The Mad Genius Behind Sea Monkeys

in the Year 1960 I discovered a wonderful almost immoral animal that possessed characteristics soon to astound even the most worded scientists although it sounds like science fiction these animals live for years perhaps centuries in suspended animation sealed in magic crystals time travelers journeying through the fourth dimension when you witness the miracle of instant life a door will open that had always been close to you a door to a new dimension in your awareness of the nature of life only a dollar plus 25 cents shipping [Music] at the end of World War two Americans were having lots of kids and if kids love anything its toys and if they love anything else it's pets and also kids love surprises this is the story of a man named Harold von Braun high who once had an idea for all those new American kids an idea that combines pets toys and surprises it was a small idea that would have a big impact on generations to come Harold's idea came from the strangest place a bucket of brine shrimp cottony sold his fish food he looked into the bucket and said to himself I think I can make the best foods into the pet harold von braun hood set out to sell brine shrimp to kids as pets you see Harold realized that brine shrimp might look boring but they actually have this cool superpower called cryptobiosis to survive long periods of drought brine shrimp produce eggs that can remain dormant for years or even decades to the naked human eye the eggs just look like tiny grains of sand but if you just add water I thought if you could see it come to life I mean what would be more remarkable than that the world's only instant live pets this is how Harold made it work first you pour ordinary tap water into the microview ocean zoo microview ocean zoo then you put in the contents of packet number 1 the water purifier pocket number 1 purifies the water you must wait 24 hours for the purification process to complete by the way for a kid this is like a super long time packet number 2 is where the magic happens you drop these mysterious crystals into the tank and your new pets just instantly appear kids were gonna love it but he still needed a name and although it would prove a confusing choice too literally everybody else in the world - harold von braun hut it was obvious sea-monkeys in a clever move harold skipped over parents and marketed directly to the kids everyone else was buying TV time so I went to comic books back then a lot of companies look down on comic books I bought something like 3.2 million pages of comic book advertising a year hey it worked beautifully hired Joe Orlando later vice president of DC Comics to draw the advertisements those Joe Orlando images are iconic beyond belief but the ad copy that was all heralds and heralds really had a voice bubbling over with spectacular tricks these tiny talented troopers perform like will psychist us what's the comic antics of these fantastic underwater balloons that are actually really alive order now only a dollar plus 25 cents shipping [Music] [Music] x-ray glasses spy pens see mugeez and a real rocket ship fully two bucks oh it's all novelty boat trick little kids none of that crap ever worked this might be a good time to acknowledge that for a lot of people sea monkeys are kind of just a scam like maybe their most famous for being a massive disappointment not for everyone mind you but still for a lot of kids sea monkeys marked a key moment in childhood where you learn that real life is just not as awesome as your dreams sometimes real life is just downright crappy but what are you loved sea monkeys or hate them man I love sea monkeys you have to admit it's pretty amazing that Harald could breathe this much magic into brine shrimp and it's not just that harold has sold sea monkeys to tens of millions of kids over decades sea monkeys have also warranted serious study like at this place the center for post natural history we're a small museum that is dedicated to living organisms that have been intentionally altered by people through selective breeding domestication or genetic engineering we view these organisms as works of culture we're specifically interested in sea monkeys because to the best of our knowledge they're the only living creature that's ever been specifically bred so that its lifecycle would match the life cycle of a toy most people when they think of sea monkeys they think about advertisements that look like these and they would promise that if you sent away your dollar and your coupon you would get back at these little anthropomorphic people in reality what you get are these tiny little monster creatures that are wiggling around and you can barely see them Harald once said that he was inspired by the flea circuses he'd seen as a child that people would willingly believe and talented fleas that obviously didn't exist girl invented all of these different add-ons one of them was called Cupid's arrow it was sort of a sea monkey viagra and things like the banana treat that if you look closely at it it looks an awful lot like they're smoking banana peels does anyone get that reference anymore banana peels very little is known about Harold von Braun Hut but what we do know is pretty amazing he raced motorcycles as the Green Hornet's he managed the careers of entertainers novelty acts like the great gun insurer and Henry lamothe who had died from 60 feet into just 12 inches of water Harold was the antithesis of the post-war calm he took a black-and-white world and put it in color and he didn't just invent sea-monkeys Harold was a prolific inventor his inventions included x-ray specs sea-doo goes crazy air breathing crabs as gentle as a pussycat and amazing hair-raising monsters just add water and start this crazy horse show right in your own home his best invention though was the invisible goldfish all you had to do was send in your dollar and you'd get an empty fish tank and some fish food the ad copy promised you would never see the goldfish by the late 1960s Harold had a problem his sea monkeys were selling well and they did work they just didn't work very well only one or two would survived per batch and they had a limited shelf life so Harold teamed up with an actual brine shrimp expert named dr. Anthony D'Agostino and the two of them said about breeding a hybrid brine shrimp so they could live in its dormant egg state for as long as possible grow as big as possible and live as long as possible Harold was in one sense operating as a kind of 20th century PT Barnum but at the same time the invention and experimentation that went into making sea monkeys work was a lot more like a Thomas Edison United States patent number three million six hundred seventy three thousand nine hundred eighty six five July fourth nineteen seventy two methods and materials used for hatching brine shrimp a closer read of Harold seamonkey patent reveals that he's been fooling us all along but not in the way you might think remember I showed you how to make Seema well it turns out this process is more like a magic trick than a science experiment packet number one is supposed to be the water purifier this purifies the water what Harold doesn't tell you is that packet number one also contains the eggs now you must wait 24 hours for the purification process to complete so when he tells you to wait 24 hours before adding packet number two it's a form of misdirection what he's really doing is giving the sea-monkeys time to get big enough where you can actually see them so during that whole day you are anxiously waiting to put in packet number two and create instant life the sea monkeys are already alive they've been hiding in plain sight you must wait 24 hours so what is in packet number two blue dye Harold put a tiny bit of blue dye in packet number two this dye settles on the now day old sea monkeys and makes them even easier to see so instant life is real cryptobiosis remember but Harold knew it just didn't look that cool so he created this whole elaborate stage show in illusion of instant life that's just a little better than the real thing [Music] this is where things get a bit strange and a lot darker in 1968 Harold Patton did something called the chi yoga spring whip chi yoga the steel Cobra is an automatically magnetically triggered steel whip on with a heavy caliber striking tip nobody needs to know you are secretly armed to the teeth the advertisements that he took out for the Kyoto spring whip are eerily similar to the ones that he took out for sea monkeys same layout same coupons and perhaps most troubling the same address then in an even stranger turn harold pledged the profits of the Cayuga to the Aryan Nations according to the anti-defamation league which kept a large file on him Harold was a very generous and very active member of this group and then there is someone named Hendrik von Braun [Music] an overwhelming amount of evidence forces me to conclude that the man you are looking at here is actually Harold [Music] [Music] one person who knew Harold quoted him as saying Hitler wasn't a bad guy he just got bad press it's the great mystery lurking out behind the SeaMonkey castle how does the guy own events all of these wonderfully playful fun things also promote such horrible ideas the closer I look the more different these two Harold's appear to be to me now I have to back up and tell you that Harold had yet another identity and yet another name Harold von Braun hutt was born Harold Brown Hut to a Jewish family in New York so now we have the inventor of sea-monkeys who is Jewish pledging large portions of his fortune to an anti-semitic hate group those reports are all lies I don't have to defend myself to you or anyone else the calm down here [Music] Harold files his final patent in 2002 background of the invention kids love pets for some children pet service friends confidence items of affection and a grams of consolation for other children pets take the place of brothers and sisters they never had or will have one drawback of aquatic pets however is that they must be kept in a stationary tank at home oftentimes children are left to fixate on their watch counting down the hours minutes and finally seconds until they can get back to playtime with their beloved sea monkeys there is a need for a means to allow sea monkeys to be enjoyed around the clock so to speak such need is met by the aquarium watch of the present invention when I look at sea monkeys what I see is the imprint of Harold's imagination harold von braun hut was one part genius inventor to one part flim-flam man and add another part so dark it casts a shadow over his whole legacy people are complicated life is complicated life can be disappointing and heartbreaking and life can be magical and fun and it's all right there in the tiny story of Harold and his amazing live sea monkeys [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Great Big Story

Views: 7,663,374

Rating: 4.8172002 out of 5

Keywords: great big story, gbs, lag, really great big story, sea monkeys, science, experiment, inventor, invention, Harold von Braunhut, marketing, genius, flim-flam, Nature & Animals, Biography & Profile, Tech & Science, Weird & Fun Knowledge, Just Add Water, documentary, docs, New York, chilren, toys, pop culture, mail order

Id: A0xXKCOSZuQ

Length: 16min 47sec (1007 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 27 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/Chipdogs]

They can get quite big as they live out their carefree little shrimpy lives. When I was a kid I had three grow to be almost a cm in length among the rest of the tiny ones. I had a miniature tank with little LED lights in it and they were cool to watch before I fell asleep. They would flock to the lights as they faded on and off.

[u/FoodandWhining]

Every single kid out there who was expecting to have a tank of tiny pink monkeys with crowns and smiles on their faces only to wind up with f'ing plankton all want this man killed.

[u/kieranjackwilson]

When I was in grade school I got some sea monkeys for Christmas. I set up their home and waited for them to hatch.

The morning they were supposed to rise from their slumber to befriend me, I found the enclosure knocked over. There was water all over the floor. Corpses all over the floor. I wished it had been me and not them.

I few weeks later, my older brother finally fessed up. His curiosity had gotten the best of him that rainy July morning. He’d woken up to check if they were alive and accidentally spilled the tank, ensuring that if they had been alive, they no longer would be.

I don’t know if I ever forgave him. Sometimes I’m sure I have. I’ve gone days, weeks, months, years without thinking of them.

But when I see an article like this, I am unsure if I am capable of forgiving the man who killed my monkeys of the sea.

[u/DarthBaio]

Spoiler alert to little kids: they're not gonna have fucking bikinis.

[u/richfiles]

I loved having sea monkeys. I even used them as the inspiration for an art robot I built one Christmas, when I got stranded at my apartment at college. My car broke down, everyone else went home for the holiday. I was broke, nothing could ship over the holiday, I couldn't go anywhere, and none of my friends were around... So I used the random junk I had on hand to build a robot I ended up calling "Floor Monkey". It faced away from light using a roller on it's "tail". When in perfect conditions, it's 11 pairs of guitar string "pseudopods" would resonate and begin to chatter. Built that back in 1998. http://richfiles.solarbotics.net/robots/FloorMonkeyTop.jpg

[u/Casserole233]

The mom sea monkey always looked so hot in the advertisement. I used to dream of of growing them and then having sex with her while her sea monkey husband was busy with the kids.

[u/[deleted]]

Nazi shrimp

[u/hithereworld2]

glad i watched! thank you!

[u/blazin_chalice]

That was a very well-produced and interesting documentary. You may also want to share it in /r/mealtimevideos.