Name: The Unexpected Stories You Never Learned in School
Uploaded: 2026-01-12T17:22:51.000Z
Duration: 25 min 21 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Before 1857, it was impossible to capture, lost to the passage of time.

Ed was a French printer and bookseller running a humble shop in central Paris in the 1800s.

Now he was no scientist, but had big aspirations to become an inventor.

Whilst proofreading a physics textbook, Ed stumbled upon some diagrams of the human ear.

He wondered if a camera replicated an eye to record an image.

How about some sort of mechanical ear to record sound to paper?

With the help of instrument maker Rudolf Koenig, Edd began building a device.

The device had a speaking cone which caused a sharp pin to vibrate etching patterns onto a soot covered piece of paper.

Ed thought that one would be able to read the paper squiggles like written text.

The concept was pretty ingenious at the time, but

it was far too difficult to make out any words from these squiggles.

The phonautograph never caught on and was doomed to obscurity.

Ed tragically passed away in 1879 with no knowledge that his recordings would ever be heard.

Across the Atlantic, a young inventor was making waves of his own.

Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, a similar device in which the sound was recorded to a tin foil cylinder and his device allowed playback.

Edison became an international celebrity, hailed as the inventor of sound recording.

Scientists realized that the microscopic cameras they used in particle physics could be used to scan obsolete recordings without damaging them further.

They were now able to play back Ed's recordings for the the first time.

One of these was a snippet of the French folk song Au Claire de la Lu, originally thought to be sung by a small child.

They found the correct playback spin and realised it could actually be Eddie's voice singing.

It is now considered to be the earliest recording of a recognisable human voice, predating Edison by 17 years.

He inadvertently created the first ever recorded sound that could be replayed.

And it took the rest of us 150 years to realize this is a story about beavers, the largest rodents in North America.

And a story about a man named Elmo, a perfectly average sized human from Idaho.

He worked as a warden with the Idaho Department of Fish and Game.

Not much is known about his life, who his friends were, what he enjoyed doing on the weekends, or even whether he preferred Coffee or tea?

The year is 1948, and it's summertime in the lakeshore town of McCall, Idaho, where our story begins.

Families are enjoying the sun, the scenic vistas and the cool breeze.

And somewhere high above them, beavers are parachuting from the sky.

This was a government approved wildlife relocation program.

To understand how we got here, we first need to understand the beaver.

Cute and furry, yes, but incredibly prodigious.

With ever growing razor sharp front teeth and an unwavering propensity to build dams.

The beaver can transform a landscape like no other creature in the animal kingdom.

And in the tiny town of McCall, this was precisely the problem.

The beavers were becoming a menace, cutting down trees, blocking streams and risking floods and damage to the town and its inhabitants.

The destination, Chamberlain Basin, 100 miles away, across the rugged terrain of the Frank Church river of no Return.

By all accounts, the area was a beaver's paradise, home to towering forests, clear glacial lakes and cold running water.

But there was just one small problem getting there.

Planes couldn't land, trucks couldn't drive, and

nobody volunteered to hike up by foot with dozens of beavers in tow.

What if, he wondered, we don't bring the beavers in, we drop them in.

Elmo designed a wooden box with a built in parachute.

The plane flies, the box drops, the chute opens and the beaver lands.

And just like that, a new life for the rodents begins.

That was the plan, at least before any rodents took to the skies.

Of course, early wooden box prototypes were met with a predictable flaw.

But eventually, a more durable design emerged.

Two lidless crates hinged together like a clamshell with a parachute on top.

Then there were the test jumps, led by an old male beaver named Geronimo.

Elmo wrote, one old male beaver, whom we fondly named Geronimo, was dropped again and again on the flying field.

Each time he scrambled out of the box, someone was on hand to pick him up.

Finally, on August 14, eight crates of beavers were loaded onto a twin engine Beechcraft Travelaire.

Accompanied by a conservation officer and a pilot.

For four straight days, beavers took to the sky and sailed back down to Earth.

The plane makes a careful approach, ready for the drop.

Down to the ground near a stream or a lake, with only one sad and unfortunate casualty.

A curious beaver who decided mid flight to climb on top of his box.

Despite this tragic accident, the Idaho Department of Fish and Game considered the beaver project a resounding success.

His nose and his instinct tell him where to find the water.

The beavers got to work immediately, building dams, restoring wetlands, and

creating a thriving habitat for the plants, fish and birds alike.

So if you ever happen to find yourself in central Idaho, wandering through the wilds of the Chamberlain Basin, listen closely for the flick of a tail or a rustle in the brush.

You might just catch a glimpse of of the descendants of those airborne pioneers.

But did you know Michelin also makes the Michelin Guy, the most prestigious restaurant and book in the world?

So how did a French tire company go from cars to cuisine?

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The Unexpected Stories You Never Learned in School

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