Run and Gun

city of bill Bao. He hadn't started the business, though, No, that was the work of his father, Jose, a savvy trader. Jose did all kinds of legitimate business and built up a company big enough to keep his children busy as they grew up. So Diego, the second of Jose's eight children, was among them. But he didn't just learn on the job. Jose sent Diego to London to study economics and trade, and Diego did just that and plenty more. He learned English and made friends who would give him the idea

for his smuggling empire. Because along the way he came to see that if there's one thing big, international shipping companies like It's making money hand over fist while dodging government oversight and government tax collectors. And in that business, Diego was about to become an international superstar. In fact, he had a plan to do some club or dealing that would see him set up a smuggling network that

criss crossed the Atlantic. After Diego wrapped up five years of studying business in London and arrived back home in Spain, he saw his competitors making quite a pretty penny all under the table. He saw wealthy American buyers paying big money for illegal Spanish oil and wine on the black market.

If Diego was really dialed into just how much smuggling was going on, he would have known that other shipping companies were dodging taxes and pocketing profits not just on wine and oil, but on all kinds of Spanish merchandise, even cloth and raisins. And Diego wanted in on that game. So after his father Jose died, Diego rallied his brothers and set his plan in motion. First, he helped some businesses across the pond find new ways to sell their

own products, like lumber and even prefabricated houses. Those were shipped to Spain. Diego even set up a successful gambit to smuggle American wheat flour from Philadelphia to northern Spain and then back across the Atlantic to Cuba. It dodged authorities and kept things out of sight. The documents aren't quite clear, after all, smugglers don't usually want a paper trail, but we can easily guess that the shipping lanes from Spain to Havannah were a little more open than the

lanes from Philadelphia to Cuba. And that wasn't all. There were also luxury goods going the other way. To working with the family business in Massachu Sits, Diego and his brothers shipped across fine European silk in unprecedented amounts wealthy Americans with a taste for the opulence of distant shores. We're getting a little something special and all under the radar, and American money was getting back to Diego's Spanish bank

just the way he wanted. But then things took a turn because other orders started to come in and they weren't just for silk. Now, Diego's smuggling partners wanted something far darker. Guns you see his American contacts had been shipping in weapons from other places in Europe, not least the Dutch city of Amsterdam, but a recent crackdown had dried that up. It sent them looking for a new contact to get weapons of war into their hands, and Diego's contacts in Boston realized that he had a talent

for doing business while ducking the law. They offered Diego and his brothers an enormous sum of money to become merchants of death. We don't know whether or not this made Diego feel guilty, but we do know that he was the and for the job. He hesitated at first. He told his Massachusetts contacts that guns in Spain, while they were only made for the government. Even so, he

didn't want to lose the deal. He told them that he had found a stockpile of over one thousand handguns and three hundred rifles that had just been manufactured for the Spanish army. If his American buyers wanted them, they could probably get them out of the country. And of course, this sounded just like what Diego's contact wanted, so he got his hands on the weapons with ammunition to follow.

He was now officially a gun runner. It didn't take long for his guns to be put to use, though in fact, the same year he sent that first shipment, there was an open gun battle in Massachusetts. Even without his name in the headlines, Diego's illegal firearms were all

over the international news. That didn't stop him, though. Over the next few years his family trading company would ship across thirty thousand rifles, five hundred thousand bullets, and twelve thousand grenades, and more than two hundred pieces of artillery.

In fact, Diego was so successful making business contacts for selling illegal weapons in America that years later Spain would make him the ambassador to the United States because the people of Massachusetts in Philadelphia, well, they were fighting the British government, and Diego de Gardoqui was the smuggler who provided guns for the first battles of the American Revolutionary War. According to some figures of speech, getting numerous people involved

in a project can spell doom for its completion. Too many cooks spoil the broth, the more chickens in the coop, the more poop, and the fewer the eggs. And of course a camel is a horse designed by a committee. All those phrases have some truth to them, and that last idiom is particularly appropriate when discussing a project like

the Bristol Brabazon. As World War Two raged across England, Germany and beyond, the British aircraft industry decided to put all of its effort behind manufacturing combat planes, with their focus dedicated to one pursuit that left a gaping hole in another demographic civilians. After all, the war would end one day, and without a commercial airline industry for public use, Britain would fall behind the competition, especially the United States.

So the government formed a committee to be led by a man named John Moore Brabazon, first Baron Brabazon Terra, a name as large as the plane that would share it. Under the Baron's leadership, the Brabazon Committee developed a report in which five plane designs were studied and four were recommended for construction. They varied in size and range, with some being smaller puddle jumpers and others a bit larger in scale. However, it was the Type one that captured

everyone's imagination. The Type one would be a massive transatlantic airliner capable of carrying three passengers across the ocean, but the committee was worried that first class travelers would dislike flying for hours with little room to spread out. Instead, they opted for sixty first class seats and plenty of room. In fact. Comfort with such a priority, there were plans to include a movie theater and a cocktail lounge as well.

The Bristol Brabazon, bearing the model name of Type one six seven, boasted a few solage of one hundred eighty feet long and an enormous wingspan of two hundred thirty feet in length. For comparison, the Boeing seven forty seven has ranged in wingspans from one d ninety feet to two hundred twenty four and it was to be powered by eight Bristol Centaurus eighteen cylinder radial engines capable of

producing over twenty six hundred horsepower each. This plane wasn't just going to be the largest to ever take to the skies, It was also going to be the most technologically advanced. It featured servos and sensors to prevent the wings from bending during turbulence. Engineers also outfitted it with high pressured hydraulics and electric engine can trolls, a first

for modern aircraft at the time. But aaron you might say that is a lot of airplane, and it was probably heavy, and you wouldn't be wrong, but a unique fabrication process was developed to use the least amount of metal necessary all over the wings and body, thus reducing its overall weight. The original plan had been to build a total of eight of these planes. Little hangars were even constructed to house them, but only one was ever

fully made. The Bristol Brabazon had its maiden flights in early September of nine after working out some kinks with the steering, It soared over Bristol, England for about twenty five minutes at an altitude of three thousand feet and the top speed of one sixty miles per hour. The British press dubbed her the Queen of the Skies, and that was just about the nicest thing anyone had or ever would say about it. The Bristol Brabazon was heavy, slow,

and unresponsive. It was also costly to build, maintain and operate at a time when airlines were focused less on comfort and more on carrying as many passengers as possible at one time. So when the Brabazon finally went on sale, nobody bought it. Three point four million pounds mostly down the drain, but all wasn't lost. Many of the new technologies that had gone into building it were used on more successful planes later on. Plus, John Moore Brabazon, a

pilot in his own right, had done the impossible. He'd managed to get two pigs to fly during his lifetime. There was the Type one six seven that bore his name, and in nine he carried an actual live pig in a basket tied to the wing strut of his own biplane. And if that's not curious, I don't know what is. 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. Yeah,