President Lincoln's Wrestling Origin Story (Season 2) _ The UnBelievable with Dan Aykroyd

Wrestling today is a billion dollar spectacle. You've got stadiums that are packed to the rafters with tens of thousands of spectators all watching to see what crazy moves these performers are going to be doing in the ring. And one that has become probably the most iconic is the chokeslam. Some people contend that it traces its origins back to a rather unexpected figure, the great emancipator himself, Abraham Lincoln. Long before he was president, Lincoln was just a kid trying to survive and learning to fight back. Abe Lincoln is born in a one-room cabin in Kentucky. Abe's mother dies when he's young of milk sickness. His father is a brutal man, frequently beats him. He grows into a gangly, lanky young man with a high squeaky voice and it seems everywhere he goes he is an easy target for bullies. He's fighting in the streets and this slowly but surely develops an ability we wouldn't suspect of our late president. By his early 20s, the once scrawny boy has grown into a six-foot four-inch powerhouse. Abe leaves home, relocates to New Salem, Illinois and becomes friendly with a local man named William Berry. Berry is a town drunk, but he also wants to open a bar. They form a partnership and they open Berry and Lincoln's. The bar is a rough establishment. Abe has to both tend bar and serve as bouncer, getting rid of rowdy drunks. One night at the bar, there's a promoter and he sees Lincoln wrestling some of these rough and tumble kind of guys and he tells him, you know what, I really think that you would make a splash on the wrestling scene. And just like that, Abraham Lincoln, the professional wrestler, is born. Abe's bouncing around Illinois making a name for himself. Over the course of a decade, Abe Lincoln wrestles in 300 matches and only loses a single bout. Key to his near-perfect record, a signature finishing move first seen in 1831. In New Salem, you have a local gang called the Clary's Grove Boys and they're hearing about Abe Lincoln talking smack and saying that, you know, he's the toughest fighter in the frontier and stuff. And so the gang's leader, a guy by the name of Jack Armstrong, who is a wrestler in his own right, decides I'm gonna challenge this tall drink of water. A large crowd forms around the ring and at first, Abe and Jack, they're just circling around, both hesitant to make the first move. But pretty soon, it's on. And Abe starts dominating. But it's not enough for Abe to just win the match. He wants to send a message. Lincoln takes his hand and he wraps it around the throat of Jack Armstrong, strangling him. And then Lincoln proceeds to lift Armstrong off of the ground and then slam. A crowd-pleasing move that cements Lincoln's reputation, not just as a fighter, but as a leader in the making. Many historians believe that Abe's presence in the ring helped launch his political career. When Lincoln is running for Illinois Senate in 1858, national news begins reporting on his wrestling career and it reflects well on him. He is a fighter. He is scrappy. He has what it takes as a politician. In 1992, the rail splitter himself earns a post-mortem career high by being inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. In 1935, there's great anxiety among the British people because Hitler has come to power. He's rearming Germany in violation of the Versailles Treaty from World War I. And the British know that one key element of Hitler's rearmament is the building of a massive air force called Luftwaffe. Adding to the anxieties are these intelligence reports that suggest that Germany is on the cusp of developing a death ray, an invisible beam that can vaporize people, buildings, maybe even entire cities. It's a weapon that sounds like science fiction, but this is an era where even more outlandish weapons were actually being tested and fielded. Back then, it seemed quite feasible. The British are stuck. What do you do? How do you fight a death ray? Well, the best defense is a good offense. Build your own death ray. The British gather some of the most brilliant scientific minds on the planet and get to work. What would it take to create a radiation or particle beam that could be used to shoot down attacking aircraft? The idea is that this weapon could cook the pilot, killing him, or could be used to detonate a bomb on board the aircraft. This team spends months running the numbers, doing simulations, and guess what? They come up with nothing. Their experts can't come up with a solution, so they turn to the general public and they have a contest. Who can figure out the death ray? It's sort of like crowdsourcing your ultimate weapon. Unfortunately, British civilians also come up short. In a last-ditch effort, the British Air Ministry turns to a celebrated and renowned radio engineer who works with the BBC radio service, Robert Watson Watt. They ask him how high of a frequency would it take to literally melt an airplane out of the sky? The laws of physics simply say, not gonna happen. And that's because the radio waves that you send towards the aircraft just bounce off. But it's in these calculations that Watson Watt has a real genuine eureka moment. These radio waves that bounce off of targets can be picked up by antennae. By measuring the time it takes for the signal to return, Watson Watt can calculate the relative position of the aircraft. So this means they might be able to detect invading aircraft long before they can see or hear them. Cautious but intrigued, the Air Ministry requests a demonstration. On February 26, 1935, the Royal Air Force takes an old bomber and they fly it between two BBC radio masts that are positioned six miles apart. Positioned between these two towers sits Robert Watson Watt, his assistant, and an Air Ministry official. They sit in front of a cathode ray tube with a green indicator light. Over and over again as the bomber passes overhead, the green light turns on. While this was no death ray, these three men alone are essentially seeing the dawn of radar. This is crazy. There can be a plane so far away that no naked eye, no pair of binoculars could ever pick it up. And yet by sending out radio signals and waiting for them to come back, you can pick it out of the sky. It's like a comic book superpower. Four years later, radar proves its worth, empowering an outmatched British Air Force to outwit and outlast the mightier Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain. In early Christianity, purifying with holy water against evil spirits was called kurnips, and it's something very important to worship. Outside of many temples at the time, it's customary to have an urn or vessel of holy water, which people either imbibe, anoint themselves, or use to wash their hands before entering. However, early Greek Christians start thinking that the holy water is a cure-all for all of life's ailments. As a result, churchgoers are taking the holy water at will, and the church elders are obviously a little miffed. That's because there's not an endless supply at the time. In the Greek church, holy water is produced once a year on January 6th in the Feast of Epiphany. This container of holy water is expected to last the entire year. It is not meant to be squandered. The potential for a holy water drought leads church authorities to begin searching for solutions, and they turn to a very inventive figure known as Hero of Alexandria. Hero is this genius mathematician, engineer, inventor. He's been credited with inventing the syringe, the first steam engine. So if you need a machine, he is the guy to talk to. Hero invents an ingenious device, essentially a fountain inside of a box that can only be activated by a compulsory donation. Now that people have to pay, they become much more careful stewards of this limited resource. You put a coin in the urn, it hits a lever, the weight of the coin releases a plunger, the perfectly measured dose of holy water comes out a spout, the plunger closes again, no more holy water, and the church gets its much-needed tithes. It's genius in its simplicity today, but for the time, it's an engineering marvel.