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Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, All of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

John was sweating in his stiff uniform under the hot studio lights.

It was October 4th of 1957, and all that morning, he'd been focusing on music.

This wasn't unusual for John.

As a test pilot, his mind was usually on popular mechanics, not popular songs.

Today, however, he was turning in his pilot's license for a chance to compete on a game show called Name That Tune.

As the cameras started rolling and the orchestra played, the host of the show introduced John and Eddie, the 10-year-old boy who'd be his partner on the show that night.

Noting that John was a military pilot, the host went slightly off script to ask him a question that the entire audience was probably wondering.

What did he think of the Russian satellite that was circling the globe at that very moment?

Beyond this being John's debut in game show stardom, October 4th of 1957 was the day that Russia launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite into orbit.

John smiled and responded that this marked the beginning of a new age of space travel, one that perhaps his co-contestant Eddie would participate in someday.

John didn't know it yet, but it was he, not Eddie, that was about to shoot for the stars.

Growing up in Ohio, John had a fascination with planes from a young age.

After taking his first flight with his father at eight years old, he spent hours making model planes and imagining flying them through the clouds.

As he grew older, imagination turned into action.

John obtained a private pilot's license in college in 1941, clocking hundreds of hours in the air.

By the time the United States entered World War II in December of 41, John knew what he wanted to do.

He wanted to be a fighter pilot for the U.S.

military.

He served in the Pacific as a Marine pilot, flying 57 missions against Japanese planes.

By the time the Korean War rolled around in the early 1950s, John was known as a fearless flyer who didn't hesitate to hunt down the communist forces' faster, better-equipped MiG-15 jets.

While he was patrolling the skies over Korea, he had his first brush with fame in the form of his wingman, Boston Red Sox Hall of Fame hitter Ted Williams.

But in a few short years, it would be John and not Ted making the headlines.

After the war, John began working as a test pilot for the the Navy.

And as the years went on, John found himself behind a desk more often than he was in the cockpit.

Knowing if he didn't act soon, that he would be relegated to paperwork forever, he came up with a scheme, one that would show off the Navy's latest technology and cement his status as a flying star.

On July 16th of 1957, John made the first ever supersonic transcontinental flight.

He flew from California to New York in just three hours and 23 seconds, a full 22 minutes less than the standing record.

The moment he exited the cockpit in New York, he entered a new world, where he was a celebrity.

He was profiled in the New York Times and invited to compete on the game show Name That Tune.

On that game show, he won $25,000, which he used for his children's college fund.

But the money wasn't the biggest impact from the game show.

John's taping of Name That Tune just so happened to coincide with the launching of Sputnik, Russia's first satellite.

And while Sputnik was a huge human achievement, it also spiked anxiety across the globe.

The U.S.

was terrified that if Russia controlled space, it would control the world.

And so the race was on to master the final frontier.

John shared these fears.

He had spent his whole career fighting America's enemies in the sky.

And if the fight was going even higher, then he wanted to join it.

So once the United States announced that they were recruiting astronauts for its space program, he was one of the first to apply and the first to make the cut.

On February 20th of 1962, John's dreams finally came true when the spaceship Friendship 7 launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

John navigated several malfunctions and technical failures, forcing him to take over manual operation of the spacecraft.

Despite that, just five hours later, they splashed down safely in the Pacific Ocean.

And just like that, John Glenn became the first American astronaut to to safely orbit our planet.

An achievement that wasn't just incredible, it was literally out of this world.

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The dawn of the 20th century saw the invention of many staples of our modern life.

The motion picture was slowly gaining ground as a popular entertainment rather than as a novelty.

The automobile was growing increasingly popular, and in the realm of cuisine, sweetened carbonated soft drinks were becoming more and more ubiquitous.

While soft drinks had been around for over 100 years, the late 1800s saw the formation of both Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola, companies that would define the market to the present day.

Their immediate popularity would also inspire a gold rush of food chemists and entrepreneurs trying to gain a foothold in that market.

Among those was Charles Leiper Grigg, an adman who saw the value in creating a distinct drink to counter-program Coke and Pepsi.

You see, both of those drinks were colas, extremely high in sugar.

Grigg believed that he could invent a so-called uncola, a soft drink that would be just as appealing, but based on an entirely different set of flavors and ingredients.

His first experiment was with an orange flavor profile, which led to the creation of a soft drink called Whistle in 1919.

However, disputes with the co-founder of that company caused him to disown the invention and strike out on his own.

He attempted to launch another orange drink independently, which he called Howdy.

However, this particular drink never took off.

The market was already being dominated by orange crush, an invention of the 1910s.

Greg soon realized that any future success he might have with soft drinks would not be among the oranges.

He began exploring drinks that were based not on an orange flavor, but lemon.

There were many lemon drinks at the time, but they varied widely by region and none had properly been franchised.

There was no lemon crush to steal his thunder.

He tested a number of different combinations of flavors, around 11, most say, and eventually settled on a formula that he thought would be a runaway success.

The formula included something called lithium citrate.

Lithium at the time was a popular mood stabilizer and it would become a central part of the soda's marketing campaign once it hit the shelves in 1929, two weeks before the stock market crash that triggered the Great Depression.

A cheap beverage that made people feel better would be in high demand as fortunes plummeted and millions faced financial ruin.

The drink was internally known as Bib Label Lithiated Lemon Lime Carbonated Soda, but this name would be a bit of a mouthful, no pun intended.

The marketers who were working with Griggs said that it would need to be shortened to lithiated lemon soda in order to fit more comfortably on advertisements.

But that was not a particularly catchy name either, not like whistle or howdy.

The name they settled on would be much catchier, but to this day historians are uncertain exactly where it came from.

It was either the atomic mass of lithium, the size of the bottles in ounces, or a reference to the number of ingredients in Grigg's final formula.

But whatever the truth is, we all know what they settled on.

Here's an early advertisement.

It reads, Seven surprises await you.

Seven natural flavors blended into a new drink delight.

You get the intensified flavor resulting from the blending of flavors known to you, an invented sugar drink, 96 to 104 calories per bottle.

And this drink, of course, would be 7 up.

Almost a century later, it is still regarded as one of the giants of the soda world.

Although in the years since its invention, certain adjustments have needed to be made.

Lithium citrate, for instance, is no longer part of the recipe.

But it still occupies the same unique spot in the soda world that Grigg carved out 96 years ago.

Not bad for a drink.

It was once known as lithiated lemon.

I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts or learn more about the show by visiting CuriositiesPodcast.com.

The show show was created by me, Aaron Mankey, in partnership with How Stuff Works.

I make another award-winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show.

And you can learn all about it over at theworldoflore.com.

And until next time, stay curious.

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