Picture a 17th-century man being lowered by fraying rope into the smoking crater of Vesuvius because he wants to see a volcano's engine from the inside. The same man outlined how to stop the bubonic plague with masks, quarantine, and burned clothing centuries before germ theory, designed an infamous cat piano, believed armadillos came from turtles mating with porcupines, and faked his way through Egyptian hieroglyphs so convincingly the world accepted it for generations.

Athanasius Kircher, the Jesuit "master of 100 arts," was once the most famous scientist alive. This episode follows him from the chaos of the Thirty Years' War through the shipwreck that stranded him at the center of the Catholic world, where he ran a 760-correspondent Jesuit network like a 17th-century internet. It weighs his genuine breakthroughs against his spectacular d ...