Created in 1926 by fusing together a patchwork of regional highways into one uniform national thoroughfare, U.S. Route 1 runs for 2,369 miles from Fort Kent, Maine all the way to Key West, Florida.
While it runs through most of the major cities on the Eastern Seaboard, the country's longest and easternmost north-south highway has only one starting point, which is celebrated with a granite monument to America's First Mile.
When plans for the U.S. numbered highway system were first hatched in 1925, there were already a number of connected but logistically discontinuous named highways built and maintained by private entities that carried traffic up and down the east coast. In determining the route for the easternmost roadway in this new national system, a course was chosen that followed the coast's so-called fall line, which maps the the furthest inland navigable points for commercial shipping.
At these places up rivers or at the tops of bays, cargo would finally have to be unloaded from boats and transferred to wagons or warehouses. Thus, busy towns and cities tended to develop at these points, and roads tended to develop to connect them. It was, in other words, a geographical feature that provided a convenient framework for a continent-spanning coastal highway. And the American town at the northern end of this fall line was Fort Kent.
The northern terminus of U.S. Route 1 was marked by a wooden sign until 2010, when the new granite monument and accompanying plaza were built in a spot overlooking the bridge across the St. John River to Claire, New Brunswick. If you're standing at the monument looking for U.S. Route 1, however, don't look south—the road actually leaves town to the north, following the looping contour of the international border to Saint Leonard, where it finally turns firmly south on its long journey to the Florida Keys.
Divers at the wreck site examining the bones. (Photo: Brett Seymour, EUA/WHOI/ARGO)
Since 1900, when Greek divers first discovered it, the Antikythera shipwreck has been one of the most exciting troves of information about the ancient world. Not long after the wreck was first found, divers came upon the mysterious Antikythera mechanism, a piece of ancient technology made of complicated clockwork, sometimes called the world's first analog computer. It's lent the wreck an aura of mystery: Who were the people on the ship? How did they use this fabulous object?
In August, archaeologists made another discovery, reported in Nature, that will help them better understand this wreck—a well-preserved skeleton of a person who could become the first victim of an ancient shipwreck to have their DNA sequenced.
Skeletons have been found at the site before. In the 1970s, a team led by Jacques Cousteau brought up many human remains, but those bones were preserved with methods unfriendly to DNA analysis. This newly discovered set of bones includes the petrous bone, the Guardian reports, a part of the skull where DNA tends to be well preserved.
The scientists are waiting for permission from the Greek authorities to actually sequence the DNA. They believe the skeleton belongs to a man who was in his early 20s when he died; by sequencing the DNA, they could find out what he looked like and where he came from. It'll one more clue to understanding the life of this ship and its precious cargo.
In 1530, to escape the wrath of the Pope, Michelangelo holed up in a tiny secret room under the Medici Chapel of the Basilica di San Lorenzo. The artist had been working on the lavish tomb when all hell broke loose in Florence, and he was forced into hiding. With nothing but time and a little charcoal on his hands, he covered the bare walls with some prisoner graffiti.
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni designed the Medici Chapel as an elaborate domed mausoleum for his patron family, but for three months he hid underneath it and filled the walls with drawings—of himself, of Christ, and even, some experts believe, sketches for later Sistine Chapel wall paintings.
Michelangelo owed his career to the Medici, one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in Europe. In 1529 he joined ranks with other Florentines who had grown weary of their rule, hoping for a more democratic system of governance. Defying the formidable family, let alone the Pope (Clement VII, who was a Medici), was more than a little counterintuitive for the artist, whose livelihood depended on them. But defy he did, working to help fortify the city walls against Medici-friendly forces led by the Pope himself.
After ten months of struggle the Pope and his family won, and the republican sympathizers were swiftly punished. This would have included Michelangelo, had he not retreated for those three months to his subterranean hideaway to wait it out.
In November of 1530, after the Pope let it be known that Michelangelo could go back to work—unpunished–to complete the Chapel, he reemerged. All was forgiven between the artist and his patrons, eager to finally have their finished tomb. Michelangelo never let on where he had been, and for almost 500 years his whereabouts remained a secret.
The room and the drawings weren’t discovered until 1976, when they were stumbled upon by the director of the Museum of the Medici Chapel. Since then, given its fragility, the tiny, dark and unvented space has been alternately opened and closed to the public. Imagine spending three months down there with nothing but doodling to keep a genius occupied.
There is a small stone owl carved into a corner of the oldest church in Dijon, France. His face has seen better days and he’s less than a foot tall, but for over three centuries he’s had a big job: granting wishes to all who reach up and stroke his little face.
This is the Owl of Notre Dame de Dijon, the city’s symbol and unofficial talisman. The carving sits about six feet off the ground on an otherwise unremarkable corner of the church, and as the tradition goes, if you touch him with your left hand and make a wish, your wish will come true.
The original Gothic structure of Notre Dame dates to the 13th century, but the owl isn’t nearly so old. He was added—no one knows why or by whom—during construction of a more modern chapel (and by European church standards, “modern” means early 16th century) on the north wall. Here the narrow pedestrian street is called Rue de la Chouette, "Owl Street."
Dijon is no out-of-the-way place, and the church is dead center, so you can imagine how many left hands have touched the carving over the course of more than three hundred years. His face, probably once well defined, now looks more like a melted wax candle of an owl.
The pint-sized bird has come to symbolize Dijon, capital of the region of Burgundy (as in wine country—it’s not all mustard here). Owls represent everything from the local football team to official tourism destinations, marked with brass plaques of cartoon owls that form a trail of sites around the city.
The history of the owl as a symbol of wisdom goes back to Athena, the ancient Greek goddess of wisdom who was represented as one in her animal form. Right up through the old Tootsi-Pop commercial (“I’ve never made it without biting… ask Mr. Owl”), the bird has been associated with stolid and steady smarts. In Dijon, they’ve added a touch of magic.
The methane river delta on Titan, one of Saturn's moons, as depicted by space artist Ron Miller. (Photo: Ron Miller)
In a serpentine building that snakes through the Connecticut countryside, a strange meeting took place this past July. A group of four scientists from NASA, including an astronaut, a robotics expert, and the agency’s deputy administrator, conferred with some 30 painters, sculptors and poets. Adding an extra layer of mystery to proceedings was the fact that the meeting was hosted by Grace Farms, a faith-based think-tank created by an evangelical hedge-fund billionaire.
Tea was served. Thomas Pynchon may or may not have been present.
The aim of this odd confluence was to engage an “artistic response” to NASA’s journey to Mars, the space agency’s ambitious goal of putting a human on the red planet’s surface sometime in the 2030s. To help set the mood, NASA brought some zappy toys to share—a Hololens headset that offered an augmented reality view of Mars, as well as surreal images of winds carving the Martian surface. According to those present, scientists spoke of the necessity of having “an outpost” on Mars to help solve the many riddles of the galaxy. The question they were asking the assembled artists was whether they could help communicate this vision to the public as part of a new program entitled “Arts + Mars”.
Some of the artists were left scratching their heads. Many of them, schooled in the ambiguities and anti-authoritarian verities of contemporary art, saw NASA’s open call for guileless propaganda as being entirely at odds with the art they practice. “The conversation about art was at such a naïve level,” said one attendee, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of rousing the space agency's ire. “It just didn’t seem like NASA was that interested in what we had to say.” What’s more the overtly commercial and exploitative language of the Mars boosters—their mentions of partnerships with private industry and “putting tracks on Mars”—did not play well with their youngish, liberal audience.
There is no doubt that NASA needs some help. The moon landing will celebrate its 50th anniversary soon and the number of people inspired by actual memories of that event is dwindling fast. With no “space race” to offer a geo-political impetus to the expedition NASA desperately needs to engage the millennial generation in their Martian quest for the next 15 years.
Yet when the NASA scientists asked the attendant artists to refrain from posting pictures of the meeting on social media, it seemed to sum up both a generational and a temperamental mismatch. (In an email, a NASA spokesperson said that "participating artists are free to discuss their attendance.")
From a NASA perspective, the secrecy was a budgetary imperative. In 2003, the renowned performance artist Laurie Anderson was appointed NASA’s first “artist-in-residence” with the remit of creating art about the agency’s exploration of space. Republican congressmen quickly seized on the move as a sign of wanton profligacy. “Mr. Chairman,” sputtered Representative Chris Chocola of Indiana on the floor of Congress, “nowhere in NASA's mission does it say anything about advancing fine arts or hiring a performance artist.” There has been no artist-in-residence since and the reverberations were no doubt part of the reason why NASA’s workshop at Grace Farms seemed tentative and vague.
In the not-so-distant past, though, space and art intermingled happily. Artists were crucial to NASA’s development, at times outpacing the science of space travel itself. What happened?
In 1542, the German botanist, Leonhart Fuchs, created a book replete with hundreds of extremely detailed drawings of plants. This was unusual. A pervasive prejudice dating back to antiquity had scorned the usefulness of visual images in scholarship. Writing in his introduction, Fuchs railed against such lunacy: “Who in his right mind would condemn pictures which can communicate information much more clearly than the words of even the most eloquent men?”
From the Renaissance onwards, art and science became inextricably bound together. You can see it in Leonardo Da Vinci’s sketchbooks that he used as laboratories for his thinking, and you can find it 300 years later in John James Audubon’s lushly illustrated catalogue of American birds.
However sometime in the 19th century the introduction of photography and its offspring—cinema, radiography—severed this relationship. Scientists embraced these new technologies for their clarity and dispassionate precision. Artists, meanwhile, felt liberated from having to reproduce the natural world realistically, and began infusing it with their own subjective emotions. Once bosom buddies, art and science slowly drifted apart from each other, without either seeming to mind too much. Science still needed some illustrations, but illustrations now seemed more handmaidens to science than the equal partner they had once been. It’s notable that the greatest of anatomical textbooks, Gray’s Anatomy, published in 1858, is named after its author, Henry Gray, and not its illustrator, Henry Vandyke Carter.
Nevertheless there were still some areas of science that photography could not touch. Chief among them was outer space, which was too far away to be photographed yet too thrilling to be left undocumented.
These subjects required imaginative as well as illustrative skills to help understand them. The space artist was born.
Space art can trace its beginnings to the illustrations found in Jules Verne’s 1865 novel, From the Earth to the Moon. Before Verne, tales of outer space had largely been venues for satire, mysticism and comedy. But Verne chose to portray space travel realistically using the scientific data that was available to him at the time, and his illustrators followed suit.
Sometimes, the illustrators surpassed the scientists. In the early 20th century, Lucien Rudaux, a French commercial illustrator and amateur astronomer, created countless pictures of the moon taken from his own observations. Rudaux was baffled why scientists spoke of the moon as being dominated by towering jagged peaks. He believed it should be depicted with smoother more rounded terrain, a fact that would only be verified with the Apollo moon landings more than 20 years after his death.
However the discipline took its greatest leap forward with the work of one specific pioneering American space artist. Chesley Bonestell had trained as an architect and worked as a designer on the Chrysler Building in New York—perhaps an inspiration for his subsequent pictures of space rockets. But it was a series of paintings he created for Life magazine in 1944 that caught the imagination of a war-weary public searching for transcendence. These paintings showed Saturn from the perspective of its moons, an impossible view but painted in a realistic and plausible manner. His depictions of space travel were so vivid that he almost single-handedly rid it of its Buck Rogers connotations, stirring up a torrent of public and government interest and support.
Charles Bonestell's Saturn as seen from Mimas, 1944. (Photo: Reproduced courtesy of Bonestell LLC)
“Most scientists simply don’t think visually,” says Ron Miller, one of the most well-known and prolific space artists working today. It is this ambivalence towards the visual that he sees as lying at the heart of the continued split between the two disciplines. Miller knows a thing or two about getting people excited about space. He has created space-themed postage stamps, been a production designer on David Lynch’s Dune, and painted countless otherworldly scenes for books and magazines. He believes it is the space artist’s remit not only to reveal science’s discoveries to the world but also to build enthusiasm for it, to be the educator that NASA seems to be looking for in its Arts + Mars program.
For Miller, the true precursors to the space art of today were the painters of the Hudson River School. “Back in the late 19th century when Yosemite and Yellowstone [national parks] were discovered, artists like Thomas Moran and Alfred Bierstadt painted gigantic paintings, 10 feet, 20 feet wide, that actually toured the country,” he says. Indeed if you look at Moran’s painting of Castle Geyser in Yellowstone, the image is strangely alien, the landscape singed, the lake an ungodly blue, the sky dashed grey-black as if it had been scorched by fire.
“Their purpose was to make people believe that these insane places existed," he says.
Jon Ramer, President of the International Association of Astronomical Artists (IAAA), concurs. “We seek to inspire people to want to go and see what is ‘out there’ in our universe,” he says.
It’s strange to think that while space exploration is a defining factor of the modern era, many space artists hearken back to the landscape painting of a pre-modern age to depict it. Largely this is due to space art still following Leonhart Fuchs’s dictum of communicating information clearly. But perhaps this is also a nostalgic wish to return to a time when scientists and artists took each other’s work seriously.
When Chesley Bonestell was painting his realistic planetscapes in the late 1940s, Wernher von Braun, America’s leading rocket scientist at the time, called his art “the most accurate portrayal of those faraway heavenly bodies that modern science can offer.” This was an astonishing pronouncement. It suggested that Bonestell’s imaginative renderings were as important as von Brauns’ own calculations. Certainly Bonestell felt that his art was as rigorous as the science he depicted. When von Braun sent him some sketches of possible rocket ship designs they were returned with blistering criticism of the scientist’s inconsistencies and oversights.
From the European Space Agency, an artist's concept of the nearest exoplanet to our solar system. (Photo: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI))
Enter the Exoplanet
The year was 1995 and something was making a distant star called 51 Pegasi wobble. It wasn’t wobbling much but it was wobbling enough that there were small fluctuations in the light it emitted. These small changes had been picked up by an earthbound spectrometer, a machine that analyzes the shifting spectrum of starlight, and scientists at the Geneva Observatory were now puzzling over the numbers. They eventually came to the conclusion that the only thing that could cause a star to wobble in such a manner was a planet, for just as a star’s gravity affects the movement of planets, so a planet’s gravity affects the movement of a star.
Space aficionados reacted immediately. Although scientists and science fiction writers had for centuries imagined countless planets in other solar systems, scientists had never before actually found proof of a single one.
There was just one problem: Although 51 Pegasi b’s existence as an exoplanet orbiting a sun like our own could be inferred, it couldn’t actually be seen. 51 Pegasi b lies approximately 300 trillion miles away from Earth and gives off a feeble amount of light compared to its star. So although this discovery was hailed as one of the greatest of our age, something felt like it was missing—namely, visual evidence.
At the time of this discovery Lynette Cook was a freelance scientific illustrator living in San Francisco. She was working part-time as an artist and photographer at the Morrison Planetarium at the California Academy of Sciences, providing visuals of our cosmos to the delight of children, adults and stoned teenagers. When a scientist friend suggested she try her hand at depicting this new discovery she thought, “Why not?”
Working for free, she first discussed 51 Pegasi b with various astronomers and tried to pin down its size, color, distance to its star and possible composition. Then she turned to her paints. The result, created in a mixed media combination of gouache and colored pencil, was the first ever picture of a confirmed exoplanet. Cook depicted it alongside its churning sunspot-specked star, the superheated gases in its atmosphere giving it a red luster as clouds of iron vapor streaked across its surface. From a barely-detectable inference, 51 Pegasi b was finally revealed in all its terrible glory.
Lynette Cook's artwork of 51 Pegasi b. (Photo: Lynette Cook)
Although astronomers initially seemed uninterested in Cook’s work, the media was hungry for images. Cook’s artwork was thus used countless times in documentaries, magazines and books. Indeed the painting of 51 Pegasi b proved pivotal to her career and was the first of many exoplanets she portrayed. The original was eventually purchased by the Geneva Observatory where it hangs as the sole physical embodiment of a remarkable discovery.
Work like this, says Bill Hartmann, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, can do more than just get people excited about space travel; it can help improve the very science it depicts. Hartmann was an investigator for the Mariner 9 probe that mapped Mars for the first time in 1972. He originated the now-accepted theory that the moon was formed by the earth’s impact with another planet some 4.5 billion years ago.
He’s a visionary thinker. He’s also a space artist.
Hartmann sees his artistic role as being that of a synthesizer, blending a mass of disparate and highly specialized astronomical data into a more complete whole. This is often necessary in a field that wallows in minutiae at the expense of the big picture. Hartmann remembers attending a scientific conference where the brightness of the auroral glow around one of Jupiter’s moons was announced in kilo-rayleighs (a unit of measurement). When Hartmann asked if that meant it could be seen by the naked eye the scientists giving the presentation were dumbfounded and couldn’t come up with an answer. “This question hadn’t occurred to them as something interesting to know,” he says.
An artist's impression of 10 hot Jupiter exoplanets, drawn to scale with each other. (Photo: ESA/Hubble & NASA/CC BY 2.0)
He explains how in the 1970s there was little overlap between the scientists who studied icy comets and those who studied rocky asteroids. When Hartmann decided he wanted to paint a comet as if he was standing on its surface he realized that there was “essentially no work” on the comet’s possible geology. Only asteroid structures had been studied but surely, he thought, the two must have features in common. Hartmann’s painting thus led to the sharing of ideas between two previously unconnected fields of research. “Art has long been used to clarify science, and vice versa,” he says. “Leonardo Da Vinci sketched waves to learn about wave motion but dissected bodies so he could paint better portraits.”
Since 51 Pegasi b first swam into view 20 years ago, over 3,000 other exoplanets have been discovered. They vary in size, density and absurdity with some planets believed to have atmospheres of vaporized rock and mantles of liquid diamond. As such you’d think these would be boom times for space artists like Lynette Cook but in fact it’s been quite the opposite. Her space art career has never been more tenuous.
“The budgets to hire people like me on the part of publishers and science organizations has really dwindled in recent years,” she says. Partly this is due to recent changes in print economics. Cook has watched as publishers have become increasingly willing to use inaccurate and poorly rendered “no-fee” illustrations to keep costs down. “I saw a shift,” says Cook, “from commissioning new art, to wanting me to rework earlier images, so they looked different (but didn't cost as much), to reusing older art “as is” for new discoveries.” Eventually her clients simply stopped calling, “as if they were stars in the heavens that were winking out.”
There is another slayer of space art budgets, though: the success of space photography. Over the past two decades huge amounts of photographic imagery has been sent back from NASA probes at Pluto, Ceres, and Saturn, not to mention the Hubble Telescope. These images were primarily intended for scientific research, but the fact that they were beautiful—and rights-free—hasn’t hurt in raising public awareness in NASA’s mission. The only people it has hurt are the space artists.
Outer space is getting easier and easier to see. The camera’s reach has gotten ever longer and, as the depths of the universe have become increasingly familiar to us, there appears to be less demand for the imaginative types of space art as practiced by Chesley Bonestell, that less than a century ago inspired us to strap a man to a rocket and blast him off our planet. For all the ostensible benefits of art and science working together, artists have found themselves being squeezed out of the field of astronomy, just as they had out of the life sciences in the 19th century.
In the hyperwall room at NASA’s Goddard Research Center in Maryland it is hard not to feel like God. There in front of you is the Earth portrayed in super high definition on a huge wall of video monitors. The forces and emanations that shape it ebb and flow before you—whirling ocean currents, roiling clouds of carbon dioxide, and the madly pirouetting paths of hurricanes. You can focus on a particular region or just let the whole thing wash over you as if you were in an ambient chill-out room, albeit one filled with sober men wearing laminated tags.
These animations are the work of the Scientific Visualization Studio (SVS) whose job it is to turn the myriad sets of data NASA scientists produce into images that explain, entice and entrance. Using software created by the animation studio Pixar, Dr. Horace Mitchell and his team of 10 visualizers make science palatable to both the public and the grant-endowing poobahs of NASA who, overseeing such a vast and diverse enterprise, are just as likely as the public to need some scientific hand-holding.
“In the early days I think the scientists were more focused on getting their work done, getting the next paper out, getting their reputation established. They looked at this as eye-candy,” Mitchell chuckles. Climate change, Neil deGrasse Tyson and the evolution of social media have shifted this landscape. “Now I think there are very few scientists who don’t understand the value of public outreach.”
A still from the video Dynamic Earth: Exploring Earth's Climate Engine, created by NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio. (Photo: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/CC BY 2.0)
The animations SVS creates are more an alluring extension of graphs and charts than they are a subjective depiction of the world. This is what traditional scientific illustration became. It doesn’t aim to inspire new scientific ideas or help improve a scientist’s work, but it does seek to make the specialized scientific knowledge comprehensible. “Sometimes you have to show people something before they understand its worth,” says Mitchell.
As an educational tool, its purpose is tightly defined—the SVS graphics are more translation than expression. This is art on NASA’s terms, closely clinging to the data. Occasionally, however, translation can become its own form of expression.
Tucked into a cramped corner of NASA’s ramshackle visitor center is the video installation known as Solarium. It depicts the sun’s raging ultraviolet light, normally invisible to the naked eye, but here colorized and cropped. For the viewer pressed up against the images by necessity of the tiny space, the view is all-encompassing—you feel as if you’re flying over a firestorm—and the chance of fully comprehending it is minimal. One looks first, and enquires second. Transforming the data into immersive visceral thrills without heed to its practical purpose seems something of a bold move for NASA, almost a misuse of sacred data, but it suggests that the Art + Mars workshop at Grace Farms this summer might not be as much of a dead end as it seemed. Although Solarium is hidden away like a mad aunt in the attic, it’s a tentative step out of the quantifiable world of data and into one of subjective experience. In doing so it seems to get to the very essence of NASA’s mission statement: seeing the unknown with your own eyes is, after all, the very essence of exploration.
A still from the video for Symmetry, filmed at the Large Hadron Collider. (Photo: Courtesy Arts@CERN)
Dance Like NASA's Watching
People are dancing in the Large Hadron Collider. Somewhere beneath the French-Swiss border, men in blue hardhats are spinning, falling, leaping, and doing things that particle physicists don’t normally do. They are part of a dance-opera that was unveiled last year called Symmetry, just one in a long line of artistic interventions organized by the European Organization for Nuclear Research’s official arts program, Arts@CERN.
Over the past five years sculptors, photographers, musicians and filmmakers have been invited to CERN (which takes its name from the French moniker Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) to create works inspired by its science and to stimulate the minds of the 10,000 engineers and scientists who work here and at other CERN facilities. Just as the Large Hadron Collider smashes particles into one another to test different theories about the underlying structure of reality, so the arts program seeks to create similar collisions between art and science. Scientists have been surprised in the CERN library by slow-moving dancers crawling under their chairs or by having the sounds of the collider recorded and played back to them. Sound artist Bill Fontana, photographer Andreas Gursky, and the sculptor Anthony Gormley have all had residencies here, each one accompanied by a “scientific partner” drawn from CERN’s staff.
The question is what are they hoping to gain.
Ron Miller's depiction of Kepler-16b. (Photo: Ron Miller)
“We need to bring other voices inside our conversation,” says Monica Bello, the head of Arts@CERN. “Artists are the most radical thinkers in a non–systematized environment, they are really pushing new questions. They are rigorous in the way they process information and in the way they interact with other experts.” On the one hand, Bello sees the artists transmitting CERN’s extremely complex deeds to a worldwide audience in museums and galleries, but she also sees the arts programs as having the holistic aim of “supporting artists and scientists talking to each other, focusing on developing devices together, thinking how knowledge is expanding and having many other kinds of conversations.” When asked what the main aim of the program is, Bello says simply, “We’re supporting research.” It’s part of Arts@CERN’s success that she doesn’t need to say whose research they’re supporting. Scientist and artist have become one.
A growing movement seems to understand the importance of the visual to science. This is especially true in the more theoretical sciences where, free from the camera’s prying lens, an artist is needed to visualize the concepts. Take, for example, the art of Professor David Berman, an authority in the tortuous complexities of string theory, whose prize-winning collaborations with contemporary artists have thrust theoretical astronomy into the art world and artists into the world of theoretical astronomy. This is space art at its furthest, invisible frontier. Berman’s reasons for doing so are clear: “If you can imagine doing an experiment in which you have a group of scientists who sat isolated in their offices and didn’t talk to artists, or weren’t exposed to art, and then you had scientists who talk to artists and are exposed to art, and then saw what research they produced after x number of years, then I believe that the diverse scientists would do better.”
Yet there’s still some way to go. While other scientific agencies have instituted artistic residencies few are as well-integrated, or as well-funded, as Arts@CERN. CERN’s budget for artistic residencies and art activities ranges between $225,000 and $337,000 a year, and has, so far, not appeared to raise any eyebrows amongst the European nations funding it. It is hoped that the CERN model can inspire other scientific ventures to follow suit.
It’s certainly a model that Lynette Cook, exiled from the very science she helped to popularize, can appreciate. “Anything that brings artists and scientists together to collaborate in some way —and which also provides funding to said artists—is a good thing, in my opinion,” she says. Indeed Arts@CERN often seems to be striving to recreate the Renaissance mindset of art and science being so obviously useful to one another that nobody in their right mind would challenge it. Might NASA’s Arts + Mars program follow this route?
There are hopeful signs. Shortly after its inaugural meeting in July, NASA announced that it would be developing “action steps” for its Arts + Mars program in 2017. It also dropped its stipulation for secrecy from the attendant artists (although it did provide a pre-approved statement for the artists to use on their social media—old bureaucratic habits die hard). In shoring up the relationship between art and science, NASA does more than improve the odds of the popular success of the Mars mission; it takes one giant leap towards getting rid of the pervasive prejudice that art has no role in science, and science no role in art.
Cecilia Bembibre sampling the VOCs of an old book. (Photo: HMahgoub/Used with Permission)
We experience our world with five senses to guide us, but for the most part, we learn about the past with only three. We have become adept at preserving our history in audio, visual, and tactile forms, while old recipes can communicate taste, but rarely do we ever think to capture a whiff of the scents that swirl around us.
Luckily, there are scientists who think that stinks, and are doing something about it. Cecilia Bembibre, a doctoral candidate at University College London, is attempting to preserve history like very few before her. She’s cataloging the smells.
Smells "help us connect to history in a more human way," says Bembibre, whose project combines chemistry, electronic noses, and centuries-old English manor houses.
Bembibre records the smells of historic locations and objects around England, looking for sites that are both culturally significant and strongly scented. Currently, her research is focused on two locations: Knole House, an English estate that has been inhabited by the same family since it was built in the 15th century; and the library in St. Paul’s Cathedral, a perfectly stuffy room full of books and pieces of furniture that are hundreds of years old.
The room at St. Paul's is opened by appointment only, helping to maintain its heady scent. “It’s a wonderful library and it smells great,” says Bembibre.
Scent-collecting fibers set up to capture VOCs at St Paul’s Cathedral Library. (Photo: Courtesy of CeciliaBembibre)
A veritable treasure trove of historic smells, Knole House is said to contain 365 rooms. The sprawling mansion has the added benefit of an extensive family archive, which offers the researchers valuable historical context for the objects they are sniffing.
Bembibre has selected a handful of objects and atmospheres to test there, including a pair of fringed, leather gloves from the 1800s ("I think the gloves might have been perfumed"); a unique 1750s potpourri recipe found in the archives; the wax used to polish the furniture; the smell of the “Venetian Ambassador” room; an old book; and more modern smells, like a vinyl record from the family’s collection.
But how do you even go about recording a smell?
Bembibre uses several different methods to capture a smell for study. One is known as the Headspace technique, wherein an object is placed inside a clean, sealed bag that has a valve on it, sealing in the volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. Then an absorbent carbon fiber is inserted into the valve to soak up the ambient VOCs that have been isolated inside. She also uses another method, known as passive diffusion, which involves leaving a sort of carbon sponge in a space and allowing it to just soak up the nearby smells.
Once the VOC-laden sample is ready, Bembibre runs it through a gas spectrometer, which she describes as a “big nose.” In the end, she is left with a sort of electrocardiogram, but for smells, which she can use to identify the various chemicals in a smell. “It would be like having a recipe, and maybe in 100 years, someone wanted to reproduce that smell, they could look at that recipe,” she says.
The analyses can be surprising. For example, the smell of an old book is primarily made up of chemicals like acetic acid, which smells like vinegar; furfural (“It smells sweet, like bread and almonds. It’s a very pleasant book smell”); benzaldehyde (“It has a very sweet, almond-y, cinnamon-y smell even. It smells of food”); vanillin, which smells of vanilla; and hexanol, which has been likened to freshly cut grass.
Taken all together, these chemicals, many of which are a product of cellular decay, create what we think of as the old book smell. “It’s a smell that we appreciate, but it’s also the smell of the books dying,” says Bembibre.
One of her research partners, the company Odournet, has even developed a spectrometer that allows Bembibre, and other researchers, to actually smell each component as it is processed. She says that it’s a heady experience, with scents coming at you so fast that it’s hard to accurately identify them—no easy feat to begin with.
Because our olfactory senses are so closely tied to context, identifying scents just by their chemical make-up doesn’t do us a whole lot of good, when it comes to the historical record. “Smells are anchored in a time and a place, so it’s not enough to have the chemical information for a smell,” says Bembibre. “We also need to know if people thought that smell was pleasant or unpleasant, strong or weak; if it had some sort of cultural associations; if it was unique or familiar; if people thought it was worth keeping or not, and why.”
Cecilia Bembibre sniffs the smells of St Paul’s Cathedral Library. (Photo: Courtesy of Cecilia Bembibre)
Opinion plays a significant part in the analysis, too. Bembibre is far from scent-agnostic, though; she has smells she loves and odors she hates, just like the rest of us.
'There is a smell I really dislike, which is the smell of butyric acid. You find it in human sweat in a low concentration. You also find it in Hershey’s chocolate, the Kisses," she says. "I’m always going to the States and thinking, ‘How can they be so popular? How can people like them so much?’ If you grew up celebrating with this chocolate, you obviously love it."
Beyond the academic importance of smell, she's interested in sussing out "the personal associations, because they’re part of why we think smell is worth keeping," she says.
In addition to her studies, Bembibre currently leads "smellwalks" that bring people closer to the unique scents of their world. Smells are the most visceral aspects of the human experience, and yet we lose them everyday. As the technology gets better, though, hopefully we can begin to preserve our own precious scents.
Bembibre has her own special scent memory she wishes she could preserve. “I have a small child, and we’ve just been on holiday to the beach. You know the smell of skin when you come back from a day at the beach and it’s a bit salty, and there’s the sun and the cream?" she asks.
"It was just a lazy family holiday that brought me back to my own childhood. I’d love to collect that smell.”
Until last week, it hadn't hailed in Samoa since 2011, and, looking at the average temperatures in the archipelago nation, it isn't hard to see why: it's consistently, reliably, in the mid-80s there.
But on Friday, the country saw a very rare hail storm pass through, 15 minutes of precipitation that many in the nation found hard to believe. So hard to believe, in fact, that meteorologists had to produce the receipts.
“Because it was so unexpected a lot of people thought it had been invented," Luteru Tauvale, a meteorologist for the Samoan Meteorology Service, told the Guardian. "We had to release satellite images of the conditions that led to to the hail for people to believe it was real.”
The hail came down on the island of Savai’i, one of six islands in a country of around 200,000 people, producing a weather event that has only happened one other time in recorded history.
The hail wasn't large—less than an inch wide—but, even so, some islanders took it as fresh evidence of climate change, according to the Guardian.
“More like we have just woken up to the fact it had been with us for a while but we refuse to accept/believe it," one wrote on Facebook.
Danny Borzage wasn’t a great actor. Visit his IMDb page and you’ll see he specialized in parts with names like “Townsman,” “Barfly,” and “Courtroom Spectator.” While he did appear in a few landmark films such as Citizen Kane, Vertigo, and To Kill a Mockingbird, he was only onscreen for a few seconds. Blink and you’ll miss him.
But while Borzage never became a superstar, he holds a special place in Hollywood history. After all, the man was a master manipulator. He could help A-list stars relax on set, or he could make big-name actors cry on-camera, all with his trusty accordion.
In the era of silent films, Danny Borzage made his living as a mood musician. Before The Jazz Singer, the first feature film with synchronized dialogue sequences, revolutionized cinema, mood musicians were hired to play their instruments on film sets. As the camera rolled, these performers would create live soundtracks in order to evoke emotions from the actors. If a leading lady needed to shed a few tears, a musician like Borzage would play something sad to get the waterworks flowing.
While it sounds pretty weird, this was standard practice back in the day. According to Patrick Miller in his article "Music and the Silent Film," Hollywood director D.W. Griffith enlisted a brass band to encourage extras during the battle sequences of his 1916 three-and-a-half-hour epic, Intolerance. Fellow director King Vidor often relied on opera recordings to get his actors in the right headspace.
In his autobiography, Charlie Chaplin explained how he created a melancholy mood for The Gold Rush by playing “Auld Lang Syne.” On the flip side, while shooting a slapstick short called Twenty Minutes of Love, Chaplin used a catchy dance number called “Too Much Mustard” to create an atmosphere of “nonsense.”
As for Danny Borzage, he performed a wide array of hymns and early American folk songs on set, courtesy of his wheezy accordion. His music conjured up an old-timey feeling, which worked perfectly on Westerns. And Danny had quite a catalog of songs, as he’d been playing the stomach Steinway ever since childhood.
Born in 1896 in Salt Lake City, Utah, Danny grew up in a musical family. His father, Luigi, was skilled at the accordion and passed on his passion to Danny and two other sons, Bill and Henry. Together, the Borzage boys entertained audiences via radio, and Danny eventually performed at the L.A. Orpheum with his brother Lew, who was a guitarist and violinist.
In addition to their love of music, the Borzages were also big into show business. Henry worked as an electrician for 20th Century Fox, Lew was an assistant director, and Bill was a bit player. And then there was Frank, the two-time Oscar-winning director of films like 7th Heaven, Street Angel, and AFarewell to Arms. Inspired by Frank’s cinematic success, Danny packed up his accordion and made his way to Tinseltown, where he auditioned for an up-and-coming director by the name of John Ford.
Director Frank Borzage, Danny's brother, c. 1920. (Photo: Public Domain)
A four-time Oscar winner, Ford is widely considered one of the all-time great American directors. The man behind classics like Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Searchers, Ford inspired filmmakers from Akira Kurosawa to Orson Welles to Steven Spielberg. But in 1924, he was still a young man making a name for himself, and he needed a mood musician for his upcoming historical drama, The Iron Horse.
When Danny showed up for the audition, he impressed Ford with a song called “My Buddy.” And it probably didn’t hurt that Ford knew Danny’s brother, Frank. Thanks to his musical know-how and a little bit of nepotism, Danny landed the gig. It was the beginning of a beautiful work relationship that lasted over 40 years.
Even after the silent era gave way to sound, Danny remained an integral part of the Ford Stock Company (a group of actors who repeatedly appeared in the director’s films). While mood musicians had mostly vanished from Hollywood sets, Ford stuck with tradition and kept Danny around. Only now, with the advent of sound and the appearance of microphones, Danny worked most of his magic behind the scenes.
During shooting, the accordionist would escort actors away from the set and play specific songs to manipulate their emotions. While filming Cheyenne Autumn, Danny helped actress Dolores del Rio cry by performing a love song from one of her old films. In The Searchers, he played the movie’s theme to help Vera Miles prepare for a big romantic moment. John Wayne also remembered hearing Danny on the set of films like The Long Voyage Home and admitted that when Danny was playing the accordion, it gave the director a major advantage. As the Duke put it, “It’s easy to talk an actor into a scene that way.”
The poster for The Horse Soldiers, in which Borzage had a bit part. (Photo: Public Domain)
But not everyone appreciated these antiquated tactics. While filming John Ford’s Civil War segment of How the West Was Won, future A-Team star George Peppard was completely baffled when Danny led him away from the camera. “To my astonishment,” Peppard related to biographer Ronald L. Davis, “[Ford] sent me off with this accordion player, who played me sad music of the time. I was puzzled. I’d had a lot of training as an actor, and I thought I was ready to do the scene.”
Evidently, John Ford disagreed.
When Danny wasn’t taking aim at specific actors, you could still hear him squeezing out old tunes. In between scenes, his job was to create a relaxed atmosphere, one that left a lasting impression on the rest of the Ford Stock Company. When reminiscing about his experiences with John Ford, actor Harry Carey Jr. remembered that Danny “was not a particularly good accordion player,” but whenever he launched into a song, there was “a plaintive sadness that pulled at your heart, that made you feel, ‘Thank God I’m here to do a scene for that Old Man [Ford] in the chair by the camera.’”
In addition to appearing in films like The Horse Soldiers and Two Rode Together, Danny directly contributed to some of the most memorable moments in the John Ford canon. His heartbreaking accordion rendition of “Red River Valley” caps off Ma Joad’s final monologue in The Grapes of Wrath. As a group of pioneers pray over a massacred family in The Searchers, Danny accompanies the mourners with “Shall We Gather at the River?” He shows up again at the end of the film, performing an energetic version of “The Yellow Rose of Texas” at an Old West wedding. And you can hear that bittersweet accordion in films like My Darling Clementine, 3 Godfathers, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
Danny also excelled at cheering up his coworkers. According to Kathryn Kalinak in How the West Was Sung, Borzage would welcome particular actors to the set each day with their own specialized theme songs. Every time Henry Fonda showed up for work, Danny would launch into “Red River Valley.” John Wayne was often greeted with the theme from She Wore a Yellow Ribbon or “Marcheta,” a love song featured in They Were Expendable. And whenever John Ford made his grand entrance on set, Borzage welcomed him with “Bringing in the Sheaves,” the director’s favorite hymn.
Director John Ford circa 1946. (Photo: Public Domain)
Even when they weren’t making movies, Ford kept Borzage pretty busy. Every year, the director invited friends and family to a Christmas party at his private California hangout, the Field Photo Farm. As guests mingled in the clubhouse, an actor like Andy Devine or Burl Ives (both large men) would secretly dress up as Santa Claus. With a bagful of presents for the kids, this fake Kris Kringle would ride up to the party in a stagecoach, complete with a cowboy escort. And sitting atop the coach were Danny Borzage and Jimmy Stewart, both playing “Jingle Bells” on their accordions.
But Danny was there for the hard times as well, and he played a key role in one of the Stock Company’s most somber moments. Before John Wayne became Ford’s biggest star, the director had made over 20 movies with veteran actor Harry Carey Sr. When the elder Carey passed away, Ford pulled out all the stops to give his friend a proper send-off. According to historian Joseph McBride, Carey’s funeral was jam-packed with stars, ready to pay their respects. The Duke recited Tennyson, Burl Ives sang a Western ballad, and Danny said adios by once again playing “Red River Valley.”
Even when Danny wasn’t working with Ford, he liked sticking close to his friends. According to film historian Scott Eyman, when John Wayne was directing The Alamo, he brought Borzage along to recreate that Ford Stock Company feeling. The accordionist even appeared on an episode of The Lucy Show where the Duke meets Lucille Ball. And after John Ford finally retired from the picture business, Danny continued working as an extra, appearing in movies and TV series like Support Your Local Sheriff, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and The Wild Wild West.
Thanks to his Hollywood career, Danny became a celebrity in his hometown, and on several occasions, he was lovingly profiled by The Salt Lake Tribune. While he never achieved stardom like his brother Frank, Danny left an impact on everyone who heard his mournful accordion. Years after Danny passed away in 1975, actor Harry Carey Jr. honored his old friend with a few kind words. “I feel reverent when I say his name,” the actor said, “because he’s the most underscored, underappreciated human on the John Ford Stock Company.”
What do you see in these ghostly inkblots? Featured in Psychobook, edited by Julian Rothenstein, published by Princeton Architectural Press 2016. (Photo: Redstone Press Collection)
A signature can reveal a lot about a person. At least that’s what many believed in the early 20th century when people collected signatures of friends, family, and celebrities in autograph albums. But there was one particular book that bled the ink of an autograph into creatures, coffins, bats, and skeletons.
Titled The Ghost of My Friends, it is a book of “ghost signatures,” the well-inked swirls of a cursive autograph transformed into strange, elegant, and devilish inkblots. The smudges and splatters found in a booklet are akin to that of a Rorschach inkblot, but the linear thin tracks of a fountain pen give these ghostly inkblots a unique look. The Ghost of My Friends was a popular item in London and New York, yet its exact purpose and place in psychological testing remains a mystery.
Signatures are more easily deciphered in some blots than others. Featured in Psychobook, edited by Julian Rothenstein, published by Princeton Architectural Press 2016. (Photo: Redstone Press Collection)
Inkblots began gaining popularity around the mid-19th century, when German poet Justinus Kerner accidentally dropped ink on paper. The nebulous shapes sparked images of “hades” and “hell,” inspiring Kerner to write an entire series of poems published in 1890.
Simultaneously, people were generally interested in collecting autographs, filling albums in parlors and haggling celebrities to get their signatures. The Ghost of My Friends was a response to the fascination of inkblots and “a good way to get genuine autographs from celebrities otherwise tired of requests,” suggests Kathy Haas, associate curator at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, on the library’s blog.
The first known copy was published in London in 1905. It was compiled and authored by Cecil Henland, who had also authored other books including The Mind of a Friend and The Book of Butterflies. Not much is known about Henland aside from her marriage to Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Percival and her avid collecting of keepsakes. To set the tone of The Ghost of My Friends, Henland preludes the book with an eerie Shakespeare quote (“The best in this kind are but Shadows”) and a poem by Gerald Villiers Stuart, appropriately titled “Ghosts”:
“Shadows form in our ghostly past; Ho! Ho! young man. Ho! Ho! From forgotten graves they will rise at last; It is so, young man, it is so. You may run, you may dodge, you may Twist, you may bend, The flying phantoms win in the end; Ho! Ho! old man, Ho! Ho!”
There is nothing written on the intent of the book, only the simple instructions to “sign your name along the fold of the paper with a full pen of ink, and then double the page over without using blotting paper.” The book consists of 48 blank glossy pages—optimized for the ink to bleed instead of soaking into the paper—that have two lines to print the name and date. Slow-drying Indian ink and fountain pens gave the best result on the glazed paper.
Inky birds, duchesses, monsters, and other creatures and objects your mind may interpret are found within The Ghost of My Friends, making it difficult (and in some cases impossible) to tease out the original signatures. For example, the cover and the first ghost signature, which vaguely resembles a stretched, dilapidated frog, is of an unknown “Ghost of a Celebrated General.”
The cover of The Ghost of My Friends with the signature of an unknown, but celebrated general. Featured in Psychobook, Princeton Architectural Press 2016. (Photo: Redstone Press Collection)
A filled book looks like a homemade alternative to the projective Rorschach inkblot test that has been commonly used to analyze personality traits and emotions. However, archivists and scholars are unsure if the ghost signatures were ever meant to be interpreted as a psychological test.
“It seems likely that Hermann Rorschach was familiar with this popular parlor game where you friends would sign a page in ink and then fold the page in half to create a unique inkblot that looked, as Mark Twain wrote in 1905 ‘something that looked like a skeleton,’” says Julian Rothenstein, the editor of the recently published Psychobook which features ghost signatures from a copy of The Ghost of My Friends.
Some rare, pricey copies of The Ghost of My Friends contain high-profile autographs. As Rothenstein mentions, Mark Twain wrote a letter in 1905 to his daughter Clara describing the ghost autograph fad, even sending one of his own to her. Winston Churchill, actress Sarah Bernhardt, American bass singer and Civil Rights activist Paul Robeson, and Australian opera singer Dame Nellie Melba are even commemorated in inkblot form.
The signatures are described as "poetic, comic, and, sometimes, slightly sinister," in Psychobook, edited by Julian Rothenstein, published by Princeton Architectural Press 2016. (Photo: Redstone Press Collection)
The strange autograph book was a short-lived fad, but it was enough to distribute an ample amount of copies throughout the Northern America and England. Books have been found in Cleveland, Ohio and Ontario, Canada, while about 40 known copies are held in libraries in the United States. It’s quite easy to recreate ghost autographs of your own. Fans of the original The Ghost of My Friends, Reflections of My Friends, make and sell modern replicas of the book.
Today, the signatures found in this haunted early-19th century book can be considered true “ghost autographs,” the names and people forever immortalized. Maybe after all these years, The Ghost of My Friends could reveal something about the inscribers: “Ghost autographs might be the starting point for all sorts of discoveries,” says Rothenstein.
Object of Intrigue is a weekly column in which we investigate the story behind a curious item. Is there an object you want to see covered? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
In another step towards the science fiction future many of us have been looking forward to, a British watchdog agency has released what might be the first set of laws regarding ethical robot creation. As the Guardian reports, the British Standards Institute (BSI) released their paper on the best practices of robot creation, addressing everything from physical safety to racism.
Since the early 20th century, Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics have stood as the theoretical moral baseline for a future where robots have much the same agency as humans. But this new paper gets a bit more detailed. Asimov’s fictional laws state that, 1. A robot cannot harm a human being; 2. It must obey the commands of human beings; and 3. That it must protect itself. When Asimov came up with these laws within his science fiction stories, such a future seemed a million miles away, but today it seems right around the corner, and his edicts a bit simple.
BSI is the decider of national engineering standards in the UK, and they decided to take a serious look at our robotic future, and get the jump on making sure it isn’t a nightmare. Working with a panel of scientists, ethicists, philosophers, and more, they developed BS 8611:2016, a document that will hopefully guide roboticists in the right direction.
Among the issues brought up by the paper, it addresses robots that could cause physical harm. As quoted in the Guardian, “Robots should not be designed solely or primarily to kill or harm humans; humans, not robots, are the responsible agents.” It also looks at over-dependence on robots and the dangers of creating emotional connections with them, especially as more automated caregiving automatons are introduced. It also warns of “deep learning” robots, which use the entirety of the internet as a knowledge base, could develop their own commands and alter the their own programming in response to their calculations, creating strange or unforeseen actions.
Maybe the most immediate and troubling point the standard explores is the robotic tendency towards dehumanization and even accidental bigotry. As facial recognition technology becomes more standard there are already issues with its ability to identify different races, and could easily be programmed, either willingly or unconsciously, to have a bias. As robotics are more seamlessly integrated into areas like medicine and policing, robotic thinking (literally) can create major issues.
For now much of BS 8611:2016 regards a future that is right around the corner, but like Asimov realized, it’s never too early to start planning to avoid killer robots.
Every year, thousands of pilgrims travel to a small temple in the Indian village of Chilkur to ask for United States visas.
In a shady courtyard, they circumambulate a shrine 11 times. Those who receive their visas come back and make 108 more circuits, marking each lap on a pink chit and leaving bundles of holy basil in front of the god’s image.
It’s not just visas: Visitors to Chilkur Balaji Temple—commonly known as "Visa Balaji Temple''—also ask for spouses, children, property, and even government postings. (According to a priest there, a minister came and made 108 grateful circuits shortly after getting his job.) But immigration documents have become the temple’s signature wish. Around the shrine to Balaji—an incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu—tradition mixes with globalization, and the bureaucratic and the divine intersect.
At first glance, Chilkur is an unlikely place for a booming Vishnu shrine with a national reputation. It is an unremarkable agricultural village on the western edge of Hyderabad, a city with a significant Muslim minority. The area is better known for its mosques than its Hindu temples.
But Hyderabad is also an emerging hub of India’s tech industry. Dell, Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon all have major offices there. Hyderabad is a college town, too, with a number of big engineering schools. A 2014 Brookings Institution report found that the city sends more people to study in the United States than Delhi and Mumbai combined, and more than almost any other city in the world.
In other words, it’s a hotbed of ambitious young people who may be looking for F-1 (student) and H-1B (skilled employment) visas to the United States. And there, right in the neighborhood, sits a temple with a reputation for granting wishes.
For centuries, travelers approaching the Roman city of Palmyra were greeted by an iconic structure: a 20-foot arch, intricately carved, framing the city's markets, temples, and bustling citizens. Over the centuries, the Arch of Palmyra transformed from artful infrastructure to ancient landmark, crumbling slightly. But it still stood tall—until August of 2015, when it was dynamited by Islamic State militants during the orgy of destruction that accompanied Palmyra's seizure.
Yesterday, the Arch reappeared far from home—in City Hall Park, on the southern tip of Manhattan. This rebirth was the work of the Institute for Digital Archaeology and UNESCO, which are collaborating on efforts to digitize and occasionally recreate ancient artifacts that have been lost to time or terrorism.
The arch was carved by a crack team of Italian stone-carving robots, following a 3-D model put together from photographs taken by archaeologists and tourists before the arch was destroyed. As Artnet reports, it was brought to New York to coincide with the United Nations General Assembly, which runs through this week. Photographs show a sandy-colored, surprisingly skinny arch, standing astride a flagstone path and looking like what it is—a traveler from another time and place.
The remade arch has also stood in London's Trafalgar Square. It will be in New York City for a week before moving on for a stint in Dubai. It is free and open to the public.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
Books were once made by hand, one by one, with patience and perfection. In this video, you can watch each step of the process—from the setting of the type, to the application of ink, to the impression onto paper, to the folding, cutting, hammering, sewing, binding, clamping, and trimming. And all of this is still after metal type was invented, replacing painstakingly handwritten script.
Bookmaking, though it now enjoys newer and faster forms technology, is still an art. And though these days, books are much easier to make and acquire, we still think that they are objects of great value. Perhaps we're biased, since we just finished making our own book, Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders. And though we may not have sewn the binding ourselves, it sometimes feels as though we might have.
Let us never forget that books are treasures.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
The stately Victorian buildings may be falling to pieces, but the contents inside them betray a lot about the sometimes happy, sometimes tragic lives of patients at Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane.
Though asylums often carry connotations of dark and torturous existences, Willard and other institutions like it were intended to be a better alternative to systems in place for taking care of the mentally ill. In the early 19th century, those without anyone to care for them and incapable of taking care of themselves were left to almshouses (basically shelters) which were overcrowded and under resourced. In response to these squalid conditions, New York's Surgeon General Dr. Sylvester D. Willard proposed a state-run hospital for the insane. Abraham Lincoln himself signed off on the proposal a mere six days before his death.
Willard welcomed its first patient in 1869. She was a woman named Mary Rote, described as "demented and deformed", who had spent ten years confined to an almshouse. The theme of horrific neglect would follow in patients admitted later. One girl had been shackled in a cell since childhood, another patient arrived at Willard in a chicken crate. The dreadful situations patients were arriving from coupled with the lack of understanding of mental disability meant that Willard essentially became a dumping ground for undesirables. Patients' afflictions ranged from severe mental and physical handicaps to "nervousness", "chronic" to "acute" insanity, "feeblemindedness", and "lunacy."
The asylum was built in the same style as many other Victorian institutional facilities. The campus was divided between a women's side and a men's side with a violent end and a non-violent end. Administration buildings sat in the middle. The land had originally been designated for agricultural purposes, so the hospital ran its own farm with crops grown and tended by patients. Patients were unconfined, able to walk about as they pleased (though unable to leave the premises). There was a bowling alley, a movie theater, and a gymnasium, and patients took part in camp-like activities like sewing classes. It was still a hospital though, and there were entire buildings devoted to treatments like electro-shock therapy and ice baths, as well as operating theaters and a morgue. A cemetery on the grounds features markers with numbers, no names, for the thousands buried there.
After Geraldo Rivera's 1972 expose on the deplorable conditions at Willowbrook Asylum, numbers in large institutions declined sharply. Willard Asylum discharged its final patient in 1995 and shuttered its doors for good. Now some of its buildings are used as training facilities and dormitories by the Department of Correctional Facilities, which maintains the grounds, but many of them have been left to rot for so long that they are totally unusable. In these, asylum life has been preserved in the artifacts left behind by staff and patients.
If you've heard of Willard Asylum, it's probably because of the suitcases. A cleaning person stumbled upon hundreds of dusty suitcases in the attic, brought by patients upon their admittance to the hospital. They contained mementos that piece together a bittersweet picture of their owners, who were identified on handwritten luggage tags: Earl B. brought a newspaper clipping on a "Smuggling Plot"; Virginia W. brought a clown doll. The patients died at Willard, and their personal effects went unclaimed anyone outside the institution. The staff, apparently unable to throw them away, meticulously stored and catalogued the suitcases in the attic. The Willard Suitcase Project now compiles information on the owners of the suitcases. Photos of the luggage, carefully packed by the inmates and their families, indicate they believed they were just passing through.
We simply didn't know what to do with these people who could not fit into the social norms of the 19th century, so they were often shelved away into institutions. Though the people who lived and died at Willard have faded into the tapestry of history, their belongings left behind at the abandoned asylum boldly assert their existence.
China will launch its second space lab into the sky on Thursday, the country has said, while still keeping an eye on their first space lab, which remains in space, mindlessly circling the Earth on a path of inevitable and uncontrolled destruction.
That's because, last week, China revealed what many in the space community already thought to be true: they had lost control of their space station Tiangong-1, which is now slowly, if surely, falling back to Earth.
As Popular Mechanics points out, this is not the usual order of things. The station, which was launched in 2011, had its mission repeatedly extended, but, earlier this year, China officially ended its service.
What usually happens next is a controlled burn into the Earth's atmosphere. But China has said that it no longer has control of the station, and, for now, all it can do is watch.
"Based on our calculation and analysis, most parts of the space lab will burn up during falling," Wu Ping, deputy director of the manned space engineering office, said at a press conference Wednesday.
There is a remote chance that parts of the station could survive the burn, falling to Earth and causing damage or injuring people, but when the station does begin its final descent—expected to be sometime in late 2017—there will be plenty of people watching, for just this reason.
It also promises, if all goes well, to be a pretty good show.
Located on the Isle of Usedom in Zinnowitz, Germany, what looks like an Art Nouveau gazebo is actually the world's first "Tauchergondel," or Submerged Gondola.
The submerged gondola made its first dive in 2006. Fixed to a metal pillar ten meters deep in the Baltic Sea, the gondola slides up and down like an elevator. To overcome the buoyant force of about 50 tons, the pressure-resistant cabin weights 45 tons and is powered by two electric engines.
The "Tauchergondel" was installed off a pier in Zinnowitz. The cabin seats 24 people, and houses a small shop that sells souvenirs and drinks, as well as a 3D theater. Through the windows all around the cabin, the guests can have a look into the underwater world. As the water in the Baltic Sea is very rich of plankton, the visibility conditions are often less than crystalline. This is why, during the approximate dive of 40 minutes, the 3D cinema on board shows educational 3D films which bring the guests to tropical coral reefs, schools of sharks, giant cuttlefish and sea monsters, but also explain the biology of the Baltic Sea.
It was designed by local architect and engineer Andreas Wulff, who plans to install more Submerged Gondolas all over the world, to offer people everywhere a view of the underwater world. He has installed three larger gondolas elsewhere in Germany, and projects in Poland, Sweden, Croatia, China, and along the Mediterranean coast are in the works. All his submerged gondolas have the technical equipment for dives down to 8 meters in their respective waters.
The Spirálovitá Rozhledna ("Spiral Lookout") in Krásno is one of the most unusual lookout towers in Czech Republic, a country with no shortage of lookout towers. Situated 777 meters above sea level, this twisty tower offers not just a beautiful view of the surrounding area but also some unique architecture.
During the economic crises between 1933 and 1935 the village of Krásno wanted to provide work to it's citizens and attract people to town by building an observation tower. Legends tell that the designers—local sculptor Willy Russ and the local architect Fritz Hoffmann—had been inspired by the story of the Tower of Babylon.
A staircase with 120 steps leads up the tower, arranged spirally around the outside of the tower. The work was done by unemployed citizens of Krásno only. To save money the stone used for construction was collected in the near area.
Up until the end of WWI, Krásno was called "Schönfeld" and was part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. With the expulsion of German-speaking people from the Czech Republic after the war, the population diminished greatly and the view tower was not tended to. It slowly decayed, until 1997 when it was renovated and partly reconstructed.
During the renovations porcelain plaques were added on top of the tower, explaining what can be seen. The tower offers great views in far areas around the year. Many events are organized around the tower by the people of Krásno during the year, among them a traditional burning of an effigy of witches.
Bernhard Stellmacher has always been a collector. In his teenage years he amassed everything he could find about Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. He was fascinated by her smile. However, his interests shifted when he heard a report on the radio that stated "the banana is nature's smile."
Since then, as he puts it, he was infected with "Bananicus." He began collecting everything and anything banana related. He began creating art under the name "Stelli Banana." Soon he had the idea for a showcase of his artifacts, rebuilt the basement of his house, and opened the Banana Museum, or "Erstes Deutsches Bananen Museum," "Germany's First Banana Museum."
The basement museum is stuffed to the brim with bananas of all sorts, from a banal salt shaker in form of a banana, to banana flavored condoms, to a train signal with a banana as pointer. The museum's insight extends beyond the obvious, and features pop cultural items like Andy Warhol's banana print and a corner dedicated to Josephine Baker's banana skirt. The most valuable exhibit is an 18th century engraving by the natural scientist and artist Maria Sibylla Merian.
Half an East German car bursts through the wall in an exhibition about the "Banana Boom" caused by opening of the inner German border in 1989. Prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, itwas hard for East Germans to get produce, including bananas, which they could only get on Christmas if they were lucky. When the border opened the East Germans came in droves to supermarkets in West Germany to load their cars full of bananas, making it hard to get bananas in West Germany, and of course, raising the banana prices. These fruit wars went on for some time.
Stellmacher ascribes Biblical roots to the humble banana. He claims, "Everybody thinks the apple is the fruit of knowledge. But this is not written in the Bible. There it only says, '... and Eve thought the fruit was cheerful to look at.' And a fruit cheerful to look at can only be the banana."
Over the years Bernhard Stellmacher has collected more than 10,000 banana related artifacts. And almost every day he receives parcels from all over the world from people wishing to contribute to the museum. He once got a parcel from Thailand with a coconut inside. Engraved on the husk was the phrase: "I exclaim: I am a banana!" Stellmacher is always delighted and grateful to receive new donations, particularly ones as happy as that.
Due to the expansiveness of Stellmacher's collection, banana exhibits are frequently swapped out. This is why visitors return again and again, as there is always something new to admire. Stellmacher reports that more than 75% of his visitors are women. He is unsurprised by this statistic, as he believes women are naturally more curious. Men, in his view, are more thin-skinned, particularly when it comes to phallic objects. They fear someone might poke fun at them, and Bernhard Stellmacher likes to do just that.
David Hospador, Captain of the 3rd PA Light Infantry Company, showing off a haversack. (Photo: Sarah Laskow)
The Battle of Harlem Heights was scheduled to begin around 2 p.m., and before it started, Rob Morris, commander of the 84th Regiment of Foot, needed to order a new coat. The one he was wearing, bright red, worn and dirty at the edges, had been purchased in 1995, and everything about it was wrong—the color, the buttons, the epaulettes, the trimming.
He didn't need to go far from where the fighting forces were camped in neat lines of white canvas tents, at Monmouth Battlefield State Park in New Jersey. Just outside the camp, there was a cluster of larger tents, where the sutlers had set up their shops. At the Royal Blue Traders tent, Ian Graves had spread out bolts of fabric, rolls of ribbons and rows of bonnets. Tall and gangly, he took Morris' measurements, and they discussed how Graves would source the regimental lace which would adorn the front of Morris' new waistcoat.
From afar, British redcoats might look the same, but each regiment's uniforms are distinct, with strips of lace in special patterns and colors or buttons arranged in particular designs. Once, these details might have been overlooked. Morris' late commander was more concerned with getting people out in the field than in the exacting uniformity of their jackets, he says.
But while the public at large might think re-enactments are just about playing war, within "the hobby," as it's called, there has been a heightened interest in pursuing greater authenticity in the clothing they wear and the objects they carry.
"Part of the joy of doing the hobby wasn’t just going into the field and pulling the trigger. That’s a brief thrill," says Roy Najecki, who's been involved in re-enactments since his twenties and sells period fabric and reproductions. "Part of the joy became about really replicating these items accurately. The more you got to the original item, the greater satisfaction you got out of doing the hobby in general."
Ian Graves at work. (Photo: Sarah Laskow)
Once, Revolutionary War re-enactors might have altered modern canvas painter's pants into a simulacrum of 18th-century trousers and served spaghetti and meatballs at their camps. Today, more re-enactors than ever put a premium on having pants hand-made from material with a historically accurate thread-count and cooking food that soldiers would have actually eaten, sometimes even made from the recipes they would have used.
The demand for meticulously recreated objects is high enough that there is a small group of people, like Graves, who make their living by recreating the material culture of the past as accurately as possible. They are tailors, leather-workers, and coppersmiths, who hand-make waistcoats, harnesses, and chocolate pots. There is even a one-stop shop for everything an 18th-century historical re-enactor might need.
The firm of Jas. Townsend and Son, Inc. was born in 1973, after John Townsend's father, James, became interested in muzzle-loaded guns. He first starting selling gear—candles, lanterns, and so forth—to people yearning to experience a more primitive, historic style of camping during re-enactment events; the business grew from there, and today offers hundreds of items, from stays and garters to flint pouches, tankards, washtubs, wooden whisks and sieves.
The store, based in Pierceton, Indiana, is like a Walmart for 18th and 19th century items. But these aren't mass-manufactured items: the shirts and dresses are made to order by on-call seamstresses, and many of its products requires hours upon hours of historical research as they're developed.
Graves also sells thread, wax, awls, and other tools of tailoring. (Photo: Sarah Laskow)
When John Townsend was developing a wooden whisk, for instance, he found the birch twigs he needed in Michigan, where the right kind of birch trees grow. For an 18th-century sieve, he needed to find a source for horsehair and for green ash wood. These sieves aren't the metal bowls used today, but wooden frames with a screen on the bottom.
When developing the prototype, Townsend went out and cut down a green ash tree he happened to have on his property. Creating the screen for the sieve was more difficult. Eventually, he found screens woven out of horsehair in a part of northern China where the horse culture is still strong enough that such a product can be made.
"Sometimes you have to go a long way to get what you're looking for," he says.
The skills to make some of these objects can be incredibly specialized, too: Townsend estimates the store works with 50 companies, both large and small.
Najecki casts pewter buttons in his basement. (Photo: Sarah Laskow)
Peter Goebel, for instance, is a coppersmith who has been filling orders from Jas. Townsend & Sons for years. One of his first accounts was making canteens for the company. Goebel started out making lanterns and sconces but soon expanded to cookware, and, when an injury ended his career in construction, turned to hammering copper full time. He spends his days making cups, canteens, flagons, pots and kettles—one of the most satisfying items he's made was a chocolate pot.
A historic site had sent him pictures of the original, to make a copy. "It took me almost a year and half to make the tools to make the pot," he says. "You have to study, study, and study the pictures to figure out how each piece was made, and which piece came first. It’s a horrible pot to make. It’s very simple, deceptively simple looking. It’s a taper with the big end down and small end up, with a waist, and it’s all hand-hammered."
But making a new item is more exciting that making multiples of the same item. "You can only hammer so many hours a day before you climb the wall," he says. He's more interested in making items that no one has manufactured in a couple hundred years, like cups that take even more work to build than the chocolate pot, or the little boxes where gentlemen kept sweetmeats, mints, salt, and snuff.
American militia heading to battle. (Photo: Sarah Laskow)
Exacting craftspeople like Graves and Goebel rely on pieces from history that have survived until now to hone the accuracy of their work. "It's guesswork, but very, very educated guesswork," says Graves, who has a collection of original material that he's found at estate sales.
But sometimes the details of the craft have been lost. Once-common items were recycled—Paul Revere bought up copperware to recast into sheets of copper used in naval vessels—and as these trades became less relevant, the knowledge of how they worked disappeared.
"Coppersmiths had hundreds of years of tradition behind them, and no one put it in writing," says Goebel. "We’re trying to reinvent the wheel by looking at original pieces and measuring and talking with museums," calling them dozens of times to ask more questions about details and dimensions.
Not everyone, even in the hobby, cares about that level of accuracy. It's possible to go to a historical re-enactment event and spend hundreds of dollars on gear that's made from more modern materials and machine sewn—products that look good from 20 feet away but not two feet away.
Part of the appeal of wearing 18th century clothes and using 18th century objects is feeling connected to people who lived 200 years ago. It's another way into this world for outsiders who might not be so interested in the "lining up and shooting blanks at each other" part of battle reenactments.
Townsend discovered this potential new audience after he starting making cooking videos on the store's YouTube channel. Originally, the company started the channel for re-enactors, to demonstrate how they might use the items the company was selling. Some were tongue-in-cheek and a little goofy. But the first time they posted a cooking episode, it was immediately one of the most popular videos they'd ever created. Today, the store's most viewed video is a demonstration of making 18th-century fried chicken.
This recipe, it happens, requires a bit of whisking, and for anyone who wants an authentic 18th century experience, Jas. Townsend & Son has birch whisks available for sale. They're reusable, and, at $21 apiece, comparable in price to the modern equivalent.
The image is common enough: A passenger plane with human cargo belted snugly into their seats. But look for another second and you’ll see that every passenger is a child, and each one has been bundled up inside an identical cardboard box. Most of them are babies, but some are older and their limbs spill over the edges of their makeshift bassinets. They appear marooned without any adults in the shot.
The image is one of many taken during the chaotic end of the Vietnam War when the United States undertook an operation to evacuate thousands of children from Vietnam in April 1975, just weeks before the Fall of Saigon. Supposedly all orphaned, they were slated to be adopted out to waiting U.S. families. Over 2,500 children were brought stateside on flights manned by volunteers outnumbered by infants. Three processing centers were quickly formed at military outposts on the West Coast—two in California and one in Washington—where children were received before being placed with families throughout the country.
Doubts about some of the children’s orphanhood would bubble to the surface almost immediately, but before such questions could even be posed, those tasked with manning the operation had to grapple with an incredible logistical problem: quickly transporting and caring for thousands of infants during a time of pandemonium.
Those who accompanied children on flights—including commercial flight attendants who were recruited or volunteered—used the materials on hand to turn planes into makeshift nurseries.
Flight attendant Jan Wollett told NPR that she and others lined the floor of their plane with blankets for the babies, and secured others with cargo netting.
“We constantly peeked into bassinets to make sure each baby was still breathing. I froze as I flashed my light on each little back, waiting for what seemed like hours to see a ribcage move with the breath of life.”
A nurse and babies arriving into San Francisco as part of Operation Babylift. (Photo: National Archives/23869151)
A nurse who accompanied a planeload of children to Seattle wrote that she was “overwhelmed” as she saw “the endless flow of little ones pouring into the plane filling every available space.” She did not sleep during the 30-hour flight.
Jim Trullinger was doing doctoral research in Vietnam when forced to flee the country. He secured a trip back to the United States with Operation Babylift. “When we got to the airport, I helped carry babies onto the plane, a 747 charter, and strap them into their seats,” he wrote.“There were no baby carriers, so we just had to use seat belts tightened around the babies. There were so many babies that there was no place for me to sit. Before take-off, the flight attendant told me that if there was a crash, I was to get off the plane first and she would toss babies to me.”
Catastrophe was fresh in everyone’s minds, as the first scheduled flight of Operation Babylift flight had crash-landed on April 4th, killing many of the passengers, including 78 children.
Upon arriving in the United States, planes were met by medical teams that triaged groups of children who were suffering from a range of maladies such as severe dehydration, intestinal illnesses, pneumonia, skin infections and even chicken pox. Ambulances rushed the sickest to hospitals. Around half of the children flowed through San Francisco’s Presidio. Now a lush recreation area, the Presidio was an army base at the time and a cavernous football field-sized building called Harmon Hall was transformed into a massive care facility.
Harmon Hall was turned into a care facility for the babies. (Photo: Golden Gate NRA, Park Archives and Records Center)
Michael Howe was the president of the Bay Area Health Planning Council at the time, a voluntary organization that oversaw the direction of healthcare and hospitals in San Francisco. Organizers tapped him to help, and he became a volunteer coordinator at the Presidio, working with nursing students, Vietnam veterans and others to assist in caring for the children. In 2015, Howe revisited Harmon Hall with a group of fellow volunteers as well as men and women who had arrived as children on Operation Babylift flights. He described the setting as “extraordinary”.
“How did we do this?” he wondered, “Did we really do this?”
When the children started arriving, it was a chaotic scene. “There was really no one in charge and in some way it’s kind of a misnomer to call me or anybody else a leader—we were there doing what we possibly could do in an environment where we really weren’t quite sure what to do, bottom line,” says Howe.
The hall was lined with small mattresses for the babies; when mattresses ran short, children were sometimes placed on layers of blankets on the floor. Half of the facility was devoted to support services for the children; part to feeding volunteers who worked long shifts, sometimes sleeping at the facility. The children were sick, and volunteers fell sick as well. In very rare cases, people who felt they had been promised a child for adoption would show up at the Presidio and try to abscond with a baby.
An April 6, 1975 San FranciscoChronicle article reported that there were “7,886 bottles of formula, at least 10,000 disposable diapers, 2,400 cotton tipped swabs and 750 cotton balls, 1,440 aspirin tablets, gallons of baby powder, ointment by the bushel, toothpaste and towels” on hand at the Presidio. The same article described a plane bound for Seattle “crammed with bassinets, diapers, bottles, and food including hot dogs.”
President Ford carries a baby from one of the Operation Babylift planes. (Photo: National Archives/7839930)
As they marshaled the resources to care for thousands of children, volunteers—who were not involved in the decision to receive or adopt out children—quickly began to doubt whether every child was without family
“There are unquestionably children in the airlift who are true orphans,” Jane Barton, a translator from the American Friends Services Committee told the San Francisco Chronicle on April 13, 1975. “But I talked to a number of children who said they are not orphans.”
Howe, too, had concerns.
“I felt it before we closed out our work,” says Howe. “The word ‘felt’ is important—I had no proof.”
Did the U.S. save kids—or steal them? The legacy of Operation Babylift is a deeply complicated one. Lawsuits were filed on behalf of the children including one brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights in 1975 that sought to reunite adoptees with living relatives. Some have successfully formed relationships with biological family as adults while others are still searching. Many have made the pilgrimage back to Vietnam to reconnect with their roots, reversing the flights they took over 40 years ago, scattered in the cabin of an airplane filled with crying babies.
