USS Princeton Canon Disaster of 1844 | Episode 45

No one loves work functions, but office booze cruises are the worst because there's no way to sneak out early. Still, I'll bet you've probably never been on a work cruise so bad it directly led to the death of six hundred and thirty five thousand people. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday, History's most dangerous podcast. Together we're going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and onspiring, but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, you'll learn the most popular death cries of different presidents. We'll learn how a cannon can have more than one business end, and we're gonna play a game of shipboard Body Part two that literally changed the course of American history. This is not the show you play around kids, or while eating or even a mixed company. But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that could potentially save your life, our work is done. So when all that said, shoot the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin to give you a sense of how old today's story is. We're going to be following around a US president John Tyler, who don't even worry about it. He's going to be two hundred and thirty three years old this March, so yeah, we got you. He was president right after William Henry Harrison and right before James K. Polk when he took the office, As more vocal opponents said, he was the first accidental president of the United States. And I can explain that. Did you ever hear of Tippy Canoe and Tyler too? Tyler had been VP under President Harrison, and Harrison was the first and only president to leave the payroll with two World records and a Darwin Award. During his inauguration speech, Harrison blathered, I'm sorry, it's just most presidents prepare a speech, you know, twenty minutes or less. Harrison's speech, on the other hand, took one hour and forty five minutes to get through, and he did it on a rainy winter day. He was also the oldest man elected president to that point. He was sixty eight at least when he started a speech. And here's where maybe you've heard of this guy. He did all this without a coat or gloves or a hat or of his mind. Clearly he was also wearing these big swashbuckler style boots that caught the rain and soaked his feet. So between that and the seven different people who sneezed directly into his face during the processional, he ended up dying a month later from pneumonia, and thus Tyler became the tenth President of the United States. He's best remembered for annexing Texas, Mexico into the Union. Hey Texas, But after today's tale, you're going to remember him for something a little different. You're going to see how this story, in the fashion of all good disasters before, it starts with a simple decision that compounds future decisions that'll lead to vanloads of blood. When he first took office, he immediately set out to behead Harrison's cabinet from before and started over, and one of his new picks was Secretary of the Navy, Able p Upsher Upshur was a squeaky wheel who spent most of his time attacking Congress for more money for the Navy. He had to do this with his words because he couldn't afford fancy cannons and actually fighting in the Senate not that weird. In eighteen fifty six, Preston Brooks of South Carolina beat Charles Sumner of Massachusetts most of the way to death over the head with his cane right on the house floor. In eighteen fifty Thomas Benton of Missouri was about to beat Henry Foot of Mississippi to death with his meaty pause, but Foot was all not today in surprise him with a pistol. But my favorite incident was in eighteen fifty eight when thirty members of the House of Representatives brawled openly until John Potter and pad Walletter Washburn ripped William Barksdale's to pay off his house, and the fighting was replaced with laughter. Two other things about that story. You might remember the name cad Walletter Washburn as the owner of the Massachusetts mill that exploded in our Pemberton Mill episode. And John Potter was famously nicknamed Bowieknife because he owned a thirty one pound six foot long knife. Actually, the worst story was that he was nicknamed Bowie Knife because he was once challenged to a duel and he accepted, but he made one stipulation. He needed it to happen in a closed, locked room with knives until one of them couldn't stand anymore. Anyways, what the hell were we talking about? Oh? When Congress saw Upshur's wish list, they told him to kick rocks. They told him he was dreaming, but they did loosen the purse strings just enough to finance a few experimental steam powered w Navy Captain Robert Stockton was a politically connected naval officer who also believed in modernizing the fleet, but had the political poll to get something really extra built, and with that meet the USS Princeton. He was a marvel at the age she was the first US Navy vessel to be driven by a steamed power school propeller. This made her the fastest ship in the fleet and one of the most advanced in the world. We don't throw the word genius around easily on this show, but the guy who designed it, Yep, he was one engineering genius. John Ericsson hailed from Sweden, and this dude changed everything. He designed engines that burned hotter and generated more power than anything ever seen before, so Stockton wooed him into coming stateside. Stockton was going to end up eating a lot of the costs to see the USS Priston come to life, but he was okay with it and He named it the Princeton, in honor of the city in New Jersey that played an important role in the American Revolutionary War. From the outside, the Princeton was only one hundred and sixty four feet long, he was thirty feet wide, and it displaced about nine hundred tons. But inside the ship was powered by two seawater cooled ericson original vibrating link engines that drove a six bladed bronze propeller screw. You know the first time you saw the warp core the engine room from the Enterprise, well to the contemporary eye, the Princeton's engine room was something kind of like that. The engines were powered by tubular iron boilers designed to burn smokeless coal, which for a sea going vessel was basically a cloaking device. And another thing was he had designed the ship so that everything sat internally, and that freed up the deck space for guns. Lots and lots of guns. There were twelve forty two pound cannons mounted within the hull, and this left room for one real cannon mounted to the deck. Erickson was a bit of an engineering unicorn. Not only did he design the greatest sea going engines in the world. He also designed cannons, and not just any cannons, the biggest in the world. He designed a smooth bore muzzle loader made of wrought iron that could fire a two hundred and twenty five pound round and it contained the explosion of fifty pounds propellant per shot to spit a twelve inch cannon ball five miles or eight kilometers away. For reference, a bowling ball is closer to only eight and a half inches. This thing could put a shot through six feet of solid oak and the only way all this worked was to have a revolutionary design. By casting it from wrought iron, this thing was strong enough to support larger shells and a longer barrel. His special trick was to include iron bands preheated to shrink fit over the cylinder to provide extra strength without adding a bunch of extra weight. This man also designed rangefinders and elevation gauges calibrated to the yaw of the ship. He came up with a compressor brake system to minimize the recoil, and he even created a pivot mount allowing it to aim. Seems so much easier than traditional mounts. Swedish edison over here was such a savant. He also worked on optical devices and solar energy, so really it was only a matter of time before he invented the first ship mounted laser. But for now he was all about cannons. He named his design the Orator because when it spoke, people listened, and to me, that is pretty much drop your ink quill, collect your gold star kind of branding rate there. But then came Stockton, and he loved changing things for no reason, so he renamed it the Oregon, which isn't especially clever or memorable. No offense to Oregon. Like all designs, the cannon needed to be test fired extensively, and think about trying to hold a firecracker in your hand. When it goes off, all that pressure wants to blast your hands apart, and a gun barrel faces the same kind of pressure, only much much greater. It has to repeatedly eat explosions powerful enough to push a two hundred and twenty five pounds shell for miles, and it has to hold itself together to force all that energy out of the shooty end in the same way that you would probably lose a finger even in the comparatively indestructible cast iron small tension cracks formed around the barrel, and while Erickson was off inventing a new way to strengthen the barrel to parent this, Stockton got to thinking again. See, the Oregon had been forged in Liverpool, and he thought it would be more patriotic to have an American made cannon on deck. So he took a copy of the plans and a ootlocker full of cash to a firm called Hog and Delameter in New York City and got them to forge a duplicate of the Oregon, only bigger. What they built was the largest naval cannon ever constructed, from the largest mass of wrought iron ever forged by human hands. Ericson didn't think it was particularly well made, but Stockton simply did not care. I mean, just look at it. It was said to be the most formidable ordinance ever mounted, and beyond comparison, the most extraordinary forged work ever execu and he named the new gun the Peacemaker, which is a kind of a nod to this really played out old idea that if you were to make a weapon so terrible and unenviable, people would immediately see the futility of war and bring about a kind of Age of Aquarius or something. The USS Princeton's first Potomac Cruise took place on February the sixteenth, eighteen forty four. The invite list included President Tyler, various military big wigs, and the congressional committees that oversaw the Navy. The band played patriotic tunes while Stockton plyed the visiting dignitaries with ooze and droned on about the ships in her workings. But the only smoke these guests wanted to see being blown was by the cannons. The second cruise took place on the twentieth, and to all reports, that trip was identical to the first. A third and final cruise was planned for the twenty eighth. It was a beautiful day, mild and serene, not a cloud in the sky. The guests were all high society socialites, dressed in their very face finest. This thing was the hottest ticket in town, and the invite list went on and on. It included everyone from Secretaries of War and Navy, to the Attorney General, to the reigning Queen of Washington high society, seventy five year old Dolly Madison, and also David Gardner of New York, who it doesn't matter. What does matter was that he was a well connected member of the New York State legislature. But for the purposes of this tale, he is the father of two hot daughters. I mean, the papers said they were real head turners, especially his youngest daughter, Julia, who was only twenty at the time. And I'm not calling him a pimp, but I am going to say that he was willing to barter his daughters for a ticket to the big time. Gardner was looking to marry her off to a wealthier, famous, or influential bachelor, or maybe even a widower. Perhaps. You see, President Tyler's wife, Letitia, had died only a few years earlier, and he'd become famously morose about it until he met Julia. He wrote her love letters and poetry and had her over to the White House so many times people started to talk. When he eventually asked for her hand in marriage, she laughed in his face. Still, he was desperate for her attention, so he invited her to the Princeton Gala just to be able to spend more time staring at her. On February the twenty eighth, nineteen forty four, guess boarded a ferry in Washington, which took them out to the USS Princeton. When the President boarded, three cheers went out and the band struck up Hail to the Chief, while cannons fired off a twenty one gun salute, but not from the big one earlier in Philadelphia. It tested the gun too close to the shore and shattered windows up and down the waterfront. As soon as everyone was on board, she pushed off and left for Alexandria. The cruise was said to be in celebration of the upcoming annexation of Texas, and with all guests aboard, she made her way down the Potomac. Well, almost all our guests. Ericson was supposed to be on board. He'd been left behind in New York City as the Princeton had steamed away, and I mean standing sadly on a dock, suitcase in hand, kind of left behind. And he was pissed, and not just for that. See, it turns out he'd been owed fifteen thousand dollars from Stockton for his designs. Well, I guess it was time to start working on that laser. Stockton assembled everyone on deck by the big guns and gave a quick safety speech. Before firing the cannon. He said everyone should hold onto their hats and open their mouths to dissipate the force from the blast. The peacemaker fired with an unholy kraffume, and all aboard cheered and squealed, ludling, probably because all they could hear was a high pitched squealing where their hearing used to be. They would have had no idea how loud they were. As the ship traveled down the icy Potomac, the peacemaker was fired twice, displaying the range of this powerful armament over the icy Potomac. It blasted an enormous cannon ball straight down the river, which bounced seven times off the thick ice and only stopped about four miles down the rid. When it turned, there were more huzzahs, and then everyone went below deck for a late lunch. Stockton had gone all out with a lavish spread of meats and fruits and cheeses, and case after case of champagne. Some of the partitions of the innership had even been removed to make space for all the booze and guests, but there still wasn't enough room for four hundred people to eat at the same time, so the gentlemen let the ladies eat first while they drank. As the ship approached Mount Vernon, however, the guests began to demand that the peace Maker be be fired one more time. Mount Vernon is the final resting place of George and Marca Washington, who, by their point of view, had only died about forty five years ago. Now maybe it was the champagne talking, but these people wanted to see the first president commemorated by firing the biggest cannon in the world at his old house. Stockton agreed, and many clambered above deck the watch, including Julia's father David, but not Julia herself because cannons are loud. Tyler stayed behind too, because Julia was hot. When the Princeton reached Malvernon, the band played again as the peacemaker was ready to fire one last time. As everyone took their place around, the cannon stoked and strode up struck a jaunty Captain Morgan leg pose and smiled proudly. Lieutenant King pulled the firing cord and the peacemaker exploded. The sound of jeers were replaced with chaos. Now the thing about a cannon firing is they make a lot of smoke, like a lot of putrid smelling and metallic smoke. And before the firing, Stockton to made sure the cannon had been packed with as much explosive as it could to make for a bigger explosion. Well, bulwarks for twenty feet on either side of the breech shattered and blew away, and when the thick cloud of powder smoke finally dissipated, it revealed Captain Stockton, somehow still standing like something out of a road Runner cartoon. He stood there staring blankly at the shattered gun. Flames from the explosion had burned off his eyebrows and most of the sideburns, and blood was squirting out of his legs. Shards of hot iron had alone across the deck and through the crowd of bystanders. He hadn't even noticed. Everyone else within thirty feet of the cannon was buffeted by the shockwave and knocked off their feet. Hats and bonnets weren't things anymore, and many suffered concussions, breueizes and broken bones. Others were sliced up by shrapnel, and almost everyone was bleeding from the nose and ears. The National Intelligencer described what happened. The scene upon the deck may more easily be imagined than described, nor can the imagination picture to itself half of its horrors. Wives widowed in an instant by the murderous blast, daughters smitten with their heartrending sight of their father's lifeless corpse, the wailings of agonized females, the piteous grief of the unhurt but still heart stricken spectators. Wounded seamen were borne down below, and that the silent tears and quivering lips of their brave and honest comrades tried in vain to subdue or conceal their feelings. What words adequately depict a scene like this? Stockton also had noticed a one hundred pound fragment of the gun that flew between himself and Lieutenant Candon. But it splintered a solid oak gun carriage behind them into a thousand pieces, and blasted through a solid iron bar like it was nothing. Secretary of the Namy Thomas Walker Gilmer had been standing close to the gun and was now laying on his back, mouth and eyes wide open, staring at the sky. Hello, I don't know how much the fragment that had hit him and the forehead had weighed, but the piece pinning his legs to the deck weighed two thousand pounds. He was losing blood so excitedly that he soaked his would be rescuers before coughing once and dying on the spot. Gilmer, Secretary Upscher, and Senator David Gardner's bodies looked like they were playing twister. Upshur lay face down, and once turned over, it was revealed that his stomach had been torn wide open by shrapnel, and his bowels spilled onto the deck, and he too died on the spot. Gardner had taken less of the blast than Gilmour or Upsher, and his reward was half an hour of writhing in the most helpless and excruciat pain before he bled to death. Captain Kennon took a whole bunch of the blast. His chest had been completely smashed inwards, his limbs were so broken that could be used as slap bracelets, and one of his feet was just missing. A lawyer named Virgil Maxi was missing an arm, and the rest of his body was riddled with injuries, turning him into a kind of perflined butcher's chart under his clothes, and no one had noticed this until they tried to move him, and his body literally fell to pieces. Two of the ship's gunners were also killed. Nine officers and a dozen civilians were seriously injured. So a honk of flaming metal the size of a phone booth lands across your body and your rescuers describe you as seriously injured? Would you know what to do? My oldest friend, Mark, who I've referenced several times on the show, has worked in transit safety and has told me things about the human body that would technically help with weight loss. And one injury that is as sad as it is disturbing is a person who's fallen onto a subway track and while trying to escape, becomes trapped between the train and the platform. The victim is alive and even coherent, but definitely gonna die as the pressure holding their interior together is finally released. Every year, over one hundred and twenty five thousand people suffer different forms of crush injuries. They happen when the body is caught or sandwich between two objects, or entangled with machinery. Some refer to these hazards as pinch points. The physical force exerted upon the body caught and a pinch point can vary, causing injuries that arrange from light bruising to amputated body parts, mangling, and death. And here are some of the numerous causes of crush injuries. Playing catch with falling equipment, being pinned or struck between two objects like a piece of metal in a building, or getting pinched between two vehicles, getting run over by machinery or equipment, limbs, playing kuchiku machinery, even building collapses. Almost the incident you find yourself crushed between two objects, muscle cells are going to start to die, and three mechanisms within the body cost the cells to do this. Lysis, ischemia, and vascular compromise because you never heard of them. Lysis refers to the immediate disruption of cells that occurs when a part of the body is crushed. The pressure exerted on the muscle cells from the crushing causes the cells to be is schemic, which basically means a large amount of light g acid is produced, leading to leaking cells. And when stuck in a pinch point, your vessels are often compromised. They cut off the blood float of the muscles and the tissue, and they usually result in nerve or muscle damage, cell death, and even necrosis. The extent of this depends on the strength of the crushing and the part of the body involved when the total time elapsed. It is often the extremities. You know your hands, feet, legs, and arms involved in a crush accident, but nearly any body part of the entire person can become trapped. Case in point, I read of a drunk driver who was so entangled in the records of his own car they had to remove his penis and one testicle to free him. Right below that was the story of a teen who degloved his penis and inverted his scrotum right a bicycle. But again, this is not a penis safety segment per se. Crush injuries frequently lead to severe disability and have a pretty high chance of additional complications, including infection, swelling, blood clots. You got phantom pain and then comes the need for further amputation and heart problems. Emotional consequences are also pretty common, everything from depression and anxiety to post traumatic stress disorder. There's not a lot to do in more serious situations, but fluid resuscitation is a good start. Intravenous fluid resuscitation maybe necessary just to keep the kidneys alive intravenously, because I don't imagine your stomach digests very well when it's crushed to one and a half inches thick. But the first step to keeping anyone alive in an accident is to stop any bleeding. But because they've been crushed, you're going to want to be pretty selective about how you add pressure to wounds. Ideally you'd be well equipped with tourniquet brand tourniquets, but people have more commonly used ripped up clothing or belts to apply enough pressure to temporarily stop or slow blood loss. The tricky part, of course, is doing it without completely depriving the tissue of oxygen. It's a real balancing act, and that's where proper training comes in, or even better, an ambulance full of paramedics and empts. These are the important for steps before freeing them from their injury, should it ever even be considered. And most importantly, you already look at your phone seven thousand times a day as it is, now's the time to use it to call for help. I'm just trying to help you learn simple triage. I'm not going to turn you into Dougie Hauser on this program. And if you're asking who Doogie Howser is, but you're trapped under a rock or something. A full third of the entire executive branch of the United States had been killed. The partier's below were completely oblivious to the horror above until the screening started and blood began to drip through the ceiling. They rushed top side and were immediately stopped by the hideous carnage. Someone slipped and fell in it. Ladies fainted, men vomited, Ladies vomited. Julia Gardner had run to the deck to see her father's ruined corpse and fainted right into the arms of President Tyler. Stockton was still standing there and his brain had completely shut off, so his second lieutenant, Johnson, took command of the situation. They covered the bodies with an American flag while the crew tended to the wounded. President. Tyler, who had been below decks, was completely uninjured, and after squirreling Julia away to safety, he returned to stand vigil over the dead. An official Navy court of Inquiry almost immediately cleared Stockton of any responsibility for the accident, almost word for word, just as Tyler had told them to say it. For years leading up to the disaster, Stockton had done everything he could to take credit for the Princeton and its glorious deck guns, but once it all went sideways, he was all, what's a boat and pinned everything on Ericson. Ericson was all what the actual hell man? Only in Swedish. He dusted his hands, called them all untrustworthy, shortsighted, self absorbed thimbleheads, said no screw for you, America, and returned to Sweden. This turns out to have been a much better deal for Sweden than America. With half the cabinet dead and Erickson giving the one finger salute from the back of an ocean liner, all plans for modernizing the US Navy got scuttled, and as a result, the American Navy fell about a decade out of step. They'd attempted to copy the Oregon's design, but with no real understanding of what made it work, including Ericsson's absolutely crucial hoop innovation. Stockton just told him to make the barrel thicker, and they did, and the thing was over twenty seven thousand pounds by the time they were done, and because of a little something called the transverse force of the explosive charge, all this only made things worse. Tyler had lost some of his closest political allies, and he was very nearly the second president to die in office. If he had, you would have been forced to learn about the next man in the presidential line of succession at the time alternate timeline President of the United States, Willie P. Mangum yep man Gum. The dead were laid in state in the White House's East Room and were given a full state funeral three days later. Congress halted all funding for steam powered propeller driven ships, even though steam had literally nothing to do with the accident, and kind of pissed that Stockton had done a full run around on their oversight. The House Committee of Naval Affairs ran their own investigation, and their report was essentially an image of Stockton with the word sucks written over it. Stockton was shocked and he really wanted to clear his name, so he commissioned his own report from the Franklin Institute in Philly, and he probably shouldn't have. Their report found that the peacemaker was fundamentally flawed and should have never been put into service. Hogg and Delimeter had no idea how to work with wrought iron at the scale, and this allowed impurities and air pockets to form in the metal, which made it weaker, and not understanding the importance of Ericsson's reinforcing band technique, they just welded them on, which really just kind of made them decorative. The whole report stung, and when asked for his opinion, Ericson wired back that Stockton quote lacks sufficient knowledge for the construction of a common wheelbarrow. Tyler ordered a replica of the peacemaker to replace the shattered original, but the Navy refused to mount it anywhere vact iron cannons, who got such a bad rap from the event. Even the Oregon was removed. You can find it now sitting in Annapolis. And here is where this one disaster becomes a pivotal moment of historic importance. Remember Stockton, Yeah, he jumped ship when Tyler lost the election, and he joined the winning team. Uh huh, that's right, Team polp and he would go on to help President Pope acquire the Oregon Territory and start a war with Mexico that led to the capture of the entire American Southwest all the way to the Ocean. And you say, well, that's obviously not great for Mexico, but I can live with it. It's not just that entering into the war with Mexico was the decision that worsened tensions between America's various parties, and this butterfly affected into the Civil War just fifteen years later. Three quarter of a million people died, two percent of the American population at the time, all wiped out as a consequence of the decision to start the Mexican American War, which itself was a consequence of the election of James K. Polk, which itself was the consequence of the explosion aboard the Princeton. And that's just not me conjecturing here. This all came from eighteenth President Ulysses S. Grant. He was the one who originally put up all the pins and strings on the mystery board. After everything was done, everyone dealt with the lingering trauma and horror in their own way. Dolly Madison had been the shattiest woman in America. But if you asked her about her experience that night, she shut down like she had a microchip and planted in her brain. William Montgomery Crane had been chief of the Naval Bureau of Ordnance and Hydrography. He had absolutely nothing to do with design or the testing of the peacemaker, but he could never shake the guilt that if he had been able to oversee it, he could have saved all those lives. He basically he became kind of like Judge Reinhold in that one episode of Seinfeld, where all he wanted to do was sell his watch to pay for just a few more inches of leg room on a flight for Jerry's parents. Crane took his responsibility to heart. In fact, he took it so seriously he couldn't live with us, and he didn't just a short while later, if you take my meaning. Stockton, on the other hand, was whatever kind of man who lacked any kind of introspection to see himself as anything more than a victim of these events, and he never stopped commissioning studies to try to prove it. But it was all just good money after bad oh and William Crane, Yeah, he was survived by his brother achabod Yep, the lanky schoolteacher from Washington, Irvings, the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow fame, and speaking of stuff getting killed. When Abel Upsher went up to heaven the deal that he had been crafting so carefully to bring Texas into the Union before the end of Tyler's first term, it all went with them, and Texas had been Tyler's campaign promise. But now Upsher's replacement was at the table. It was none other than seventh President of the United States and human boob, John C. Calhoun. He managed to torpedo the whole thing and as a result, Tyler wasn't even renominated. The whole thing tanked the election, but Tyler didn't care. In the days and weeks after the explosion, Julia Gardner started to see him in a different light. I mean, when she woke up on board and found Tyler carrying her to safety, she freaked out and nearly slap fought her way into the Potomac. But now she kind of saw him as a suave man of action three and a half times her age, that heroically put her safety before his own. It's entirely possible she just transferred her father issues to the next available father figures, but who knows that June they were wet and John was as devoted to her as he'd been to Letitia before her. He had seven children with Julia, which added to the eight he already had with Letitia, made him the biggest sperm donor in American presidential history. And before you ask, Letitia died of a stroke, not from uterine exhaustion or anything. The Princeton of our story was not the last ship to carry the name. Four more ships would be christened Princeton, the last being a Taikonderoga class guided missile cruiser. It retired back in nineteen eighty nine. Tyler retired from public life in eighteen forty five and from actual life in eighteen sixty two, leaving this world saying, doctor, I am going. Perhaps it is best, which was certainly better than his predecessor, wet blanket, former Hall monitor, and I wish I'd spent more time at work. Deathbet confessor Henry William Harrison's last words, which were, I wish that you could understand the true principles of government. I asked them to be carried out. I asked nothing more. There's certainly one hundred times better than Benjamin Harrison, who yelled out doctor my lungs, or Herbert Hoover, whose last words were Levi. Strauth was one of my best friends. And it's maybe weird to mention this here, but while we're still on Robert Stockton, they named a town in California after him. If you're a naval history buff, you might remember Ericsson's name from the USS Monitor, one of the world's first successfully ironclad armored coastal warships. Oh and he invented the first single revolving turret with two cannons mounted, so that was pretty cool too. See. Lincoln had begged him to return to continue inventing for America during the Civil War, and in return, they invented a memorial on the National Mall just south of the Lincoln Rotunda to commemorate him. The USS Princeton disaster saw the deaths of more US officials than any other day in American history. Historians said, until the Civil War and the Lincoln assassination, the Princeton explosion had been the most extreme tragedy to confront a sitting US president. I don't believe we've ever touched on a disaster that had such a profound impact on the geography and politics of a continent. And this is why we remember the USS Princeton Cannon disaster of eighteen forty four as one of the most butterfly effecting moments in American history. Well, that was a hell of a story that had everything love, political intrigue, explosions, but it also had what should be shocking levels of personal greed, jealousy, and consequence. We've done a few episodes now where people on authority make rash or bizarre decisions that end up getting a lot of innocent people replaced by earns. Now, every serving member of the US military and Congress, etc. Know that there's always the expectation that they could potentially die in service to their country and be recognized for making the ultimate sacrifice. And in a different version of this story, the Princeton successfully blasted Mount Vernon and everything would have been different except the cover up and the finger pointing and the miscarriage of justice. You can reach out to us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, or fire us an email to Doomsdaypod at gmail dot com. We're also on tech Talk as doomsday dot The dot podcast. Older episodes can be found where you found this one, and while you're there, please leave us a review. More accordingly, tell your friends. If you'd like to support the ongoing production of the show, you can find us at Patreon dot com slash Funeral Kazoo or buy Me a Coffee dot com slash Doomsday. But if you can spare the money and had to choose, we ask you to consider making a donation to Global Medic. Global Medic it's a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistants around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They're often the first and sometimes the only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over three point six million people across seventy seven different countries. You can learn more and donate at Globalmetic dot CAA. On the next episode, what does football have to do with cooking? Normally nothing, but there was that one time in nineteen hundred and when you get that reference, you're going to be horrified. It's the big game football disaster nineteen hundred. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off and thanks for listening.