was allowed near the box, and she would not open it under any circumstances. Villagers had their theories about where the girl had come from, of course, and what she was carting around in that box. One possibility was that she was a queen from a far away land who had been unfaithful to her husband. Her lover had been executed for his misdeeds. The young woman was exiled from her country, set afloat in the wooden vessel with enough food to last for a few days.

Whatever happened to her afterward would be left to fate and the box well. One reason why she might not have wanted anyone to touch it is that because it held the head of her lover. Though the box could also have contained any number of untold objects, like a that the virus, or a powerful weapon. No one knew for sure, and no one in the village could communicate

with a girl to find out the truth. All of these unknowns put the villagers on edge, so to spare them of a potential threat, they placed her back in her round vessel, sealed her inside, and then set her adrift again on the ocean. Today, there are three prominent versions of this legend. These stories have been passed down for hundreds of years, but each one varies only slightly

from the other. Sometimes place names are different, or certain descriptions are changed, but each iteration always has the same basic characteristics. A young girl, far from her homeland is found in possession of a box that no one is meant to open. Scholars have attempted to explain the legend as a simple folk tale meant to highlight a time when Japan was isolated from the rest of the world. There are even ancient stories that could have served as

the basis for this tale. However, the lack of variation among the three versions tells us a different story of an encounter with a being from another world. Given the roundness of the girl's vessel, the strange text written on its walls, and her unknown language, some people believe that she was a visitor not from another country, but from another planet, and a craft she i'ved in was one of the first recorded cases of a UFO and unidentified

floating object. They say that necessity is the mother of invention. Entrepreneurs and inventors come up with all manner of devices to make our lives easier. The incandescent light bulb brought a safe form of light into every home. The steam engine revolutionized multiple industries, including travel and textiles. Even something as ubiquitous as paper was once considered a seismic change

in how people communicated. We remember people like Guttenberg and his printing press, or Marconi and his wireless radio, and of course Thomas Edison's moving camera. But there's one person who predates all of them, and he's kind of a hero to inventors everywhere. Literally, his name was here on Hero for short, and he wore a variety of hats. Mathematician, engineer, and professor. He was also a student of the greats that came before him, taking their teachings and using them

as a springboard for his own work. Hero's interests varied as widely as his professions. He wrote extensively about topics like physics and pneumatics, and was among the first to discuss how animals and machines communicated with each other, known today as the study of cybernetics. But above all else, Hero like to experiment using simple technology. From his day,

he would build complex machines to accomplish different tasks. For example, he developed a kind of steam engine called an aola pile, which stored water in an enclosure vented on two opposite sides. When the water was heated, steam would escape through the vents and spin the enclosure like a rocket engine. This knowledge led to another engine that used water heated to pull ropes and open doors. If there was a way to simplify daily life, Hero searched high and low for it.

One of his devices was a large box with a slot in the top, a silver coin could be inserted and would land on a plate inside the box. The weight of a coin on the plate tripped a lever that would open a valve and allow holy water to flow from a small spout inside. As the plate continued to tilt, the coin would slide off and the plate would rise up and turn off the lever, closing the valve. With his box, Hero had invented the first vending machine.

There was also an organ which utilized a large wheel of paddles that spun as they caught the wind. The wheel would share in a pump that forced air through the organs pipes to create music. Hero had been the first person in history to harness the power of the wind. He brought his ingenuity to the theater, too, where he

incorporated advanced mechanics to create an automated puppet show. Sand would flow from one central chamber through holes into different weights that pulled levers and turned wheels attached to the puppets on stage. They'd move and perform for the audience for up to ten minut it's at a time. But Hero didn't stop there. His creations benefited the public in ways beyond entertainment and vending machines. He developed a fire engine.

It's attached pump used compressed air to shoot streams of water. There was also an endless cup of wine, a goblet attached to a reservoir of wine that automatically refilled as the person drank from it. And unlike inventors who patented their creations to make money, Hero made all of the instructions for building his inventions public. Over a dozen volumes on topics ranging from pneumatics to mechanical engineering to automata were published. The principles behind his inventions are still used

today in their modern counterparts. Jet engines, vending machines that dispense candy, bars and soda, and big red fire trucks can all trace their origins to this one man and his amazing mind. Perhaps even more amazing, though, was that Hero didn't develop any of these things during the twenty century, or the nineteenth century, or even the eighteenth century. Hero lived between ten a d and seventy a d. During

the period when Rome controlled Egypt. He also taught at the Great Library of Alexandria, home to tens of thousands of texts from cultures all over the world before fires and war reduced it to rubble. Here On of Alexandria was a man way ahead of his time, though he'd laid the groundwork for devices that made our lives easier and faster. Today, very few know his name, making him truly an unsung hero. 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. Yeah,