This is 99% invisible. I'm Delaney Hall, filling in for Roman Mars.

In 1997, a curator named Catherine Ott

was learning her way around the Smithsonian National Museum of American

History.

She was new to the job.

She specialized in medical science.

And there was this one storage room in the building where she worked. It's like that classic

what you'd think of as a dark dusty sort of scary, mildly mysterious storage room in a museum.

There were drug jars, there was parts of

mannequin bodies laying around.

But the weirdest thing was,

there was this wheelchair that had go-cart wheels. It was completely customized.

It had a Ricardo seat that was used in Porsche cars, but I kept tripping over it and finally I'm like,

what the heck is this thing?

So Catherine Ott started asking around.

Where did this wheelchair come from?

Why is it in storage?

And no one at the castle, which is what the staff calls the main Smithsonian

building, could really tell her.

Nobody completely understood who had owned it. It had been left at the door of the castle with a note pinned to it like an orphan in a basket.

And the note said this was a chair that belonged to Ed Roberts. We think it should be at the Smithsonian.

Ed Roberts. Aught didn't recognize the name. Not yet.

...