Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

Today, I want to introduce you to the man who did for the outdoors what Steve Jobs did for

gadgetry. His name was Robert Baden Powell, and he was the founder of the Boy Scouts.

This was back in the days when, if you needed a flashlight, you actually had to have a flashlight,

not just some button on a phone.

So who was this guy, Faden Powell?

He was a legendary cavalry officer with eyes, quote, as keen as the Hawks, as one historian

put it. During the Second Boer War, a garrison he led fended off thousands of enemy soldiers

in South Africa for 217 days. Baden Pau was also the author of a best-selling book called Aids to Scouting,

a handbook for soldiers on tracking, hiding, and reconnaissance. He wrote, quote,

Scouts can go unseen where parties would attract attention. One pair of trained eyes is as good

as a dozen pairs untrained. To a boy 110 years ago,

reading something like that was about as exciting as winning around in Fortnite today.

And so, while Baden Powell was off at war, boys in England began to obsessively read and role play his book.

He became some kind of outdoorsy hero to them.

Baden Pau, he had no idea how popular his book had become with young boys until he returned home from the war.

He decided to rewrite his scouting book for a younger audience,

calling it scouting for boys. It was the book, and I do mean the book, that launched

the scouting movement. He tested his ideas on some wannabe scouts. He took 22 inquisitive

boys to a tiny island just off the coast of England to scamper

around his boyhood utopia.

Brown Sea Island.

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