Time Warp

Time traveling is one of those concepts relegated to summer blockbusters and classic novels. But what if there was something else, Not a way to travel through time, but to see it like a television one could tune in any period and get a glimpse of the way things were. In short, what if someone built a window into the past. A fictional version of such a device was written about by sci fi author T. L Shared in his seven story

E for Effort. In it, the main character Ed sees a silent film depicting the conquest of the Aztec Empire by Hernan Cortez. It's incredible, with acting and sets that looked just like the real thing, except for one thing. That event took place in fifteen nineteen, almost four hundred years before the birth of the movie camera. Ed learns that the person who made the film he was watching has invented a special time viewer capable of recording the past.

Ed and the inventor's greed gets the better of them, and they are eventually taken into custody by the U. S. Government. I won't spoil the end, but the heroes don't fare too well. That said, the device was not always the fictional maguffin of a creative author. Back in the nineteen fifties, a device called the Chronovisor was being developed by a team of scientists backed by an unlikely organization, the Vatican.

Like the novel's literary device, the Chronovisor would allow viewers to see historical events on a television screen and even captured them in photographs. Allegedly, the screen was so powerful it had the ability to see the future as well. The team was led by an Italian priest named Father Pellegrino Maria Ornetti. Assisting him in the endeavor were two others, Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi and an actual rocket scientist. This project was no joke, at least not according to the Vatican.

Ernetti had gotten the idea for his time TV not from a science fiction novel, but from listening to Gregorian Chance at a university in Milan. He and another priest, father Augustino Gamelli, were engrossed in the performance when a single, clear voice ing out above all the others. It was that of father Gamelli's own father, who had long since

passed away. Ernetti believed that the voice was not a ghost, but a moment from the past that had been preserved in time and was waiting for the right frequency to be discovered again. He and the other scientists working on the chronovisor allegedly managed to build a working model, but the whole project went underground for twenty years until Italian newspapers got wind of it again. They printed articles poking fun at Hernetti's silly little machine, which he not only

claimed existed but worked as advertised. He told the papers he'd seen Napoleon Bonaparte, performances of lost plays by Roman poets, the Fall of Sodom and Go Mora, and perhaps the most historical event of all time, Christ's Crucifixion. When asked to provide a demonstration as proof, Ornettie objected. He said he couldn't since he had destroyed the Chronovisor out of

fear it would be used for evil. The Vatican never admitted to having funded the creation of the device, but they did state that anyone caught using anything like that would be excommunicated. But don't let that fool you into thinking Ernettie was some sort of fraud ster. He was respected within the church as a scholar and a clergyman, a man who was able to combine his scientific curiosity

with his faith to a great success. He had already performed comprehensive research on religious music and the acoustics of churches and cathedrals before he ever started working on a time viewer. Ernettie passed away in swearing with his dying breath that the Chronovisor was real and it did work, and he might have been right. One theoretical physicist from the University of Connecticut has spent his life trying to build a time machine in order to reunite with his

late father. He claims it's possible, and though he hasn't been successful yet, he's certain someone somewhere will eventually build one, or maybe they already have of far off in the distant future. If so, we'll never know it, but to those watching, it will most likely be an instant classic. Some athletes become legends for a reason. Olympic gold medalist Usain Bolt is widely considered to be the fastest man alive.

Tennis icon Serena Williams is the winner of twenty three major singles titles, an Open Era record, and Jim Thorpe born in eight seven, was the first Native American to win a gold medal for the United States when he competed in the nineteen twelve Olympics. He's also considered the greatest athletes of the first half of the twentieth century. They poured their lives into their passions. Their hard work and determination earned them worldwide fame. Children look up to them,

aspiring Olympians idolize them. However, not all legends are born out of sweat and gold. Some don't work as hard as the others. Some stumble onto the pages of history without doing anything at all. Frank Hayes was born in Brooklyn in one year after Jim Thorpe, and he got his start working around horses. He tried his hand at jockey to no success, so eventually became a stable hand for a local horse breeder. Work was work, after all, and he wasn't about to look a gift horse in

the mouth. Frank's boss saw potential in him, though, but not as a jockey. Instead, he wanted Frank to train his thoroughbreds to race, and Frank was a natural. Despite never winning a race of his own, he went on to train several champion steeds, earning him respect from all over the sport of horse racing. Still, Frank never forgot about his first passion. He was a jockey at heart, and he dreamed of the day when he would once again mount up and ride one of his trained horses

to victory, and that day eventually arrived. In June of nineteen, he had been training a particular horse named sweet Kiss for a steeple chase at New York's Belmont Park. A steeple chase is different from a regular horse race in that it involves jumping over obstacles such as fences and ditches. Unfortunately, with the event only days away, Frank found that riders were in short supply, of course, he was only too happy to volunteer his services for the event and hopefully

the horse's owner would agree. The owner, however, didn't want him to compete, claiming his weight would slow the horse down. But time was running out and there were no other jockeys. If sweet Kiss was going to compete at Belmont, they had to rely on Frank to do the job. He went on a severe diet to lose the weight needed to qualify, and on the day of the race, Frank

Hayes got his wish. He was thrilled, of course, finally someone had taken a chance on the thirty five year old stableman and he wasn't going to throw it away. Even the other jockeys could see how excited he was to compete. It didn't matter that the odds were stacked against him literally too. At twenty to one, Frank climbed a top Sweet Kiss at the starting line and waited for the signal. The starter waved the flag and the

race was begun. Frank and Sweet Kiss took off like a rocket, jumping over hurdles around two miles of track, leaving the other horses in the dust. As they pulled into the final turn. It was just the two of them galloping toward the finished line. Frank hunkered down, leaning into Sweet Kiss, the wind whipping overhead. The audience roared. They stood to watch the underdogs, this horse and it's jockey, who hadn't a chance of winning minutes before, about to

win the competition. They crossed the finished line to deafening cheers, and Sweet Kiss gradually slowed to a stop. Over another hundred yards, Frank Hayes had won his first race after years of staying off the track. The horse's owners and the people in the stands all ran down to meet him to congratulate him for what he had accomplished. The place was a buzz with the joyful chaos of celebration, but as they got closer, it was clear something had

gone wrong. Frank fell off the horse and landed face down in the dirt. Almost immediately, Doctor John Vorhees, the track physician, hurried over to see what had happened, and the news he delivered to the others was bad. Apparently Frank's excitement got the better of him during the race. He had suffered a heart attack, but somehow managed to hold on. By the time the horse finally crossed the finish line. Frank was nothing more than cargo hitchen a

ride on its back. It's ironic. I know Frank Hays had wanted to be a jockey his entire life, but in the end he turned out to be nothing more then dead weight. 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 World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.