Ring-a-Ding-Ding

scientists to accompany astronauts into space. But that's not the most curious fact about Harrison Schmidt. Not even close. You could say he's studied and prepared his entire life for the moment when he stepped foot on Apollo seven on December eleventh of nineteen seventy two. After studying geology at the California Institute of Technology, he spent a year at the University of Oslo. In nineteen sixty four, he received

his PhD from Harvard. From Rocks to Gas and the matter that makes up planets and their moons, I think it's safe to say that Schmidt knew a lot about the material that makes up our world. While most geologists work for energy companies or mining sectors, Schmidt took a different route. In nineteen sixty five, he found work creating geological field techniques at the US Geological Surveys Astrological Center in Flagstaff, Arizona. Those techniques would go on to be

used by Apollo Cruz. When NASA decided to send scientists to the Moon with astronauts, they selected Schmidt. Schmidt trained with the Air Force for the next year, learning to become a jet pilot. Schmidt made his second mark in history as the only geologist in the Astronaut Corps. From there, he moved to Houston, where he put his lifelong love of geology to use, training the astronauts to be come better at recognizing geologic changes while in orbit and collecting

material from the Moon's surface. In March of nineteen seventy, Schmidt was assigned to the Apollo eighteen crew. Unfortunately, his hopes were dashed when NASA scrubbed the mission. All wasn't lost, though, and his breakthrough came in late August when scientists convinced NASA to reassign Schmidt to the Apollo seventeen mission. It would be the last Apollo mission, Schmidt certainly had some shoes to fill, replacing an astronaut Joe Angel as the

lunar module pilot. Two years later, on December seventh of nineteen seventy two, Schmidt and his crewmates Commander Jean Cernan and Ronald E. Evans boarded Apollo eleven at the Kennedy Space Center for launch. A few days later, Cernan and Schmidt landed on the Moon. Before collecting rocks, Schmidt took pictures and claimed to have snapped the iconic blue Marble photo of Earth. To date, it's the most widely circulated

photo ever taken. Schmidt collected formations, picked a sample that became one of the most significant rock specimens ever collected. At just five ounces, the plutonic rock has helped NASA support its theory about what material makes up the Moon's core. After collecting samples, Schmidt's and Commander Sernan returned to the Lunar module. Both men removed their helmets. Moments later, Schmidt realized that he was congested was at the start of a cold With his next breath, the inside of his

nose felt irritated. It was then that he understood the source. He and Sernin had moon dust on their suits, helmets, and boots. Schmidt felt his throat tightened, his voice faltered. It turned out that Schmidt was allergic to the very thing that he had trained for the Moon's surface. He wouldn't be the only one, though, One of the flight surgeons on the mission also suffered an instant and severe reaction.

Both men recovered, though, and the mission resumed. Apolo seventeen splashed down in the South Pacific Ocean on December nineteenth of nineteen seventy two. In the fifty years since the Apollo seventeen mission, Schmidt has advocated test in future pilots against such allergic reactions. The soft, powdery material is difficult to remove, even when the astronauts attempt to brush it off.

For Schmidt, the ease with which moondust can make its way into astronauts lungs, it seems there is nothing to sneeze at. The world is a massive place, with billions of people separated by thousands of miles of oceans. But every once in a while, something serendipitous takes place. We might run into an old friend in an unlikely location, or realize that the differences between our cultures aren't as

vast as we had once thought. But Cornish missionary William Colenzo discovered something quite unexpected on his trip to New Zealand in the late eighteen thirties that the world was a lot smaller than any of us really knew weren't. In Penzance, Cornwall, England in eighteen eleven, Colenzo was a printer's apprentice before he joined the Church Missionary Society to spread the gospel. It was eighteen thirty four when he first traveled to New Zealand and came face to face

with the native Maori people and their customs. According to some reports, he was the first European to ever set foot within the village. They welcomed him in, allowing him to witness their customs. Colenzo was watching some Maori women cooked potatoes when he noticed something strange about the pot they were using. It was made of bronze. These people wouldn't have cooked in a bronze vessel. They would have used something wooden with heated stones inside to warm their food.

Not to mention, Colenzo was, if not the first, then among the first Europeans to enter their community. The Maori had never traded with foreigners before, so where had they gotten this bronze pot. Well. As he began to examine it more closely, he realized that it wasn't a pot at all. It measured six inches across by six and a half inches tall, with a jagged lip going around its opening. There was also an inscription embossed around its

middle in a language Colenzo didn't understand. But what he did know was that the object the Maori had thought was a pot was in fact actually the crown of a ship's bell. It had apparently been in their possession for decades, and had been discovered tangled among the roots of a tree that had been felled during a storm. Colenzo knew it needed to be studied further, and so he bartered with the women, offering them an actual cast iron pot in exchange for the bell. They acquiesced and

allowed the missionary to take it back to England. It was later revealed that the writing around its rim was Tamil, a language spoken in parts of India, Singapore and Sri Lanka. But how had it wound up so far from home? In eighteen eighty two, a New Zealand scientist named William Maskell suggested that it might have been owned by a sailor who had traveled to South Asia and taken it

for his own before ultimately losing track of it. Later, almost a century beyond that, historian Robert Gossett claimed that it had been part of a ghost ship that had lost its crew and traveled thousands of miles away from its home before crashing into New Zealand. Neither story, though, was ever confirmed. And then there was the matter of the inscription. At first, it was believed to date back as far as the fourteenth century, but that theory was

dismissed as of several years ago. Nalina gopol, a museum curator in Singapore, examined the bell in twenty nineteen. A native Tamil speaker herself, Gopel easily read the text along the bell's edge without question. That was because it was more modern than earlier researchers had determined. Gopel knew that an older version of Tamil would have been almost impossible to read because it would have been too different from the current iteration of the language. She figured it was

only as old as the seventeenth or eighteenth century. As for what it said, the literal translation read the Bell of the Ship of Mohideen Bucks. Early experts assumed that meant that the ship had been owned by a person with the name of Mohideen Bucks, but not Gopel. After quite a bit of search, she determined that Bucks wasn't the owner, nor was it the name of the ship.

It was the name of a saint. In fact, many ships coming out of Southeast Asia at the time would have been named mo hitting Bucks as a way to bless them on their journeys, to keep them safe, and at least in this instance, it didn't work out so well. Not only did Gopel nor any of the other experts who studied the bell know how it arrived in New Zealand, there was no trace of the ship that had carried it either, and we might never know the true story

behind the bells providance. The sea may get angry and loud at times, but there is no greater keeper of secrets on this earth than the water that covers it. 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 Mank 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 Loore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.