Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of My Heart Radio. Hi, my name is Robert Lamb and this is the Artifact, a new short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, focusing in on particular objects, ideas, and moments in time. In this episode, I want to talk about a concept quite familiar to fans of spy movies and space operas, a false tooth that contains a deadly poison. Fans of Frank Herbert's Doone may best remember
this innovation as a piece of technology. The doctor You implants in Duke Letto's mouth, telling him that he need only break the tooth open to exhale his poison onto Baron Harkonen and kill them both in a last act of defiance. Of course, the homicidal aspects of the invention don't work as well as intended for Letto, but we see variations of the suicidal principle here in other films
as well. In the second season of The Mandalorian un Imperial Captain bites open a false tooth that electrifies them to death. Variations of the poison tooth also appear in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the James Bond franchise. The concept is intriguing, but is there any reality to it? Certainly cyanide capsules have been used by captives and would be captives, most notably in the case of multiple high ranking Nazis after the close of World War Two, But
did they ever store one in a false tooth? Writing for Atlas Obscura, and Eric Grundhauser spoke with Vince Hoton, curator of the International Spy Museum in Washington, d C. On the topic, and Hoden indicated that he had never come across any evidence of their existence. While glass capsules of cyanide, a fast acting poison, were sometimes hidden in the tips of pins and other items, or even temporarily secreted in the mouth, the false tooth idea presents too
many problems. Not only would it prove dangerous to carry around in your head, but the capsule size required to carry uh an advisably lethal dose of ionide was typically too large for such concealment. Plus, there are simply better
places to secure such a deadly secret. Herman Goring, for instance, is thought to have kept a cyanide capsule hidden in his navel or possibly his rectum, for eleven months during his Nuremberg War crimes trials before using the capsule in n Some historians, however, proposed that Goring's pill was simply slipped to him, and, as Bob Poole reported for the Los Angeles Times in two thousand and five, a former American g I named Herbert Lee Stivers claimed responsibility for
passing the capsule to Goring, believing it to merely be medicine hidden in a pin. But hollow teeth used in espionage were also a reality, designed to carry microfilm and other very small items of value. For example, during World War Two, German spy Nikolai Hansen kept an invisible ink
capsule hidden inside one of his teeth. In the end, the poison tooth seems to be a mash up of two realities, poison capsules that were sometimes hidden in the mouth and could be crushed between the teeth to release the poison, and false or hollow teeth used to conceal very small items of spycraft. It's an imagined item, a fictional artifact, but it emerges from the real world. Tune into additional editions of the artifact each week, hosted by
either Joe or myself. As always, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.