All language subtitles for The UnBelievable with Dan Aykroyd s03e19 Maddest Minds.eng

[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 .

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