Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchThe first female doctor hated medicine
Episode 6379
The first female physician in the United States initially found medicine repulsive. Elizabeth Blackwell couldn't stand the sight of disease, but when…
1 week, 4 days ago
The Fifty Three Million Pound Securitas Heist
Episode 6378
Picture standing in a vault staring at 154 million pounds in cash, and having to walk away from every penny of it because your 7.5-ton getaway truck …
1 week, 4 days ago
The Farm Boy Who Invented Television
Episode 6377
On July 3rd, 1957, a man introduced only as "Dr. X" stumped the celebrity panel of the CBS quiz show I've Got a Secret. His secret: "I invented elect…
1 week, 4 days ago
The False Face of Vitus Bering
Episode 6376
His name covers the map: the Bering Sea, the Bering Strait, a glacier, an island. But when forensic scientists exhumed his grave in 1991, the bones d…
1 week, 4 days ago
The Empty Safe of Thérèse Humbert
Episode 6375
Paris, 1902. A court orders a legendary, heavily guarded safe cracked open, the safe that supposedly held millions in bearer bonds and had anchored t…
1 week, 4 days ago
The Dropout Who Invented the Microwave
Episode 6374
The humming box in your kitchen owes its existence to a double orphan from rural Maine who left school at twelve to work in a spool mill. Percy Spenc…
1 week, 4 days ago
The Deaf Teacher Who Invented Spaceflight
Episode 6373
In a drafty log house on the muddy outskirts of a Russian provincial town, a deaf, self-taught math teacher the locals dismissed as the town crank, f…
1 week, 4 days ago
The Curse of the Brink s-Mat Gold
Episode 6372
On a chilly Saturday morning in November 1983, six armed men broke into a Heathrow warehouse expecting one million pounds in Spanish pesetas. Instead…
1 week, 4 days ago
The Cult Leader Behind the Theorem
Episode 6371
Think of Pythagoras and you picture the equation and a dusty chalkboard. But modern scholars believe the man himself probably never did significant m…
1 week, 4 days ago
The Clerk Who Shocked Cambridge Mathematics
Episode 6370
In 1913, one of the world's leading mathematicians opened a nine-page letter from an unknown accounting clerk in Madras and initially suspected fraud…
1 week, 4 days ago