War at Home

wanted to talk to lived very far away. Perhaps that was why he became a Catholic priest, so he could have a direct line to someone else very far away. Born in Seattle, Italy, in eighteen fifteen, Casselli may have arrived a few hundred years too late for the Renaissance, but he certainly grew into quite the Renaissance man. In addition to getting ordained in eighteen thirties six, he also studied history, science and literature. Casselli eventually transitioned from being

a student to being a teacher. He tutored Italian aristocrats in Parma for several years before his exile to Florence for political activism. He soon took a job as a physics professor at the university. There, Casselli soon became entranced by the sciences. His own teacher, Leopoldo Nobili, taught him about subjects like electro magnetism and electro chemistry. Casselli took it upon himself to adapt those lessons into a journal he called The Recreation, which was meant to distell such

complicated science into a more accessible form. One particular topic struck Casselli during his tenure at the university, electricity, specifically its use in transmitting signals from one place to another. When he wasn't teaching, Casselli was researching how to send messages across long distances over wire. Now, the telegram, which sends electrical pulses across a vast network of wires, had

existed since the eighteen forties. Casselli didn't want to send beeps and blips, though, he wanted to send words and even pictures. Unfortunately, he was limited by the technology at the time. Sending messages from one location to another required a lot of power and a method of synchronization between the transmitter and the receiver. After many years, though, he finally cracked it in the eighteen fifties with his invention

he called the pan telegraph. It was six ft tall, shaped like a giant wishbone, and was powered by massive batteries. On one side, two curved metal plates were situated next to each other, a transmission plate and a receiving plate. The transmission plate held the message to be sent, which was written in a non conductive ink. To send it, a stylist would travel across the plates in parallel lines

until the message had been scanned. The information gathered from the conductive plate and the non conduct if inc was then sent over telegraph lines to another Pan telegraph set up elsewhere. A pen fixed over the receiver plates on that device would write or draw the incoming transmission on a new piece of paper. To solve his syncretization problem, Casselli used a fairly low tech solution, a pendulum clock

known as a regulating clock. The pendulum would swing back and forth, completing and breaking the circuits over and over again, keeping both the transmitter and receiver in sync. He first demonstrated his device in eighteen fifty six to Leopold, the second Grand Duke of Tuscany. The Duke was in awe of what Casselli had accomplished. And provided funding for his other experiments and inventions for some time. Eventually, though, the Duke grew bored waiting for the next big thing from

the physicist. Seeing the writing on the wall, Caselli packed up and headed to Paris, where he showed off his pan telegraph to Napoleon the Third, and like the Duke, Napoleon was hooked. Casselli conducted a test of his device between Paris and Amia, a distance of almost ninety miles. The machine passed without a single hiccup. Another message was set nearly five hundred miles from Paris to Marseilles. Napoleon

was convinced. In eighteen sixty four, the pen telegraph became an official and legally authorized method of transmitting written messages across long distances. It didn't last long though. While impressive and relatively fast, the device was not the most reliable method of sending information from one place to another. Eventually, Casselli walked away from it entirely and went back to Italy to live out in the rest of his days.

Eleven years later, an inventor named Alexander Graham Bell would receive the patent for a little device known as the telephone. It goes without saying that the telephone changed the way people communicated all over the world. But it was Giovanni Casselli who went down in history is the man who gave us something even more impressive, the very first facts machine. Wilmur McLean wasn't just as simple farmer. He had moved with his wife to her plantation near Manassas, Virginia, a

home they called Yorkshire. Unsurprisingly, McLean was an outspoken supporter of the Confederacy, like most of his Virginia neighbors. That was probably why Confederate Brigadier General P. G. T. Beauregard had chosen McLean's farm to be his base of action. Signs of a major conflict had been evident for months, as more and more states seceded from the Union. Following the capture of Fort Sumter by South Carolina troops back in April, Abraham Lincoln enlisted tens of thousands of volunteer

soldiers to prepare for war. Wilmer fled his home with his family on July seventeenth, eighteen sixty one. Beauregard had arrived that day with his staff to commandeer the land, the house, and the barn as his headquarters. Thirty five thousand Union troops had marched for two days in the blistering summer heat, finally arriving at bull Run, while roughly thirty two thousand Confederate soldiers had taken over Manassas Junction

and the surrounding areas. On the evening of July eighth, Beauregard was sitting in Wilmur's home waiting for his dinner, when out of nowhere, a visitor came tearing through the front door and landed in the fireplace. It was a cannonball. Dinner may have been canceled, but the Battle of bull Run, and in a way, the Civil War itself, had officially begun.

For four years, brother fought brother, father fought son. When the fighting had finally stopped, seven hundred and fifty thousand souls had been lost, about two point five percent of the country's population, and almost half of the bodies were never identified. Wilmer had been too old for the front lines. However, he did find ways to support the South. He made money as a sugar broker and smuggler, bringing it to

the Confederate Army through Union black aides. A year after Beauregard had taken control of his home and turned his barn into a field hospital. Wilmer came back to the plantation to help out in other ways. The house had seemed quite a bit in his absence. As you might imagine, the wood had splintered where cannon fire and bullets had gone through its walls. It was no longer the place where he and his wife had hoped to raise their family. It had become a war torn shell of its former self.

Even so, this had been his home, and Wilmur chose to stay for the winter as a quartermaster to support the troops. When the snow started to melt and budding flowers blossomed, the fighting between the North and the South grew more heated as well. Wilmer decided that he'd had enough. He and his family traveled over a hundred miles away to another tiny village in Virginia, far from the blood

stained fields and air choked with gunpowder. He used his money to buy a new house, a converted tavern that had been built in eighteen forty eight by a man named Charles Rain. Rain's family sold it to Wilmer in eighteen sixty three, and the one time farmer breathed a sigh of relief, believing that he had left the violence of war of his previous home in the past. Unfortunately,

he would not be so lucky. On April nine of eighteen sixty five, Wilmer was greeted on the street by Charles Marshall, a Confederate colonel who randomly stopped the first man he saw to ask a simple question. Was there a home nearby where General Ulysses S. Grant of the Union Army could meet peacefully with Confederate commander General Robert E. Lee.

Wilmer took Marshall on a tour of an old brick house he thought might work, but Marshall told him no, it had to be nicer, somewhere quiet and respectable, where the two men could sit down and talk things out. Wilmer hesitated before eventually suggesting his own home as a possible meeting place right there in the village of Appomattox Courthouse and Marshall accepted. Lee and Grant sat across from each other in Wilmer's lavish parlor as the Confederate general

through in the town. The war was over and the South had lost the Union officers and attendance, hooted and hollered, getting downright rampunctious as they tore the house up, looking for any and all souvenirs to mark the momentous occasion. They cut strips of fabric out of Wilmer's furniture. They took silverware and candlesticks, and even a doll belonging to

his young daughter. They paid for the damage with money they practically forced into the man's pockets before leaving with their keepsakes, and Wilmur McLean became the only man in history with the right to say that the Civil War had started in his backyard and ended in his front parlor. 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 h