Pop!

As we get older, that desire to remain awake bleeds into the nighttime hours, until we find ourselves welcoming the sunrise with a crowd of drunken revelers we met the night before. Then we hit adulthood and the only thing we want to do is lay in bed and sleep, or watch reruns of the Office until we nod off. But one woman allegedly got to live the dream in more ways than one, so to speak. Her name was

Carolina Olson born in eighteen sixty one in Sweden. She was the second oldest of five children, but didn't attend school like her four other brothers. Her mother took care of the house and felt Carolina should learn to help as well, so missus Olsen kept her at home On top of the household chores, she also taught her how to read and write. When Carolina was fourteen, she finally started attending school like the other children. Things were going smoothly for about a month until one day she came

home in immense pain. Her tooth hurt, but her mother didn't believe that that was the cause of her ailment. She felt that Carolina was under the influence of witchcraft or an evil spirit, so she told her to sleep it off. What her mother didn't realize, though, was that the toothache would be the least of the girl's problems. Carolina tucked herself in and fell asleep. The next morning, she was still asleep. No matter what her parents tried,

they could not wake her up. She hadn't died, she was simply unconscious and sadly, they didn't have enough money to send for the doctor, but the town banded together to pay for one instead. In his opinion, Carolina had fallen into a coma. Her mother tended to her around the clock, feeding her two glasses of milk each day. Meanwhile, her doctor was taking matters into his own hands. He penned a letter to the editor of the Scandinavian Medical

Journal for advice. Soon, other doctors began writing back with several pain Carolina visits of their own. They remarked that her fingernails, toenails, and hair didn't seem to be growing, and one doctor in particular, a guy named Johann amel Almblod, transferred Carolina to his hospital in eighteen ninety two for observation. He watched her for a month, during which time he conducted a number of tests to verify the severity of

her condition. He poked her skin with sharp instruments, sent small jolts of electricity through her body, and even altered her diet, but nothing worked. When the thirty days were over, he sent her home with a diagnosis of dementia paralytica, a neurological disorder typically seen in people suffering from syphilis. But Carolina didn't have syphilis. She simply slept and slept and slept, although her father claimed to have seen her crawling around on her hands and knees a few times

before scuttling back to bed. Otherwise, she slumbered as her mother took care of her every need, feeding her, changing her clothes, and bathing her, and after that years went by. Sadly, missus Olsen passed away in nineteen oh four, and Carolina lost one of her brothers in nineteen oh seven. She was then taken care of by a maid, but one day, without warning, she finally woke up in nineteen oh eight. She had been out for a total of thirty two years. Her maid had walked in on her, jumping up and

down and crying. She was emaciated and sensitive to light for a short time, but Carolina also didn't recognize her remaining brothers who came to see her, nor could she speak to them easily. She hadn't uttered a word in years. It was as though she had been reborn, but luckily she still knew how to read and write. In fact, she retained much of what she had learned before her coma. In the weeks following her awakening, Carolina was visited by

scores of reporters looking for a story. They came from the United States and Europe to find out everything they could about the miracle girl who had slept for three decades. She also underwent a battery of psychiatric tests to gauge her facilities, and was found to be completely healthy. Mentally speaking, she was the same girl she had been all those

years before. Carolina Olsen managed to live another forty two years after that, dying from an inter cranial hemorrhage in nineteen fifty at the age of eighty eight, finally slipping into a slumber that none of us ever come back from. This story starts with a bit of a personal anecdote. The other weekend, I went to the movies and I did what you have to do when you're at the movies.

I spent way too much money on a massive bag of popcorn, And as I sat in my seats, eating one delicious kernel after another, I started to wonder, how did popcorn become the movie theater snack. That was so curious that I went home and I did a little research, and it turns out the story behind movie theater popcorn is actually pretty amazing. You see America's first movie theater open in nineteen o five in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was

called the Nickelodeon. You'll probably recognize that is the name of a modern children's TV network, But this is where the word originated. The price of admission was a nickel, and the ancient Greek word for theater was odeon, hence nickelodeon. The Nickelodeon was a classy place too. The goal was to emulate the experience of seeing a live theater performance, so thick curtains surrounded the movie screen and the floors were lined with expensive carpet. The first movie ever screened

there was a drama called The Great Rain Robbery. It was just ten minutes long and it was totally silent, and it was also a huge hit. After this movie, theaters started springing up all over the country, but they had pretty strict rules, the most shocking among them no snacking allowed. There were a couple of reasons for this. Of course, first, the carpets right, theater managers didn't want

their nice rugs getting covered in crumbs. And second, snacks that were already associated with entertainment, like potato chips and yes, popcorn, were crunchy. But the movies didn't have any audio. Imagine going to a silent film and all you can hear in the background is people chewing their food. Definitely not ideal. It wasn't until nineteen twenty seven, a full twenty two years later that the first movie with sound debuted. This

led to a huge spike in ticket sales. The nineteen thirty movie theaters in the US sold about ninety million tickets per week. And now that the whole listening to people chew thing wasn't a problem, you would think that theater managers might be a little more lax about snacking. Right, well, sort of. By this point, street vendors had noticed that the outside of a movie theater was a great place to find customers. Moviegoers would buy popcorn outside and then

sneak it into the theater in their coat pockets. Theater managers realized that there really wasn't any way to get around this, so rather than fight human's natural inclination to smuggle snacks into a movie theater, they decided to go directly to the street vendors. They gave the salesmen an ultimatum either take the popcorn carts elsewhere or pay a daily fee to do business outside the theater doors. For the most part, the vendors agreed to give a cut

to the theaters, and the arrangement worked well. But then in the early nineteen thirties, the Great Depression took hold of the United States, entertainment became a luxury that people weren't so quick to spend money on anymore. Those record breaking ticket sales from just a few years before I'll dried up. If the movie industry was going to make it through the depression, theater owners needed a way to increase profits, and popcorn was the perfect way to do it.

The ingredients were extremely cheap. A bag of popcorn kernels that cost ten dollars could last a theater for years. Small bags of cooked popcorn cost customers anywhere from five to ten cents, which was a profit margin of about eighty five percent. This was the point in history when movie theaters began relying less on revenue from ticket sales and more on the money they made from selling concessions.

Snacks had become their saving grace. Once outright banned from the movies, theaters now played advertisements encouraging patrons to grab a bag of popcorn and a soda before the film began. By nineteen forty five, more than half the popcorn eaten in America was enjoyed in front of the big screen. So the next time you're at the movies, snacking on

some overpriced popcorn. Remember your purchase is part of a larger story, one in which the humble popcorn Kernel saved the American movie industry from financial collapse that I think certainly qualifies as curious. 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 Worldoflore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.