True Weird History: "Torture Telephone" & "Wiley" | 2 Unusual Tales

0:00 Speaker 1: Doorway to Nightmare presents.

0:07 Speaker 2: And now, Curiouser and Curiouser True Tales of the Uncanny and Peculiar With Crimson McKenzie.

0:21 Speaker 3: The Terrifying Telephone Torture Imagine, if you will, that you're a prisoner in a state-run prison. You're taken to the hospital ward for some sort of infraction. There, you're subjected to a series of electrical shocks made possible by... a telephone.

1:00 Speaker 3: The phone in question is just one of those silly little... Oh, antique crank-style phones. Ordinary on the face of it. But with the addition of an electric generator and two dry cell batteries, it becomes a notorious torture device that even the Marquis de Sade would be proud of. The prisoner would be strapped to a table. The ground wire was wrapped around this big old toe in the hot wire, the one in which electricity ran through. I don't even want to say it. It would be attached to the prisoner's genitals.

1:56 Speaker 3: Once the doctors turned the crank on the telephone... Their victims were brutally shocked by torrents of electricity. Sometimes these torture sessions dragged on for so long. Such long periods known as long-distance calls. Makes you think twice about putting those two quarters in that thing, don't it? The sheer barbarism of this method of torture was described in a book published in 1970, and I quote, In long-distance calls, several charges were inflicted. I'm not talking about quarters of a duration designed to stop just short of the inmates fainting.

2:56 Speaker 3: Sometimes the telephone operator's skill was so defective, and the sustained current not only caused the inmate to lose consciousness, but resulted in irreparable damage. End quote. Curiouser and curiouser. Oof.

3:20 Speaker 1: It's crazy.

3:25 Speaker 3: Tragically, many of the prisoners not only ended up with permanent organ damage... but also suffered from mental illness following the torture. I wonder why. But in this prison, it wasn't just the telephone that was used. Many prisoners reported being beaten with paddles, pins stuck under their fingernails, and even tortured in an electric chair. You say this must have taken place in some other country, Yes, yes. Very far away from the United States. But you would be wrong. This was the state prison farm in Arkansas in the 1960s.

4:17 Speaker 3: So heinous was the Tucker telephone, which was the name given to the device. It was used in a movie in 1980 about the prison. Unfortunately... even after the torture device was no longer deployed against the inmates, the Tucker telephone was repurposed by the Chicago Violent Crime Unit under Lieutenant John Berg to torture suspects in the 1980s. What?

4:46 Speaker 4: This is crazy.

4:50 Speaker 2: I digress.

4:55 Speaker 3: American interrogators abroad said, have also reportedly used the device to torture their captives. Sick. Flippin' sick. This is Crimson McKenzie. I hope you join me again for another true tale of the peculiar and uncanny. If you dare. Curiouser and curiouser.

5:35 Speaker 1: Meet Jerry Connors. Family man. Business man. Psychopathic killer. The Convincer by Winslow Swan. Now available on Amazon. Jerry Connors. He can convince you to do anything. Even die.

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6:09 Speaker 1: Doorway to Nightmare presents....

6:18 Speaker 2: And now, Curiouser and Curiouser. True Tales of the Uncanny and Peculiar With Crimson McKenzie.

6:35 Speaker 3: Wiley At the turn of the 20th century, food manufacturers could use pretty much anything in their products, and it was perfectly acceptable. But one Purdue scientist thought that things were... I don't know, beginning to get out of hand, you'd think. His name was Wiley, born in 1844, six of seven children. Wiley was raised on a 125-acre farm in Indiana. He earned his medical degree from the Indiana Medical College in 1871 and eventually accepted a faculty position in chemistry at Purdue University that same year.

7:28 Speaker 3: In 1902, Wiley decided, along with Congress, that certain preservatives in food were essentially poison. But how to go about proving it? This is going to be a good one. Curiouser and curiouser. For what happened is the strangest part. Wally found twelve volunteers. Yes, I said volunteers. Young, healthy men who actually signed a waiver absolving Wally in case of sickness or death. The first of these preservatives was Borax. used to tighten old meat, which had begun to decompose. They also use it to kill insects.

8:28 Speaker 3: Just saying. Predictably, the men who were given this poison became sick. Wiley moved on to sulfuric acid, sodium benzoate, formaldehyde, copper sulfate, saccharin, and saltpeter. Wiley knew That these preservatives would make the men sick. Or perhaps kill them. He knew it. Everybody knows it. But his research and drive made it possible for Congress to pass. Yes, pass. The 1906 Pure Food Act and Meat Inspection Act.

9:15 Speaker 2: Dr.

9:16 Speaker 3: Harvey Washington Wiley said, who convinced 12 men to voluntarily consume poison for the good of the country. Now what's happening? Think about that for a second. This is Crimson McKenzie. Join me again for another true tale of this strange, peculiar, uncanny, curiouser and curiouser. Might not want to. join me again after this one, but please stare.