Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Our personalities are deeply ingrained within us.

We all have certain traits and quirks that we can't change no matter how hard we try.

But what exactly is it that makes you you?

Modern science has some ideas, and it's all thanks to a nineteenth century railroad worker named Phineas.

On September thirteenth of eighteen forty eight, Phineas was working at a construction yard outside cab Dish, Vermont.

He was regarded as his company's best foreman.

He had a steady mind and a good business sense, and everyone on the crew respected him.

The job that day was supposed to be simple too.

They were clearing rocks to make way for the new Rutland and Burlington Railroad.

So once the crew had drilled a hole into the rocky ground, Phineas filled it with explosives and then he picked up a long iron tamping rod and used it to pack sand into the hole.

But while he was doing so, the iron rod gave off a spark, and suddenly the explosives detonated, blasting the rod out of Phineas's hand and threw his left cheekbone.

The rod tore through his brain, out the top of his skull, and landed on the ground eighty feet behind him.

Phineas was knocked onto his back with a massive hole through his head, but as the smoke cleared, Phineas sat up.

Not only was he alive, but he was still conscious.

He stood up calmly, walked over to an ox cart and asked his co workers to give him a ride to town to see a doctor.

Phineas was taken to a young physician named doctor John Harlowe, who was stunned that his patient was even able to speak.

He told the doctor exactly what had happened to him, and he could even recall the names of the people who had been there with him.

But Phineas told doctor Harlowe not to bother bringing any of his coworkers in to visit him.

He was sure that he'd be back to work in a day.

Or two, and amazingly, Phineas did make a full recovery, but he never went back to work at the railroad company.

The accident had changed his personality so dramatically his old employers refused to hire him back.

Once he was a responsible, motivated young foreman with a bright career ahead of him, he was now a rude, moody, and impatient man.

He swore constantly, had no impulse control and didn't seem to care about anyone but himself.

In the words of his friends, he was no longer who he used to be.

Unable to hold down a steady job, Phineas ended up joining Arnham's circus as a curiosity.

After that, he worked as a stable hand and a coach driver for a while, but about a decade after his accident, he developed epilepsy and his health went downhill quickly.

He moved back in with his mother in San Francisco, and in eighteen sixty he died after a series of seizures.

But that was just the beginning of his story.

Seven years later, Phineas's body was exhumed and doctor Harlowe, the man who had treated him after his accident, wrote the first detailed medical report on his case.

He observed that the damage to Phineas's frontal lobe had caused major personality changes, but only a minor impact on his intellect.

At a time when scientists knew next to nothing about the human brain, this was a major turning point in research.

Phineas's injury helped early neurologists learn about the brain structure and the frontal lobe's role in behavior.

His skull was donated to the Harvard School of Medicine, where it is still on exhibit today.

In the last century and a half, it's been studied again and again by new generations of scientists trying to understand exactly what happened to the man and how to help patients with similar brain injuries.

The human brain is still a source of mystery, but thanks to Phineas Gage, we're all a little closer to understanding why we are who we are.

Have you ever found yourself wondering why it is so hard to see when driving at night?

I know I have.

The darkness isn't the problem.

It's the lights from the other cars.

They're so bright that having someone behind you or in front of you can be utterly blinding.

For a technology that's only supposed to help protect us, it really seems like it's becoming an annoyance for many drivers.

So how did we get here?

While the path of the car headlamped through history is a straightforward one, but its history gives us some sense of where it might be going as well, nothing changed the landscape of our cities quite like the automobile.

What started as a self propelled carriage soon became a faster and more efficient mode of transportation than anything pulled by a horse.

But you can imagine that the early designers of cars were faced with a number of problems right from the start.

For instance, what happens when you drive at night?

You see, when a horse is pulling your carriage, you have a certain amount of protection from dangerous roads.

Under normal circumstances, a horse won't lead you straight off a cliff into the darkness.

Even if the light from your lantern doesn't go very far.

The animal's instinct of self preservation winds up protecting the vehicle itself.

Meanwhile, an automobile has no such protection.

So early on engineers work to design a way for cars to see in the darkness.

The first headlights would be invented in the eighteen eighties.

They were essentially gas lamps mounted to the hood of the car.

The cast ambient lights in front of the vehicle, and it was far from the powerful beams we have today, but at least they were resistant to wind and rain.

The first electric headlamps came in eighteen ninety eight, courtesy of the Electric Vehicle Company of Hartford, Connecticut.

These were actually a step back in effectiveness from the gas lamps, though not because electricity was a bad choice, but because the batteries were exhausted very quickly.

There would be steady attempts to improve the electric headlights in nineteen oh eight and nineteen twelve until a new standard finally took over.

By nineteen forty, all US cars were required to have sealed beam headlamps.

Gone were the round bulbs protruding from the front of a car.

From then on, every headlight would be in set into the front of the car in a square housing.

In the nineteen sixties and seventies, the electric lights were bolstered with halogen gas to strengthen the beam and make it last longer, and in the nineteen nineties manufact replaced halogen lamps with xenon gas to brighten the beams even further.

Now, you may have noticed a pattern throughout history.

Automobile manufacturers design a lamp, it has a shortcoming.

We introduce a new design, it becomes brighter and more reliable.

Now, while this sounds like a pattern that can only lead to improvements, you already know where I'm going with this.

A halogen ball produces about one thousand llumens of light.

In the early two thousands, cars started introducing LED headlights, which were about four times stronger, and after market headlamps can go as high as ten thousand lumens.

Now, aftermarket headlamps are generally discouraged, but it's difficult to fully police what someone does with their own vehicle at home, and once it's on the road, the problem has already manifested itself.

Most cars today need to pass safety checks before they hit the road.

Then brighter headlights can only be a good thing because these standards are designed with the driver's visibility in mind, not the other drivers on the road, and that is a problem that might require more complex solutions than car companies are willing to think about.

Europe has addressed this problem by pursuing adaptive brightness, or beams that adjust their intensity based on the proximity of other cars.

But as inspiring as this sort of development is, it will take a long time to see a mass scale.

Cars are long term purchases.

After all, the vehicles on the road today are not all brand new off the production line from yesterday.

There's a lot to be said about our impulses toward light.

Technology and progress make the world feel safer, less cloaked in shadow and mystery.

But if we aren't conscious of how our progress affects the world around us, we run the risk of causing more harm than safety.

As any moth can tell you, a light in the dark may be a beautiful thing, but it isn't always that's safe.

I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com.

This show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works.

I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the Worldoflore dot com.

And until next time, stay curious,