Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. It was an Alaskan hunters pot luck. I know those are a lot of unrelated words,
but let me try to unpack them for you. You see, state laws in Alaska ban the sale of game meat, so if you were to swing on down to the local steakhouse, you aren't going to find caribou on the menu, no matter how badly you might want to try it. Of course, no one can stop you from eating something you hunted yourself. So a common event all across the state is for hunters to invite a few friends over
for a meal. Maybe everyone brings their own hunting related dish, or perhaps there's just one main dish that everyone will share. It's different each time, depending on the success they've had that season. With all that said, Dale had had a very successful hunt. He had brought home meat from a prized catch, something to be proud of, so he invited a few friends over to celebrate and partake in the bounty.
The trouble was there wasn't a lot of meat to go around, so he did what people have done for centuries. He made a stew out of it. Dale cut up carrots and potatoes, diced some onions, and crushed some garlic, and put the whole thing on the stove for a good long simmer. By the time guests arrived that evening, there was a rich aroma filling. The house wine was poured, bowls were filled, and then every single one of the
eight people around the table dug into their meals. Dale wasn't a celebrity chef, so don't expect something amazing to have taken place. According to one interview, everyone managed to finish their portion, but no one remembers anyone going back for seconds. I get it, there's nothing unusual or curious about a gathering of Alaskan's around the dinner table enjoying a nice stew that one of them cooked up. But this was no ordinary dinner party, and the meal was curious.
That's because the meat in dale stew was from a bison, a bison that died over fifty thousand years ago. Reggie was a bit of a practical joker. Sure, he was a physicist by training and used his skills to help the British military defend itself from the Germans during World War Two. But trickster nature was always right there near the surface. It said that in the nineteen thirties, while he was a research fellow at Oxford, he called up one of the other professors to carry out a prank.
The first few times he called, Reggie immediately hung up as the man was answering. Finally, after sowing the seeds of frustration and doubt, he called and pretended to be a representative from the telephone company and reported a faulty line. He then went on to ask the professor to run a series of tests to see if the problem was on his end. Those tests included tapping his pencil on the phone, standing on one leg, and dipping the receiver
into a bowl of cold water. Much to Reggie's enjoyment, the professor followed all of the instructions to a t. Let's be honest. Though the college campus is no stranger to practical jokes. In fact, Steve Wozniak, one of the founders of Apple Computer, engaged in his own fair share of fund Wozniak actually built a sort of signal jammer for early televisions and would carry it in his pocket in the dorm and cause TV shows to cut in
and out, much to everyone else's frustration. But most people grow up, they move on and leave those college pranks behind them. Steve Wozniak went on to help found one of the most culturally significant companies of the last century, and Reggie went on to work for British military intelligence. His training as a physicist allowed him to help the British avoid the bombing raids that the Germans continuously sent
their way. The Germans had developed a technology they called the nick and bine, which was a method of guiding airplanes to a very specific target using a pair of radio beams that intersected over the location. Reggie's first assignment was to find a way to bend one of those beams and throw off the German bombers, and it worked. Rather than dropping bombs on major cities, the German planes were guided out into the countryside, where their bombs did
much less damage. 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.