[Dan Aykroyd narrating]
[suspenseful music]
What happens when a town is faced
with an actual whale of a problem?
- This thing is decomposing by the day,
and it might fall apart if pushed or pulled.
- They wanna pack this thing with so much dynamite
that it will literally vaporize.
You might be thinking, "It's a bit excessive, isn't it?"
[explosion booming]
- Or how does one deal with an island overrun by snakes?
[snake hissing]
- These animals are almost impossible to kill.
- So the plan is to bomb the jungle
from helicopters with mice.
- Here's where it gets complicated.
[snake hissing]
- What about the astonishing way
one man keeps his family warm?
- He needs to find something to burn
to save his daughter's life.
[flame sizzling]
They're throwing stack after stack of money onto the fire,
$10,000 at a time.
- These are the ideas so outlandish,
they are truly "Unbelievable."
[dramatic music]
It started as a calm day on the Oregon coast
until a strange stench filled the air
and set the stage
for one of the most bizarre cleanup efforts in history.
[suspenseful music]
- It is a lovely fall day in Oregon in 1970.
People are taking November walks down the beach,
and, all of a sudden, they see this massive whale
washed up on the shore.
- This is a rotting sperm whale
that's the size of a school bus.
We're talking 45 feet long and eight tons.
- At first, the whale is kind of an attraction.
People go to check it out.
People are taking pictures.
But pretty soon, things start to turn
in a different direction.
- It starts to reek very badly.
I mean, this is a massive, rotting mammal.
- You've probably had something go bad
in the back of your refrigerator.
Well, imagine eight tons of rotting leftovers.
People can smell it a mile away.
- [Dan] Back then, beach cleanup fell
upon an unlikely source:
the Oregon State Highway Division.
- The Highway Division considers their options.
This thing is decomposing by the day,
and it might fall apart if pushed or pulled,
making an even bigger mess.
They have to find a way to get rid of it without moving it.
- [Dan] After consulting with the Navy,
the State Highway Division comes up with an explosive plan.
- They wanna bring in a half a ton of dynamite.
Now, 1,000 pounds of dynamite,
you might be thinking, "It's a bit excessive, isn't it?"
That's the plan, though.
The plan is to pack this thing with so much dynamite
that it will literally vaporize.
They want to blow it to smithereens.
- The idea is the bigger the explosive charge,
the better the chances
it will disintegrate the whale carcass.
And whatever small pieces of the whale are left,
well, those will get eaten by seagulls
and other little scavengers like crabs.
- [Dan] That morning, hundreds of people show up,
and the local news even sends their best anchor
to cover the story.
- If there's any large chunks left,
possibly set another charge.
- They pack the whale full of dynamite,
and they start the countdown,
and everybody's getting excited,
and they count it down
with five, four, three, two, one.
[explosion booming]
- [Dan] As the pink mists
of blood and blubber spray the beach,
it seems as though the idea is a success.
- And then people start running,
because what goes up must come down.
[intense music]
- Even from 900 feet away,
people are being pummeled with whale blubber, and blood,
and everything that was rotting inside this giant carcass.
[people screaming]
- People are desperately trying to avoid getting crushed
by these 50-pound chunks of whale.
- [Dan] While no onlookers suffer any major injuries,
one spectator takes a different kind of hit.
[film screeching]
- That day, Walter Umenhofer drives to the beach
in his beautiful, new 1969 Oldsmobile Regency.
Walter is parked a full quarter mile from the explosion,
but that doesn't stop [explosion booming]
a gigantic five-foot-long slab of whale flesh
[car rattling]
from landing directly on top of his new car.
- But here's the best part.
When Walter went to go buy this car,
he bought it from the dealership that was holding a sale
that was called, "Get a Whale of a Deal."
- Safe to say,
if another whale ever washes ashore in Lane County,
the folks in charge will definitely think twice
before lighting the fuse.
Lesson learned.
Now, 7,500 miles away,
there's another mammal trying very hard to not get blown up.
[tense music]
- Cambodia's the site of a great deal of Cold War combat,
[gunshots echoing]
stretching from the 1960s
all the way through to the 1990s.
[gunshots echoing]
- During this time, combatant groups found landmines
to be a very effective way of fighting the war.
[explosion booming]
- It's an extremely reliable weapon.
You can put it somewhere, walk away,
and forget about it.
[gunshots echoing] [explosion booming]
- [Dan] Long after the war ends,
the forgotten landmines remain buried,
turning ordinary fields into death traps.
- By 2016 in Cambodia,
it is estimated there are
close to six million active land mines
and other undetonated explosives
spread throughout the countryside.
- Now, you have to appreciate how incredibly scary this is.
They have absolutely no record
of where these mines and these bombs are.
They could be anywhere.
- For years, the solution has been
to send bomb experts in body armor
using metal detectors and soil density detectors.
But this is expensive.
It's very, very slow.
Also, it's incredibly dangerous.
- [Dan] That's when a plan comes along
to bring in an unusual squadron of bomb detectors
to sniff out the problem.
- About 5,000 miles away, in the country of Tanzania,
there is an organization called APOPO.
APOPO are using giant African pouched rats
to sniff out landmines
in conflict areas around the globe.
- The giant African pouched rat
is kind of the perfect bomb-sniffing animal.
They actually have very bad eyesight,
so they really rely
on this incredibly fine-tuned sense of smell
to do just about everything,
to navigate, to find food, and so on.
They call them hero rats,
and their noses are even more sensitive
than those found on dogs.
- [Dan] There's also another crucial benefit
that works in their favor.
- Most mines take approximately 11 pounds of pressure
to set off the detonation switch.
Well, the heaviest an African pouched rat can be
is two to two and a half pounds,
so they can traverse the terrain incredibly well and safely.
- [Dan] So how do you get a rat to sniff out a landmine?
[slides flicking]
- Mine-sniffing rats take about a year to train.
At 10 weeks, the pups are weaned from their mothers,
and given basic clicker training
where they learn to associate the sound of a click
with a tasty food reward.
- Then, they're introduced
to a small metal ball containing TNT.
When they sniff it, they'd hear a click,
and they'd get a little tasty reward like a banana.
- From there, they're taken to the field
where they begin to train
with real but deactivated landmines.
- [Dan] By 2016, the Cambodian government is ready
to put these African mine-sniffing rats to work.
- They're going to be targeting
the Srey Nui area of Siem Reap
where it is known that the farmland is littered
with anti-personnel mines.
- The rats are brought into a field where they'll be working
and they're all hooked to a string that's about knee height.
- Picture a grid system
in which each rat is hooked to a line
via a short leash.
And, as they're sent out along this grid system,
they trail behind them a measuring tape.
So when the rat detects a mine,
the handler can pinpoint its exact spot.
- [Dan] Once a mine is detected,
the rats signal to their handlers.
- The rats put their noses high up into the air and sniff
while enthusiastically scratching at the ground
in front of them.
- The hero rats are not only thorough,
they're able to work incredibly efficiently.
It could take a crew of human beings five days
to clear an area the size of a tennis court.
Hero rats could do that in 30 minutes.
- Since 2016, hero rats have found
roughly 1,200 anti-personnel mines,
and more than 700 unexploded bombs in Cambodia.
- [Dan] But one stands out from the pack:
Magawa, the GOAT of hero rats.
- This little giant has sniffed out
over 100 landmines and other explosives
during five years of active duty in Cambodia.
- In 2020, Magawa is actually awarded a gold medal
by a UK veterinary charity,
because of his lifesaving devotion to duty.
[dramatic music]
- After retiring from service,
the bomb sniffers get to live out their lives
in the lap of luxury with other hero rats
back home in Tanzania.
Not a bad way to spend your golden years.
- Today, modern dentistry has put a perfect smile
within reach of anyone with enough cash.
But there was a time when that pristine set of chompers
required a much bigger sacrifice.
- In 1815 in London,
dental care is nothing like it is today.
[tooth breaking]
You can't just pop down to the drugstore and buy toothpaste,
and it'll be another 40 years
before there's anything resembling trained dentists.
Suffice to say, teeth are in pretty bad shape.
- If you are a rich Georgian living in London at this time,
what you really, really want is a beautiful set of teeth.
- [Dan] Which is easier said than done,
because the upper class has a bit of a sweet tooth.
- Sugar is a status symbol.
The more confections that you have on your table,
the greater your wealth is presented
to your friends and your peers.
- There's cakes, there's candies,
there's sweet treats and pastries.
They have no idea
that the sugar is actually rotting away their teeth.
- And any false teeth at the time,
those are gonna be made from ivory
that is taken from animals like elephants,
but they don't feel good,
they wobble, and it makes it really hard to chew.
And, for some people, it even affects the way they speak.
- So what's the only surefire replacement for a human tooth?
More human teeth.
So there's an entire black market amongst the poor
to sell their teeth to dentists,
and they go straight into the mouths of the rich.
- The problem is that there aren't enough human teeth around
for the supply to meet the demand.
So these experts turn to another source,
not the living,
but the recently deceased.
- [Dan] And just as the demand for dentures grows,
fate delivers a grim solution.
- On June 18th, 1815,
the Battle of Waterloo takes place.
This is the final battle
in Napoleon's 23-year quest
to take over Europe.
70,000 French forces take arms
against over 113,000 British and their allies,
and the French are defeated.
In the course of battle,
47,000 soldiers die.
- [Dan] It doesn't take long for gruesome opportunists
to turn the bloodshed into a business.
- These scavengers go around yanking out
tooth after tooth after tooth.
[tooth breaking]
- After they collect these,
they sell them to dentists for six pence a tooth.
It's about seven bucks today.
If that sounds like not very much,
think about more than a million teeth.
This is more than a $7-million deal all told.
- And what makes these ones so great is that
they're predominantly from people in their early twenties
or even younger.
So these are fit, healthy people, good teeth.
- [Dan] Dentists across London begin filling orders
for what will come to be known as Waterloo teeth.
- Of course, the dentists mark up
that six-pence-a-tooth price
when they're creating these dentures,
but everyone wants to get a set of Waterloo teeth,
because that means you have
the teeth of a young, healthy soldier.
- It even becomes something of a bragging statement
for someone to say,
"Hey, I've got a mouth full of Waterloo teeth."
- [Dan] Thankfully, it doesn't become a permanent solution.
[slide clicking]
- By the middle of the 19th century,
advances in technology like porcelain and vulcanized rubber
render obsolete the practices of harvesting teeth
from the deceased. [tooth breaking]
- Sure, money can buy a fancy new set of pearly whites,
but it can't fix everything
unless, of course, you're the most ruthless
drug cartel kingpin in history.
- In the cocaine capital of South America
with bombings every night,
Medellin begins to look like a city under siege.
[slides clicking]
- Pablo Escobar's easily the world's biggest drug trafficker
in the eighties and the nineties.
At his height, he is supplying the United States
with about 80% of its cocaine.
- [News Anchor] Western demand for the drug
almost outstrips supplies.
- This makes him one of the richest people on planet Earth
with roughly $30 billion to his name,
about $75 billion in today's money.
- And Pablo Escobar has no problem showing off his wealth.
[slide clicking]
He's got a private zoo, yachts,
and mansions, and cars.
He's also got no problem using his money
to buy influence with politicians,
and, in some cases, using his money
to pay for the murder of people that might get in his way.
[slides clicking]
- [Dan] Eventually, by 1991,
mounting pressure forces the Colombian government to act.
Kind of.
- They put Escobar in a very low-security prison,
so low, in fact, that they let him design it himself,
and he puts in a sauna, and a pool, and a nightclub.
- Unfortunately, but
not surprisingly,
Pablo's actually still running
his criminal enterprise
from inside these prison walls.
And when he commits a murder on prison grounds,
the Colombian government has had enough.
- [Dan] When prison officials attempt to transfer him
to a higher-security institution, Escobar flees.
- Escobar collects his wife, his young daughter, his son,
and a few bodyguards,
and they go into hiding,
jumping from safe house to safe house.
- Escobar is hiding out in a safe house
that is located very high up in the Andes mountains.
- One night, his 8-year-old daughter Manuela complains
about being cold.
Escobar and his wife can see
that she's shivering and turning blue,
suffering from hypothermia.
- With Manuela's condition getting worse,
Escobar realizes he needs to make a fire
to warm his daughter up,
but this is rocky terrain.
There is no tree to cut down to build a fire,
and he needs to find something to burn
to save his daughter's life.
- [Dan] Luckily, this is one problem
he can still use his money for.
[wall smashing]
- Like a lot of drug dealers,
a good amount of his fortune is in paper cash,
which he's hidden in cellars and in walls in his hideaways.
- So his plan is to literally burn his money.
[dramatic music]
- [Dan] The cash is collected,
and then he sets it on fire. [flame sizzling]
- Now, we're not dealing with Colombian pesos.
This is U.S. currency.
And as the fire builds,
they're throwing stack after stack of money onto the fire,
$10,000 at a time.
- [Dan] That night, Pablo Escobar burns $2 million
to keep his daughter warm.
- It helps to stave off the hypothermia,
and the Escobar family lives to run another day.
But this doesn't last forever.
- On December 2nd, 1993,
Pablo Escobar is shot in the head and killed
during a shootout with authorities
on a rooftop in Colombia.
[shotgun echoing]
[electronic music]
- Technically, given Escobar's $30-billion fortune,
he could have kept up his very expensive life hack
every night for over 40 years.
- Controlling pests is as old and vexing
as any problem in human history.
But when a Micronesian island becomes overrun
with unwanted vermin,
their solution is a bit outside the box.
- The Pacific island of Guam is part of Micronesia,
but it's a U.S. territory.
It's a beautiful island. It's got resorts and palm trees,
and beautiful beaches.
- But behind all that,
you've got all of this jungle,
and that jungle is just totally and completely littered
with venomous snakes.
- [Dan] They're known as brown tree snakes,
and these nocturnal predators can grow
to be over six feet long.
- The brown tree snake is an invasive creature.
They started showing up on the island
shortly after World War II,
hiding in Indonesian shipping vessels
destined for the ports of Guam.
- When they were unloaded on Guam,
the animals slithered off into the jungle,
and entered an environment
where they face absolutely no predator at all.
[snake hissing]
- They're at the top of the food chain,
so they can literally eat anything that they want to.
They've eaten most of Guam's birds,
and because of that,
there are no birds that are seeding the ground any more,
which causes the thinning of the forest.
They're eating power lines, biting villagers,
and they're biting children.
[snake hissing]
And so it's decided that these snakes have gotta go.
- These animals are almost impossible to kill,
because they are nocturnal.
Plus, they're arboreal,
which means that they're pretty much outta reach
at most points,
because they're way at the top of the canopy.
- Laying traps on the ground is virtually useless.
They have to try to figure out
how to get them where they feed,
and that's in the trees.
- So the plan is to bomb the jungle
from helicopters with mice.
- [Dan] But not just any ordinary mice.
These mice are packing a secret weapon.
- In 2000, the Department of Agriculture does a study.
What can kill these snakes?
And they're feeding them various poisons,
but also some over-the-counter drugs.
And what they discover is that
these snakes are highly reactive to acetaminophen,
the active ingredient in Tylenol.
[pills rattling]
- And with just 80 milligrams of acetaminophen,
there's a 100% kill rate among these snakes.
So they take 2,000 frozen dead mice,
and just stuff them with Tylenol.
- Here's where it gets complicated.
If you drop a frozen mouse from a helicopter,
it's just gonna go through the trees and hit the ground.
But what we could do is glue the mouse
to a piece of cardboard,
and then attach some streamers
in hopes that it will slow it down enough
that it'll kind of catch in the trees and get stuck.
Boom, dead snake.
- [Dan] With the choppers fired up,
it's time for the first mission:
to bomb the hell out of some snakes.
- Just before sundown,
the military helicopters fly in,
and, one by one, they drop their Tylenol mice bombs,
and watch them slowly descend into the jungle.
- [Dan] And then they wait
to see if the hungry snakes will take the bait.
- The next day, officials find dead snakes everywhere.
They're on the ground,
they're hanging from tree limbs,
they're on fences.
- They estimate that, in this area alone,
80% of the snakes have been killed off.
The U.S. government decides
to run a few more mice bomb missions,
but these missions are running up a pretty high tab.
- [Dan] It turns out dropping a few thousand mice
from helicopters costs nearly $8 million per mission.
That's a whole lot of cheese.
- After a few years,
they decide to move on to a cheaper,
more toxic-based chemical
that they can just automatically drop onto the trees.
[snake hissing]
- The snakes might have been a nuisance,
but for one island,
the location itself was the biggest headache of all.
- Sitting off the coast of Wisconsin's Lake Chippewa
is what appears to be a pretty nice-sized island.
- You might expect to see some beautiful houses,
or a farmer's market on Sundays,
but it's deserted.
- [Dan] That's because this isn't technically an island.
It's a giant floating bog,
and Lake Chippewa is loaded with them.
- Lake Chippewa is a manmade lake
about 22 miles in diameter.
When it was created in 1923,
engineers basically just flooded an existing swamp land,
covering its peat bogs with about 90 feet of water.
- And when they let that water rush in,
[water splashing]
some of those bogs floated to the surface
held together by a network of roots and peat.
- Unlike an island which is attached to the earth,
these aren't anchored by anything.
So when the winds are high,
these tamarack trees, well, they act as a sail.
The islands start moving all over the lake.
- [Dan] One bog in particular is the most restless,
known as the Forty Acre Bog.
- Beginning in the early 2000s,
when the winds are just right,
they blow this 200-ton, 40-acre bog island across the lake,
and lodge it underneath a highway bridge.
- Whenever this happens during a busy summer,
fishing boats and pontoon boats can't cross
to the other side,
and the people on those boats
are understandably ticked off about it.
- [Dan] At first, some suggest blowing it up.
- The 40 Acre Bog has been on that lake for decades.
There's different species of wildlife that live on it.
Migratory birds use it.
So, now, it's about destroying a whole ecosystem,
and clearly that's not something people want to do.
- [Dan] That's when the community of Lake Chippewa
comes together with a pretty outlandish idea.
- They ultimately decide to push the bog.
You might imagine a complicated operation
run by the Army Corps of Engineers
involving barges and pulleys.
But no, this is actually gonna be carried out
by 10 local fishing boats.
- They all line up.
On the count of three,
they all rev their engines.
[engines revving]
[tense pulsating music]
This thing is massive.
It's 200 tons,
and, at full throttle,
they just barely get it to budge.
They realize they're gonna need more boats.
- Pretty soon, boats from all over the lake volunteer
to join this cause.
So now, you have 50 boats working together
to try and push this thing.
[upbeat music continues]
- [Dan] Eventually, after several hours,
the makeshift armada gets the 40 Acre Bog
away from the bridge.
Unfortunately, it's only a temporary solution.
- Every year, that bog still floats underneath the bridge
and blocks the waterway.
And every year, the people of Lake Chippewa push the bog out
to where it can't be a nuisance.
- But the residents of Lake Chippewa don't seem to mind,
and, at this point, it's become an annual tradition,
where they hold this kind of
big, yearly bog moving boat party.
- At least they get a party out of it.
- Medicine is full of miracles,
and, occasionally, totally insane-sounding ideas
that somehow work.
- Every year, approximately one third
of organ transplantations are rejected,
and that is because their body says,
"Yes, this is the right organ.
But no, it did not come from me."
And the body tries to kill it.
And this amounts to thousands of lives lost per year.
- In 2017, scientists at the Salk Institute
for Biological Sciences
are trying to solve this problem in a very strange way.
- As crazy as it sounds,
they are trying to grow human-compatible organs
inside of pigs.
- We're talking about using the stem cells
from the patient themselves
that are then grown into real human organs
using the pig body as a host.
This way, the organs are fully developed, fully functioning,
and guaranteed not to be rejected.
[pig oinking]
- Pigs are already the best candidates
for organ donation to humans,
because the organs are anatomically
and functionally very similar to the human organs.
- [Dan] They call these pig-human organs chimera
after the hybrid monster from Greek mythology.
- To pull off this experiment,
scientists inject a small number of human stem cells
into a pig embryo.
The pig embryo with human cells inside
is then implanted into the womb of a sow.
- [Dan] 28 days later,
the chimera embryo is removed from the mother.
It's just the size of a grain of rice,
but inside is a small miracle.
- The researchers examine the chimera,
and they find functional human cells
in the heart, in the brain, in the liver.
- Potentially, this means that
if one of these chimera were allowed to fully develop,
its organs could be transplanted
into the human that donated the original stem cells,
and function fully as if it were their own.
- [Dan] While this could solve
the problem of organ rejection,
it could present a whole new set of nightmares.
- The worry is that if pig and human DNA commingle,
we might, one day, get a real human-pig hybrid
living among us.
- For now, at least, the scientists are only allowed
to let their chimera develop for 28 days.
They have a lot more work to do
before proving it's safe to allow one to mature.
- Thankfully, it doesn't look like
we will be living on Planet of the Swine any time soon.
Meanwhile, a beekeeper in Turkey is dealing
with his own group of piggies.
[suspenseful music] [bees buzzing]
- Ibrahim Sedef is an agricultural engineer
who has a honey farm in the town of Trabzon
along the Black Sea.
- [Dan] This isn't any old honey he's making.
This is top-shelf stuff
that goes for as much as $40 a jar.
- This is a part of the world
where they had been making honey for thousands of years.
His stuff is like honey gold.
- [Dan] The problem is someone's been helping themselves
to Ibrahim's supply,
so he sets up cameras.
- Every night, hungry brown bears break into his farm,
sniff out hives, and steal his honey.
- Over the last three years,
Ibrahim has lost $10,000 to these brown bears.
- With the average pest,
you could just go outside and shoo them away,
but these are eight-foot-tall bears.
They will maul you.
- So night after night,
he's watching on the camera.
These bears come in,
and steal his honey.
So his first thought is,
"I'll just hide the honey better."
- He puts the hives in harder-to-reach places,
and the bears just climb up and find it.
He even takes heavy rocks and puts them on the hives,
and the bears just flick them away.
- He tries leaving other sweets and other foods behind
like apples and sourdough bread,
and even store-bought honey.
But these bears are having none of it.
They just walk right past it,
and go right for the good stuff.
- So he starts to get creative,
because he realizes this is really not a fight
that he can win.
So let's figure out how to turn this
into something positive.
- [Dan] That's when he comes up
with a truly unbelievable idea.
- Since these giant bears are obviously
connoisseurs of honey,
he decides to put their expert palates to work for him,
and he sets up a taste test
to see which of his honeys they like best.
- If all goes to plan,
he could actually charge more for his honey,
because it comes with the brown bear seal of approval.
- So he decides to set out a table
with four different bowls on it.
One has cherry jam,
and the other three bowls all have
different types of honey in it.
There's flower honey, chestnut honey, and Anzer honey.
- Night falls, they show up,
they see the cherry jam.
They're like not interested in it at all.
They sniff the two other honeys.
They're like [humming] whatever.
- Then, they come to the Anzer honey,
and they go crazy for it.
[bear growling]
Anzer honey is the most expensive honey in the world.
It's made from the nectar of 90 flowers.
- You're talking about $150 a pound.
- For Ibrahim, this is everything.
This is video proof that brown bears prefer the Anzer honey,
his Anzer honey.
- He's got bear-approved honey.
- Ibrahim says his bear-approved honey has become so popular
he no longer minds the regular donations
to his taste testers.
- When a family in Northern California decides
to spend their afternoon amidst the clouds,
their trip goes from peaceful to chaotic
in a matter of seconds.
With their lives on the line,
a brilliant, unexpected fix appears
just in the nick of time.
[gentle mysterious music]
- 38-year-old Artem Konokuk
along with his wife and their 2-year-old child
are buzzing with excitement.
Artem, who's an amateur pilot,
has chartered a plane for the family
to spend their spring afternoon
flying above the Northern California scenery.
[plane engine revving]
- After takeoff, the family in the plane are gliding south,
observing the treetops
as they head towards their family home in Santa Rosa.
- [Dan] That's when the chug of the plane's engine stops.
[engine whirring]
It's just lost all power
2,600 feet above the trees. [alarm sounding]
- Artem is desperately trying to restart the aircraft,
but he's running out of altitude very quickly.
Artem's big challenge is that
there's no field anywhere in sight.
He's looking down on a vast expanse of forest
with no place to put the aircraft down.
- It's quite possible
that the Terrain Collision Avoidance System, called TCAS,
is screaming at them:
"Terrain, terrain, pull up, pull up."
And there's nothing that they can do,
because they have no power to that engine.
- His wife and child are beginning to freak out.
He then tells them, "Brace for impact."
- [Dan] That's when something unbelievable happens.
[parachute flapping]
- There's suddenly a jolt,
and then calm.
The plane feels like it's just floating.
- [Dan] Are they being carted off
to the pearly gates by angels?
Not quite.
- Artem has just pulled the lever
to deploy the Cirrus Airframe Parachute System, or CAPS.
- This is actually a parachute for an entire aircraft.
This is a 2,400-square-foot parachute
that deploys [rocket exploding]
by virtue of a rocket
that gets it open very quickly,
and it has the effect of slowing the descent of the aircraft
from dangerous and fatal speed
to a survivable speed.
- Because it is at the weight center of the plane,
it keeps the aircraft completely level.
- The airplane parachute is invented
by Cirrus co-founder Alan Klapmeier
after he survives a mid-air collision in 1985.
After that experience,
he decides that he's going to put a life-saving parachute
in every single Cirrus plane.
[water splashing]
- [Dan] Luckily, for the Konokuk family,
by 1998, this becomes a reality.
- Miraculously, they are more or less unscathed.
They have survived this horrible incident,
and, now, they also have a great family story
where they can talk about
how one parachute saved three people.
[parachute popping]
- To date, this airplane parachute system
has saved 249 lives.
Maybe, one day, they'll put one on the red eye
out of Los Angeles just in case.
Next up.
Something unusual that protects
against a different type of disaster.
[tense music]
- In China, in 2008 and 2010,
there were two devastating earthquakes
that hit in the middle of the night,
and ended up killing thousands of people,
mostly because they were crushed
by buildings that collapsed.
- [Dan] This leads an ambitious inventor
by the name of Wang Wenxi
to come up with an idea that could save your life
from the comfort of your own bed.
- In 2010, Wang secures the patent for his invention
known as an earthquake bed.
- Say, for example,
you're in bed with your wife or your husband,
and an earthquake happens.
[earth shaking]
A series of sensors detect vibrations,
and, within seconds,
the mattress folds you and your loved one into a taco,
and draws you in into the reinforced steel frame
beneath the bed.
- Once you and your partner have hit
the bottom of the metal box,
the steel bed frame slabs slide into place,
and provide a lid for you.
So, now, you're enclosed in this giant metal box, basically,
that's gonna protect you from any sort of falling debris.
[earth shaking]
- It's said the earthquake bed can resist
6,000 pounds of vertical roof load,
so that even if the building you are in collapses,
you won't be crushed by the debris.
- [Dan] While you're waiting to be rescued,
you still get to enjoy all the comforts of home.
- The earthquake bed is a little bit more than just a bed.
It's almost like a studio apartment.
It's got a ventilation system,
it's got food, it's got water,
it's got a gas mask.
- It's got a makeshift toilet, which sounds gross,
but, if you think about it, is super necessary,
and wait for it, there's wifi.
- Most importantly of all, there's a radio beacon,
so rescuers can pinpoint your exact location.
- The base model bed starts around $6,000,
but you can upgrade it from there.
If you wanna put in, say, a TV,
maybe a nice bar.
- A person, or persons,
can survive for about a week in there before being rescued.
That means you can just stay in there,
you can binge-watch your favorite shows,
you can take calls,
you can close important deals.
You can do whatever you want.
[man snoring]
- Guess it's time to ditch that,
"I can't work today,
I'm stuck in the rubble of an earthquake" excuse.
- The early 1940s is the era of new ideas.
Color television, the Polaroid camera,
even the first jet aircraft take to the skies.
And, of course, a machine for babies
too busy to make it to the gym.
- In 1940s England, parents are being told
that their babies might not be exercising enough
to be able to take their first steps.
- [Dan] Fortunately for parents,
there's a solution for this
called the Baby Exercise Machine.
- [TV Host] Not only does it give baby something to do
when he's not eating or sleeping,
but it also develops the leg muscles
making every child a potential soccer international.
- The idea is that, with each kick,
the baby's leg muscles are getting stronger,
and, soon enough, your baby will be the first one
to start walking,
the first one to start running.
- This invention, though,
does have a pretty good dual purpose.
It's strengthening your baby,
but it's also a great way to distract fussy babies,
and keep them occupied.
- [Dan] The little basket even doubles as a bassinet,
which might be the most useful feature of all.
- When Junior's all done kicking, he's tired,
and so he's going to sleep,
which means maybe you can too.
[tense music]
- [Dan] Keeping the family strong
isn't just about working out.
How do you make the most of precious time together?
One inventor has a bizarre idea.
- [TV Announcer] We've discovered the answer
to every motorist's problem.
Introducing Charlie Steinlauf and his family.
- Charlie's family bicycle,
which he showcases in an exhibition in Chicago in 1939,
is this ginormous two-story bike
that fits, well, the whole family.
- Charlie himself is on the second floor
pedaling and steering the bike with a steering wheel.
- Below him is his son Charlie Junior
pedaling along with his dad.
And at the front is his daughter Maria
on the lookout for any potholes.
- And mom is in the middle
operating a foot-pedal sewing machine.
- [TV Announcer] If Mr. Steinlauf wears out
the seat of his pants,
Mrs. Steinlauf puts in a new seam.
- Because even on a bike ride in 1939,
a mom's work is never done.
- Kind of a sign of the times, right?
As the rest of her family gets to leisurely ride
through the streets,
she's just sewing away.
- [Dan] So where did Charlie's outlandish idea come from?
- Charlie is an inventor, a creator, a tinkerer.
He likes repairing things,
and fittingly, his wife's sewing machine wasn't working,
so she brought it to his workshop to repair.
She didn't get it back for a while,
and then, when she went to look for it,
it now had wheels on it,
and was part of a two-story bike.
- [TV Announcer] So the Steinlauf family
just keep rolling along.
- Sure, a bike that does everything might keep
the family unit nice and tight on dry land,
but it won't help you on open water.
- So in 1959, Canterbury Motors comes up with an idea.
It's a motorcycle with a sidecar,
but not just any sidecar.
- [TV Anchor] A young couple sets out for a day's run
in a motorcycle combination.
Nothing unusual about that,
but, in fact, it's unique.
- The sidecar is actually a seaworthy boat:
the amphibious sidecar motorcycle.
- Once pulled aside your favorite body of water,
just you and your wife can remove the boat,
place it in the water,
and you are off on a romantic boat ride for two.
- You actually start it much as you might a lawnmower,
and it has an 80cc motor,
so it's capable of speeds of about 13 miles per hour
when you have two people aboard ship.
- The idea behind this boat is
to really just spark the romance,
but you're sitting front to back,
so it would be really hard to whisper sweet nothings
into your darling's ear.
Plus, if you move too rapidly,
you could tip over both of you.
[slides clicking]
- Ultimately, it's too expensive for mass production.
[slides clicking]
Just five are made.
And sadly, the Canterbury Belle is relegated
to the garage of history.
- Whether you are blowing up beached whale carcasses,
dropping mice bombs to kill snakes,
or burning millions to make sure
your daughter doesn't freeze,
there's an idea to solve any problem,
but it's only the most outlandish
that are truly "Unbelievable."