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This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.

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Welcome to Erin Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild.

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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.

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If you've ever worked in any sort of service job, you've probably heard the phrase the customer is always right. It's a truism that is hard to believe when you're dealing with an irate person or someone who simply doesn't like you. And the saying isn't true in the literal sense. The customer is rarely actually right all the time. But the customer is the one with the money, so they're the one who must be appeased. And if you fail to do so, you may still hear from a customer for days, weeks, or months later. Especially if they're not happy with your product or your behavior. To quote one particularly irate customer complaint, what do you take me for, that you treat me with such contempt? Actually, that's not something a recent customer said. That's a customer from over 3,000 years ago. I'd like to take you back to 1750 BCE to the ancient city state of Ur in ancient Mesopotamia. There, a man named Nani spoke to a merchant about purchasing some copper ingots. The merchant, whose name was A Nasir, wasn't just a copper trader. He also sold textiles and foodstuffs on occasion, but his primary specialty was copper. At least that's the impression he gave to Nani. He assured Nani that he would provide him with copper of excellent quality as soon as he got back from Dilmun. He made the trip, and upon his return, he sent word to Nani that the copper was ready. Nani dispatched a servant to pick up the copper and to pay the merchant for his services. It should have been a fairly simple transaction. However, when the servant arrived, he had a far less pleasant interaction with the merchant than his master had. A Nasir set the copper before him, and the servant quickly quickly realized that the ingots were not the right grade that Nani had requested. When he pointed this out, a Nasir told the servant that he can take or leave the copper. If he doesn't want it, then he should get out of his sight. The servant, not knowing what else to do, paid for the copper and returned to his master. Hearing what had happened to his servant by this merchant, Nani was outraged. He wrote to a Nasir accusing him of being rude and callous and demanding that he send his money back as he would not accept the poor quality copper from him. And I wish that I could give you more of this dramatic story, but we know little else about it, because all of the information that we have comes from the written complaint that Nani wrote to the merchant, a Nasir. It was on a clay tablet written in Akkadian cuneiform. The tablet was unearthed between 1922 and 1934 by an expedition from the British Museum to modern day Iraq. At around 3,775 years old, it's thought to be the oldest surv customer complaint in history. And it wasn't the only one that they found there. The building they found it in contained several more tablets, also addressed to a Nasir. They were all fairly irate, with some asking about the status of their orders, about undelivered orders or the copper they were promised by the merchant. Others were requests for a batch of copper to pick from. But even if most of these dozen or so tablets were all annoyed at this one merchant, none were as thoroughly frustrated as Nani's message. We'll likely never know if a Nasir responded to this storm of messages and complaints and accusations. Archaeologists seem to think that his business waned in the later years, with his house being relatively small compared to other neighboring units. The fact that he kept all of his customer complaints implied that they were either from the latter days of his business or he had a fairly petty nature. Few of us get to choose the way that we are remembered. Leaving behind a monument or a tomb is beyond even the wildest dreams of the ordinary person. So it's curious to to think about how something like a customer complaint can preserve names across the millennia, to the point where you can read Nani's complaint tablet yourself in the British Museum, or at least a translation of it. We know just how incensed this man was by the merchant's rudeness, making the past a little more relatable in spite of the vast gulf of time between us. It just goes to show, when you treat people rudely, they remember it. Perhaps a Nasir should have remembered the Golden Rule, or, well, maybe in this case we should say the Copper Rule. A man walks into a pet shop in 1957 and stumbles upon his fortune. It sounds like the start of some vaudevillian joke, but this is a true story of a man who took the lowest of creatures and with them built an empire of novelty before making a strange turn that nearly tore it all down. This man was Harald von Braun Hutt, born into a Jewish family of toymakers in Memphis, Tennessee. In early life, he was something of a daredevil, racing motorcycles under the name the Green Hornet before taking on clients as a talent agent. These early forays into entertainment wouldn't pan out, and so Harold changed his career path, looking for something new. And so on one fateful day, he walked into that pet shop where his eyes landed on a bucket that would change his life forever. The bucket was filled with water and it contained thousands upon thousands of tiny little swimmers. They were brine shrimp, which are a type of crustacean. Brine shrimp, whose scientific name is Artemea salina, are a species who have evolved to live inland in brine pools and other other salty inland waters. They're very small. The largest of them grow only to about 15 millimeters in length. In nature, the tiny arthropods serve an important function in their ecosystem. They eat green algae and so keep the waters clean. And then they serve as food for migrating birds. They've remained little changed since they appeared in the Triassic period 250 million years ago. And Harold was fascinated by the tiny creatures. But what got his imagination reeling was a curious biological traitorous. Their eggs are capable of survival of up to two years out of water and are resistant to both heat and cold. This survival mechanism made them perfect for shipping long distances. Harold saw potential in these shrimp and hired a marine biologist to breed the brine shrimp to best endure shipping conditions. They were sold in small kits, complete with packets which included the desiccated eggs, an agent to purify the water and salt, and instructions to create the perfect environment for the shrimp to thrive. And he branded them as sea monkeys and hired well known cartoonist Joe Orlando to design all new advertisements. These ads showed a fantastical underwater wonderland with a family of anthropomorphized pink brine shrimp smiling up from the page. They looked nothing like the product that would arrive to eager children's doors. But that mattered very little to sales, which skyrocketed as the first ads were released in 1964. And as a side note, as a kid growing up in the 80s who frequented yard sales where boxes of old comic books were sold. I distinctly remember these ads over and over again in almost every issue I read. And as you'd imagine, sea monkeys became a smash success with sales rivaling ant farms. And so Harold used the same type of marketing for all new inventions, selling a seemingly endless line of novelty toys, including X ray specs which ensnared the adolescent mind with promises of seeing through clothing and crazy crabs, which were hermit crabs sold with their own small tanks. In all, he had 195 patents registered with the US government, although none of them ever came close to the success of Sea Monkeys. One of those patents was very unlike the others, though. It was a spring loaded baton used for defense which was named the Kyoga agent M4. 5. The baton had early success when it was used in the 1981 Burt Reynolds film Sharkey's Machine. It was another success, albeit a modest one, but it uncovered an ugly truth about the inventor. Although born into a Jewish family, it turns out that Von Braun Hutt was a rabid white nationalist who had added the von to Braun Hut to distance himself from his own heritage. In fact, he used the proceeds from The Cayuga agent M5 sales initially on a legal defense fund of one Richard G. Butler, who happen happened at the time to be the leader of the Aryan nations group. When Butler included a mention of Von Braun Hut's donations, it caused a scandal and further digging by national papers discovered that he was well enmeshed with white nationalist causes. He annually attended the Aryan Nations World Congress and had helped buy firearms for the KKK in Ohio. His reputation was in tatters, but he abandoned neither his ties to white nationalists nor his drive to create and market new inventions. When he died from a fall in 2003, he was still working on ideas for a pet lobster and what he called an instant frog. In following years the company would be sold and litigation over payments to his widow would last for years. By the end, she was destitute. Although Sea Monkeys continued to sell well under the new ownership, Harald von Braunhut's legacy is a paradox. A visionary entrepreneur who turned a humble brine shrimp egg into a cultural phenomenon, yet whose personal flaws and covert alliances cast a long unsettling shadow over his achievements. In the end, his story serves as a reminder that brilliance and moral blindness sometimes coexist. Harold wasn't a good man, but he made something that people loved making him a curious example of just how complex and sometimes horrible human beings can be.