Episode 192: Time Will Tell

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This is the story of the one.

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John Tyler was born in 1790 and served as the 10th President of the United States in the early 1840s.

And last year, one of his grandsons passed away.

Let those dates and details sink in for a moment.

The grandson of a president born in 1790 just passed away last year.

It sounds insane.

It sounds made up.

And yet it's real.

It's a concept that writer Jason Kotke calls the Great Span, when individual lives seem to span inconceivable lengths of time.

Another example would be the 1956 TV show I've Got a Secret that featured a guest named Samuel Seymour.

His secrets?

He was in Ford's Theater on April 14th of 1865 and witnessed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

And one more, because I love these kinds of stories so much.

Last year, a woman named Helen Viola Jackson passed away.

You've probably never heard of her, but she had an amazing distinction that should be pointed out.

She was the last surviving widow of a Civil War soldier.

Impossible?

Not true.

You see, back in 1936, she was just 17, and that's the year she married James Bolin, a 93-year-old veteran.

The Civil War had ended 155 years earlier, and yet here was a woman last year who could remember conversations with someone who fought in it.

Like I said, I love these kinds of stories.

For someone who loves history, it brings the past to life in a whole new way, and it certainly gives us something fun to tell others at parties.

But the most fascinating aspect of stories like these are what they do to our perception of time.

They wow us because they seem to break the rules.

They put the impossible on display and they expose just how brief and fleeting all our lives seem to be in the face of history.

Time might move at the same speed for all of us, but if we break the rules, we risk inviting dangerous consequences.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is lore.

Time is a funny thing, isn't it?

We're all aware of it.

It's a rule that all of us must follow, and so it's no wonder that for thousands of years we've been trying to measure it.

The oldest example of this, as far as archaeologists are concerned, is a bone object from the Simliki Valley in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

It's nearly 20,000 years old, and it has the distinct marks on it of someone recording the passage of time.

And of course, all around the world, there are examples of monuments built and aligned to connect us with the solstices, and sometimes even constellations.

Needless to say, our love affair with time is pretty old.

The Babylonians and ancient Egyptians introduced calendars to civilization around 5,000 years ago, and they were designed to make life more efficient.

When to plant and harvest was of the utmost importance to them, and they needed to make it foolproof.

New technology appeared over the years, of course.

Sundials used shadows to mark off the hours, but only worked during the day.

Candle clocks and water clocks could operate at night, but they weren't as accurate and were a bit messy.

But it was religion that really pushed clocks into the forefront of everyone's minds.

You see, monastic orders throughout Europe needed a dependable way for their followers to strictly observe prayer times.

In 1283 the first known weight-driven mechanical clock was installed at a priory in Dunstable in England, creating a way for everyone to be on time.

Oh and because these early timekeepers used bells to indicate the time they were referred to by the Latin word for bell, clocka, which is why we call them clocks.

But don't be fooled by our modern understanding of timekeeping.

that appearance of mastery and control, because for most of history our track record at measuring time was pretty weak.

For example, there was a while when no one could agree on when a new day began.

Italians believed it started at sunset, Babylonians thought it was sunrise, and Germans preferred the middle of the night.

But even knowing what the daily boundaries were didn't make measuring the time between them any easier.

Right up until the 14th century, if you were to watch a clock in London, an hour might vary anywhere from 40 to 80 minutes in length.

But it wasn't long before reliable mechanical clocks were created, and the day was chopped up into little clocks, what the French called hours.

One thing to keep in mind was just how mystical all of this must have felt to people.

Measuring time was complicated and mysterious, and so much of it was up for debate.

We could all agree that time marched onward and that the effects of time were clearly observable.

But how it all worked?

Well, that was just plain magic.

For the longest time, if you'll pardon the pun, people spoke about the passing of time as a forward-flowing river.

Some ancient mythology, like the Mahabharata, for example, used time in fascinating ways though.

In one story, King Kakudmi was said to have traveled to the home of the creator god to seek an audience, but he was asked to wait a few minutes for a song to finish playing.

When he finally returned to earth from the heavens, more than 100 million years had passed by.

And of course, most everyone has heard of Rip Van Winkle, a story by Sleepy Hollow author Washington Irving, about a man, Rip, who falls asleep and wakes up two decades later.

It was a clever way of showing how much can change in just a few years, and readers loved it.

But there's one thing that literature hadn't done.

People were moving forward in time, whether through help from the gods or just a good old-fashioned nap, but they weren't moving backwards.

At least not until the 1800s, that is.

Thanks to the Industrial Revolution and a fire hose of new life-changing technology, people were starting to wonder.

Between electricity, steam power, and things like the railroad and the telegraph, it honestly started to feel like just about anything was possible.

And perhaps, it really was.

In August of 1901, Charlotte Moberly took a trip to France.

She was the principal of St.

Hughes College for Women at Oxford, and the school had just hired a new vice principal, a woman named Eleanor Jourdain.

And ahead of Eleanor's arrival in England, Charlotte decided to go spend time with her in Paris to get to know her a little better.

On the 10th of August, the two women decided to take a trip to the Palace of Versailles.

They did tourist things, and who can blame them?

Versailles is breathtaking, and so they spent time walking all over, soaking it in, and enjoying their little window into the past.

But at some point, they seem to have gotten lost.

Charlotte later described it as a feeling as if she were walking in her sleep, and a week later, after nervously wondering if she should bring it up with Eleanor, she discovered that her new friend had experienced the same thing that afternoon.

Exactly what those things were?

Well, let me walk you through it so you can form your own opinion.

Both of them would later describe walking through the ornate gardens there, and how as they did, they spotted a woman sitting on a ground level terrace on the northwest side of the palace.

As they approached they noticed that the woman was dressed in old-fashioned clothing in a light summer dress from another era.

They said she was older but beautiful and Charlotte couldn't shake the feeling that the woman didn't belong there.

It probably didn't help that she was holding a large parchment up and away from her chest so she could read it better.

All of it, from her white hat and big hair to the woman's location on the grounds, just felt off.

Nearby, they also spotted something less beautiful, but just as jarring.

Both women remembered seeing a man dressed in a heavy black cloak and an odd hat.

And as he turned to look in their direction, they noticed how his face was covered in smallpox scars.

Perhaps it was his overall appearance, or maybe it was in the expression that he gave them.

But Charlotte and Eleanor both wrote that they felt the man was an evil presence.

After that, the pair of women were swept up in the arrival of a French wedding party, and after that, they boarded a carriage that took them back to their hotel.

In the weeks and months to come, they would share more and more of their personal observations with each other, finding comfort in the realization that neither of them had imagined it all in their own minds.

It had really happened.

A decade after their experience, the two women published their account in a book called The Adventure, and they also set about trying to prove what they witnessed was true.

They dug through old maps and documents, getting a better understanding for the palace, its history, and key figures who once lived and worked there.

And their realization?

They were certain that they had stepped backward through time into a different August 10th, one set over a century earlier.

In fact, they believed that they had witnessed Marie Antoinette on the terraced lawn and passed by the imposing figure of Comte du Devral, a man who would later betray the queen in the midst of the French Revolution.

Naturally, there are those who disagree.

Time travel isn't possible, they say, and so there must be a more reasonable explanation.

Some have suggested that Charlotte and Eleanor had a chance encounter with a tableau vivant, a silent reenactment, like a living still-life exhibition.

Others think it was just a random historical dress-up party, and the women happened to step right into it.

But what's clear is just how much discussion their book has generated over the past century.

People are still talking about it, dissecting it, and analyzing the details.

Because it's ever so tantalizing to think about the possibilities, the what-ifs that their story presents.

To experience something like that firsthand would be extraordinary for sure, but something else is even more certain.

To see it happen to someone else might just be the most thrilling of all.

The story is absolutely mind-bending, so let me walk you through the details.

It all begins on a warm summer night, around 11 p.m.

in 1950.

As it's told, the setting is New York City and one of the busiest intersections in town.

According to witnesses, that was the time and place that an unusual figure appeared in the street.

He was dressed in odd clothing and had a look of astonishment on his face.

Some say he even looked up at the tall buildings and cowered slightly, as if all of it was just too much to take in.

No one saw him approach from down the street.

No one saw him step out of a cab.

He just sort of appeared in the middle of the intersection.

And while his moment of wonderment was noticed by some, it was short-lived.

A few heartbeats later, a car struck him.

and brought his life to an end.

But what sort of life had that been?

And who did he leave behind in the wake of his death?

As has so often happened before, the authorities were called and they tried their best to identify the man.

But the only clues they found were some items in his pockets.

Unusual items, to say the least.

One object was a crisp, new, handwritten letter addressed to someone named Rudolph Fence.

But it was dated 1876 and quickly dismissed.

Other than that, there was some cash, also relatively new in appearance, but also from the early 1870s.

The man had no identification, his fingerprints didn't match anything on record, and there was no one by that name in the police files.

Investigators, as you might imagine, were stumped.

And then the detective hit on an odd lead.

He found a Rudolph Fence Jr.

listed in an old phone book and tried to track the man down.

A man by that name had indeed passed away a few years earlier, and his widow had moved to Florida, so the authorities reached out to her, and her story sent the investigation into dark territory.

Her late husband's father, Rudolph Sr., had lived in New York City, yes, but the man disappeared one night and never returned.

It seems that one evening in 1876, he went out for a walk around 10 p.m.

and had simply vanished.

It's said that the detective felt like the story was too weird to be true, so he didn't pursue it further.

And for a long time, no one talked about it.

But in 1972, they say it started to appear in publications around the world.

First, in a journal by an organization called the Borderland Sciences Research Foundation, who devoted their time to studying paranormal events.

Around the year 2000, a Spanish magazine published an account of the events, and that article caught the eye of an Englishman living in Spain.

Chris Albeck was a researcher well-versed in supernatural phenomena, and he recognized the story, so he reached out to the Spanish magazine for more information.

It turns out that their source for for the piece was a short story by an author named Jack Finney, published in a 1951 issue of Collier's magazine.

It was, from the start, presented as fiction, an imaginative work of speculation that allowed the author to explore time and space and what might be possible.

In other words, it was science fiction, picked up by the internet five decades later, and passed around as if it were true.

An urban legend of the highest quality, right up there with Slender Man and Polybius.

It's a realization that's done two things ever since.

First, it's blown a hole in the story, leaving a lot of people disappointed, which is totally understandable.

I think it's a great tale, and even I wish all or parts of it could be real.

But second, it teaches us that I'm not alone.

A huge population of people also wish the story had been true.

It shows how attractive these time-bending stories are, how drawn the human mind is to the possibility that time is more than a one-way river, and it's left us more aware than ever before of what sort of oddities to look for.

Because even in the face of labels like Impossible and science fiction, these stories continue to bring out one of our most enduring qualities:

hope.

It is amazing what the past couple of centuries have given us from an entertainment point of view.

We've gone from stories about men who fall asleep and wake up years later to those of individuals who have slipped backward in time.

Mark Twain gave us a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court back in 1889.

Six years later, H.G.

Wells published the OG of time travel stories with his novel The Time Machine.

And there have been countless others ever since.

From Back to the Future to The Umbrella Academy, pop culture is obsessed with time travel.

And that obsession is hidden in plain sight right inside our words.

In his 2005 book, The Unfolding of Language, author Guy Deutscher makes an interesting point.

No matter where people are from in the world, It's impossible for them to talk about time without using terms reserved for space and distance.

We meet our friends for lunch around noon and we pass time as if we were riding by it in a car.

Honestly, it's not a surprise.

The passage of time is full of interesting qualities.

Writer Mark Sumner pointed out a few years ago that if you picked key historical figures that shared birth and death dates, like a baton race, you could line them up one after the other and build lines of connection between the past and the present.

Through that method, you and I are only six lifespans from William Shakespeare.

Time is a funny thing, and for one man it was more of a playground than most.

Stephen Hawking famously held a dinner party for time travelers on June 29th of 2009.

He kept the plans for it a complete secret and then arrived at the location in Cambridge that evening to sit in his wheelchair below a banner that read, Welcome Time Travelers.

You see, because the invitations were sent out after the party began, the only people who could have shown up on time were people from the future who were capable of traveling into the past.

It was a fun game that demonstrated the possibilities wrapped up in that commonplace term.

Time traveler.

Hawking, of course, passed away in 2018, after a lifetime of altering the world of physics in a way that few others have accomplished.

His funeral was held at Westminster Abbey in London, and as you can imagine, it was a grand affair.

And as it turns out, Hawking's foundation decided to make the event open to the general public, as long as they filled out an online application.

But only a select group of people were allowed to submit those applications, those who could prove they were born between the years 2019 and 2038.

Time travel, according to the Foundation, had yet to be disproven, and so they wanted to make sure time travelers could come pay their respects to one of the key figures in scientific history.

But it seems that none were around to take them up on the offer.

Time is the centerpiece of so many stories we share and love.

Whether individuals are breaking the rules of time, racing the clock, or using their connection to the past to determine their future, so many amazing stories wouldn't tick without time.

And I've tracked it on another that you're going to love.

Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it.

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So what do this animal

and this animal

and this animal

have in common?

They all live on an organic valley farm.

Organic valley dairy comes from small organic family farms that protect the land and the plants and animals that live on it from toxic pesticides, which leads to a thriving ecosystem and delicious, nutritious milk and cheese.

Learn more at OV.coop and taste the difference.

I've always been fascinated by the physical paraphernalia of time.

Grandfather clocks, tall clock towers, and mechanical wristwatches.

There's something magical bound up within those tiny gears and jewels, with terms like escapement and balance spring, giving them almost a living quality.

So naturally, clockmakers have always been considered fine craftspeople, working in a specialized field that gives us an essential tool.

If you want a fascinating deep dive into that world, you should read Longitude by Dava Sobel, a history of the work of 18th century clockmaker John Harrison.

It is utterly fascinating.

But another clockmaker made a name for himself centuries before, deep inside Europe.

And the story of his achievement and the drama around it has left a mark that is still felt to this day.

And it all begins in the 15th century, in the beautiful city of Prague.

Mikulas was a clockmaker from the town of Cadania, who is credited with being hired to design and build a clock for the city of Prague.

It's said that the earliest parts of the current clock were completed by him around 1410, and if you haven't seen videos, it's really worth looking at them.

The astronomical clock, known in Prague as the Orloi, is a mechanical marvel.

It has multiple clock faces that track things like the calendar, the zodiac, the position of the sun and moon, and even the stars.

And it has this wonderful hourly show where a parade of wooden sculptures of the apostles march by, along with a skeleton that represents death.

But there's a legend attached to the clock tower that stuck around for centuries.

It seems that after completing his masterpiece, clockmaker Mikolas was approached by other countries to come and build them similar clocks.

And word of his fame began to spread to the leaders of Prague, who were worried that he might take one of these countries up on their offer, making their clock less unique, less special.

So they did the only thing that a medieval government ever seemed to be able to do.

They used violence.

They took the clockmaker into custody and then blinded him so that he could never work again.

For them, it was problem solved, but for Mikolas, life was over.

He could no longer do what he loved.

He could no longer enjoy life the way he had before.

So it's said that in a fit of grief, he decided to destroy the city's clock tower in the only manner left to him.

He climbed to the top, stood over its matrix of massive gears, and threw himself into it.

Ever since, folks in Prague have claimed that the Orloi has been cursed.

For starters, the final act of Mikolas left the clock itself inoperable for over a century, finally being repaired in the 1550s.

But more than that, people believe that anyone else who works in or near it will go mad or die.

Some have even whispered that if the clock should ever stop, the city itself would experience massive tragedy.

Which sounds like something an old crone might mutter to a young hero at the beginning of a fantasy movie.

But there are events in Prague's history that seem to give the legend the flavor of truth.

In 1939, for example, the Nazis took control of the city.

Some say it was because the clock stopped working, while others blame the breakdown on the occupation, a sort of chicken and egg debate.

But the biggest example happened just a few years later.

In May of 1945, a group of Czech resistance fighters attempted to free the city from Nazi hands.

It's referred to as the Prague Uprising by historians and has enough drama to fill a novel.

But it's said that during the battle, the tower was badly damaged by a firebomb, causing the clock to stop.

The Czech rebels ended up losing nearly 1,700 lives that day, almost four times the losses suffered by the Nazis.

And local legend says that's because of the risk they brought to the foot of the tower.

Proof, they say, is in the time that the tides of battle turned against them.

The very moment the damage to the clock occurred.

This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Robin Miniter and music by Chad Lawson.

Lore is much more than just a podcast.

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Check them both out if you want more lore in your life.

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