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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.

Nightingale, lark, falcon, crow, snipe, loon, seagull, heron, turtle dove, magpie.

What do these birds all have in common?

Well, here's a hint in the form of a quote.

The cuckoo then on every tree mocks married men for thus sings he.

Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo.

That's right.

All these birds appear in the works of William Shakespeare, which is perhaps a fancy way of saying that they were all common knowledge in Elizabethan England.

Throughout the bard's works, birds are a flexible metaphor.

They're symbols for pining love, for men and women behaving like fools, for the devastation wrought by war.

More than 60 species of birds come up this way.

Romeo and Juliet famously argue over the call of a nightingale or a lark, an argument that stands for the fear that dawn has come and Romeo must flee for his life.

Over the years, Shakespeare's work has been viewed through various cultural lenses and experienced growing pains when it traveled from England to America.

As the new cultural identity of the United States emerged, British actors looked down on Americans trying to perform the bard's greatest works.

Different acting styles emerged, and arguments within the theatrical world began that continue to this present day.

But did you know that Shakespeare's influence on the new world was a little more than cultural?

There was even an environmental impact as well.

In 1890, 51 years after the Macbeth-inspired Astor Place riots that we've already covered on this show, a man named Eugene Shefflin stepped out into New York's Central Park.

As the story goes, he was a huge fan of William Shakespeare.

and also an amateur ornithologist.

This man just loved birds.

And when he traveled to Central Central Park that day, he brought with him 60 European starlings that he had imported with some help.

You see, he was an influential member of the American Acclimization Society, a group that sought to introduce European flora and fauna to America.

They had previously introduced European sparrows and blackbirds to Central Park and were eager to see how successful starlings would be.

Shefflin first released 60 starlings and then came back with 40 more.

They eagerly found home amongst the hollows in the trees, muscling out the other birds.

Unlike attempts to introduce the nightingale, bullfinches, and skylarks, this one was a success, for better or for worse.

Over the following decades, the United States realized that as a group, starlings were something of a menace.

They proliferated madly across the country, eventually reaching a population of 200 million in the U.S.

alone.

And when commercial aviation took off, starlings were their biggest problem.

The most deadly bird strike of all time occurred in 1960 when starlings brought down an airplane as it took off from Boston.

Despite their size, their bodies are extremely dense, making them a hazard for aircraft of all types.

And damage they do to farmers' crops numbers in the billions of dollars, stealing grain and produce.

Experts have pointed out that declining numbers of woodpeckers and bluebirds could be attributed to how many starlings live in the continental U.S.

Whether this is true or not, the result is a startling one.

European starlings are one of the few bird species that are unprotected by law.

Hunters and trappers can kill as many as they like without consequence, as could farmers who want to protect their crops from these creatures.

Of course, they're so small that they evade most natural predators, and the same is true for human hunters.

They're just too little and too many to fully control.

And all of this because of Shakespeare and a single line in Henry IV, Part 1, Act 1, Scene 3.

In this scene, one of the characters reflects on the king's attitude toward one of his enemies.

And I quote, He said he would not ransom Mortimer, forbade my tongue to speak of Mortimer.

But I will find him when he lies asleep, and in his ear I'll hollow Mortimer.

Nay, I'll have a starling shall be taught to speak nothing but Mortimer.

and give it to him to keep his anger still in motion.

And it makes you wonder, if Shakespeare had not chosen chosen this particular metaphor for the rant, the entire landscape of North America might be different.

It feels like in discussing the trajectory of the European starlings, we've discovered a new version of the butterfly effect.

Maybe we should call it the starling effect.

Now that's something that would be worth writing a play about.

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In 1955, Soviet newspapers were awash with stories on the future of space exploration.

Humankind was not destined to remain on Earth, they insisted.

Our future lay in the stars, and the charge into that great unknown would be led not by the West, but by the Russians.

And cementing these bold proclamations was a somewhat mundane development.

Moscow had just approved the formation of a new commission to study interplanetary space.

In other words, nothing had been built yet, the science still had to be done, but the Soviet Union was ready to spend the rubles to make it happen.

The news was picked up by the American media sources, setting off alarm bells in Washington, D.C.

In July, the Eisenhower administration announced plans to launch a satellite into orbit by 1958.

And thus, the spark had been lit.

Thrusters primed and ready, all systems go.

The space race had begun.

But here's the thing, those Soviet articles that stirred the U.S.

into action, they were a lie, or at least a massive exaggeration.

The man behind them was a scientist named Sergei Korolev, who had spent the last decade building missiles for the Soviet Union.

Korolev was convinced that his rockets had greater purposes than just blowing people up and had recently lobbied the Soviet government to create a satellite program.

The response had been lukewarm at best.

Moscow wasn't interested in throwing away money on science without a clear military purpose.

But Korolev wasn't ready to give up.

He rewrote the proposal for a less expensive program and then got to work drumming up enthusiasm.

He put out speculative articles that first got Russians and then Americans hyped about the possibilities of space travel and then when washington took the bait korolev knew his gambit had paid off soviet leadership reversed course embracing the program that he had asked for and suddenly he had everything he needed permission funding and the authority to move forward and move forward he did korolev personally oversaw the design and construction of the world's first artificial satellite Sputnik 1.

The polished metal sphere, equipped with four antennae, was small, simple, and built in record time.

On October 4th of 1957, it was launched into orbit with an R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile, the first rocket of its kind, engineered by Korolev himself.

The launch of Sputnik ignited a frenzy in the West, spurring the U.S.

government to accelerate its own space program.

Meanwhile, Korolev's bosses in Moscow were over the moon, no pun intended, with his splashy success and gave him the green light for even more ambitious projects.

Korolev didn't let the momentum go to waste either.

Just a month after Sputnik 1, he launched Sputnik 2, carrying the first living passenger into orbit, a dog named Laika.

Then, in 1961, he achieved the unthinkable.

He put the first human, Yuri Gagarin, into space aboard the Vostok 1.

Every major Soviet space milestone of the era bore his fingerprints.

Yet despite all he had done for the Soviet Union, Moscow kept the identity of Sputnik's creator a secret until after his death, almost like they were ashamed of their greatest rocket scientist.

And maybe they were.

You see, at the time Korolev started his space program, he was technically a political prisoner.

In 1938, during Stalin's purges, he was arrested on falsified charges of anti-Soviet activities and sent to the Gulag, where he nearly died of malnutrition and abuse.

Only the desperate need for missile engineers during World War II saved his life.

He was quietly pulled from the camps and forced to work under strict supervision, designing weapons for a regime that had nearly killed him.

Even after his later rehabilitation, Korolev remained under constant surveillance, unable to travel abroad or even be publicly named as the leader of the Soviet space program.

But there was an even more damning reason Moscow might have wanted to keep his identity under wraps.

one that undermines the Soviet Union's early claim to superiority in the space race.

Because the man who created Sputnik didn't even call the Soviet Union home.

That's right, Sergei Korolev wasn't Russian.

He was born in Ukraine.

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 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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