Is it a bad thing for me to say that even though I'm a historian, I tend to find museums boring? I know, I know, shouldn't museums be some sort of holy land for me? Most of the time they are filled with things like dinosaur bones that just don't hold any interest for me. So when the Travel Channel contacted me about watching their new show Mysteries at the Museum, I freely admit that I had trepidations. But I watched it anyway and folks, I am SOOOOO glad I did.
The first episode of Mysteries at the Museum was filled with all sorts of crazy stuff that kept me glued to the screen. Hybrid critters that made my skin crawl... a Mona Lisa that might or might not be the real thing... the Enigma Machine (pictured above), a device that the Germans used to send out coded messages in WWII- at least until American scientists cracked the code and used the Enigma Machine against the Nazis. Cool stuff!!! The kind of stuff that I talk about in class.
The thing that caught my attention the most was this little cube that looked like it was made from filters that you put in your AC unit stuck together with duct tape. Come to find out, that wasn't far from the truth. During the Apollo 11 space mission, an accident on the capsule nearly cost the astronauts their air supply. What little air was left was compromised by the CO2 the astronauts were exhaling. These guys used what little supplies they had on hand and fashioned an air filter. How cool is that?!?! Sounds like something my Daddy would do (he has a Ph.D. in BS'ing)
Episode 2 of Mysteries at the Museum premieres tonight at 8:00 on the Travel Channel. I'll definitely be watching it and I hope you will too.
Ramona. I am sad to tell you that you are the worst historian I have ever heard of. You did not know about Enigma????
ReplyDeleteYou are even more terrible than the show itself, which I found to be trash TV. The narrator uses exaggerations and falsehoods that would make the actual experts they interviewed cringe.
I agree. Ramona's lack of knowledge of the Enigma machine demonstrates her ignorance. Any high school student studying WW2 would know that it was British mathematicians that cracked the Enigma code. I thought it interesting that the presenter never mentioned the fact. Yet another example of WW2 history presented as an American versus the Germans affair!
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