Gone Fission

of the world around us. Even our choices and behavior can be informed intentionally or not by the art we consume. For example, when a criminal is placed under house arrest and is forced to wear an ankle monitor, they can thank Spider Man. A judge in New Mexico got the idea while reading a Spider Man comic strip in nineteen seventy seven. He noticed the wall Crawler was wearing a tracking beacon on his arm thanks to one of his enemies. The judge took the idea to an engineer who helped

develop the first ankle monitor for law enforcement. The British version of the show House of Cards, as well as the novel that inspired it, took place in a world after Margaret Thatcher had resigned from office. The novel was released in nineteen eighty nine, while Thatcher was still in power. The television show came out a year later, and Thatcher herself resigned as Prime Minister only months after that. Some think it struck a bit too close to home. Alexander's

story was different. He was born in Scotland in sixteen seventy six, and from a young age he liked to fight. He got in trouble with the Church on several occasions for misbehaving. But more than fighting, Alexander had a passion for the open sea. By seventeen o three, he had already put in quite a bit of time on board various ships, so when he met William damp Here, an

explorer headed to the South Pacific, Alexander joined him. His job was to serve as the sailing master on board the sinc Ports, its sister ship, which was being led by Captain Thomas Stradling. They sailed for months, navigating through storms and battling other ships for their supplies. One particular fight left the sinc Ports badly damaged. Strand Ling no longer wanted to follow damp here and insisted that they sailed south to an uninhabited island off the coast of Chile.

Once off the ship, Alexander assessed the damage. It was so extensive that he didn't trust it to get them safely home without some repairs first, but Straddling wouldn't have it, so rather than risk his life on a broken ship, Alexander stayed behind on the island. He took some supplies with him, though, including a musket, a knife, a hatchet, cooking pot, a bible, some blankets, and the clothes on

his back. At first, he'd tried to live on the shore, fishing for his food and keeping an eye out for passing ships who might save him. But it wasn't until he moved inland when he realized what he'd been missing. There were goats there for him to eat, and milk left behind by previous visitors, as well as countless fruits and vegetables growing under foot. Alexander turned out to be

surprisingly skilled at solo island life. Rather than build a ramshackle home for himself out of twigs and leaves, he constructed two huts using pepper trees. One became his kitchen where he prepared all of his meals and he slept inside the other one. He also made his own clothes out of goat hides, which he's handed himself. When the rat situation got out of control, he tamed wild cats to chase them and keep them away from his home. For four years, Alexander lived on an island by himself.

He did much more than survive, though. He hunted for his own food, made his own clothing, and forged his own weapons. In early February of seventeen o nine, his salvation finally arrived i'd in the form of the Duke, a ship captain by none other than William Dampier. Apparently Alexander had made the smart choice by not getting back on the sinc Ports, because not long after leaving him

on the island, it sank. Straddling and his remaining crew had surrendered to Spanish troops passing by, and ended up becoming imprisoned for years. Alexander, though, was finally rescued upon his return to the civilized world. The story of how he survived on an island alone for four years took England by storm. One of the crew members that had worked with him even wrote a book about their travels together. In its he included a section about Alexander's isolation and

in a clear example of art imitating life. Another book was written about a decade later, in seventeen nineteen. It was about a man clad in tanned goat skins trying to survive on a deserted island all on his own, and its author had been inspired by Alexander Selkirk's Tale of Survival. The book Daniel Dafoe's classic, The Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The biggest dreams often start

as a series of small goals. Swimming laps in the community pool can eventually turn into an Olympic gold medal. A piano recital can one day become a sold out performance at Carnegie Hall, And for David Han of Royal Oak, Michigan, a simple love of science turned into the scariest day of his life. David was born in nineteen seventy six to an average middle class family and lived an average

middle class life. It wasn't until his grandfather gave him a book on chemistry experiments when his life changed course. From then on, he devoted every waking hour to science. He devoured any science related book he could get his hands on, including his father's college textbooks. As he got older, his taste matured with him. He built himself a laboratory and started stocking his shelves with books on handling hazardous materials. It didn't take him long to develop a recipe for nitroglycerin.

From there, he started thinking bigger. David took various jobs at fast food restaurants and grocery stores to help fund his work, but none of them really stuck. His primary focus was whatever was blowing up in his lab, quite literally. For example, one time he showed up to a meeting bright eyed and orange faced. He'd been trying out different forms of artificial tanning using a natural pigment, but it had unfortunately exploded in his face. He also almost blinded

himself after pounding red phosphorus with a screwdriver. It ignited and blew up, causing shards of the plastic container that he'd been keeping it in to embed themselves in his eye. It took months of regular sessions with an opthalmologist before all the pieces were removed, But these experiments were just the tip of the iceberg. David had a much larger plan to build his own breeder reactor. A breeder reactor used a fertile material like uranium to thirty eight to

create nuclear fuel. It was not something an average citizen should have been able to build, but there was nothing average about David. He lacked the resources of a government funded nuclear program, but he was resourceful. By posing as a high school physics teacher, he sent letters to every scientific organization he could find who might have information on creating nuclear material. They sent him books, pamphlets, and detailed

outlines on how to isolate radioactive elements. They also sent him a list of places where he could buy those elements himself. One easily obtainable substance was amrassium to forty one, which was readily available in all smoke detectors. He contacted a supplier who sold him a hundred broken units for a dollar each, no questions asked. He also managed to find radium to twenty six in antique clocks and thorium

to thirty two in gas powered lanterns. After welding all of the amrassium from the smoke detectors together, with a blow torch. He dropped the whole thing into a hollowed out lead block and poked a hole in the side to let the alpha rays out. Then he slid a piece of aluminum in front of the hole to absorb the alpha rays and emit neutrons. David had built himself his own neutron gun. However, he still needed uranium to

complete his reactor. A company informer Czechoslovakia that was known to sell to colleges sold him black or with uranium traces in it after David wrote them a letter pretending to be a professor with a nuclear laboratory. He purified his materials by pounding them with hammers and passing them through coffee filters, then blasted them with his neutron gun. By the time he was finished, he had created fissionable uranium two thirty three, which he combined with the radium

he'd scraped off the antique clocks. Before he knew it, his labs started to glow for weeks. He watched as the concoctions got stronger and more potent. He tried to offset the radiation with cobalt, which was supposed to absorb the neutrons, but it wasn't enough. At a certain point, his Geiger counter could detect the radiation come from his lab up to two hundred feet away. David quickly realized

he'd gone too far. He dismantled his reactor and separated the components into different boxes, but it was too late. Someone had tipped off the police. In the early morning hours of August thirty one, authorities searched his car and discovered a bunch of random metals, as well as a lock toolbox wrapped in duct tape. David told them what

it was. Within hours, the Michigan Police were on the phone with every federal organization that dealt with radioactive materials, including the E p A and the Department of Energy. Around Thanksgiving of that year, his makeshift lab was rated to make sure all other irradiated substances were properly removed and disposed of. Months later, a cleanup finished the job by cutting up his lab and placing the pieces into barrels. The barrels were then carted off to the desert, where

they were buried with radioactive materials from other facilities. David's poor mother suffered the most out of the whole ordeal. Not only had her son nearly turned their town into a radioactive waste land. She had also lost her potting shed. That's what David had used as his lab. His breeder reactor hadn't been the failed experiment of a seasoned scientist. It had been a misguided attempt by an eager seventeen

year old. All David Han had wanted was to earn his Atomic Energy Merit badge and eventually make Eagle Scouts, which thankfully he did. 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