Misfortune's Melody

He played the serpent, a wooden instrument in the shape of a large s, but instruments were expensive in the early eight hundreds, and Charles Joseph decided to make one for himself. He followed the pattern of another Belgian craftsman and soon enough had his own serpent ready for him to play. But his budding talent for crafting musical instruments wasn't the only thing he was nurturing. There was also

his courtship with Marie. He met her when he turned his talent for crafting intricate mechanical devices to the service of a local factory. He made their spinning machines, and he met to his future wife at the same time. After they were married, he was soon also nurturing his young son Antoine Joseph. That was a bit of a mouthful, though, so the little boy was nicknamed Adolph, the first of the family's eleven children, but one of just three who

would grow to adulthood. It was a time of great loss for the family, but it was a time of change beyond them. The factory closed and they moved along. They made their way to Brussels, and that's where the family serpent business really caught on. And then young Adolph watched as his father's work turned from cabinets to clarinets.

Serpents were followed by flutes and then bassoons. Innovations and happy accidents were turning the small operation into a veritable orchestra stockpile, and each new instrument had a twist, an improvement over the reeds and the woodwinds of the past. Not all the accidents were happy, though, Remember those tragedies that turned the family of eleven children to a family of just three. Well, Adolph avoided a similar fate by

the thinnest whisker. For instance, he once fell down three flights of stairs and landed hard on the stone floor at the bottom. They say he cracked his head. Fortunately he was able to recover and It was far from the last of his close calls. Once he was burned in a gunpowder explosion. I don't know the full story there, but it doesn't sound safe. Or there's the time that a falling stone from a roof came down on his head. It left him with a scar that he would carry

for the rest of his life. At the age of three, he drank a cloudy white mixture. Maybe he thought it was milk, but it turned out to be a poisonous slurry of chemical sulfates that could have also killed him. But somehow young Adolph survived after he almost drowned in a river. Once his mother said he is a child, can them to misfortune, He won't live in the area. The little boy became known as the little Ghost. It's a sad testament to just how dangerous it was to

escape childhood unscathed. In those days. His hardhead and his iron stomach were apparently only matched by the constitution of his lungs. A few stories said that on multiple occasions he went to sleep with his room filled by the poisonous fumes of new varnish. It was a familiar danger to the family of instrument makers. Maybe it was even what had killed some of his brothers and sisters. Whatever the case, on each of those occasions, something happened that

kept young Adolph alive. It had to be a comfort to his parents, especially since so many of their other children didn't have Adolph's sheer luck. Not to mention his resilience to bounce back from so much misfortune, but I think we can all be glad that Adolph managed to pull through. Maybe it was his personality. Some historians have said that he was notably fiery, always pushing beyond whatever ranks were around him and breaking down categories to find

something new. Maybe it was just his good bones. But whatever combination of fate and toughness carried Adolf through his kisses with death, it also protected the inventiveness of his young mind. First, it was turned towards the world of music itself. He trained at the Belgian Royal School of Music, and by all accounts he was a star. Private lessons on the clarinet made him a virtuoso, but he didn't stay. Maybe it was a reminder of just how precious family

can be in the midst of so much loss. But something brought Adolf back home. The family workshop was a place of tragedy, sure, but also a place of invention. And at fifteen Adolf wasn't just wowing people with his clarinet skills. He was also showing off his instrument designs. But he was thinking beyond his father's woodworking. His first exhibitions were of flutes and clarinets made in Ivory. When they came under the eye of the chief conductor of

the opera house in Paris, he wasn't impressed. He called Adolf's work barbarian instruments. But the young inventor got wilder and more inventive. Still, the standard clarinet has seventeen keys. Soon Adolph was showing off a boxwood clarinet with twenty four. One of the musicians in Brussels who saw it said that he would never play an instrument made by the

weedy little pupil. What came next was an instrument that put Adolph's name in mouths all around Brussels, than Paris, and then everywhere that people were making music in Europe. Because he made his next bass clarinet in brass. He gave it bends that followed the twists and turns of his own life. He gave it a sweet and haunting honey tone that carried all the sorrow and joy and

inventiveness of his father's machines and his family's losses. And in eighteen forty one, at the Belgian Industrial Exhibition, he gave the world the testament to his creativity and the prize one from his survival. And it was the thing that would in turn survive him, to give life to songs and sounds beyond anything he could imagine, and it would carry his name, the name of Adolph Sachs, the

inventor of the new clarinets in brass, the saxophone. The lives of pirates have been written about and portrayed on stage and screen for generations. They were bandits of the sea who took what they wanted, drank heavily, and killed people just for the fun of it. Some fairy tales would have us believe they were incompetent fools, while popular novels portrayed them as cunning cutthroats in search of buried treasure. But no pirate on record was quite like Benjamin. Benjamin

was born in England in the late sixteen hundreds. He was relatively unknown until seventeen thirteen. When he started committing acts of piracy on the high seas. Many of his early efforts were focused on merchant ships sailing near the island of New Providence in the Bahamas, and he operated exactly as you might expect. He and his crew with lion waits for the perfect moment when they would rob

the vessels carrying goods to and from the islands. But rather than command a massive sailing ship armed with cannons, Benjamin and his men traveled by canoes and snuck onto ships in order to loot and rob them of their goods before getting away. But after several years of flying under the radar, Benjamin eventually upgraded from those little canoes to a ship called the Ranger. It was armed with thirty cannons, making it the deadliest vessel in the Bahamas

at the time. The pirate captain traveled with quite the entourage back in the day, too. He built his crew from a few dozen to almost three fifty across a fleet of five ships, and a second in command was pretty talented as well, none other than Edward Teach, better known to history as Blackbeard, a vicious killer, despite no verified accounts of him actually having killed anyone with his

own hands. Benjamin developed a reputation for himself as well, especially among the ships passing through the Bahamas, so much so that the Governor of South Carolina once sent an armed vessel of his own to take down the troublesome pirates and bring him back to face justice. But Benjamin fought back with his massive fleet of armed ships. The governor's forces soon realized they were outgunned and fled in terror.

It seemed that Benjamin could not be stopped. However, although he behaved like a pirate, there was a code that he followed. For example, he refused to attack ships of the British Empire as he supported the country's economic policies. Instead, he only went after enemies of the crown. He also liked to drink a lot. On one occasion, he caught

a merchant ship sailing off the coast of Honduras. As he and his men stormed the decks, they corralled the unlucky crew members, who didn't think that they would live to see tomorrow. Swords were drawn, men wept. By the time it was over, Benjamin, Edward Teach, and the other crew of the Ranger had relieved the merchant vessel's crew of everything they'd come for their hats, and amazingly no

one was killed. According to the tale told by one of the passengers who had witnessed the attack, Benjamin and his men had gotten so drunk the night before they'd thrown all of their hats over the sides of their ship. They had only boarded the other vessel to find replacements. Unfortunately, not everyone agreed with Benjamin's Shenanigans nor his pirate code. Growing tired of only attacking non English ships, they took

a vote and ousted him as captain. With no crew of his own and a bounty on his head by various governments, Benjamin sought a pardon from King George the First, who granted it on one condition. The hunted now had to become the hunter. The one time pirate was given a new mission and a new purpose in life to take down other pirates for the British Crown, especially his

former crewmates. He even went after his old partner, the legendary Blackbeard Benjamin Hornegold hunted pirates for almost two years until his new ship was destroyed in a hurricane. The ship, the captain, and all its crew were tragically Lost at Sea, hats and all. 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.