Wildcat

the moon, and for technological superiority. A space race led to countless discoveries. Both the Americans and the Russians launched unmanned satellites, planetary probes, and sent astronauts into orbit. Soviet pilot Yuri Gagarin was the first human to enter outer space in April of nineteen sixty one, but the United States wasn't far behind. One month later, Alan Shephard did his country proud and became the first American in space. In the years following Shepherd's launched, NASA worked on a

second human powered space flight called Mercury Redstone. Four engineers developed a small spacecraft they dubbed the Liberty Bell seven, to be steered by Air Force pilots and astronaut Virgil Gus Grissom. The craft was designed to be carried by the rocket with Grissom inside, before breaking off on its own. It was a true feat of engineering and sported several technological advances of the time. For example, it featured a new rate stabilization system which allowed Grisom to reorient the

capsule using a handheld controller. Corning glass Works, the same company behind the popular bakeware, made the window of the Liberty Bell seven out of a type of glass capable of withstanding temperatures as high as eighteen hundred degrees fahrenheit. But perhaps the most impressed of component of the spacecraft was the explosive hatch NASET, designed to get Grissom out in case of an emergency. In previous iterations, the hatch was secured with seventy bolts To evacuate the capsule and

astronaut would have to climb through an antenna compartment. It was a tight fit for even the slimmest astronauts that if the person inside had suffered an injury or fallen unconscious, there would be no way for someone on the outside to get them free. To trigger the detonation of the new hatch, the person inside had to remove a pin and then pressed down on a plunger. It could also be done by someone on the outside, though by pulling on a rip cord, as if they were deploying the parachute.

On the day of the launch, Grissom boarded the red Stone rocket and settled into the Liberty Bell seven module. It took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on July one, nineteen, ascending towards the heavens and zooming through the sky for over two minutes. When the rocket reached its desired altitude, the engines died and the capsule separated. Grissom was now on his own, gazing down at Cape can Avril and

the surrounding area from over one miles up. He floated among the stars, taking in the view from the top of the world, before reorienting the Liberty Bell seven for re entry. His time in orbit had been short but breathtaking. Grissom fired up the retro rockets and aimed the craft back toward the Earth, picking up speed on his way down. As sunlight poured through the glass windows, obscuring his view a feet his drugue parachute deployed to slow his descent.

At twelve thousand feets, his main parachute fired and he eased into a splash down in the North Atlantic Ocean. His rescue team was on their way by helicopter, but Grissom needed to get some information first. He quickly gathered his bearings and recorded the data from the instruments in the cabin, then pulled the pin out of the detonator attached to the hatch door. Now he had no intention of exiting the spacecraft so soon, so he didn't push

the plunger. The hatch had other plans, though. It blew open on its own and the capsule started to flood. Grissom refus used to go down with the ship. He swam out on his own and bobbed in the water, waiting for his team to come get him. They got there just in time. His space suit had begun losing its buoyancy due to an air leak in the neck. If he'd waited much longer, the weight of the suit

would have dragged him down with it. Gus Grissom was saved that day However, he criticized the design of the hatch, which he claimed had popped off on its own as a result of the doors unpredictable behavior. It was changed by NASA for the Apollo one launch six years later. The Apollo one mission saw the return of Gus Grissom, now joined by two new astronauts named Ed White and Roger Chaffey. NASA's engineers had taken Grissom's complaints about the

original hatch door to heart. The Apollo one command module now featured a more secure plug door design, which opened from the inside and used air pressure inside the cabin to keep it closed. On January nineteen sixty seven, Jeffy White and Grissom were strapped into the command module to perform a launch simulation test. The cabin was pressurized and the air inside was replaced with pure oxygen. Minutes after they began their test, a spark in the wiring caused

a fire which grew in seconds. It was fueled by the oxygen being pumped into the cabin. White tried to open the door, but the internal pressure had risen too high. It wouldn't open. It couldn't. Tragically, Chaffee, White and Grisom died that day, all because the hatch had worked exactly as it was supposed to. They called it wildcatting. I'm not talking about the college football formation that came years later in earlier times, and we're talking about the first

decades of the eighteen hundreds. Here there was new American slang for the business world, but it wasn't used much until that is the oil boom, especially with the discovery of oil in western Pennsylvania. And what did it mean. Well, even in the early days, the oil industry was controlled by a few powerful players, I think J. D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company, but there were lots of independent oilman too.

Because the more people wanted to buy oil, the more it was an opportunity for people with small fortunes to turn them into big ones. Those were the wildcats, and as more and more people decided to take their shot at a rich and undiscovered oil deposits, the more well known wildcatting became. For instance, take John He was a successful actor whose celebrity and powerful performance has made him

popular and brought him a good living. The newspapers called him a star of the first magnitude and the youngest star in the world and the most handsome man on the American stage. There were even some who would look at him as quite rich, especially because he was just twenty four years old, and John agreed, my goose does

indeed hang high. He wrote to a friend. He had made a tidy sum from his stage performances and general handsomeness, But the outfits people saw him wear, the velvet, the fur lined royal coats, the silver buckles and gold embroidery, those belonged to his characters like Richard the Third. And when chronic bronchitis made John's throat titan, he started to lose his voice, and he wondered if he would be better off finding a way to turn his earnings into

a new stream of revenue. So he put on flannel and overalls and traveled inland to the Allegheny Mountains in western Pennsylvania. In eighteen fifty nine, an inventor named Edwin Drake kicked off Pennsylvania's oil boom when he drilled the first commercial oil well in titus Pville, Pennsylvania, and shot a hole down into the ground to get below the seepage on the surface and really suck out the good stuff and under a year, there were five hundred wells

dotting the countryside. And it was five years later that John wanted in on that game, and he brought along a few pals from his theater days. They came from Cleveland and Boston and threw in their lot together to create what they called the Dramatic Oil Company. When they were looking for the right land to strike it rich, John met with one local driller who reached out to shake his hand and then apologized his palm was covered in oil. Never mind, John replied, that's what we're after.

He hired the man, hoping it would grease his palms too. John also convinced his sister Rosalie to buy into the industry and gave her some money to spend. She took one thousand dollars and invested in a different wildcat. Maybe John should have taken that as a sign, but John and his partners thought they found the right spot. They bought an oil lease on three and a half acres of a farm outside Franklin, Pennsylvania, and dropped a well into the ground. To live up to their company title.

They gave the well a name Wilhelmina, after one of their wives. In the summer of eighteen sixty four, they started drilling, and then they waited. John traveled back and forth from his frontier oil operation to his ordinary hangouts on the coast, places like New York in Washington, d c. Where he had friends. He was a wildcatter, sure, but a half hearted one. Even when he was in Franklin, he spent more time in taverns than he did trying to find ways for his oil investments to pay out.

He was more interested in watching the progress of the Civil War and chatting politics with his city pals than in doing oil business. It needed his attention, though Wilhelmina. The oil well wasn't working out. Yes, the Dramatic Oil Company got a few barrels a day, but it was nothing like what they hoped for, and John found that one of his Cleveland partners was spending the company money on hats and watches. The two men got into a

knife fight, and John came away with bleeding wounds. Dramatic Oil Company indeed to sort out the well, John took advice from other oil hunters and tried a new method, dropping charges of black powder down into a dry hole. The idea was that if pockets of oil were just close enough to the shaft, the explosion would burst it open and the oil would come flowing into the well. It was an early version of fray called shooting the well. Of course, digging the well in the first place was expensive.

John threw lots of his stage money at the project. When it came time to buy some explosives. Well, between the oil boom and the war powder wasn't cheap. Naturally, the money for that black powder came out of John's pocket. The thing was, John's shooting turned a bad situation worse. Instead of bringing more oil into the well, black powder explosion made a collapse. One partner's son said that the blast utterly ruined the whole, and the well never yielded

another drop. Despite his enthusiasm, John's plans pulled his partners into a mess. In an ironic twist, John's sister Rosalie made good on her investment outside Franklin. Her well brought thousands of barrels of oil out of the ground, But John's dramatic oil company was a dramatic failure. He had dropped more than five thousand dollars into the efforts, Almost

one hundred thousand dollars in today's money. His fortunes followed the explosives underground, in a very real example of the phrase sunk costs, shooting the barren earth just through good money after bad. But it was far from the most desperate thing that John would do, nor was it the darkest mark on his legacy. For that we turned to eighteen sixty five. Seething with disappointment, John retreated from Pennsylvania. When someone asked him where he was going, John only answered,

I AM going to Hell. It wasn't his only disappointments either, because John was a Southern sympathizer, so he was also gushing with rage about the South's defeat and the Civil War. In Baltimore, he pulled together childhood friends and former Confederate soldiers to hatch a new and even more dramatic plot. By now, you probably see it coming, although Abraham Lincoln and the nation did not, Because that actor turned failed oilman would channel his anger into a loaded pistol and

shoot the President. The next hunt would be for him, as the call went out for the country to unearth an assassin, a wildcat oilman named John Wilkes Booth 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. Ye