4.8 • 7.2K Ratings
🗓️ 8 May 2013
⏱️ 4 minutes
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If you enjoy this story, please tell a friend about The Memory Palace.
Thank you kindly.
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0:00.0 | This is the memory palace when they came out. |
0:04.6 | Their ones were some fruit flies. |
0:07.3 | They were born. They made it. They ate some fruit when they died about 30 days later. |
0:14.4 | Like fruit flies do. But these particular fruit flies spent one of those 30 days, |
0:21.1 | a winter's day in 1947, in space, as the first of Earth's creatures to leave its atmosphere. |
0:30.9 | Their ones were four monkeys named Albert, Albert the first through Albert the fourth, |
0:36.0 | who blasted forth from the New Mexico desert in four rockets to see whether humans could survive |
0:41.2 | the trip to space. Albert's one through three didn't live long enough to let us know if we could. |
0:47.6 | So he strapped the fourth Albert with wires and sensors to monitor his health on his trip. |
0:53.0 | He did great, survived no ill effects, until the landing, which killed him on impact. |
1:00.3 | Their ones was a monkey named Yorick, who went 236,000 feet up and 236,000 feet down, |
1:12.0 | landing softly and safely with a parachute. |
1:16.2 | The middle last poor Yorick didn't survive the weight for rescue. |
1:20.4 | A metal capsule gets awfully hot in the desert sun. |
1:30.3 | Their ones were two monkeys, Mike and Patricia, who did everything together were told, |
1:35.6 | including it shot into space in May 1952, awake and weightless in the nose cone of a rocket. |
1:43.7 | They made it back alive, and retired to the National Zoo in Washington DC, |
1:49.7 | where Patricia died just a couple of years later of natural, non-space-related causes. |
1:55.6 | She was survived by her mate, Mike, who lived until 1967. |
2:01.6 | Let's spare a thought for Mike in his doge. A widower, on display at the National Zoo, |
2:07.4 | a government worker until the end, whose memory, primatologists tell us, may well have held |
2:14.0 | thoughts of Patricia, and that odd adventure they took one spring day long ago. |
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