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The UnBelievable with Dan Aykroyd S03E19
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00:01What you're about to see could be disturbing to some viewers.
00:05Viewer discretion is advised.
00:14We've covered our fair share of odd experiments,
00:17but these are the strangest of them all.
00:20Like the doctor who believes youth can be restored with a little help from a goat.
00:26Brinkley is taking the testicles from Billy Goats
00:30and inserting them into the scrotums of his human patients.
00:35Men line up by the thousands, even given the fact that it sounds pretty sketchy.
00:41Or a fearless backyard flyer who takes to the skies in a lawn chair.
00:48Larry reaches 16,000 feet. That's three miles above the earth.
00:54At this point, he's rapidly losing oxygen.
00:58Now he's kind of freaking out.
01:01How about the CIA's plan to turn a house cat into a super spy?
01:06Cats are notoriously difficult to train.
01:09They get the cat ready, they open the van, the cat jumps out.
01:12And...
01:15These are the mad minds behind experiments so outrageous, they are truly unbelievable.
01:34The search for eternal youth has inspired legends, potions and endless promises.
01:39But in the late 1920s, one doctor claims he has the real thing.
01:43Hidden in a place no one expects.
01:48In the 1920s, it's the dawn of radio.
01:51Just about every American family has one and they gather around it at night to listen.
01:56One of the most successful shows on the radio at the time is hosted by a Kansas-based doctor named
02:03John Romulus Brinkley.
02:05Twice daily, he plays country music, preaches the gospel, but most importantly, tells his audience how modern medicine is failing
02:15them.
02:16Brinkley ends up making a fortune.
02:18He's netting about $14,000 a week.
02:20That's about a quarter of a million dollars today just from prescribing these tonics and elixirs to these listeners for
02:27all sorts of ailments.
02:28But for all his so-called cures, one bizarre treatment grabs national attention and makes Brinkley a household name.
02:38Brinkley is taking the testicles from six-week-old billy goats and inserting them into the scrotums of his human
02:46patients just under the skin.
02:50Brinkley says he worked at a slaughterhouse when he was a young man, and he noticed that goats were virile
02:56and resistant to disease.
02:57They seemed to have all this get-up-and-go.
03:00And this inspires his claim that transplanting goat gonads to human patients can give tired old men the energy and
03:10virility of a young goat.
03:13Men line up by the thousands to get this unvalidated treatment, even given the fact that it sounds pretty sketchy.
03:22This isn't just a medical hustle. It's a national phenomenon led by a man with almost no real training.
03:30I think calling him a real medical doctor is a stretch too far.
03:34He claims he took these correspondence courses with Eclectic University, but that's kind of like getting a medical degree from
03:41watching YouTube videos.
03:42And although Brinkley claims to be doing a lot during this procedure, he's actually just making an incision in a
03:49scrotum, and he's stuffing this goat testicle in there, and he's not connecting any blood vessels.
03:54He's not connecting any sort of tubes that could transport the different hormones from the goat testicle.
04:02Brinkley performs this procedure upwards of 5,000 times, and unbelievably, a large portion of his patients say they've never
04:11felt better.
04:13Let's be clear on this. There is no biological basis for any of this. Most experts agree that it's the
04:21placebo effect, the power of suggestion.
04:24By the late 1920s, skepticism starts to rise, and one physician finally steps up to challenge Brinkley head on.
04:33In 1928, Brinkley actually gets called out by a more mainstream doctor named Morris Fishbein.
04:40He calls Dr. Brinkley a charlatan of the rankest sort and publishes a paper that gets the attention of the
04:49Kansas Medical Board.
04:51They revoke both his radio license and his specious medical license in the state of Kansas.
04:58Incredibly, this doesn't stop Brinkley. He moves to Texas where the laws are looser, and he cooks up his next
05:04big idea.
05:06He calls it Formula 1020. It's a distillation of goat glands, and it can cure everything from impotence to insanity.
05:15As Brinkley rakes in the dough and continues peddling his goat cures all over the southern U.S., there's someone
05:22else who rivals his persistence.
05:26Dr. Fishbein, he decides to write a new piece on charlatanism, and this time he gets it published in the
05:32prestigious journal of the American Medical Association in 1938.
05:37Brinkley is incensed that he gets mentioned in this article, so he decides to sue for a libel.
05:44But Dr. Brinkley shrivels on the stand.
05:48Under oath, Brinkley is forced to admit that he knew the goat gland surgeries he was performing could not possibly
05:57enhance a human male's virility, and he knew it all along.
06:05If you think goat parts are extreme, just wait till you hear where our next mad surgeon gets his ingredients.
06:14In 1928, Buck Kelly, a 23-year-old, is executed at San Quentin.
06:19They take him to the gallows. He is hanged.
06:22After that's done, they take down his body and hand it over to the resident medical expert, Leo Stanley.
06:29He performs the autopsy, as one would expect, and then does one other little thing.
06:36He removes Buck's testicles.
06:39Just who is Leo Stanley, and why is he collecting testicles from a dead inmate?
06:45Leo Stanley is a guy who goes to college originally at Stanford, but then he drops out.
06:50And later, he goes to Cooper College and actually gets a medical degree, and he's looking forward to being a
06:56doctor.
06:57He thinks he's going to live a life of just a town physician somewhere, and then an opening appears at
07:03San Quentin, and he applies for it, and he gets it.
07:08But Stanley's not just there to treat criminals.
07:12He's also determined to curb their bad behavior, and he has some odd ideas on how to do it.
07:20He feels that there is a direct link between the age of a man's glands and gonads and his tendency
07:28to commit horrible and heinous crimes.
07:32Leo comes up with the idea of doing testicle transplants.
07:40But Leo doesn't use slivers.
07:43He uses entire whole testicles.
07:49Stanley believes that his surgical process will actually be a form of social rehabilitation.
07:58That these prisoners who had been stuck in San Quentin once they had a new set of testicles could go
08:03out, be productive members of society, and would not return to San Quentin.
08:09Ranging from voluntary to involuntary, Dr. Stanley carries out this experiment at least a thousand times, taking them off of
08:17freshly executed prisoners and putting them onto those who are still alive and well.
08:23Eventually, the mad testicle transplants of San Quentin runs into a bit of a supply problem.
08:33He doesn't have enough source of young male testicles.
08:36They're not executing a young inmate every day or every week even.
08:40So what does he do?
08:41He turns to animals, goats, deer, bears, water buffalo, you name it.
08:48If it has balls, he's putting it in an old dude.
08:53When the grafts fail to produce results, Stanley doubles down with something far more invasive.
09:00He does something incredibly bizarre and, you know, kind of gross.
09:05He takes a bunch of testicles and he blends them up into kind of a paste.
09:14And he injects this testicle paste into the abdomen of prisoners.
09:23Leo's testicle mash paste injection idea doesn't work either.
09:27So he comes up with a new idea.
09:29Okay, if I can't restore your vitality, I can at least restore your looks.
09:33And so he starts offering plastic surgery to the inmates so they can look more handsome.
09:41So that when they get out, they can maybe find a wife or get a job or be somewhat normal.
09:47This guy, his chain of reasoning is not exactly strong.
09:51Why he wasn't fired almost immediately is a mystery.
10:00After 40 years, Dr. Leo Stanley's experiments finally come to an end.
10:06He's kind of your real Dr. Frankenstein.
10:09He sees inmates as things that he can experiment on, that he can play with.
10:15He's carving up human beings.
10:17And he does this 10,000 times across his career.
10:22In the end, Dr. Stanley can't unlock the secret to youth.
10:26But he does carve out one of the strangest and most unsettling chapters in medical history.
10:34When one of history's greatest minds fires up a strange device, let's just say it shakes a whole lot more
10:42than the walls.
10:44In the 1890s, genius inventor Nikola Tesla, he is working on new, more efficient ways of generating electricity.
10:56The rotating electrical generator, he finds, is not very efficient.
11:02So he decides to invent a new version.
11:05Something oscillating goes up and down.
11:08So basically it works with an air or steam powered piston driving a coil back and forth through a magnetic
11:13field.
11:14This happens at an incredible frequency.
11:16This device does create a lot of electricity very efficiently.
11:22But it also produces an enormous amount of vibration.
11:31The amount of vibration is so immense.
11:33Not only does it shake his building, it shakes the neighboring buildings.
11:37So much so they think they're experiencing an earthquake.
11:40As scary as this is at first, there seems to be at least one upside.
11:46Tesla's team realizes that if they stand on a platform above the machine, the vibrations get sent throughout your whole
11:54body.
11:56People who experience this are having like laughing fits.
11:59Their mood changes.
12:00And some people say it actually improved their health.
12:04Tesla, ever the inventor, thinks, hey, maybe this machine might have applications in medicine.
12:10Maybe it could destroy cancer cells or eliminate tuberculosis.
12:16It may even be able to help one of Tesla's famous friends who's suffering from something much different.
12:23In the 1890s, Tesla becomes a good friend with no other than Mark Twain.
12:29When Tesla and Twain meet at a dinner party, a bromance quickly ensues.
12:36As they get closer, Twain reveals the fact that he's suffering from a really embarrassing problem.
12:42He has insufferable constipation.
12:47Tesla tells Mark, I think I might have something for you.
12:50Go stand on that platform.
12:52We're gonna let those vibrations course through your body.
12:55And we're gonna see if we can shake something loose.
13:01But Tesla gives Twain a very frank warning.
13:05When I say get off the machine, you get off the machine.
13:11Twain loves it.
13:12He's eating it up.
13:13He's euphoric.
13:14He's feeling better than he has in years.
13:18But sure enough, eventually, Tesla's like, yo, time.
13:21You gotta get off now.
13:23And Twain is like, you're tripping, dude.
13:25Twain says, no way.
13:27I'm not stopping this.
13:28Suddenly, Twain feels a gurgling in his intestines.
13:32And he hops off the platform and makes a mad dash for the bathroom.
13:36But unfortunately, nature is a bit faster than he is.
13:43On the upside, Tesla did prove his theory.
13:48Today, vibration therapy is proven in alleviating constipation.
13:54So much so that in 2023, University of Georgia invented a vibrating pill to help disrupt constipation.
14:04Fortunately, the only casualty in Tesla's experiment was Mark Twain's dignity.
14:09But our next inventor risks a lot more than that.
14:14It's 1962, and a 13-year-old boy named Larry Walters walks into an army surplus store in Los Angeles.
14:22Suddenly, something unusual catches his attention.
14:25These large weather balloons that are hanging from the ceiling.
14:29And that moment begins Larry's fixation with flight.
14:35As he gets older, he graduates from high school.
14:37He heads down to the Air Force Recruitment Center.
14:39And as they go through the process, they get to the eye exam, and he finds that his eyesight is
14:46not up to snuff.
14:49With his dream dashed, Larry spends the next 15 years doing odd jobs, eventually becoming a truck driver.
14:56But his fixation with flying never goes away.
15:01Now the year is 1982, and a 33-year-old Larry is pulled over to the side of the road,
15:07and he's looking up at the sky.
15:09And he starts thinking about those great big weather balloons he saw hanging from the ceiling when he was 13.
15:14Right then and there, Larry hatches his plan.
15:18He's going to get some weather balloons, fill them with helium.
15:21He is going to sail through the air over the San Gabriel Mountains and land safe and sound in the
15:27Mojave Desert.
15:28Some people may think it's a crazy idea or a pipe dream, but it isn't to Larry.
15:37Larry shares his idea with his girlfriend, Carol Van Dusen.
15:40She sort of laughs it off like a crazy flight of fancy, and she thinks he'll never do this.
15:47But Larry disagrees.
15:49This is now a mission.
15:52Larry draws up blueprints.
15:54He decides he's going to take 42 weather balloons, rig the balloons to an old-fashioned lawn chair,
16:05attach 30-gallon-sized jugs of water to release weight if he needs to go higher.
16:14And he also brings with him a BB gun.
16:19The plan is that when he gets to about 7,000 feet, he will then start shooting judiciously a few
16:26of those balloons and start his descent.
16:29Could this absurd plan even work?
16:33On July 2nd, 1982, Larry decides to find out.
16:39You can just imagine what this must have looked like to neighbors.
16:42They're out in the streets looking, gawking.
16:45Along with Carol is Larry's best friend, Ron.
16:47He's here to film the whole thing for posterity's sake.
16:50As fate would have it, just as Ron yells, Larry, don't do this, a gust of wind blows up, snaps
16:57the rope, and the chair flies into the air.
17:00In no time, Larry reaches 500 feet and counting.
17:05Suddenly, he's at 1,500 feet, the height of the Sears Tower, and he keeps rising.
17:11After just one hour, Larry reaches 16,000 feet.
17:16That's three miles above the Earth.
17:19That's higher than the maximum altitude of a Cessna airplane.
17:25At this point, Larry's freezing, and he's rapidly losing oxygen.
17:30To make matters worse, he's been blown off course by the winds.
17:38And now he's encroaching on airspace around the Los Angeles airport.
17:44At that point, a Delta flight launching out of LAX almost hits him.
17:52With dangers mounting, Larry realizes this lawn chair needs to be grounded.
17:59Larry pulls out his BB gun and starts his process.
18:03He shoots down seven of his weather balloons.
18:09And then he drops his BB gun. It slips out of his hand.
18:14Fortunately for Larry, he's popped enough balloons to start his descent.
18:19Unfortunately, he's headed straight for the power lines.
18:23Via CB radio, he is able to make contact with city power authorities
18:29who actually kill the power so Larry is not electrified to death when he lands.
18:37He is brought back down to the ground, surrounded by well-wishers who are cheering him,
18:43who are asking him to sign pieces of his weather balloons.
18:48He's greeted like a returning hero.
18:51Did it have a name, by the way?
18:53The craft itself?
18:53The craft, yes.
18:54Yes, it was called The Inspiration.
18:56The Inspiration.
18:58Larry receives his 15 minutes of fame for this stunt and even appears on several late-night talk shows.
19:04But he's also slapped with a $1,500 fine from the FAA.
19:09Interestingly, the actual lawn chair Larry piloted now hangs in the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.,
19:17making this strange spectacle a part of unbelievable aviation history.
19:24They say necessity is the mother of invention.
19:27But there's one invention no mother on Earth would want to be the test subject for.
19:33It's the 1960s.
19:35An engineer named George Blonsky and his wife are at the Bronx Zoo.
19:38And they get to witness the miracle of birth.
19:42An elephant is giving birth.
19:44But they notice something kind of strange.
19:46The mother elephant who's giving birth is spinning around as the baby is coming out.
19:51So they ask one of the zoo employees and they explain that the mother is using centrifugal force to help
19:58the baby come out.
19:59Think about those merry-go-rounds that are in playgrounds, right?
20:03The faster it goes, the harder it is to hang on and you're probably going to fall off.
20:07That fateful moment at the zoo gets George thinking.
20:10Could this centrifugal force concept be applied to human births?
20:14The Blonskys, who are childless, have theorized that modern women have lost their birthing muscles, have lost their abdominal strength,
20:23and thus might need a little help specifically by spinning her in the same way that the elephant was witnessed
20:31spinning on its own at the zoo.
20:33Blonsky is not an OBGYN, but he is a mining engineer.
20:38Despite this, by 1965, the couple gets a patent for what will later be known as the Blonsky birthing table.
20:46So this thing looks horrifying. It looks like a medieval torture device.
20:51This woman is strapped onto a wheel by her neck and her thighs and her waist and she's got something
20:57covering her face.
20:58But to make sure she's comfortable, you know, while she's strapped by her throat, they have given her a pillow.
21:04Once she's strapped in, it's time to start that spin cycle.
21:09The idea is that the centrifugal force, as this woman is holding on for dear life, will help eject the
21:15baby effortlessly from the womb.
21:20It's a truly bizarre concept, but could it possibly work?
21:24The Blonskys got as far as making a prototype, but surprisingly enough, they found zero buyers.
21:29Maybe it's because no one wanted the idea of spinning a mother around until the baby was ejected from the
21:34womb into a net.
21:35It's pretty clear that Blonsky didn't do the math because it would require so much rotational speed for a baby
21:43to actually be mechanically shot out of a woman that both the mother and the baby would probably die.
21:51Luckily, Blonsky's birthing table was never tested on humans or animals.
21:56Our next strange experiment involves both and has some very surprising results.
22:03Throughout history, there's been a lot of cases where children are separated from their families and raised by wolves or
22:09bears or other kinds of animals.
22:11Records of feral child studies get the wheels turning of psychologist Winthrop Kellogg.
22:17He starts to think, could you compel an animal to behave as a human were it raised exclusively in a
22:27human atmosphere?
22:30So Kellogg brings home a seven-month-old chimp named Gua to raise alongside his 10-month-old son Donald.
22:37They get the exact same behavior and treatment, feeding them the same way, diapers the same way, playing with them
22:45the same way, having them be playmates.
22:47The Kelloggs are treating their two children identically.
22:53Before long, Gua starts picking up distinctly human skills.
22:57Gua masters walking on two legs, wearing shoes, sitting in a high chair and eating with a spoon.
23:02She begins to understand and respond to commands like, show me your nose, give Donald a hug.
23:08After nine months, Gua has excelled at some things, but she's not made any progress with language.
23:13She's not speaking English. She can understand things, but she is not moving forward.
23:17Donald is also slow to speak. In fact, in some cases, Donald starts taking on the chimps' behaviors.
23:25For example, when yelling for food or wanting for food, Donald joins Gua in pant hooting and barking.
23:31So this experiment to elevate a chimpanzee to human status is actually degrading his son's learning capabilities down to chimpanzee
23:44status.
23:46The Kelloggs are concerned as Donald keeps falling behind.
23:50They decide to end the experiment and to return Gua to a primate center to be back with their group
23:56and to allow Donald to move forward as a normal human child.
24:02Donald eventually grows up to become a doctor.
24:05Safe to say that probably wouldn't have happened if the experiment had gone on much longer.
24:13When testing a new theory, you have to have conviction.
24:16But 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,
24:33especially about how it can spread from person to person.
24:39Fierth 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.
24:50And 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
25:07into 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
25:20dribble it in his eyes.
25:24And nothing.
25:27Now Firth starts to get creative.
25:30He builds a vomit sauna.
25:33He sets himself up in a small closet and fries up some of the vomit to create vomit vapors that
25:40he 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
25:56into a cup, and he drinks it straight up.
26:02He doesn't get it.
26:06But Firth is not finished.
26:08He decides he can still take the ick factor up.
26:11All the way up.
26:13He proceeds to take the vomit and mix it with other fluids that have come from a yellow fever patient.
26:20He takes their urine. He takes their saliva. He takes their blood.
26:24And then proceeds to liberally smear himself from head to toe,
26:30covering himself like the worst cake you've ever seen in your life.
26:34All over every inch of his body.
26:38Stubbins Firth still walks away, not having succumbed to any yellow fever.
26:46And he writes up his work in a paper.
26:49A treatise on malignant fever with an attempt to prove that it is not contagious.
26:56While Firth did clearly prove you can't catch yellow fever by frolicking in black vomit,
27:01his thesis still has some sticking points.
27:04So 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.
27:15We know this because six decades later in 1881,
27:19Cuban scientist Carlos Finlay proves that yellow fever is transmitted from person to person by mosquitoes.
27:26Firth went all in for medicine.
27:28200 years later, another man does the same.
27:32Only now, it's not disease he's fighting.
27:34It's time.
27:37Billionaire 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.
27:55He goes to sleep at the exact same time every night.
27:59He sleeps alone in a dark room with blackout curtains.
28:03He wears blue light glasses.
28:05But there's one crucial piece of his routine he believes will keep him young.
28:10Forever.
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.
28:25Because he believes that young blood is going to give him the energy and the power he needs to avoid
28:32aging.
28:32But then he thinks, why go to strangers?
28:35I have a ready-made blood supply at home.
28:39My 17-year-old son, Talmadge.
28:41How are you?
28:43You wanna 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.
28:53Johnson wants to be fair about all of this, so he donates his plasma to his father.
28:59It's the world's first ever intergenerational blood transfusion experiment.
29:04It probably sounds a little crazy.
29:07It probably sounds like it couldn't possibly work.
29:09The thing is, it kind of does, at least in mice.
29:14Researchers at UC San Francisco transfused blood from young mice into older mice.
29:20And those older mice get some benefits.
29:23They get a little bit more energy.
29:24Actually, some of their muscles are working a little better.
29:26So clearly, something is going on here.
29:30Still, this starts to get old, even for Johnson.
29:34After six treatments, Johnson decides he's not getting the results that he wants.
29:38So he switches to a new treatment, shock therapy.
29:43But not to his brain, to his genitals.
29:47He receives acoustic shockwave therapy on his genitals three to five times a month.
29:56He says that the pain is a nine out of ten, but it has decreased the age of his penis
30:03by 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.
30:19From poison-tipped umbrellas to a plot targeting Fidel Castro's beard.
30:24Nothing 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
30:38without concerning anybody.
30:39So if the cats can get themselves close enough to private conversations, they might be able to overhear important information.
30:47Now, the cat's not going to just go into a CIA debrief and say, the subject said this. The cat's
30:52not going to do that.
30:53So the cat is turned into a living listening device.
30:58The 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.
31:13And what they end up having to do is do surgery.
31:17They put the listening device in the ear and put a transmitter at the base of the animal's skull,
31:22and then run the antenna down an incision on the cat's back so that it's hidden by the fur.
31:27Not really fun for the cat, I'm sure.
31:31With the cat wired up and trained, it's time for this secret agent's first assignment.
31:37The goal is for the cat to eavesdrop on two men sitting on a park bench outside of the Soviet
31:43embassy.
31:44So the CIA agents drive up with the cat in their white van.
31:49They get the cat ready. They issue the cat the command. It knows where to go.
31:54They open the van. The cat jumps out.
31:57And it immediately gets hit by a taxi.
32:01$20 million out the window.
32:03With all of this research, they never think,
32:06hey, you know what, we should pull over on the same side of the street that the cat has to
32:10get out.
32:11And just what does the CIA after-action report identify as the fatal flaw in an otherwise excellent plan?
32:19Quote, cats are not trainable.
32:21And they don't have the same deep-seated desire to please a human master as a dog does.
32:29Cats aren't the only animals science has put through the wringer.
32:33Dogs have had their turn too.
32:35Especially 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 begins to probe questions of
32:55how 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.
33:07And he's doing it as a good doctor doing really beautiful good work.
33:14Vladimir Demikov's next goal? A full head transplant on a dog.
33:19But 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.
33:29He 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.
33:46One smaller nine-year-old dog named Shavka and one stray larger German Shepherd named Brodyaga.
33:54Vladimir detaches Shavka's head and he attaches Shavka's head to Brodyaga's vertebrae.
34:03Three and a half hours later, the two-headed dog experiment is complete.
34:09But does it actually work?
34:11It sounds awful.
34:13She's just a head attached to this body.
34:15But she eats, she drinks, she barks.
34:19Vladimir's two-headed dog only lives for four days.
34:23But 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.
34:36And 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.
34:46Perhaps it's for the best Vladimir's two-headed dog experiment didn't work out.
34:51It would have made playing fetch very complicated.
34:56Some of the most iconic books and films feature tales of the undead.
35:01But what might surprise you is how many of them were inspired by real life science.
35:06It's 1803 in Italy.
35:08A 40-year-old researcher named Giovanni Aldini is on a mission to prove a theory that the human body
35:16runs on its own electrical current.
35:19And he believes that if there is already an electrical current within the body, that by subjecting a dead body
35:27to electrical current, you can very possibly reanimate the dead.
35:34Aldini decides he wants to get a body on the up and up and he reaches out to local prisons
35:39to try to acquire the corpse of a recently executed prisoner.
35:44Lucky for Aldini, a man named George Foster has been sentenced to death.
35:49And they're willing to give Aldini Foster's body fresh from the gallows.
35:54The execution goes as planned.
35:56Aldini acquires the body.
35:58And then at London's Royal Academy of Surgeons, he schedules a real event to showcase his theory with this freshly
36:07dead body.
36:09The theater is packed with the best and brightest of the day, and everyone in the Oval Theater has their
36:16eyes on the wooden slab where Foster's body is lying, covered by a white sheet.
36:23Aldini rips the sheet from Foster's body as a hush falls over the room.
36:28Aldini picks up prods that are connected by wires to a zinc battery.
36:33The electricity flows forth, he approaches the body, and the crowd is on the edge of their seats.
36:40He touches the prod to the dead man's face.
36:44The dead man George Foster opens one of his eyes.
36:48Then Aldini takes the prod and puts it in his nether regions, and his whole body convulses.
36:55George Foster's arm then goes up in the air.
36:57His legs are starting to move.
36:59The entire audience thinks that the deceased is about to stand up.
37:05And then...
37:09Aldini's battery dies, and the experiment ends.
37:12But while George Foster doesn't come back to life, Aldini's legacy does live on.
37:18The experiments do indicate that electricity can at least stimulate dead tissue.
37:23That part of the experiment is a success.
37:26As bizarre as the Aldini experiment is, he's credited with pioneering electrotherapy as we know it as a modality of
37:32treatment.
37:33But there's also another thing that he is credited with.
37:37Mary Shelley wrote the book Frankenstein ten years after the Aldini experiment.
37:44Frankenstein in which a dead body is reanimated with electrical impulses.
37:49Sounds very familiar.
37:53Aldini failed to bring back a whole body.
37:56But another strange mind focused on bringing back just one piece.
38:03In 1874, Alexander Graham Bell is a 27-year-old up-and-coming inventor studying acoustics at MIT.
38:10As a day job, he is a teacher at the School for the Deaf.
38:14At the time, the deaf are seen and treated as outsiders.
38:19There is no tried-and-true method yet to teach the deaf to speak in a way that softens their
38:25sometimes harsh tones when they try to produce audible speech.
38:30They're unable to hear the sounds that they're making and thus are unable to refine those sounds.
38:36He starts to think that if he could figure out a way for his students to visualize sound, then maybe
38:42they'll understand it and figure out a way to repeat it.
38:45He's fascinated by the way the human ear works. Sound enters the ear, it vibrates, and every different kind of
38:52sound makes it vibrate a little differently.
38:55He wants to somehow capture that vibration visually.
39:00To bring his vision to life, Bell looks to the human body itself.
39:05Bell wants to base his invention off of the anatomy of an actual human ear.
39:09So he talks to his colleague, Dr. Clarence Blake, who has an interesting idea.
39:15Why not use an actual human ear for this invention?
39:19So he suggests using a dead person's ear.
39:22Bell's friend, Dr. Clarence Blake, works with medical cadavers.
39:28He procures a human ear that has been preserved so that its innards, including the eardrum, are still intact.
39:39Now that Bell has his ear, he can build his prototype and start testing it out.
39:45Bell fixes the ear to a stalk of hay.
39:50The stalk of hay travels from the eardrum to a plate that's covered with a thin layer of charcoal.
40:00His theory is that when sound hits the eardrum, the vibration will cause the hay to draw a unique pattern
40:06into the charcoal.
40:08Bell begins speaking into this ear trumpet.
40:13And it works.
40:15When the vibrations of sound hit the eardrum, it ends up moving the hay, thus drawing waveforms in the charcoal.
40:23And each one of those waveforms is unique to the letter or the word that he's saying.
40:28Next, Bell performs the experiment with his students.
40:32He speaks an A into the device, and the students can see the shape of a proper A.
40:38Now the students can speak into the device themselves, create their own shape of sound, and match it against Bell's.
40:46Bell calls the new device the dead ear phonatograph.
40:49Not only does this device dramatically assist deaf people in communicating, but it forms the germination of Bell's most famous
41:01device, the telephone.
41:03He begins to theorize that you could use the sound of your voice to create an electrical current to send
41:09your voice down a telegraph wire.
41:11And, voila, two years later, the invention of the telephone.
41:16When you're strapping microphones to cats, raising chimps like children, or sipping viral vomit in the name of research, you've
41:23crossed the line from science into something else.
41:26These aren't just bizarre footnotes in history. They've earned their place as the very best of the unbelievable.
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