Original subtitles

[dramatic music]

[suspenseful music]

We've covered our fair share of odd experiments,

but these are the strangest of them all.

Like the doctor who believes youth can be restored

with a little help from a goat.

- Brinkley is taking the testicles from Billy goats

and inserting them into the scrotums of his human patients.

- Men lined up by the thousands,

even given the fact that it sounds pretty sketchy.

- Or a fearless backyard flyer who takes to the skies

in a lawn chair.

- Larry reaches 16,000 feet.

That's three miles above the earth.

- At this point, he's rapidly losing oxygen.

Now he's kind of freaking out.

- How about the CIA's plan to turn a house cat

into a super spy?

- Cats are notoriously difficult to train.

- [Daniel] They get the cat ready, they open the van,

the cat jumps out, and...

- These are the mad minds behind experiments.

So outrageous, they are truly unbelievable.

[dramatic music]

- The search for eternal youth has inspired legends, potions,

and endless promises.

But in the late 1920s,

one doctor claims he has the real thing

hidden in a place no one expects.

- [Brinkley] And gentlemen, this is Dr. J. R. Brinkley.

- The 1920s, it's the dawn of radio.

Just about every American family has one

and they gather around it at night to listen.

- One of the most successful shows on the radio at the time

is hosted by a Kansas based doctor

named John Romulus Brinkley.

Twice daily, he plays country music,

preaches the gospel, but most importantly tells his audience

how modern medicine is failing them.

- Brinkley ends up making a fortune.

He's netting about $14,000 a week.

That's about a quarter of a million dollars today

just from prescribing these tonics and elixirs

to these listeners for all sorts of ailments.

- [Dan] But for all his so-called cures,

one bizarre treatment grabs national attention

and makes Brinkley a household name.

- Brinkley is taking the testicles from six week old

Billy goats and inserting them into the scrotums

of his human patients just under the skin.

- Brinkley says he worked at a slaughterhouse

when he was a young man and he noticed the goats were virile

and resistant to disease.

They seemed to have all this get up and go.

- And this inspires his claim that transplanting goat gonads

to human patients can give tired old men

the energy and virility of a young goat.

- Men line up by the thousands to get this

unvalidated treatment.

Even given the fact that it sounds pretty sketchy.

- [Dan] This isn't just a medical hustle,

its a national phenomenon,

led by a man with almost no real training.

- I think calling him a real medical doctor

is a stretch too far.

He claims he took these correspondence courses

with Eclectic University,

but that's kinda like getting a medical degree

from watching YouTube videos.

- And although Brinkley claims to be doing a lot

during this procedure, he's actually just making an incision

in a scrotum and he's stuffing this goat testicle in there

and he's not connecting any blood vessels.

He's not connecting any sort of tubes

that could transport the different hormones

from the goat testicle.

- [Dan] Brinkley performs this procedure

upwards of 5,000 times and unbelievably,

a large portion of his patients say

they've never felt better.

- Let's be clear on this.

There is no biological basis for any of this.

Most experts agree that it's the placebo effect,

the power of suggestion.

- [Dan] By the late 1920s, skepticism starts to rise

and one physician finally steps up

to challenge Brinkley head-on.

- In 1928, Brinkley actually gets called out

by a more mainstream doctor named Morris Fishbein.

He calls Dr. Brinkley a charlatan of the rankest sort

and publishes a paper that gets the attention

of the Kansas Medical Board.

- They revoked both his radio license

and his specious medical license in the state of Kansas.

- [Dan] Incredibly, this doesn't stop Brinkley.

He moves to Texas where the laws are looser

and he cooks up his next big idea.

- He calls it Formula 10-20.

It's a distillation of goat glands

and that can cure everything from impotence to insanity.

- [Dan] As Brinkley rakes in the dough

and continues pedaling his goat cures

all over the southern US,

there's someone else who rivals his persistence.

- Dr. Fishbein, he decides to write a new piece

on charlatanism and this time he gets it published

in the prestigious journal

of the American Medical Association in 1938.

- Brinkley is incensed

that he gets mentioned in this article,

so he decides to sue for libel.

- [Dan] But Dr. Brinkley shrivels on the stand.

- Under oath, Brinkley is forced to admit

that he knew the goat gland surgeries he was performing

could not possibly enhance a human male's virility,

and he knew it all along.

- If you think goat parts are extreme,

just wait till you hear

where our next mad surgeon gets his ingredients.

- In 1928, Buck Kelly,

a 23-year-old is executed at San Quentin.

They take him to the gallows, he's hanged.

After that's done, they take down his body

and hand it over to the resident medical expert,

Leo Stanley.

He performs the autopsy as one would expect,

and then does one other little thing.

He removes Buck's testicles.

- [Dan] Just who is Leo Stanley

and why is he collecting testicles from a dead inmate?

- Leo Stanley is a guy who goes to college

originally at Stanford, but then he drops out

and later he goes to Cooper College

and actually gets a medical degree

and he is looking forward to being a doctor.

- He thinks he's gonna live a life

of just a town physician somewhere,

and then an opening appears at San Quentin

and he applies for it and he gets it.

- [Dan] But Stanley's not just there to treat criminals.

He's also determined to curb their bad behavior

and he has some odd ideas on how to do it.

- He feels that there is a direct link

between the age of a man's glands and gonads

and his tendency to commit horrible and heinous crimes.

- Leo comes up with the idea of doing testicle transplants.

But Leo doesn't use slivers,

he uses entire, whole testicles.

- Stanley believes that his surgical process

will actually be a floor of social rehabilitation,

that these prisoners who had been stuck in San Quentin

once they had a new set of testicles, could go out,

be productive members of society and would not return

to San Quentin.

- Ranging from voluntary to involuntary,

Dr. Stanley carries out this experiment

at least a thousand times,

taking them off of freshly executed prisoners

and putting them onto those who are still alive and well.

- [Dan] Eventually the mad testicle transplantar

of San Quentin runs into a bit of a supply problem.

- He doesn't have enough source of young male testicles.

They're not executing a young inmate

every day or every week even.

So what does he do?

He turns to animals.

Goats, deer, bears, water buffalo, you name it.

If it has balls, he's putting it in an old dude.

- [Dan] When the grafts fail to produce results,

Stanley doubles down with something far more invasive.

- He does something incredibly bizarre

and you know, kind of gross.

He takes a bunch of testicles

and he blends them up into kind of a paste

and he injects this testicle paste

into the abdomen of prisoners.

- Leo's testicle mash paste injection idea doesn't work

either, so he comes up with a new idea.

Okay, if I can't restore your vitality,

I can at least restore your looks.

- And so he starts offering plastic surgery to the inmates

so they can look more handsome

so that when they get out they can maybe find a wife

or get a job or be somewhat normal.

This guy, his chain of reasoning is not exactly strong.

Why he wasn't fired almost immediately is a mystery.

- [Dan] After 40 years, Dr. Leo Stanley's experiments

finally come to an end.

- He's kind of your real Dr. Frankenstein.

He sees inmates as things that he can experiment on,

that he can play with.

He's carving up human beings

and he does this 10,000 times across his career.

- In the end, Dr. Stanley can't unlock the secret to youth,

but he does carve out one of the strangest

and most unsettling chapters in medical history.

- When one of history's greatest minds fires up

a strange device, let's just say it shakes

a whole lot more than the walls.

- In the 1890s, genius inventor Nikola Tesla.

He is working on new, more efficient ways

of generating electricity.

- The rotating electrical generator he finds

is not very efficient,

so he decides to invent a new version.

Something oscillating, goes up and down.

- So basically it works with an air

or steam powered piston driving a coil back and forth

through a magnetic field.

This happens on an incredible frequency.

- This device does create a lot of electricity

very efficiently, but it also produces an enormous amount

of vibration.

- The amount of vibration is so immense,

not only does it shake his building,

it shakes the neighboring buildings so much

so they think they're experiencing an earthquake.

- [Dan] As scary as this is at first,

there seems to be at least one upside.

- Tesla's team realizes that if they stand on a platform

above the machine,

the vibrations get sent throughout your whole body.

- People who experience this are having like laughing fits,

their mood changes

and some people say it actually improved their health.

- Tesla ever the inventor thinks,

hey, maybe this machine might have applications in medicine.

Maybe it could destroy cancer cells

or eliminate tuberculosis.

- [Dan] It may even be able to help

one of Tesla's famous friends

who's suffering from something much different.

- In the 1890s, Tesla becomes a good friend

with no other than Mark Twain.

- When Tesla and Twain meet at a dinner party,

a bromance quickly ensues.

- As they get closer, Twain reveals the fact

that he's suffering from a really embarrassing problem.

He has insufferable constipation.

- Tesla tells Mark, I think I might have something for you.

Go stand on that platform.

We're gonna let those vibrations coarse through your body

and we're gonna see if we can shake something loose.

- But Tesla gives Twain a very frank warning,

when I say get off the machine, you get off the machine.

- Twain loves it.

He's eating it up.

He's euphoric, he's feeling better than he has in years.

- But sure enough, eventually Tesla is like

"Yo time, you gotta get off now."

And Twain is like, you're tripping, dude.

- Twain says, no way, I'm not stopping this.

- [Austin] Suddenly Twain feels a gurgling in his intestines

and he hops off the platform

and makes a mad dash for the bathroom.

- But unfortunately, nature is a bit faster than he is.

- On the upside, Tesla did prove his theory.

Today, vibration therapy is proven

in alleviating constipation.

So much so that in 2023,

University of Georgia invented a vibrating pill

to help disrupt constipation.

- Fortunately, the only casualty in Tesla's experiment

was Mark Twain's dignity.

But our next inventor risks a lot more than that.

- It's 1962, and a 13-year-old boy named Larry Walters

walks into an army surplus store in Los Angeles.

Suddenly something unusual catches his attention.

These large weather balloons

that are hanging from the ceiling

and that moment begins Larry's fixation with flying.

- As he gets older, he graduates from high school,

he heads down to the Air Force Recruitment Center,

and as they go through the process,

they get to the eye exam

and he finds that his eyesight is not up to snuff.

- [Dan] With his dream dashed,

Larry spends the next 15 years doing odd jobs,

eventually becoming a truck driver,

but his fixation with flying never goes away.

- Now the year is 1982

and a 33-year-old Larry is pulled over to the side

of the road and he's looking up at the sky

and he starts thinking about those great big weather

balloons he saw hanging from the ceiling when he was 13.

- Right then and there, Larry hatches his plan.

He's going to get some weather balloons,

fill them with helium, he's going to sail through the air

over the San Gabriel Mountains and land safe

and sound in the Mojave Desert.

- Some people may think it's a crazy idea or a pipe dream,

but it isn't to Larry.

Larry shares his idea with his girlfriend, Carol Van Dusen.

She sort of laughs it off like a crazy flight of fancy

and she thinks he'll never do this, but Larry disagrees.

This is now a mission.

- Larry draws up blueprints.

He decides he's going to take 42 weather balloons,

rig the balloons to an old fashioned lawn chair,

attach 30 gallon size jugs of water

to release weight if he needs to go higher,

and he also brings with him a BB gun.

- Plan is that when he gets to about 7,000 feet,

he will then start shooting judiciously

a few of those balloons and start his descent.

- [Dan] Could this absurd plan even work?

On July 2nd, 1982, Larry decides to find out.

- You could just imagine what this must have

looked like to neighbors.

They're out in the streets looking, gawking,

along with Carol is Larry's best friend Ron.

He's here to film the whole thing for posterity's sake.

- As fate would have it, just as Ron yells Larry,

don't do this, a gust of wind blows up, snaps the rope,

and the chair flies into the air.

- [Dan] In no time, Larry reaches 500 feet and counting.

Suddenly he's at 1,500 feet, the height of the Sears Tower,

and he keeps rising.

- After just one hour, Larry reaches 16,000 feet.

That's three miles above the earth.

That's higher than the maximum altitude

of a Cessna airplane.

- At this point, Larry's freezing

and he's rapidly losing oxygen.

To make matters worse, he is been blown off course

by the winds and now now he's encroaching

on airspace around the Los Angeles airport.

- At that point, a Delta flight launching out of LAX

almost hits him.

- [Dan] With dangers mounting,

Larry realizes this lawn chair needs to be grounded.

- Larry pulls out his BB gun and starts his process.

He shoots down seven of his weather balloons,

and then he drops his BB gun.

It slips out of his hand.

- [Dan] Fortunately for Larry,

he's popped enough balloons to start his descent.

Unfortunately, he's headed straight for the power lines.

- Via CB Radio,

he's able to make contact with city power authorities

who actually kill the power.

So Larry is not electrified to death when he lands.

He is brought back down to the ground

surrounded by well wishers who are cheering him,

who are asking him to sign pieces of his weather balloons.

He's greeted like a returning hero.

- [Anchor] Did it have a name, by the way?

- The craft itself? - The craft, yes.

- Yes, it was called the Inspiration.

- [Anchor] The Inspiration.

- [Dan] Larry receives his 15 minutes of fame

for this stunt and even appears on several

late night talk shows, but he's also slapped

with a $1,500 fine from the FAA.

Interestingly, the actual lawn chair Larry piloted

now hangs in the Air and Space Museum in Washington DC,

making this strange spectacle,

a part of unbelievable aviation history.

- They say necessity is the mother of invention,

but there's one invention no mother on earth

would want to be the test subject for.

- It's the 1960s, an engineer named George Blonsky

and his wife are at the Bronx Zoo

and they get to witness the miracle of birth.

An elephant is giving birth.

- But they notice something kind of strange.

The mother elephant who's giving birth is spinning around

as the baby is coming out.

So they ask one of the zoo employees and they explain

that the mother is using a centrifugal force

to help the baby come out.

Think about those merry-go-round

that are in playgrounds, right?

The faster it goes, the harder it is to hang on

and you're probably gonna fall off.

- [Dan] That fateful moment at the zoo gets George thinking.

Could centrifugal force concept be applied to human births?

- The Blonskys who are childless have theorized

that modern women have lost their birthing muscles,

have lost their abdominal strength,

and thus might need a little help specifically

by spinning her in the same way

that the elephant was witness spinning on its own

at the zoo.

- Blonsky is not an OB-GYN, but he is a mining engineer.

- [Dan] Despite this, by 1965, the couple gets a patent

for what will later be known as the Blonsky birthing table.

- So this thing looks horrifying.

It looks like a medieval torture device.

This woman is strapped onto a wheel by her neck

and her thighs and her waist,

and she's got something covering her face.

But to make sure she's comfortable,

you know, while she's strapped by her throat,

they have given her a pillow.

- [Dan] Once she's strapped in,

it's time to start that spin cycle.

- The idea is that the centrifugal force

as this woman is holding on for dear life,

will help eject the baby effortlessly from the womb.

- [Dan] It's a truly bizarre concept,

but could it possibly work?

- The Blonsky's got as far as make it a prototype,

but surprisingly enough they found zero buyers.

Maybe it's because no one wanted the idea

of spinning a mother around

until the baby was ejected from the womb into a net.

- It's pretty clear that Blonsky didn't do the math

because it would require so much rotational speed for a baby

to actually be mechanically shot out of a woman

that both the mother and the baby would probably die.

- Luckily, Blonsky's birthing table was never tested

on humans or animals.

Our next strange experiment involves both

and has some very surprising results.

- Throughout history, there's been a lot of cases

where children are separated from their families

and raised by wolves or bears or other kinds of animals.

- Records of feral child studies get the wheels turning

of psychologist Winthrop Kellogg.

He starts to think, could you compel an animal

to behave as a human,

were it raised exclusively in a human atmosphere?

- So Kellogg brings home a seven month old chimp

named Gua to raise alongside his 10-month old son Donald.

- They get the exact same behavior and treatment,

feeding them the same way,

diapers the same way, playing with them the same way,

having them be playmates.

The Kelloggs are treating their two children identically.

- [Dan] Before long, Gua starts picking up

distinctly human skills.

- Gua masters, walking on two legs, wearing shoes,

sitting in a high chair and eating with a spoon.

She begins to understand and respond to commands like,

show me your nose, give Donald a hug.

- After nine months, Gua has excelled at some things,

but she's not made any progress with language.

She's not speaking English.

She can understand things, but she is not moving forward.

- Donald is also slow to speak.

In fact, in some cases,

Donald starts taking on the chimp's behaviors.

For example, when yelling for food

or wanting for food, Donald joins Gua

in pant-hooting and barking.

- So this experiment to elevate a chimpanzee

to human status is actually degrading

his son's learning capabilities down to chimpanzee status.

- The Kellogg's are concerned as Donald

keeps falling behind, they decide to end the experiment

and to return Gua to a primate center to be back

with their group and to allow Donald to move forward

as a normal human child.

- Donald eventually grows up to become a doctor.

Safe to say that probably wouldn't have happened

if the experiment had gone on much longer.

- When testing a new theory, you have to have conviction,

but this ambitious doctor's commitment

to curing disease goes way beyond

what most would consider safe or sane.

- University of Pennsylvania medical trainee,

Stubbins Ffirth wants to write a thesis on yellow fever,

especially about how it can spread from person to person.

- Ffirth actually believes

that yellow fever isn't contagious.

- He cooks up an experiment to prove

that you can't catch yellow fever from someone else,

and that experiment involves the most iconic symptom

of yellow fever, black vomit.

For the first step in the experiment,

Ffirth makes a incision in his arm

and simply pours the black vomit into it.

There's a little bit of inflammation at the site,

but other than that, he's fine.

- What he does next is he takes some vomit

and he mixes it in with water

and he starts to dribble it in his eyes,

and nothing.

- Now Ffirth starts to get creative.

He builds a vomit sauna.

He sets himself up in a small closet

and fries up some of the vomit,

create vomit vapors that he inhales deeply over the course

of two hours, still nothing.

- He then goes as far as taking a patient

with essentially end stage yellow fever,

has them throw up directly into a cup

and he drinks it straight up.

He doesn't get it.

- [Dan] But Ffirth is not finished.

He decides he can still take the ick factor up,

all the way up.

- He proceeds to take the vomit

and mix it with other fluids

that have come from a yellow fever patient.

- [Dr. J Mack] He takes their urine, he takes their saliva,

he takes their blood.

- And then proceeds to liberally smear himself from head

to toe, covering himself like the worst cake

you've ever seen in your life,

all over every inch of his body.

Stubbins Ffirth still walks away,

not having succumbed to any yellow fever.

- And he writes up his work in a paper,

a treatise on malignant fever with an attempt to prove

that it is not contagious.

- [Dan] While Ffirth did clearly prove

you can't catch yellow fever by frolicking in black vomit,

his thesis still has some sticking points.

- So Ffirth was right,

that yellow fever is not directly transmitted

from person to person, but he was wrong in thinking that

it was caused by exposure to excessive heat.

We know this because six decades later in 1881,

Cuban scientist Carlos Finlay proves

that yellow fever is transmitted from person to person

by mosquitoes.

- Ffirth went all in for medicine.

200 years later, another man does the same,

only now it's not disease he's fighting, it's time.

- Billionaire Bryan Johnson is a rejuvenation athlete.

Everything in his life,

everything he does is focused on one goal,

staying young and prolonging his life.

- He takes 111 supplements every single day.

He goes to sleep at the exact same time every night.

- He sleeps alone in a dark room with blackout curtains.

He wears blue light glasses.

- [Dan] But there's one crucial piece of his routine

he believes will keep him young forever.

- He's spending his billions on blood transfusions,

to the tune of $2 million per year.

- Every 30 days he gets a blood transfusion,

not just from anyone but from someone young, in good shape

because he believes that young blood is gonna give him

the energy and the power he needs to avoid aging.

- But then he thinks, why go to strangers?

I have a ready made blood supply at home,

my 17-year-old son, Talmadge.

- How are you?

Do you wanna bite a super veggie?

- [Dan] Every month the teen donates a liter of blood

to his father.

That's a fifth of the entire human body's supply.

- Johnson wants to be fair about all of this,

so he donates his plasma to his father.

- [Dan] It's the world's first ever intergenerational

blood transfusion experiment.

- It probably sounds a little crazy.

It probably sounds like it couldn't possibly work.

The thing is, it kind of does, at least in mice.

- Researchers at UC San Francisco transfused blood

from young mice into older mice

and those older mice get some benefits

to get a little bit more energy.

Actually, some of their muscles are working a little better.

So clearly something is going on here.

- [Dan] Still, this starts to get old, even for Johnson.

- After six treatments,

Johnson decides he's not getting the results that he wants,

so he switches to a new treatment, shock therapy,

but not to his brain, to his genitals.

- He receives acoustic shockwave therapy on his genitals

three to five times a month.

He says that the pain is a nine out of 10,

but it has decreased the age of his penis by 15 years.

- I'm not sure how Johnson measures these findings,

but that's one treatment I'd pass on.

- As the Cold War heats up in the 1960s,

so do the experiments, from poison tipped umbrellas

to a plot targeting Fidel Castro's beard.

Nothing was off the table, not even cats.

- The idea behind Project Acoustic Kitty

is that cats are pretty innocuous

and they can roam around lots of places

without concerning anybody.

So if the cats can get themselves close enough

to private conversations,

they might be able to overhear important information.

- Now the cat's not gonna just go into a CIA debrief

and say the subject said this, the cat's not gonna do that.

So the cat is turned into a living listening device.

- The CIA pumps $20 million into training

and preparing cats that can be these spies.

- In order to make this work,

the CIA has to figure out a way to implant

this listening device into the cat.

And what they end up having to do is do surgery.

They put the listening device in the ear

and put a transmitter at the base of the animal's skull

and then run the antenna down an incision on the cat's back

so that it's hidden by the fur.

Not really fun for the cat, I'm sure.

- [Dan] With the cat wired up and trained,

it's time for this Secret Agent's first assignment.

- The goal is for the cat

to eavesdrop on two men sitting on a park bench

outside of the Soviet Embassy.

So the CIA agents drive up with the cat in their white van.

- They get the cat ready, they issue the cat the command,

it knows where to go.

They open the van, the cat jumps out.

- And it immediately gets hit by a taxi.

$20 million out the window.

With all of this research,

they never think, hey, you know what

we should pull over on the same side of the street

that the cat has to get out.

- [Dan] And just what,

does the CIA after action report identify

as the fatal flaw in an otherwise excellent plan?

- Quote, cats are not trainable

and they don't have the same deep seated desire

to please a human master as a dog does.

- Cats aren't the only animals

science has put through the ringer.

Dogs have had their turn too.

Especially one unlucky pair

that end up sharing more than just a leash.

[suspenseful music]

- It is the height of the Cold War and a Soviet surgeon

named Vladimir Demikhov begins to probe questions

of how far you can go with organ transplants.

- Vladimir Demikhov is actually one of the pioneers

of transplant surgery.

He's transplanting hearts and lungs between dogs

and he is doing it as a good doctor,

doing really meaningful, good work.

- [Dan] Vladimir Demikhov's next goal,

a full head transplant on a dog.

But since he's never done it before,

he needs to experiment a little first.

- Demikhov and his team essentially do an experiment

of creating a two-headed dog.

He wants to be able to see if he is able to take one head

and graft that onto another, and if he can keep that alive.

- He arranges to experiment with this on two dogs,

one smaller 9-year-old dog named Shavka

and one stray larger German Shepherd named Brodyaga.

- Vladimir detaches Shavka's head

and he attaches Shavka's head to Brodyaga's vertebrae.

- [Dan] Three and a half hours later,

the two-headed dog experiment is complete,

but does it actually work?

- It sounds awful.

She's just the head attached to this body,

but she eats, she drinks, she barks.

- [Dan] Vladimir's two-headed dog only lives for four days,

but that doesn't stop him from trying again and again.

- He does these exact kinds of experiments 23 more times

between 1954 and 1959.

And even though none of them are actually a success,

he firmly believes that he's proving to the world

that head transplants are possible.

- Perhaps it's for the best,

Vladimir's two headed dog experiment didn't work out.

It would've made playing fetch very complicated.

- Some of the most iconic books

and films feature tales of the undead,

but what might surprise you is

how many of them were inspired by real life science.

- It's 1803 in Italy,

a 40-year-old researcher named Giovanni Aldini

is on a mission to prove a theory

that the human body runs on its own electrical current.

- And he believes

that if there is already an electrical current

within the body, that by subjecting a dead body

to electrical current,

you can very possibly reanimate the dead.

Aldini decides he wants to get a body on the up and up,

and he reaches out to local prisons

to try to acquire the corpse

of a recently executed prisoner.

- Lucky for Aldini,

a man named George Foster has been sentenced to death

and they're willing to give Aldini, Foster's body,

fresh from the gallows.

- The execution goes as planned.

Aldini acquires the body.

And then at London's Royal Academy of Surgeons,

he schedules a real event to showcase his theory

with this freshly dead body.

- The theater is packed with the best

and brightest of the day,

and everyone in the Oval Theater has their eyes

on the wooden slab where Foster's body is lying,

covered by a white sheet.

- [Dan] Aldini rips the sheet from Foster's body

as a hush falls over the room.

- Aldini picks up prods that are connected by wires

to a zinc battery.

The electricity flows forth, he approaches the body

and the crowd is on the edge of their seats.

He touches the prod to the dead man's face.

The dead man, George Foster opens one of his eyes,

then Aldini takes the prod and puts it in his nether regions

and his whole body convulses.

- George Foster's arm then goes up in the air,

his legs are starting to move.

The entire audience thinks that the deceased

is about to stand up.

- [Dan] And then Aldini's battery dies

and the experiment ends.

But while George Foster doesn't come back to life,

Aldini's legacy does live on.

- The experiments do indicate

that electricity can at least stimulate dead tissue.

That part of the experiment is a success.

- As bizarre as the Aldini experiment is,

he's credited with pioneering electrotherapy as we know it,

as a modality of treatment.

But there's also another thing that he is credited with.

Mary Shelley wrote the book, Frankenstein, 10 years

after the Aldini experiment.

Frankenstein in which a dead body is reanimated

with electrical impulses, sounds very familiar.

- Aldini failed to bring back a whole body,

but another strange mind focused on bringing back

just one piece.

- In 1874, Alexander Graham Bell is a 27-year-old up

and coming inventor studying acoustics at MIT.

As a day job, he is a teacher at the school for the deaf.

- At the time, the deaf are seen and treated as outsiders.

There is no tried and true method yet

to teach the deaf to speak in a way

that softens their sometimes harsh tones

when they try to produce audible speech.

- They're unable to hear the sounds that they're making

and thus are unable to refine those sounds.

- He starts to think that if he could figure out a way

for his students to visualize sound,

then maybe they'll understand it

and figure out a way to repeat it.

- He's fascinated by the way the human ear works.

Sound enters the ear, it vibrates

and every different kind of sound makes it vibrate

a little differently.

He wants to somehow capture that vibration visually.

- [Dan] To bring his vision to life,

Bell looks to the human body itself.

- Bell wants to base his invention off of the anatomy

of an actual human ear.

So he talks to his colleague, Dr. Clarence Blake,

who has an interesting idea.

Why not use an actual human ear for this invention?

So he suggests using a dead person's ear.

- Bell's friend Dr. Clarence Blake

works with medical cadavers.

He procures a human ear

that has been preserved so that it's innards,

including the ear drum, are still intact.

- [Dan] Now that Bell has his ear,

he can build his prototype and start testing it out.

- Bell fixes the ear to a stalk of hay.

The stalk of hay travels from the eardrum

to a plate that's covered with a thin layer of charcoal.

- [Dan] His theory is that when sound hits the eardrum,

the vibration will cause the hay

to draw a unique pattern into the charcoal.

- Bell begins speaking into this ear trumpet

and it works.

When the vibrations of sound hit the ear drum,

it ends up moving the hay, thus drawing wave forms

in the charcoal and each one of those waveforms is unique

to the letter or the word that he's saying.

- Next Bell performs the experiment with his students.

He speaks an A into the device

and the students can see the shape of a proper A.

- Now the students can speak into the device themselves,

create their own shape of sound and match it against Bell's.

- [Dan] Bell calls the new device,

the Dead Ear Phonautograph.

- Not only does this device dramatically assist

deaf people in communicating,

but it forms the germination of Bell's most famous device,

the telephone.

- He begins to theorize that you could use the sound

of your voice to create an electrical current

to send your voice down a telegraph wire.

And voila, two years later, the invention of the telephone.

- When you're strapping microphones

to cats raising chimps like children or sipping viral vomit

in the name of research,

you've crossed the line from science into something else.

These aren't just bizarre footnotes in history.

They've earned their place as the very best

of The Unbelievable .