Lone Survivor

the Civil War. As those trains would depart, others would arrive, this time full of the dead, the dying, and the seriously injured. There had to be a better way, he often thought. If fewer men went off to fight, there would be less death and fewer men returning with such serious injuries equally horrific. He noticed more men died from disease than gunshots. Wars, in his opinion, were futile. Perhaps the answer was to create something so formidable that maybe

wars wouldn't be fought at all. He'd been inventing practically all his life. His first foray into engineering had been well working with his father processing cotton in his home state of North Carolina. There he'd improved on cotton thinning machines. In eighteen thirty nine, he improved on propeller screws for steamboats on the Mississippi. Later, he adapted his cotton thinning machines to so crops like wheat and other grains. In eighteen fifty, he created a machine that broke apart tempt.

His inventions had helped revolutionize agriculture over the years, though he improved on other inventions as well, the bicycle, steam cleaners for raw wool, and even a better flushing toilet. But now he was faced with a new dilemma, how to end wars faster, and he'd come up with a solution. After pondering on the idea, in eighteen sixty one, he drafted a prototype of a new gun. The gun, which held up to ten magazines surrounded by a barrel, was

housed on an axis between two large wheels. Turning the crank, fired off two hundred rounds per minute, depending on the speed of the gunner. Later versions fired off even more three fifty rounds per minute. He quickly filed for a patent in eighteen sixty one and set up a factory, paying for the first six prototypes from his own funds. The factory, though, burned down, destroying everything. Determined as ever,

he set about building thirteen more. When he was done, the military practically ignored him and his new rapid fire gun, and it wasn't until eighteen sixty three before the Washington Naval Yard tested it for themselves. Even though they gave the gun glowing reviews, only twelve of the guns were purchased, and not by the government. Union commanders bought them with their own funds. After success in the trenches during the Siege of Petersburg, Virginia, eight more guns were purchased and

fitted onto gunboats. Still, the army didn't widely accept its use until after a gun company representative provided a demonstration during combat in eighteen sixty five. Oddly enough, right at the very end of the war the gun had been designed to end. This inventor never anticipated where the weapon would find its first heavy use. Sadly, the U. S. Army employed the machine guns in the campaign against Native

American tribes throughout the eighteen seventies. In fact, the gun became most well known for not being used during a famous battle. General George Armstrong Custer decided against bringing the guns to the Battle of Little Big Horn. While it's difficult to look back on the history of that event and wish Custer more success, he was, after all, slaughtering Native peoples so that Americans could spread farther west, it

is easy to see the flaw in his decision. In eighteen seventy, the inventor sold his most famous creation to firearms manufacturer Cult. The weapon had done just the opposite of what he had set out to do. The gun had been dreamed up to save lives, but had become a weapon of mass destruction, which stood in direct opposition to its inventors real profession. You see, Richard Gatling, the father of the Gatling Gun, wasn't an engineer by trade. He was a doctor. The world can be a cruel place.

War seems to be a constant plague as our famine, disease, and poverty. On top of all of that, climate change has already had a devastating effect on the planet and will only get worse if we don't do something about it. Today, natural disasters seemed to be getting stronger. Hurricanes seemed to hit harder, bloods and earthquake are wiping out entire cities and volcanoes. Well, just ask Ludgar sil Baris Silbars lived on the island of Martinique in the Caribbean, working in

Saint Pierre as a day laborer. He'd been born in June of eighteen seventy four on one of the many plantations there. Just over five and a half miles away. Saint Pierre was no stranger to the occasional disasters. In seventeen eighty a great hurricane had brought with it at twenty five foot storm search that flooded the city. Every home was washed away. Over nine thousand people perished. Meanwhile, looming over all of them was another catastrophe waiting to happen,

Mount Pale. Mount Pale wasn't so much a mountain as it was an active volcano. It hadn't gone off in thousands of years, and the people of Saint Pierre didn't seem to think anything about it. Perhaps they should have. It was the night of May seventh of nineteen o two when sail Bars found himself in a local jail cell. He had a bit of a reputation around town on

for getting into fights. According to a few people, he had been arrested after murdering a man, though it was more likely that he had gotten into a bar fight. Whatever the case, so Baris was locked up for the night. Several hours later, on May eight, Mount Paley erupted. Smoke and rumbling had been emanating from the mountain for weeks, warning everyone below, but nobody paid any attention. That morning, the mountainside blew wide open and the sky turned dark

with smoke. No one could see a thing for fifty miles. Two enormous clouds had formed in the blast. The first came screaming out the side of the mountain. The second blew straight up into the sky before falling back down to earth across Saint Pierre. This wasn't a simple puff of smoke like one that might billow out from your fireplace. It was comprised of ash, rock and gas and had reached a temperature of over eighteen hundred degrees fahrenheit's, a

phenomenon known as pyroclastic flow. The plume traveled at roughly four hundred miles per hour, leveling everything in its path homes, buildings, trees, and people all in under a minute. Villagers from nearby towns had seen the warning signs and come to Saint Pierre to hide from the blast, unaware that they had placed themselves right in its path. Twenty eight thousand souls died that day, almost the whole city's population. I say almost,

because three people managed to survive. One man lived so far away that he was safe from the smoke's reach. Another, a girl in a boat off the coast of the island, was rendered unconscious by the explosion, which also pushed her boat out to sea. Though the ash and debris did burn her, she escaped with her life. But what about Lugar Sibaris, who had been jailed for disorderly conduct the night before. Everyone else in the building had been destroyed

by the volcano except for him. He hadn't been placed in the main jail cell. Instead, he had been locked away in solitary confinement. His small cell had been built halfway underground, with thick stone walls, making it impervious to bombs and other blasts. He was found days later by a rescue crew who heard him calling for help. He had suffered burns all over his body. He told his rescuers that when the hot air started flowing into his cell, he stripped out of his clothes and urinated on them

to keep them from catching fire. He then shoved them into the single grating in the cell floor that had provided him with any kind of fresh air prior to the eruption. Blocking it up had kept the gases and other particles from reaching his lungs. So Barrus is quick thinking and his serendipitous lodgings had saved his life that day.

In fact, though the rest of the police station had been reduced to rubble, his cell held up and still stands to this day, a monument to one man's incredible luck at being in the right place at the wrong time. 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. Yeah,