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Radiolab

A Clockwork Miracle

Radiolab

WNYC Studios

Natural Sciences, History, Documentary, Science, Society & Culture

4.6 • 44.5K Ratings

🗓️ 27 December 2018

⏱️ 21 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

As legend goes, in 1562, King Philip II needed a miracle. So he commissioned one from a highly-skilled clockmaker. In this short, a king's deal with God leads to an intricate mechanical creation, and Jad heads to the Smithsonian to investigate.  When the 17-year-old crown prince of Spain, Don Carlos, fell down a set of stairs in 1562, he threw his whole country into a state of uncertainty about the future. Especially his father, King Philip II, who despite being the most powerful man in the world, was helpless in the face of his heir's terrible head wound. When none of the leading remedies of the day--bleeding, blistering, purging, or drilling--helped, the king enlisted the help of a relic...the corpse of a local holy man who had died 100 years earlier. Then, Philip II promised that if God saved his son, he'd repay him with a miracle of his own. Elizabeth King, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, describes how--according to legend--Philip II held up his end of the bargain with the help of a renowned clockmaker and an intricate invention. Jad and Latif head to the Smithsonian to meet curator Carlene E. Stephens who shows them the inner workings of a nearly 450-year-old monkbot.  This episode was reported by Latif Nasser.  Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Wait, you're listening.

0:03.1

Okay.

0:04.4

All right.

0:05.6

Okay.

0:07.0

All right.

0:08.4

You're listening to Radio Lab.

0:11.4

Radio Lab.

0:11.9

From W. N. Y.

0:13.9

C.

0:14.8

See?

0:15.1

Yeah.

0:19.5

Hey, everybody, Chad here. This is Radio Lab. Happy holidays. This is the first of two releases we're going to drop this week. Both come from the same dude, the irrepressible Latif Nasser. Latif has been working with Radio Lab for about nine years, first as a contributor and then we brought him on staff full time

0:38.4

and he has told you stories about the racial barriers and professional ice skating badminton

0:46.0

um we brought you the three-part border trilogy a story about nuclear chain of command uh

0:53.2

it's working on something really cool for 2019,

0:55.7

which we'll be bringing you soon. And yeah, we have two Latifs for you for you this week.

1:03.0

A couple of days we're going to actually send you a conversation that Latif had about how he

1:08.6

finds the weird, peculiar stories that he seems to always find.

1:13.6

He has a really interesting set of techniques that he goes through.

1:17.4

He wrote this article about it.

1:18.9

It went sort of viral.

1:20.0

So we're going to bring you a conversation where he goes through some of that stuff.

...

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