The Man Who Knew Everything: The Strange Life of Athanasius Kircher
How did the Kircherian Museum come to hold all these bizarre and fantastical objects And who was its mysterious owner the man Queen Christina had turned down all Rome’s wealthy and powerful to meet Athanasius Kircher was more than a scientist He was a star No single description could contain him He was an inventor an author an adventurer He published books on music math travel and medi cine He built microscopes and machines He spoke dozens of languages and could break secret codes He claimed to know what lay under the earth why the sky was blue and how to tell time using sun flowers and magnets He had even descended inside an active volcano and lived to tell the tale People called him The Man Who Knew Everything Kircher was a curious man living in a time when there were many more questions about the world than there were answers And he believed that by asking the right questions he could understand all the mysteries of the universe Did he always get it right Not even close His translations of Egyptian hieroglyphics were nonsense His speaking statue was a fraud He gave stories and myths the same weight as facts Kircher was a show man as much as a scientist closer to P T Barnum than to Albert Einstein So how did he become his era’s biggest scientific celebrity and why are people still fascinated by him today 7
The Wonders of the KIRCHERIAN MUSEUM If you had visited the Kircherian Museum along with Queen Christina in 1655 here are some of the things you would have seen THE VOMITING STATUE A glass of water vomited by a statue of a lobster For a different flavor you could try the vomiting eagle or the spitting lady The statues were funny but they also demonstrated principles of hydraulics the movement of liquid THE FAN CLUB Scholars scientists and other priests more than 750 pen pals in all wrote to Kircher from around the world with news of their discoveries and ideas He displayed all their letters a bit like an early version of Facebook THE BOX OF MIRRORS Kircher would place a cat inside to see it spit snarl and try to bat away all the other cats Or sometimes he would place a gold coin inside the box and watch people grab at reflections 8
A BRICK FROM THE TOWER OF BABEL This brick supposedly came from the mythical tower described in the Bible which was said to have reached to the moon If you asked Kircher he would explain his calculations proving it wasn’t really that high THE HIDDEN SHOWER Kircher loved a joke On cloudless days he might predict rain When his guests scoffed he’d pull a lever and release water over their heads THE LATEST SCIENTIFIC INSTRUMENTS The museum had telescopes microscopes sundials astrolabes and globes Special guests might even be allowed to try them out THE SPEAKING ORACLE Specially built for Queen Christina’s visit this life-sized statue moved its eyes and mouth and answered your questions The answers actually came from someone in another room talking down a hollow tube connected to the statue’s back VENOM-CURING SNAKESTONES These rocks from India were rumored to be an antidote to snakebites press the stone against a bite and it would draw out the poison There’s no evidence it really worked BONES FROM A RACE OF GIANTS In Kircher’s time no one knew that mastodons had once roamed Europe He decided these old bones must have come from ancient supersized humans 9
