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00:04Warning, what you're about to see could be disturbing to some viewers.
00:09Viewer discretion is advised.
00:17We've covered our fair share of odd experiments, but these are the strangest of them all.
00:24Like the doctor who believes youth can be restored with a little help from a goat.
00:30Brinkley is taking the testicles from Billy Goats and inserting them into the scrotums of his human patients.
00:38Men line up by the thousands, even given the fact that it sounds pretty sketchy.
00:45Or a fearless backyard flyer who takes to the skies in a lawn chair.
00:52Larry reaches 16,000 feet. That's three miles above the earth.
00:58At this point, he's rapidly losing oxygen.
01:02Now he's kind of freaking out.
01:04How about the CIA's plan to turn a house cat into a super spy?
01:09Cats are notoriously difficult to train.
01:12They get the cat ready, they open the van, the cat jumps out.
01:16And these are the mad minds behind experiments so outrageous, they are truly unbelievable.
01:37The search for eternal youth has inspired legends, potions, and endless promises.
01:42But in the late 1920s, one doctor claims he has the real thing.
01:46Hidden in a place no one expects.
01:50Ladies and gentlemen, this is Dr. J.R. Brinkley.
01:52In the 1920s, it's the dawn of radio.
01:55Just about every American family has one, and they gather around it at night to listen.
02:00One of the most successful shows on the radio at the time is hosted by a Kansas-based doctor named
02:06John Romulus Brinkley.
02:09Twice daily, he plays country music, preaches the gospel, but most importantly, tells his audience how modern medicine is failing
02:18them.
02:19Brinkley ends up making a fortune.
02:21He's netting about $14,000 a week.
02:24That's about a quarter of a million dollars today just from prescribing these tonics and elixirs to these listeners for
02:31all sorts of ailments.
02:32But for all his so-called cures, one bizarre treatment grabs national attention and makes Brinkley a household name.
02:41Brinkley is taking the testicles from six-week-old billy goats and inserting them into the scrotums of his human
02:50patients just under the skin.
02:53Brinkley says he worked at a slaughterhouse when he was a young man, and he noticed that goats were virile
02:59and resistant to disease.
03:01They seemed to have all this get-up-and-go.
03:03And this inspires his claim that transplanting goat gonads to human patients can give tired old men the energy and
03:14virility of a young goat.
03:16Men line up by the thousands to get this unvalidated treatment, even given the fact that it sounds pretty sketchy.
03:26This isn't just a medical hustle. It's a national phenomenon, led by a man with almost no real training.
03:33I think calling him a real medical doctor is a stretch too far.
03:37He claims he took these correspondence courses with eclectic university, but that's kind of like getting a medical degree from
03:44watching YouTube videos.
03:45And although Brinkley claims to be doing a lot during this procedure, he's actually just making an incision in a
03:53scrotum, and he's stuffing this goat testicle in there, and he's not connecting any blood vessels.
03:58He's not connecting any sort of tubes that could transport the different hormones from the goat testicle.
04:05Brinkley performs this procedure upwards of 5,000 times, and unbelievably, a large portion of his patients say they've never
04:14felt better.
04:16Let's be clear on this. There is no biological basis for any of this. Most experts agree that it's the
04:24placebo effect, the power of suggestion.
04:28By the late 1920s, skepticism starts to rise, and one physician finally steps up to challenge Brinkley head-on.
04:37In 1928, Brinkley actually gets called out by a more mainstream doctor named Morris Fishbein.
04:44He calls Dr. Brinkley a charlatan of the rankest sort and publishes a paper that gets the attention of the
04:53Kansas Medical Board.
04:54They revoke both his radio license and his specious medical license in the state of Kansas.
05:01Incredibly, this doesn't stop, Brinkley. He moves to Texas, where the laws are looser, and he cooks up his next
05:08big idea.
05:09He calls it formula 1020. It's a distillation of goat glands, and it can cure everything, from impotence to insanity.
05:19As Brinkley rakes in the dough and continues peddling his goat cures all over the southern U.S., there's someone
05:25else who rivals his persistence.
05:29Dr. Fishbein, he decides to write a new piece on charlatanism, and this time he gets it published in the
05:35prestigious journal of the American Medical Association in 1938.
05:41Brinkley is incensed that he gets mentioned in this article, so he decides to sue for a libel.
05:48But Dr. Brinkley shrivels on the stand.
05:52Under oath, Brinkley is forced to admit that he knew the goat gland surgeries he was performing could not possibly
06:00enhance a human male's virility, and he knew it all along.
06:08If you think goat parts are extreme, just wait till you hear where our next mad surgeon gets his ingredients.
06:17In 1928, Buck Kelly, a 23-year-old, is executed at San Quentin.
06:23They take him to the gallows. He is hanged.
06:25After that's done, they take down his body and hand it over to the resident medical expert, Leo Stanley.
06:33He performs the autopsy, as one would expect, and then does one other little thing.
06:40He removes Buck's testicles.
06:43Just who is Leo Stanley, and why is he collecting testicles from a dead inmate?
06:48Leo Stanley is a guy who goes to college originally at Stanford, but then he drops out.
06:53And later, he goes to Cooper College and actually gets a medical degree.
06:58And he's looking forward to being a doctor.
07:00He thinks he's going to live a life of just a town physician somewhere.
07:04And then an opening appears at San Quentin.
07:07And he applies for it, and he gets it.
07:12But Stanley's not just there to treat criminals.
07:15He's also determined to curb their bad behavior.
07:19And he has some odd ideas on how to do it.
07:23He feels that there is a direct link between the age of a man's glands and gonads
07:30and his tendency to commit horrible and heinous crimes.
07:36Leo comes up with the idea of doing testicle transplants.
07:44But Leo doesn't use slivers.
07:47He uses entire whole testicles.
07:53Stanley believes that his surgical process will actually be a form of social rehabilitation.
08:01That these prisoners who had been stuck in San Quentin once they had a new set of testicles
08:06could go out, be productive members of society, and would not return to San Quentin.
08:12Ranging from voluntary to involuntary, Dr. Stanley carries out this experiment at least a thousand times,
08:19taking them off of freshly executed prisoners and putting them on to those who are still alive and well.
08:26Eventually, the mad testicle transplanter of San Quentin
08:31runs into a bit of a supply problem.
08:36He doesn't have enough source of young male testicles.
08:40They're not executing a young inmate every day or every week even.
08:43So what does he do?
08:45He turns to animals.
08:47Goats, deer, bears, water buffalo, you name it.
08:51If it has balls, he's putting it in an old dude.
08:56When the grafts fail to produce results, Stanley doubles down with something far more invasive.
09:03He does something incredibly bizarre and, you know, kind of gross.
09:08He takes a bunch of testicles and he blends them up into kind of a paste.
09:17And he injects this testicle paste into the abdomen of prisoners.
09:26Leo's testicle mash paste injection idea doesn't work either, so he comes up with a new idea.
09:32Okay, if I can't restore your vitality, I can at least restore your looks.
09:37And so he starts offering plastic surgeries to the inmates so they can look more handsome,
09:44so that when they get out, they can maybe find a wife or get a job or be somewhat normal.
09:50This guy, his chain of reasoning is not exactly strong.
09:55Why he wasn't fired almost immediately is a mystery.
10:04After 40 years, Dr. Leo Stanley's experiments finally come to an end.
10:10He's kind of your real Dr. Frankenstein.
10:12He sees inmates as things that he can experiment on, that he can play with.
10:18He's carving up human beings and he does this 10,000 times across his career.
10:26In the end, Dr. Stanley can't unlock the secret to youth.
10:30But he does carve out one of the strangest and most unsettling chapters in medical history.
10:36When one of history's greatest minds fires up a strange device,
10:41let's just say it shakes a whole lot more than the walls.
10:47In the 1890s, genius inventor Nikola Tesla, he is working on new, more efficient ways of generating electricity.
10:58The rotating electrical generator, he finds, is not very efficient.
11:04So he decides to invent a new version.
11:07Something oscillating goes up and down.
11:10So basically, it works with an air or steam-powered piston driving a coil back and forth through a magnetic
11:16field.
11:16This happens at an incredible frequency.
11:19This device does create a lot of electricity very efficiently.
11:25But it also produces an enormous amount of vibration.
11:33The amount of vibration is so immense.
11:36Not only does it shake his building, it shakes the neighboring buildings.
11:39So much so, they think they're experiencing an earthquake.
11:43As scary as this is at first, there seems to be at least one upside.
11:49Tesla's team realizes that if they stand on a platform above the machine,
11:54the vibrations get sent throughout your whole body.
11:57People who experience this or have, like, laughing fits, their mood changes.
12:03And some people say it actually improved their health.
12:06Tesla, ever the inventor, thinks, hey, maybe this machine might have applications in medicine.
12:13Maybe it could destroy cancer cells or eliminate tuberculosis.
12:19It may even be able to help one of Tesla's famous friends, who's suffering from something much different.
12:25In the 1890s, Tesla becomes a good friend with no other than Mark Twain.
12:32When Tesla and Twain meet at a dinner party, a bromance quickly ensues.
12:39As they get closer, Twain reveals the fact that he's suffering from a really embarrassing problem.
12:45He has insufferable constipation.
12:50Tesla tells Mark, I think I might have something for you.
12:53Go stand on that platform.
12:54We're going to let those vibrations course through your body,
12:57and we're going to see if we can shake something loose.
13:03But Tesla gives Twain a very frank warning.
13:07When I say get off the machine, you get off the machine.
13:13Twain loves it.
13:14He's eating it up.
13:16He's euphoric.
13:17He's feeling better than he has in years.
13:20But sure enough, eventually Tesla's like, yo, time.
13:24You got to get off now.
13:25And Twain is like, you're tripping, dude.
13:27And Twain says, no way, I'm not stopping this.
13:31Suddenly, Twain feels a gurgling in his intestines.
13:34And he hops off the platform and makes a mad dash for the bathroom.
13:39But unfortunately, nature is a bit faster than he is.
13:45On the upside, Tesla did prove his theory.
13:51Today, vibration therapy is proven in alleviating constipation.
13:56So much so that in 2023, University of Georgia invented a vibrating pill to help disrupt constipation.
14:06Fortunately, the only casualty in Tesla's experiment was Mark Twain's dignity.
14:11But our next inventor risks a lot more than that.
14:17It's 1962, and a 13-year-old boy named Larry Walters walks into an army surplus store in Los Angeles.
14:24Suddenly, something unusual catches his attention.
14:28These large weather balloons that are hanging from the ceiling.
14:32And that moment begins Larry's fixation with flight.
14:37As he gets older, he graduates from high school.
14:40He heads down to the Air Force Recruitment Center.
14:42And as they go through the process, they get to the eye exam.
14:45And he finds that his eyesight is not up to snuff.
14:51With his dream dashed, Larry spends the next 15 years doing odd jobs, eventually becoming a truck driver.
14:58But his fixation with flying never goes away.
15:03Now the year is 1982, and a 33-year-old Larry is pulled over to the side of the road,
15:09and he's looking up at the sky.
15:11And he starts thinking about those great big weather balloons he saw hanging from the ceiling when he was 13.
15:16Right then and there, Larry hatches his plan.
15:20He's going to get some weather balloons.
15:22Fill them with helium.
15:23He is going to sail through the air over the San Gabriel Mountains and land safe and sound in the
15:29Mojave Desert.
15:30Some people may think it's a crazy idea or a pipe dream, but it isn't to Larry.
15:39Larry shares his idea with his girlfriend, Carol Van Dusen.
15:42And she sort of laughs it off like a crazy flight of fancy, and she thinks he'll never do this.
15:50But Larry disagrees.
15:52This is now a mission.
15:54Larry draws up blueprints.
15:56He decides he's going to take 42 weather balloons,
16:02rig the balloons to an old-fashioned lawn chair,
16:06attach 30-gallon-sized jugs of water to release weight if he needs to go higher.
16:16And he also brings with him a BB gun.
16:22Plan is that when he gets to about 7,000 feet,
16:25he will then start shooting judiciously a few of those balloons and start his descent.
16:31Could this absurd plan even work?
16:36On July 2nd, 1982, Larry decides to find out.
16:41You can just imagine what this must have looked like to neighbors.
16:44They're out in the streets, looking, gawking.
16:47Along with Carol is Larry's best friend, Ron.
16:50He's here to film the whole thing for posterity's sake.
16:52As fate would have it, just as Ron yells,
16:55Larry, don't do this, a gust of wind blows up,
16:59snaps the rope, and the chair flies into the air.
17:03In no time, Larry reaches 500 feet and counting.
17:07Suddenly, he's at 1,500 feet, the height of the Sears Tower, and he keeps rising.
17:13After just one hour, Larry reaches 16,000 feet.
17:18That's three miles above the Earth.
17:21That's higher than the maximum altitude of a Cessna airplane.
17:27At this point, Larry's freezing, and he's rapidly losing oxygen.
17:32To make matters worse,
17:35he's been blown off course by the winds,
17:40and now he's encroaching on airspace around the Los Angeles airport.
17:46At that point, a Delta flight launching out of LAX almost hits him.
17:54With dangers mounting, Larry realizes this lawn chair needs to be grounded.
18:01Larry pulls out his BB gun and starts his process.
18:05He shoots down seven of his weather balloons.
18:12And then he drops his BB gun.
18:14It slips out of his hand.
18:17Fortunately for Larry, he's popped enough balloons to start his descent.
18:22Unfortunately, he's headed straight for the power lines.
18:25Via CB radio, he is able to make contact with city power authorities
18:32who actually kill the power so Larry is not electrified to death when he lands.
18:39He is brought back down to the ground,
18:42surrounded by well-wishers who are cheering him,
18:46who are asking him to sign pieces of his weather balloons.
18:50He's greeted like a returning hero.
18:53Did it have a name, by the way?
18:55The craft itself?
18:56The craft, yes.
18:57Yes, it was called The Inspiration.
18:58The Inspiration.
19:00Larry receives his 15 minutes of fame for this stunt
19:04and even appears on several late-night talk shows.
19:07But he's also slapped with a $1,500 fine from the FAA.
19:12Interestingly, the actual lawn chair Larry piloted
19:15now hangs in the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.,
19:19making this strange spectacle
19:21a part of unbelievable aviation history.
19:26They say necessity is the mother of invention.
19:29But there's one invention no mother on Earth would want to be the test subject for.
19:35It's the 1960s.
19:36An engineer named George Blonsky and his wife are at the Bronx Zoo.
19:39And they get to witness the miracle of birth.
19:43An elephant is giving birth.
19:45But they notice something kind of strange.
19:48The mother elephant who's giving birth is spinning around as the baby is coming out.
19:52So they ask one of the zoo employees and they explain that the mother is using centrifugal force to help
19:59the baby come out.
20:00Think about those merry-go-rounds that are in playgrounds, right?
20:04The faster it goes, the harder it is to hang on and you're probably going to fall off.
20:09That fateful moment at the zoo gets George thinking.
20:11Could this centrifugal force concept be applied to human births?
20:15The Blonskys, who are childless, have theorized that modern women have lost their birthing muscles,
20:23have lost their abdominal strength, and thus might need a little help,
20:27specifically by spinning her in the same way that the elephant was witnessed spinning on its own at the zoo.
20:34Blonsky is not an OB-GYN, but he is a mining engineer.
20:40Despite this, by 1965, the couple gets a patent for what will later be known as the Blonsky birthing table.
20:48So this thing looks horrifying.
20:50It looks like a medieval torture device.
20:52This woman is strapped onto a wheel by her neck and her thighs and her waist,
20:58and she's got something covering her face.
20:59But to make sure she's comfortable, you know, while she's strapped by her throat,
21:03they have given her a pillow.
21:06Once she's strapped in, it's time to start that spin cycle.
21:11The idea is that the centrifugal force, as this woman is holding on for dear life,
21:16will help eject the baby effortlessly from the womb.
21:21It's a truly bizarre concept, but could it possibly work?
21:26The Blonskys got as far as making a prototype, but surprisingly enough, they found zero buyers.
21:30Maybe it's because no one wanted the idea of spinning a mother around until the baby was ejected from the
21:36womb into a net.
21:37It's pretty clear that Blonsky didn't do the math because it would require so much rotational speed for a baby
21:44to actually be mechanically shot out of a woman
21:47that both the mother and the baby would probably die.
21:52Luckily, Blonsky's birthing table was never tested on humans or animals.
21:57Our next strange experiment involves both and has some very surprising results.
22:04Throughout history, there's been a lot of cases where children are separated from their families
22:09and raised by wolves or bears or other kinds of animals.
22:12Records of feral child studies get the wheels turning of psychologist Winthrop Kellogg.
22:18He starts to think, could you compel an animal to behave as a human were it raised exclusively in a
22:29human atmosphere?
22:31So Kellogg brings home a seven-month-old chimp named Gua to raise alongside his 10-month-old son, Donald.
22:39They get the exact same behavior and treatment, feeding them the same way, diapers the same way, playing with them
22:46the same way, having them be playmates.
22:48The Kelloggs are treating their two children identically.
22:54Before long, Gua starts picking up distinctly human skills.
22:59Gua masters walking on two legs, wearing shoes, sitting in a high chair and eating with a spoon.
23:04She begins to understand and respond to commands like, show me your nose, give Donald a hug.
23:09After nine months, Gua has excelled at some things, but she's not made any progress with language.
23:15She's not speaking English.
23:16She can understand things, but she is not moving forward.
23:20Donald is also slow to speak.
23:22In fact, in some cases, Donald starts taking on the chimps' behaviors.
23:27For example, when yelling for food or wanting for food, Donald joins Gua in panthooting and barking.
23:33So this experiment to elevate a chimpanzee to human status is actually degrading his son's learning capabilities down to chimpanzee
23:45status.
23:48The Kelloggs are concerned as Donald keeps falling behind.
23:52They decide to end the experiment and to return Gua to a primate center to be back with their group
23:58and to allow Donald to move forward as a normal human child.
24:04Donald eventually grows up to become a doctor.
24:07Safe to say that probably wouldn't have happened if the experiment had gone on much longer.
24:14When testing a new theory, you have to have conviction.
24:17But this ambitious doctor's commitment to curing disease goes way beyond what most would consider safe or sane.
24:26University of Pennsylvania medical trainee Stubbins Firth wants to write a thesis on yellow fever, especially about how it can
24:36spread from person to person.
24:39Firth actually believes that yellow fever isn't contagious.
24:43He cooks up an experiment to prove that you can't catch yellow fever from someone else.
24:51And that experiment involves the most iconic symptom of yellow fever, black vomit.
25:00For the first step in the experiment, Firth makes an incision in his arm and simply pours the black vomit
25:08into it.
25:10There's a little bit of inflammation at the site, but other than that, he's fine.
25:16What he does next is he takes some vomit and he mixes it in with water and he starts to
25:21dribble it in his eyes.
25:25And nothing.
25:26Now, Firth starts to get creative.
25:31He builds a vomit sauna.
25:34He sets himself up in a small closet and fries up some of the vomit to create vomit vapors that
25:41he inhales deeply over the course of two hours.
25:46Still nothing.
25:49He then goes as far as taking a patient with essentially end-stage yellow fever, has them throw up directly
25:57into a cup, and he drinks it straight up.
26:03He doesn't get it.
26:06But Firth is not finished.
26:08He decides he can still take the ick factor up, all the way up.
26:13He proceeds to take the vomit and mix it with other fluids that have come from a yellow fever patient.
26:21He takes their urine.
26:22He takes their saliva.
26:23He takes their blood.
26:25And then proceeds to liberally smear himself from head to toe, covering himself like the worst cake you've ever seen
26:33in your life.
26:34All over every inch of his body.
26:39Stubbins Firth still walks away, not having succumbed to any yellow fever.
26:46And he writes up his work in a paper, a treatise on malignant fever with an attempt to prove that
26:54it is not contagious.
26:56While Firth did clearly prove you can't catch yellow fever by frolicking in black vomit, his thesis still has some
27:03sticking points.
27:05So Firth was right that yellow fever is not directly transmitted from person to person.
27:10But he was wrong in thinking that it was caused by exposure to excessive heat.
27:16We know this because six decades later, in 1881, Cuban scientist Carlos Finlay proves that yellow fever is transmitted from
27:24person to person by mosquitoes.
27:27Firth went all in for medicine.
27:29200 years later, another man does the same.
27:32Only now, it's not disease he's fighting.
27:35It's time.
27:38Billionaire Brian Johnson is a rejuvenation athlete.
27:44Everything in his life, everything he does is focused on one goal.
27:49Staying young and prolonging his life.
27:52He takes 111 supplements every single day.
27:56He goes to sleep at the exact same time every night.
27:58He sleeps alone in a dark room with blackout curtains.
28:04He wears blue light glasses.
28:06But there's one crucial piece of his routine he believes will keep him young forever.
28:11He's spending his billions on blood transfusions to the tune of $2 million per year.
28:19Every 30 days, he gets a blood transfusion, not just from anyone, but from someone young, in good shape, because
28:26he believes that young blood is going to give him the energy and the power he needs to avoid aging.
28:32But then he thinks, why go to strangers?
28:36I have a ready-made blood supply at home.
28:39My 17-year-old son, Talmadge.
28:42How are you?
28:43Do you want to bite a super veggie?
28:45Every month, the teen donates a liter of blood to his father.
28:49That's a fifth of the entire human body's supply.
28:54Johnson wants to be fair about all of this, so he donates his plasma to his father.
29:00It's the world's first ever intergenerational blood transfusion experiment.
29:05It probably sounds a little crazy.
29:07It probably sounds like it couldn't possibly work.
29:10The thing is, it kind of does, at least in mice.
29:15Researchers at UC San Francisco transfused blood from young mice into older mice, and those older mice get some benefits.
29:23They get a little bit more energy.
29:25Actually, some of their muscles are working a little better, so clearly, something is going on here.
29:30Still, this starts to get old, even for Johnson.
29:35After six treatments, Johnson decides he's not getting the results that he wants.
29:39So he switches to a new treatment, shock therapy.
29:43But not to his brain, to his genitals.
29:48He receives acoustic shockwave therapy on his genitals three to five times a month.
29:56He says that the pain is a 9 out of 10, but it has decreased the age of his penis
30:04by 15 years.
30:07I'm not sure how Johnson measures these findings, but that's one treatment I'd pass on.
30:14As the Cold War heats up in the 1960s, so do the experiments.
30:18From poison-tipped umbrellas to a plot targeting Fidel Castro's beard, nothing was off the table.
30:25Not even cats.
30:28The idea behind Project Acoustic Kitty is that cats are pretty innocuous, and they can roam around lots of places
30:37without concerning anybody.
30:39So if the cats can get themselves close enough to private conversations, they might be able to overhear important information.
30:46Now, the cat's not going to just go into a CIA debrief and say, the subject said this.
30:51The cat's not going to do that.
30:52So the cat is turned into a living listening device.
30:57The CIA pumps $20 million into training and preparing cats that can be these spies.
31:06In order to make this work, the CIA has to figure out a way to implant this listening device into
31:12the cat.
31:12And what they end up having to do is do surgery.
31:16They put the listening device in the ear and put a transmitter at the base of the animal's skull,
31:21and then run the antenna down an incision on the cat's back so that it's hidden by the fur.
31:26Not really fun for the cat, I'm sure.
31:30With the cat wired up and trained, it's time for this secret agent's first assignment.
31:36The goal is for the cat to eavesdrop on two men sitting on a park bench outside of the Soviet
31:42embassy.
31:44So the CIA agents drive up with the cat in their white van.
31:48They get the cat ready.
31:50They issue the cat the command.
31:52It knows where to go.
31:53They open the van.
31:55The cat jumps out.
31:56And it immediately gets hit by a taxi.
32:00$20 million out the window.
32:03With all of this research, they never think,
32:05hey, you know what, we should pull over on the same side of the street that the cat has to
32:09get out.
32:10And just what does the CIA after-action report identify as the fatal flaw in an otherwise excellent plan?
32:19Quote,
32:19Cats are not trainable, and they don't have the same deep-seated desire to please a human master as a
32:26dog does.
32:29Cats aren't the only animals science has put through the ringer.
32:32Dogs have had their turn, too.
32:34Especially one unlucky pair that end up sharing more than just a leash.
32:45It is the height of the Cold War, and a Soviet surgeon named Vladimir Demikov
32:53Vladimir Demikov begins to probe questions of how far you can go with organ transplants.
32:59Vladimir Demikov is actually one of the pioneers of transplant surgery.
33:04He's transplanting hearts and lungs between dogs, and he's doing it as a good doctor, doing really meaningful good work.
33:13Vladimir Demikov's next goal, a full head transplant on a dog.
33:18But since he's never done it before, he needs to experiment a little first.
33:24Demikov and his team essentially do an experiment of creating a two-headed dog.
33:28He wants to be able to see if he is able to take one head and graft that onto another,
33:36and if he can keep that alive.
33:38He arranges to experiment with this on two dogs.
33:45One smaller nine-year-old dog named Shavka, and one stray, larger German shepherd named Brodiaga.
33:53Vladimir detaches Shavka's head, and he attaches Shavka's head to Brodiaga's vertebrae.
34:02Three and a half hours later, the two-headed dog experiment is complete.
34:08But does it actually work?
34:11It sounds awful.
34:13She's just a head attached to this body, but she eats, she drinks, she barks.
34:19Vladimir's two-headed dog only lives for four days, but that doesn't stop him from trying again.
34:26And again.
34:27He does these exact kinds of experiments 23 more times between 1954 and 1959.
34:35And even though none of them are actually a success, he firmly believes that he's proving to the world that
34:42head transplants are possible.
34:45Perhaps it's for the best, Vladimir's two-headed dog experiment didn't work out.
34:50It would have made playing fetch very complicated.
34:55Some of the most iconic books and films feature tales of the undead, but what might surprise you is how
35:01many of them were inspired by real-life science.
35:04It's 1803 in Italy.
35:07Finally, a 40-year-old researcher named Giovanni Aldini is on a mission to prove a theory that the human
35:14body runs on its own electrical current.
35:17And he believes that if there is already an electrical current within the body, that by subjecting a dead body
35:25to electrical current, you can very possibly reanimate the dead.
35:32Aldini decides he wants to get a body on the Up and Up, and he reaches out to local prisons
35:37to try to acquire the corpse of a recently executed prisoner.
35:42Lucky for Aldini, a man named George Foster has been sentenced to death, and they're willing to give Aldini Foster's
35:50body fresh from the gallows.
35:52The execution goes as planned, Aldini acquires the body, and then at London's Royal Academy of Surgeons, he schedules a
36:02real event to showcase his theory with this freshly dead body.
36:08The theater is packed with the best and brightest of the day, and everyone in the Oval Theater has their
36:14eyes on the wooden slab where Foster's body is lying, covered by a white sheet.
36:22Aldini rips the sheet from Foster's body as a hush falls over the room.
36:27Aldini picks up prods that are connected by wires to a zinc battery.
36:31The electricity flows forth, he approaches the body, and the crowd is on the edge of their seats.
36:39He touches the prod to the dead man's face.
36:42The dead man, George Foster, opens one of his eyes.
36:46Then Aldini takes the prod and puts it in his nether regions, and his whole body convulses.
36:53George Foster's arm then goes up in the air.
36:56His legs are starting to move.
36:58The entire audience thinks that the deceased is about to stand up.
37:03And then?
37:07Aldini's battery dies, and the experiment ends.
37:11But while George Foster doesn't come back to life, Aldini's legacy does live on.
37:16The experiments do indicate that electricity can at least stimulate dead tissue.
37:22That part of the experiment is a success.
37:24As bizarre as the Aldini experiment is, he's credited with pioneering electrotherapy as we know it as a modality of
37:31treatment.
37:31But there's also another thing that he is credited with.
37:36Mary Shelley wrote the book Frankenstein ten years after the Aldini experiment.
37:43Frankenstein, in which a dead body is reanimated with electrical impulses.
37:48Sounds very familiar.
37:52Aldini failed to bring back a whole body.
37:55But another strange mind focused on bringing back just one piece.
38:01In 1874, Alexander Graham Bell is a 27-year-old up-and-coming inventor studying acoustics at MIT.
38:08As a day job, he is a teacher at the School for the Deaf.
38:12At the time, the deaf are seen and treated as outsiders.
38:17There is no tried-and-true method yet to teach the deaf to speak in a way that softens their
38:24sometimes harsh tones when they try to produce audible speech.
38:28They're unable to hear the sounds that they're making and thus are unable to refine those sounds.
38:35He starts to think that if he can figure out a way for his students to visualize sound, then maybe
38:40they'll understand it and figure out a way to repeat it.
38:44He's fascinated by the way the human ear works.
38:47Sound enters the ear.
38:49It vibrates.
38:50And every different kind of sound makes it vibrate a little differently.
38:53He wants to somehow capture that vibration visually.
38:58To bring his vision to life, Bell looks to the human body itself.
39:03Bell wants to base his invention off of the anatomy of an actual human ear.
39:08So he talks to his colleague, Dr. Clarence Blake, who has an interesting idea.
39:13Why not use an actual human ear for this invention?
39:17So he suggests using a dead person's ear.
39:21Bell's friend, Dr. Clarence Blake, works with medical cadavers.
39:26He procures a human ear that has been preserved so that its innards, including the eardrum, are still intact.
39:38Now that Bell has his ear, he can build his prototype and start testing it out.
39:43Bell fixes the ear to a stalk of hay.
39:48The stalk of hay travels from the eardrum to a plate that's covered with a thin layer of charcoal.
39:58His theory is that when sound hits the eardrum, the vibration will cause the hay to draw a unique pattern
40:04into the charcoal.
40:06Bell begins speaking into this ear trumpet.
40:12And it works.
40:14When the vibrations of sound hit the eardrum, it ends up moving the hay, thus drawing waveforms in the charcoal.
40:22And each one of those waveforms is unique to the letter or the word that he's saying.
40:27Next, Bell performs the experiment with his students.
40:31He speaks an A into the device, and the students can see the shape of a proper A.
40:37Now the students can speak into the device themselves, create their own shape of sound, and match it against Bell's.
40:44Bell calls the new device the dead ear phonatograph.
40:48Not only does this device dramatically assist deaf people in communicating,
40:56but it forms the germination of Bell's most famous device, the telephone.
41:02He begins to theorize that you could use the sound of your voice to create an electrical current
41:07to send your voice down a telegraph wire.
41:10And voila, two years later, the invention of the telephone.
41:15When you're strapping microphones to cats, raising chimps like children,
41:19or sipping viral vomit in the name of research,
41:21you've crossed the line from science into something else.
41:24These aren't just bizarre footnotes in history.
41:27They've earned their place as the very best of the unbelievable.
41:32And so, macro上-the kraut of, above, a education.
41:32pwai. You
41:32can't wait. In
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