Leapfrog

came into the world in eighteen forty eight. Boyton attended college in Pennsylvania, but didn't have plans for a normal job like a lawyer or a doctor. When he was only fifteen, he enlisted with the Union Navy to fight in the Civil War. Several years later, he even saw battle during the frame Go Prussian War. Perhaps it was the sight of his wounded comrades, or maybe the navies that he had served with just weren't keen on safety precautions. Whatever the reason, Boyton came back home to the US,

where he started the United States Life Saving Surface. Their mission was to help rescue shipwrecked sailors and their passengers, with a branch in Atlantic City, New Jersey headed by Boyton himself. He took his job very seriously too, and quickly began coming up with new ideas on how to save more lives. He'd become fascinated with an invention by a guy named Clark S. Merriman. It was called the immersion suits, comprised of a rubber shirts and rubber pants

that were cinched at the waist. Inside the suit were tubes that could be blown into in order to inflate a series of air pockets, making the wearer buoyant. But the immersion suit inflated, a person could float on their back and paddle themselves to safety. And Boyton knew that if there were more of these suits in circulation, he could protect more peace. He began promoting the immersion suit wherever he could, and there was no better way to

do so than to demonstrate it to the public. He started paddling himself along a number of rivers in both the United States and Europe, hitching himself to a small boat that carried tools and items that he needed to stay afloat, and the people loved him for it. They would gather along the river banks to watch him go by celebrating his floating feats of fancy. But to really sell the utility of Merriman's invention, Boyton needed to go

beyond simple river based exhibitions. He decided that he would board a ship in New York City headed for Europe. When he was a few hundred miles off shore, he was going to jump over the side, wearing the immersion suit and paddle back to land. Unfortunately, his grand scheme sounded way too dangerous to every captain he spoke to, so he took a different route. Instead, he snuck aboard a ship. It was a passenger ship to Ireland that

Boyton had boarded using a disguise. With his plan in motion, he donned the immersion suit and waited until the ship was far enough away from the coastline to make his jump, and then he was caught. The crew stepped in, stopping him from killing himself while they were still in US waters, but they gave him the option of carrying on with his stunt once they reached Ireland. Boyton agreed to wait.

He leapt overboard just as the ship was in sight of the Irish coast, and despite nearly getting killed by a passing storm, Paul Boyton successfully paddled his way back to land. His miraculous journey made him a celebrity and earned him a speaking opportunity in Cork. From there, he started performing other impressive stunts using his special rubber suit. For example, in May of eighteen seventy five, he crossed

the English Channel in only twenty four hours. That same year, he traveled over four hundred miles along Europe's Rhine River. In eighteen seventy six, he returned to the States to go from Alton, Illinois to Saint Louis, Missouri, paddling his body down the Mighty Mississippi. He sailed hundreds of miles and spent dozens of hours in the water with only his immersion suit and a paddle to help him, which took him from a local hero to a full fledged

international celebrity, and he loved the spotlights. There's no doubt about that. He even used his fame to bolster others to superstardom, although not everyone fared well under his guidance. Robert Odlam sadly died after jumping from the Brooklyn Bridge in an effort to prove that people did not die from falling, only from landing. And Boyton had been the one to encourage him to perform the stunt in the

first place. When Odlam's sister tried to bring Boyton to justice for his role in her brother's death, he silenced her by threatening a lawsuit of slander. After the tragic loss of Robert Odlam, Boyton performed with P. T. Barnum's circus for a while before moving to Chicago in the late eighteen eighties, and in eighteen ninety four he opened

the country's first permanent amusement park. It was the first of its kind and even established the idea of an entry fee, where visitors would pay a set price to access all the rides and attractions within them parks borders. Paul Boyton was a complicated man, one who was never comfortable sitting still. He accomplished quite a lot in his seventy plus years on earth, and for his efforts he

was forever remembered by a nickname, the Fearless Frogman. Apple founder Steve Jobs once said, innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower. To make a splash in a marketplace, you need to come up with something new, something big and bold, a statement that will not only wow potential buyers, but also make them remember your name. In the realm of communication, several inventions stand out. The computer, the internet, and the cell phone probably come to most people's minds.

But before those, we had the telephone, you know, the thing with numbers on it that we used to have to plug into our wall. Then before that was the telegraph. It was two English inventors who first brought the telegraph to the masses in eighteen thirty seven. Their names were William Cook and Charles Wheatstone, and their patent led to the proliferation of entire infrastructures based around telegraph communication. Their machine used electrical currents to move a series of metallic

needles in specific directions. These needles were mounted on a diamond shaped grid of letters. One needle was used to convey one set of letters, while two more were used to convey a second set. Their patent was based on a five needle array, but a four needle system was soon installed along a London rail line between Euston and Camden Town stations. Their invention was a success and led to other types of telegraphs, even other methods of conveying

signals across transmission lines. For example, Samuel Morris's electromagnetic telegraph set messages over a wire in much the same way as Cook's in Wheatstone's machine, except Morris's corresponding code allowed operators to send those messages much more or quickly by using dots and dashes to represent the letters of the alphabet instead. Telegraph operators on maritime vessels like the Titanic trained for years to learn the ins and outs of

Morse code. They would send the dits and das wirelessly over a range of about three hundred miles. This technology lasted until the end of World War One, but prior to that. Around eighteen sixty five, one man came forward with a new idea. He was raising money for an invention of his own design, one that would bridge the gap between long distances with more than just dots and dashes. He wanted users of his groundbreaking device to hear each

other on the other end of the line. According to a Boston newspaper article from that year, this entrepreneur's new invention would convey the human voice any distance over metallic wires. He called this miracle of modern engineering a telephone, a name that capitalized on the success of its predecessor, the telegraph. But the press was skeptical. After all, small electrical pulses were one thing, but could the sound of a person's

voice really be carried over a wire the same way. Well, reporters weren't the only ones who thought the whole thing sounded fishy. So did the people this inventor was hitting up for money. He needed to fund the development of his device, but lacked the capital to do so, and at the time, his dream sounded exactly like that, just

a dream. As a result, his fundraising efforts were cut short by the police, who arrested him for trying to swindle, as the papers put it back then, ignorant and superstitious people out of their hard earned money. Oh and this man's name was not Alexander Graham Bell. Bell's telephone wouldn't come out for another eleven years. The person who had just gone to jail for scheming innocent people out of money for his telephone was named Joshua Coppersmith. But the

question remains. Was he really just a con man trying to make a quick buck like Harold Hill selling the Boys Marching Band and the music Man, or was he an inventor ahead of his time seeking to bring the world a way to communicate across oceans, a full decade before Bell's own telephone would be unveiled. Almost nothing is known about Joshua Coppersmith other than this one story, and so we're left to speculate as to what really happened. But it does bring another Steve Jobs quote to mind,

one that's been attributed to Pablo Picasso. It goes good artist copy great artists, Steele Well, Joshua Coppersmith wasn't much of an artist, but he was an even lousier thief. 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 Loret. Come and until next time, stay curious. MHM.