This is an IHeart podcast.

Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, A production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

On July 2nd of 1881, the world-famous inventor, Alexander Graham Bell was working at his lab in Washington, D.C. when he received some shocking news.

President James A. Garfield had just been shot in the back at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad station while waiting for a train. The assassin was a man named Charles Gatot, a disgruntled

office seeker, furious that Garfield hadn't rewarded him with a cushy government job. Gatow was

immediately arrested, and Garfield was rushed to the White House for treatment.

Alexander Graham Bell, who lived just a stone's throw from the White House and had

personally installed a telephone there a few years earlier, follow the story with rabid

interest.

He was disturbed by reports that the president's doctors couldn't find the bullet lodged

in his body.

Days after the shooting, they were still probing

around in his wounds with their fingers, and if they didn't get the bullet out soon, the president

would die of lead poisoning. Lying awake one night, Bell had a realization. This wasn't just a medical

problem. It was an engineering problem. And in a way, he had already solved it.

Flashback a few years to 1877, Bell had just patented the world's first practical telephone.

But as his team rolled out that technology to the world, they ran into a frustrating issue.

When telephone conductors were installed next to telegram wires, the signal became

garbled with static. It seems that the metal in the telegram wires was interfering with the

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