Welcome to Aaron Benky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. From to nine, Germany was divided into two blocks, the Soviet run Eastern Block and the more capitalistic Western Block.
In the East, democracy was all but obliterated, with heavy restrictions placed on what media and political ideologies were allowed. The press was an extension of the states, serving as a propaganda machine for the Communist Party. Anyone who spoke out against those in power were silenced. For people living in the Eastern Block, times were dark, which is why so many tried to flee. Unfortunately, the border between East
and West Germany was almost impenetrable. Not only were armed guards stationed along the various walls and fences separating the two sides, but they were all manner of deterrence, waiting for anyone who dared to try to climb over. Barbed wire was a common sight. As we're watch towers where guards would keep an eye on activity and shine searchlights on anyone they thought trying to cross. Ten thousand people attempted to escape the Eastern Block. Nearly a thousand of
them died trying. But two families tried to get out in the nineteen seventies, and they did it in the most unique and dangerous way possible. The plan was hatched by two men, electrician Peter Strelzek and Gunter Wetzel, who worked as a bricklayer. They had talked many times over the years about how they wanted to escape the Eastern Bloc,
concocting various schemes to get past the border. They were mental x sizes more than true actual plans, the way two people might talk about committing the perfect crime for fun. But it wasn't until March of ninety eight when true inspiration hit. Gunter's sister in law had moved out of East Germany in the late fifties, but had come back to see family. She'd brought with her a magazine featuring an article about a yearly festival held in the southwestern
United States. The celebrations centered around a certain mode of transportation, and it gave the bricklayer an idea. He showed his friend the article, and the two men agreed that was how they were getting out. Unfortunately, though they were good with their hands, the men had never built such a device before. They traveled to their town's library for more information.
Studying whatever books were available on the subject, they determined that they would need three thousand square feet of fabric, an amount that would have set off alarm bells within the state. To avoid trouble, they went to a store thirty miles away and told the clerk they had started a camping club. The fabric was to make tense, and apparently that was enough. Gunter took on the duty of stitching all the fabric together, spending two weeks in his
bedroom behind his mother's sewing machine. Meanwhile, Peter was tasked with creating a power source and something to carry everyone in. He took two bottles of liquid propane and connected them with hoses that fed to a nozzle of his own design. Then he welded a five foot square metal plate to a few support beams, which was enough to hold a family of four. When they put their respective projects together, it was clear that Peter and Gunter had created something cool.
Well hots actually a hot air balloon. They tested the balloon in April of ninety eight, driving out to an open clearing far from the watchful eyes of the state. They tried to fill the balloon with hot air by igniting the liquid propane, but it refused to inflate. The fabric was too porous to hold the gas inside. Sealing it didn't work either, so they returned home, where they incinerated the balloon to eliminate the evidence before getting back
to work on version two point oh. After testing several of waterproof and nonporous fabrics, they settled on an inexpensive form of synthetic taffada. This time they traveled to a different store and claimed that they were part of a sailing club using the taffata to make sales for boats, and once again no one saw any issue was selling thousands of feet of fabric to two random guys off the street. One week later, the second balloon was ready
for testing. Peter and Gunter turned to the field that night and hooked their taffeta creation to the gondola Peter had put together. Everything worked as they had hoped. The fire filled the fabric with gas, lifting the whole contraption off the ground. With a little more tinkering to make sure the fuel didn't run out too quickly, the men were ready to make their great escape. The time finally came.
On the night of July three nine. Peter gathered his wife and two sons and set up in an abandoned field. The balloon carried them high into the air to an altitude of nearly seven thousand feet. Freedom was only a few hundred feet away. Without warning, though, a gust of wind pushed the family into a cloud. The water vapor weighed the taffeta down, bringing the balloon back to earth just shy of the border. The strelsas abandoned the downcraft and made their way on foot back home, which was
over ten miles away. The authorities found the homemade hot air balloon a few hours later, and it was clear that if Peter and Gunter were going to make it out alive, they had to act fast. They bought up small bundles of taffota from all over East Germany to throw investigators off the trail, and fabricated a new balloon that was twice as large as the original. The new gondola was also constructed as well, one that could support
the weight of more fuel and two families. They completed the new balloon just over a month later, and on September fifteenth, they took the only chance that they would get to put it to use. Both families left their homes and belongings behind. They drove to the launch sites and inflated the balloon just after one thirty in the morning. As it lifted into the air, the gondola tip to one side and the burners set the fabric on fire.
One of the men had brought a fire extinguisher to quickly put out the floor him, but the problems only compounded from there. Next, the fabric, ripped in the hot air began to leak out, while a strong wind kept blowing out the burners, which had to be re lit. It seemed like their escape plan was destined to fail, and then ten minutes after takeoff, the balloon finally reached an altitude of six thousand, six hundred feet. It was cold up there, very cold, with temperatures dropping to about
seventeen degrees fahrenheit. As they floated toward the border, huddling for warmth. Authorities below realized something was going on and turned on spotlights to try and catch them. Gunter, refusing to give up, cranked up the heat. The balloons soared upward another fourteen hundred feet, well out of range of the lights. They only had enough fuel for a short trip. The balloon descended rapidly and came down hard on the ground half an hour after they'd taken off. Gunter even
broke his leg on impact. By the time all was said and done, Peter and Gunter's homemade balloon had traveled a whopping fifteen and a half mile. Shortly after landing, a police car pulled up to the crash site and found Peter and Gunter standing in the road. One of the men asked the officers, are we in the West? They were. The balloon had taken them across the border,
out of the Eastern Bloc and into West Germany. After word got out about their daring escape, East Germany placed drastic limitations on how much fabric could be purchased by individuals, and anyone who wanted to buy propane had to register at first. But the Strelsas and the wet Cels didn't have to worry about that anymore. They had beaten the odds risked everything for life and liberty by traveling up up in a way and their beautiful hot air balloon.
Thomas Edison is known today as a great inventor, from the light bulb to the phonograph. There's no doubt that Edison's work has made an indelible impression on the world as a whole. However, for all the good he did, there was also plenty that he accomplished that was questionable. Sometimes it even delved into illegal and immoral territory. For example, he once drafted a pr campaign to prove that Nikola Tesla's new A C current was unsafe compared to his
own DC current. To do this, he electrocuted several animals using AC power, including a five ton circus elephant known as Topsy. Edison was also greedy. One of his first inventions, an electric voting machine, was meant to make the act of voting faster and more efficient. At the time, many votes were often cast orally, with voters calling out YEA or nay to mark their choice. Unfortunately, no state or local government wanted to use Edison's machine because it was
just too fast. It would keep politicians from campaigning between each vote, so Edison decided to use his inventing prowess for only two reasons. An invention had to serve a purpose, and it had to make him money. One of his most success full endeavors was the Kintograph, built in eighteen ninety. It was an evolution of what Leland Stratford had created in eighteen seventy seven, where he lined up twenty four still cameras along a race track and outfitted each of
them with a trip wire. Stanford then had a horse run around the track, with each tripped wire triggering a camera's shutter. When the photos were arranged in sequence, it looked like the horse was running. Edison's creation, however, used a newer kind of film made of celluloid, a flammable type of plastic. To better demonstrate the superiority of the Kintograph, he built a movie studio near his lab, which he
called the Black Maria. It was aptly named, looking like a big black cabin in the middle of West Orange, New Jersey. What made it special was its ingenious way of allowing Edison to film practically all day long. The Black Maria sat on wheels that rotated by fifteen degrees every hour. This allowed Edison to capture as much sunlight as possible throughout the day. To let end even more lights,
he would often open the retract a bowl roof. Edison owned three studios across New Jersey and New York, cornering the East coast moving picture market that he helped create. Of course, with success came competition, and Edison made sure that he nipped that in the bud before it ever got out of hand. He joined forces with several other motion picture patent holders, including Eastman Kodak, and formed the
Motion Picture Patents Company, or mp PC. The mp PC owned so many industry specific patents that any independent studio caught trying to make a movie without permission would find themselves on the receiving end of a lawsuit. Sometimes local mobsters were brought in to let the directors know who was in charge. One studio bore the brunt of nearly
three hundred lawsuits all by itself. It seemed that nobody could make inroads in what was becoming a lucrative industry, so independent artists started looking elsewhere to make their movies. One such place ended up becoming the perfect location for their new operation. It was warm all year had dependable weather, and its court system was far more forgiving towards small
business owners than Edison's trust of patent holders. Around nineteen o eight, five years after the town was incorporated, the first studios began moving to this oasis of entertainment, and as they started making movies again, the lawsuits quickly followed. It wasn't until seven years later when things finally changed. A civil suit was filed against the Motion Picture Patents Company, and the courts found that Edison's trust was in violation
of the Sherman Antitrust Act of eighteen ninety. The mp PC could no longer use its collection of patents to stop competition or end another filmmaker's business. Edison had lost his monopoly on making movies, which allowed other studios to soar to new heights. The inventor closed down his studio shortly after the ruling, but he shouldn't have been too discouraged. After all, if it wasn't for Thomas Edison's greed, those competing film studios would never have moved west to a
sleepy little hamlet in the middle of Los Angeles. Kel A Warnia, the Wizard of Menlo Park, accidentally invented one of the longest lasting and most successful industries in history, Hollywood. 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. Yeah,