In the spring of 2013, local news stations in Overland Park, Kansas began reporting sightings of peculiarly magical structures along the wooded Tomahawk Creek Trail. Miniature houses with doors, pathways, and mailboxes were hidden within the nooks of tree trunks.
The video clip above by Blackburrow Creative gives a rare look at the mysterious Firefly Forest—a community of “gnome homes." Each tiny house was unique. People walking down the trail could open the hinged wooden doors to see a tiny bed, a pair of wooden clogs on the floor, a tea set steaming with dry ice. One house with the address 12 Hollow Tree Lane had labeled moving boxes that disappeared and was later replaced with furniture.
However, the houses featured in the 2013 video mysteriously vanished from Overland Park in June 2014.
Park officials were not responsible for the whimsical installations. No one knew the identity of the craftsperson behind Firefly Forest. It remained a secret until 2015 when a 17-minute documentary titled “The Gnomist" revealed the artist to be a woman named Robyn Frampton.
The film produced by Great Big Story shows how the gnome homes struck wonder and provided comfort within the community. At one house, people could write notes to fairies that Frampton would secretly collect.
For about a year, Frampton crafted the tiny houses. In 2014, she and her family moved to Utah, taking the gnome homes with them. Only one remains: a turquoise wooden door with the sign "The Little Owl," dedicated to a three-year-old girl Allie Fisher who had died of brain cancer.
Even though Frampton's original tiny fairy structures are gone, her work has been recaptured in the Overland Park Arboretum and Botanical Gardens. Staff created the Enchanted Forest display, which has 13 intricate gnome homes. In Saratoga Springs, Utah Frampton continues making mystical homes, constructing a massive multi-level fairy house carved into a 1,200-pound tree trunk. You can also buy your own fairy door crafted by Frampton.
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.
On a cold, snowy night in January 1875, Captain G. C. Armstrong couldn’t get a cab.
Cabs at the time were single-horse, two-wheeled hackney carriages, with a small interior that barely protected the fare from the elements and a seat at the top rear that didn’t protect the driver at all. Because it was illegal to leave a cab unattended, drivers were expected to “sit on the box” in all kinds of dreadful weather, as the brilliant Cabbie Blog explains, or pay someone to watch their cab while they nipped off to the pub for some warmth, food, and probably drink.
On this particular snowy night, Captain Armstrong – a baronet who was also the editor of The Globe– wanted a cab to take him from his home to his offices in Fleet Street. So he sent his servant round to the cab stand to fetch him one. But though there were cabs, there were no cabdrivers; those, the servant found, were all in the pub, sheltering from the storm blowing outside. And they were, to a man, too drunk to drive. When the servant returned home without a cab, he got an earful – and Captain Armstrong got an idea. Why were there no places where a cabdriver could get dry and warm without having to pay for a pint – possibly too many pints – and someone to watch his cab?
Within a month, Armstrong had teamed up with a group of like-minded philanthropic worthies, including the 7th Earl of Shaftsbury, and started the Cabmen’s Shelter Fund. Their idea was to build small shelters at existing cab stands where cabdrivers could take a break from the elements and grab something to eat or a warm (and non-alcoholic) drink. The proposed shelters, outlined in an article that appeared in the February 20, 1875 edition of the Illustrated London News, would be no more than 17 feet long by six feet wide, and 10 and a half feet tall, leaving just enough room inside for 10 to 13 (thin) men. There were railings on the roof to tether a hansom cab’s horses, and the shelters would have facilities for cooking and water. By the end of the year, at least 21 shelters – all painted the same shade of glossy hunter green, with black roofs and trims – were built and doing a brisk business in tea and coffee, chops and sausages, and bread and butter.
Even if the details of the Armstrong story aren’t quite accurate, says Jimmy Jenkins, a cabdriver for 42 years and the current director of the Cabmen’s Shelter Fund, there is a kernel of truth. Cabmen were often forced into pubs to get out of the weather, and they did sometimes drink too much; a group of worthies did form to deal with this problem in a very Victorian way. And, of course, as the story illustrates, it wasn’t solely for the benefit of the downtrodden cabman, his body buffeted by icy winds and driving rain and blisteringly cold snow, that the shelters were built.
“You got to remember, this was started by the aristocracy and it was to their benefit to have cabs. It’s quite logical really, it was for their benefit, really – they could get home quicker,” explained Jenkins, who on the phone sounds a bit like a pre-Hollywood Michael Caine. “This is what it’s all about: It was beneficial for the aristocracy because they could get home quicker, and they had more access to taxis.”
The story of London– its rich, poor and aspiring – can be told, in part, by its transportation. Hackney coaches for hire have been a part of the urban streetscape since the time of Elizabeth I, when wealthy aristos would rent out their carriages to less-wealthy aristos; the first taxi rank, according to the London Vintage Taxi Association, was established outside the Maypole in the Strand in 1674, with liveried coachmen and standard rates. The hackneys’ standards fell as their numbers rose; by the 1760s, there were at least 1,000 “hackney hell carts” clattering down London’s fetid streets. By the 1830s, the word “cab” entered the Londoner’s vocabulary with the introduction of the two-wheeled French-style “cabriolet,” and the cabriolet – with its exposed seat on the top – was the style that would dominate through the end of the century.
Cabmen did have a raw deal, and by the 1870s many people knew it. Several cities, including Birmingham, had already introduced similar shelters for the benefit of their cabmen, and in 1873, plans were afoot to build a “cabmen’s room” at the new Kingston railway station, just outside of London in Surrey. If the philanthropically-minded citizens trying to build the room raised enough money, the article from the November 15, 1873 Surrey Comet reported, they could make the “room” big enough to shelter the horses as well.
The idea to build a similar shelter in London first appeared in Lloyds’ Weekly Newspaper in early December 1874 (which may undermine the veracity of Captain Armstrong’s tale); the article described how a cabdriver trying to keep warm in London’s wet winters had to choose between waiting “out of doors with his blue fingers to his lips, or his arms flapping against the breast of his greatcoat, or else he must go into a public-house and pay for the privilege of warming himself by buying ‘something to drink’ that he does not want.” By the end of the month, according to a December 31st article in the London Evening Standard, a charity was formed and already appealing to the public for donations.
The cost was put at £75 per shelter, according to the Evening Standard, including the gas and water facilities; other sources say the building cost was as much as £200. While donation would pay for the initial outlay, the shelters were expected to be self-sufficient within a few months of opening – cabmen would pay a small “subscription” fee of not more than 6 pence a week to keep the place staffed and working. To deal with the problem of who watched the cabs, the first two cabs in the stand would stay “live,” their drivers ready to take a fare, and keep an eye on the cabs whose drivers were having a bite or a cuppa. (This, notably, is still the case today.)
This being Victorian London, the shelters also served a social and moral purpose, to raise the status of the cabdriver in society. They all maintained the same strict standards of conduct: Cabmen were prohibited from gambling or playing cards, and in some shelters they were asked not to discuss politics. The explicit purpose of the shelters wasn’t only to keep London’s cabbies out of the elements, but also to keep them out of the pubs, so drinking alcohol was right out of the question.
By December 1903, there were 45 cabmen’s shelters scattered throughout Greater London, serving some 4,000 cabmen every day, according to the Fund’s 28th annual report, reported in The London Daily News. Though the project clearly worked, it wasn’t quite the self-perpetuating scheme the Fund’s creators had hoped; for one thing, as Cabbie Blog points out, the shelters lost money during the summer months, when the weather wasn’t so terrible. Even then, the Fund lamented, “It is a matter of regret that the work should be carried on under the disadvantages of insufficient income.” The number of cabmen’s shelters continued to rise, however, although it’s unclear how many there were at the height of their popularity; some figures claim 61, others 65, while Jenkins put the number at 114.
But in that year, 1903, the London’s crowded streets would change in a way that would eventually doom the shelters: The first gas-powered motorcars, French imports, began prowling the roadways. The next 15 years saw the motorcar taxi trade grow in fits and starts (the name “taxi” came from the “taximeter”, the device that measured the distance the vehicle travelled). After the disastrous, deprived years of World War I, the motorcar dominated the cab trade and the need for cabmen’s shelters was necessarily decreased; the last horse on London’s streets was taken out of service in 1947.
“Basically, a horse could only go so far before having a rest… that’s why there were so many shelters,” explained Jenkins. “If a driver was taking a fare, for instance, from St. James [central London] up to Highgate [north London], that’s a six or seven-mile journey for a horse dragging a carriage. The driver would know he could go to Highgate there would probably be a shelter there, rest his horse and get a drink himself.” But after motorcars entered the picture, “You didn’t need so many shelters, you could get about quicker and you didn’t need to water a horse.” Many shelters fell into disuse; the Blitz’s nightly bomb raids between 1940 and 1941 did for the rest.
There are now only 13 cabmen’s shelters left standing; 12 of them are still operational. Eight of those are Grade II listed, meaning that they cannot be demolished or altered without permission from the local government, but all, Jenkins said, are cared for under English Heritage, which protects other important sites such as Stonehenge and Dover Castle. In the early 1990s, the Heritage of London Trust helped the Fund refurbish seven of the shelters.
Jenkins has been in charge of the Fund for the last eight years, and in his tenure has overseen the refurbishment and modernization of seven of the shelters. Some of the shelters have been moved completely – Russell Square’s shelter used to be Leicester Square’s shelter – and the Temple shelter, next up for refurbishment and sitting squarely where the proposed pedestrian Garden Bridge is expected to be installed, is being moved.
“The last one we just finished which was St. George’s Square had an almost total rebuild,” said Jenkins. “They have to be brought up to be modernized to conform with health regulations, food and hygiene regulations.” This has also meant some changes to the interior size; in renovated shelters, there is only enough room for about eight cabdrivers (the shelters are still only open to cabdrivers, although the non-driving public can order take-out at the window).
The cost for the St. George’s Square renovations came to around £40,000, Jenkins said. The Fund’s income comes largely from rents paid by the shelter-keepers to the Fund, although Jenkins said that the Fund subsidizes the shelters’ electricity, gas, and water bills. Since Jenkins began, rents have doubled and he says they’ll be going up again, to £150 a week, in 2017. But shelter-keepers are staying at their posts: The longest-serving shelter keeper has been at the Pont Street shelter for more than 30 years.
Rents aren’t the only source of revenue for the Fund. In recent years, the Fund saw a big boost from a deal with Universal Studios, which licensed the design for the shelter to use in its Wizarding World of Harry Potter attraction. Where the shelters sell bacon sarnies and paper cups of coffee to cab drivers in London, in Orlando, they sell cuddly stuffed Hedwigs and plastic souvenir cups of butterbeer to Harry Potter-mad tourists.
While the future for the London black cab might seem bleak, with the advent of cheap car-hire Uber, London’s mayor has recently pledged support to the embattled black cabs, setting aside £65 million to help the cabs become more energy efficient and forcing all cabs to accept credit card. But even if there weren’t any black cabs, to give up on a living link to the forces that moulded London’s city streets is unthinkable, said Jenkins: “Why would you want to give away your heritage, why would you want to give up something that has been passed down to you? Surely it’s better to preserve something like that.“
Just north of Maine across the Canadian border, you'll find Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha!, the only town in the world with not just one but two exclamation points in its name.
This small town was founded in the mid 1800s as a Roman Catholic mission, and today's population rests around 1,300.
The name is believed to be derived from the archaic French word "ha-ha", which refers to an unexpected obstacle or ending of a path, such as a cul-de-sac. The obstruction, if this is the true origin, would be Lake Témiscouata just beyond the town. "Louis" is believed to refer to one of the town's founders. Why the exclamation points were added is anybody's guess.
Inside the walls of Prague Castle there are buildings dating as far back as the 9th century. Even the newer ones are from the Romanesque, Gothic and Renaissance periods, and together, along with the formal gardens, they make up one of the largest castle complexes in the world.
Along the north side there is a wild glen called Jelení příkop (the Deer Moat), originally part of the Castle’s fortification and later a private hunting ground for the king. The royal stock of stags (and even a few bears) is gone, and today the Deer Moat is a public park of inviting lawns and shaded woods, with a stream channeled down the middle. It’s all easily traversed via stone steps, paved paths, swinging timber walkways, and a 275-foot (84 m) pedestrian tunnel that runs underneath the famous Powder Bridge.
The opening up of the Deer Moat and building of the tunnel were pet projects of former President Václav Havel, who wanted to give visitors an easier way to take advantage of the extended Castle grounds. He brought in Czech architect Josef Pleskot to design the tunnel, which incorporates the moat’s stream, much of which had been relegated to underground pipes in the late 19th century.
Pleskot kept the stream, called the Brusnice, as part of the overall underground experience of the tunnel, an oval tube of elegant brick work that feels at once enveloping and expansive. The sloping curve of the walls was designed to create this sense of comforting roominess, to belie the tightness of the quarters–no doubt making some grateful claustrophobics in the process.
Now, we haven’t seen that magnetic-tape comeback just yet, but it might help if I did my part by highlighting tape-format obscurities.
One of those obscurities worth a mention is the Elcaset, just one of Sony’s many attempts to create a new standard of some kind.
The ‘70s-era format was a middle ground between reel-to-reel tape, which was too bulky for mass consumption, and the already-standardized compact cassette, which was gaining steam in car stereos. It solved the weaknesses of the cassette—mainly imperfect sound due to limited space—through sheer size. The device, as Ars Technica notes, was roughly twice the size of a standard cassette.
So why didn’t it sell? Two reasons: First, Sony made the device with the assumption that cassette tapes wouldn’t get better. With the addition of new materials, such as chromium oxide, the quality of the standard cassette got a lot better, and tape players quickly improved as well.
And the other? As Techmoan notes in this 2014 clip, no officially-released pre-recorded music ever came out on the format, meaning that all you could really essentially do with it is record your own music—likely from the radio or a vinyl format—onto a giant tape that you can’t put in your car. (Ars notes that this was because Sony at the time did not have a significant content business, something that you definitely couldn’t say about Sony now.)
The thing disappeared by 1980. But on the plus side, they were selling a tape-based product that had already healed the wound. You may have heard of it. It’s called the Walkman.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
The Chicago water cribs are the only visible portion of the century-old tunnels that carry drinking water to city taps. The circular stone structures protect intake vents that connect with brick-lined passageways hidden 200 feet under Lake Michigan.
The first Chicago water crib was built in 1865 at the tail end of the Civil War as the population boomed and water resources stretched thin. Residents had traditionally drawn their drinking water from the river and lake, but near-apocalyptic levels of industrial pollution had transformed both into a public health threat.
The cribs were a novel engineering solution to pipe in pure water from deep out in the lake, away from shoreside pollution. The 1867 Great Chicago Lake Tunnel history describes the insight thusly:
“It was true that Lake Michigan was quite as foul as the river, near its mouth, but at a certain distance from shore the water became, as pure as Croton, cold and clear as crystal. The contaminating influences of the Chicago river possessed no power over the waters of the lake, at a distance of two miles from shore. Here, then, was an eternal reservoir”.
The initial wooden crib was constructed on land and floated two miles from shore. There, it was filled with rubble and lined with armor to protect against collisions from ice or ships. Tunneling under the lake commenced from both directions and was done entirely by hand, 15 feet per day. Sappers had to contend with tight five-foot high spaces, thin air, and the constant terrifying prospect of a tunnel collapse. A miniature mule-powered rail car was installed to ferry the endless amounts of spoil out of the excavation.
When it was completed, awed commentators reported that underwater tunnel was “greatest the world ever saw, and beside of which the tunneling of the Thames was mere child's play.” But 30 years later it was necessary to double the distance and build another four miles out. Over the years increased demand and pollution lead to the construction of a total of nine water cribs.
Up until 1990 teams of “crib tenders” actually lived out on the lake in week-long shifts to keep debris and fish from fouling the vents. During winter they used hand tools—and sometimes dynamite—to prevent the life sustaining cribs from freezing over.
Hidden within the otherwise mundane offices of a legal software firm you'll find an impressive collection of office machinery through the ages.
There are hundreds of typewriters here, including, purportedly, all the machines ever made by Remington, starting with the mechanical Sholes and Glidden typewriter from 1873 (which looks like a sewing machine) and ending with a late computer-based typewriter from the 1980s.
You can stroll through full aisles of cash registers, calculators, telephones, telegraph devices, pencil sharpeners, and time clocks, as well as tons of ephemera: advertisements, old articles, merchandise. An old copier resembling a clothes drier sits right next to the fabled Xerox 914, the first successful commercial plain paper copier. A Chinese abacus shares the aisle with an early electronic pocket calculator from Texas Instruments.
The collection includes an assortment of teaching implements too, making once advanced technology such as QWERTY keyboards and ten-key calculators easier to understand and master. You can also find here, in no particular order, typewriter perfume, a slide rule for musicians, and one cash register from the Old West (it's basically just a scale for weighing gold).
The Museum of Business History and Technology comes from a collection of Thomas A. Russo, who once worked at Remington Rand, and started collecting office equipment three decades ago. Many of the artifacts, mechanical or later electromechanical, help understand the technological progress that led to the modern, electronic office technology that surrounds us all.
One of David Černý's many sculptures spread throughout his hometown of Prague, Quo Vadis depicts the iconic East German Trabant walking on four human legs. It is a tribute to the many East Germans who travelled to the West German embassy in Prague to seek asylum in 1989. Those to whom it was granted had to leave their Trabbys behind as they fled to the west.
This sculpture made its first appearance in 1991 in the city's old town square. Today it is a permanent fixture in the garden of Prague's Federal German Republic Embassy.
The Rudolph Grotto Gardens includes St. Jude's Chapel and wild gardens, but the real draw are the Wonder Caves. They resemble catacombs and consist of 26 shrines and dioramas along a .2 mile tunnel. These caves were built not by nature, but by one Father Philip Wagner.
In 1912, early in his seminary career, he traveled to Lourdes, France to visit the grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes. He asked for a return to health so that he could make it through the ordination process. If this prayer was fulfilled, he would build another shrine to Our Lady.
Wagner's prayer was answered—he became a priest, and was stationed in Rudolph, Wisconsin. Despite the fact that he didn't know the first thing about construction, he began work on a new chapel, more central to the townspeople, and of course, the shrine he promised. Work continued until 1983, carried on by Father Wagner, his successors, and various inspired volunteers.
The shrines depict the Stations of the Cross and the Seven Sorrows of Mary, but there are also several secular displays of rural life. It is a simultaneously reverent and whimsical reflection of one mans spectacularly idiosyncratic vision.
There may be one president we're forgetting about.
In the annals of who has been president of the United States, due to interpretation of the laws of succession, there is potentially one man who was president for one day—March 4, 1849. That man was President pro tempore of the Senate on that day, Missouri lawyer David Rice Atchison. His tombstone in Plattsburg's Green Lawn Cemetery tells of his one day as (possibly) POTUS.
The term of President James K. Polk ended at noon on Sunday, March 4, 1849, however the incoming President, Zachary Taylor, refused to be sworn in on the Sabbath. There would also be no swearing in of Millard Fillmore, his vice president. Under the laws of succession at the time, the President pro tempore of the Senate would be considered the Acting Vice President, and therefore president on the Sunday before Taylor could be sworn in.
However, scholars consider it a mere curiosity of history. Atchison was never technically sworn in nor did he exercise any power. Also on that date the Senate was finished for the term. In an interview, he said: "There had been three or four busy nights finishing up the work of the Senate, and I slept most of that Sunday."
Despite the claims of historians, his simple grave marker in Greenlawn Cemetery in Plattsburg reads "President of the United States for One Day, Sunday, March 4, 1849." A statue in front of the Clinton County Courthouse also proclaims the honor on a plaque. He did say afterward, however, that his "administration" was "the honestest administration this country ever had."
Even the International Space Station needs its batteries changed every once in a while. This past Friday, NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Peggy Whitson took on the task, beginning the swapping-out process during a six-hour spacewalk.
The current batteries, nickel-hydrogen units that recharge in the sunlight, have been powering the ISS for 18 years. This year, they'll be replaced by a lithium-ion design, which have a better storage capacity and are essentially just enormous versions of cell phone batteries, Whitson told NASA TV.
The swap is a two-trip effort—the actual batteries will be plugged in this Friday, Space.com reports. This time, Kimbrough and Whitson installed adapter plates and electrical connections. In the process, Whitson tied the record for most spacewalks by a female astronaut—seven.
Next time you balk at getting on the ladder to replace your smoke alarm batteries, take a deep breath and think of these two.
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.
Pooh's house is a tiny, painted door at the base of a tree stump that has been a fixture of the Harvard University campus for decades, though it has a complicated history that's not always sunny. It's a little piece of Harvard that's worth the visit—if you can bend down far enough to see it properly.
Pooh’s house wasn’t always the only local residence for citizens of the hundred-acre wood. A decade ago, Rabbit and Piglet both lived within a half-mile, in squirrel-sized homes nestled in the bases of other trees, guarded by doors with hinges the size of toenails. Adults would generally only notice the houses if they happened to drop something, or pause to tie their shoes, at precisely the right place. It was most often children who spotted the painted doors—who creaked them open to reveal the damp, spidery foyers within.
Neither Rabbit nor Piglet themselves ever made an appearance; their foyers always seemed to be empty. Perhaps they were visiting Pooh, drinking tea generously blobbed with honey. Or simply sitting in a back room, just beyond the spongy space where the wood curved into darkness.
But those trees were long ago felled to make room for crayon-colored chairs and sunbathing freshmen. Only Pooh’s house remains—though his tree, too, was cut during the 2012 renovation that tore up the cement outside the Harvard Science Center. For a while his stump sat bare, cordoned off by construction fencing. Pooh’s door disappeared, and along with it his home. It became, for a time, just a vacant hollow, a space between knobby roots.
But after a few months a wooden roof appeared to cap the exposed stump. Soon a new door was installed, and a freshly painted sign that read "Pooh." One can only assume that Pooh himself moved back in, pots of honey in hand.
For a few years his house thrived. A tiny piece of Christopher Robin’s woods, right outside the Science Center. Every day students passed, backpacks heavy with physics notebooks. Tourists paused for pictures. Pooh was there —he must have been—just out of sight behind his painted door. Eating a snack, perhaps, or taking a nap.
But paint will chip and wood, too, will soften. Pooh’s house seemed to fall apart all at once. The sign fell, first. A rainstorm, perhaps—or maybe the work of an industrious squirrel. Soon after the door disappeared, pried off its tiny hinges by vandals. The living room behind it became, again, just an empty hollow, a spongy dip in wood.
The skeleton of Pooh’s house sits, still, outside the Science Center. The roof is mostly intact. Every day students lock their bikes beside it, jogging to make it to chemistry class. But Pooh himself is nowhere to be found. He might be gone for good. Maybe he’s moved in with Owl, or into Eeyore’s shack. Or perhaps he’s just waiting, hidden in some unobtrusive, spidery hollow. On the lookout for a new door, and a fresh coat of paint.
The Jewish deli will survive—Katz’s is still with us, for one thing—but it’s still a bummer.
All of which made us reflect on a small part of a Carnegie Deli meal: the pickle, that brine-y piece of cucumber that offers a contrast to many a meal with its sharp taste and memorable crunch.
But of all the objects that we pickle, only the pickled cucumber goes by the simple one-word nickname "pickle," an iconic if still curious gastronomic institution. But how long have pickles been with us?
Their history, it turns out, might be as unusual as the fact that at diners everywhere, when you order a burger, there along side it, nearly all of the time, is a cheap, salty vegetable, its raison d'etre, aside from custom, apparently unknown.
Cucumbers reportedly experienced their first dip in the brine in 2030 BC, according to PBS’ The History Kitchen. They are believed to have come from India, though the name of the process came from either the Dutch or German words for “salt” or “brine.”
These days we eat pickles because we like them, but in the pre-refrigeration days, pickling was an essential way to preserve food for storage. The process is closely associated with Jewish food due pickled foods being used by Eastern European Jews to get flavorful food during the cold winter months. (They sure beat bread and potatoes.)
These days, pickles have become less necessary and more novel.
They have plenty of reason to exist, of course. For one thing, pickles are one of the most calorie-light foods that you can buy in the store. A single dill pickle spear has just four calories—something largely due to the fact that cucumbers are generally considered to be incredibly low-calorie. The brine doesn’t add any calories, but it does add a lot of sodium, which makes it a bit of a wash as a healthy nutrition source. (On the other hand, some athletic trainers swear by pickle juice as a way to prevent cramps, so it has that going for it.)
The biggest barrier to enjoying pickles might be the vacuum seal on the jars. That seal creates a high amount of pressure, which means you have to work to twist extra hard. But it can be dealt with. This video helps to explain the science behind the problem, while this clip offers an overview of the various jar-opening techniques out there.
If you don’t want to deal with the jar, you can always make your own with a plastic syringe, strangely enough. Over at Instructables, the Oakland Toy Lab explains an alternative pickling strategy that takes just 30 seconds—and a little science.
And you aren’t necessarily stuck with dill pickles, either. For generations, the most popular alternative flavor has been “Bread and butter” pickles, a variety that tastes sweet and sour, rather than like bread and butter. The flavor got its name essentially because the variety’s popularizer, Cora and Omar Fanning, gave their pickles away to a local grocer in exchange for bread and butter.
But the step away from tradition isn’t just limited to the flavor, but the shape. Tiny gherkins, for example, come from a different part of the traditional cucumber family, one that grows extremely undersized. A more obscure-but-interesting variant is the Mexican sour gherkin, which looks like a tiny watermelon. Modern Farmer calls it “adorable, delicious, and easy to grow.”
While pickles maintain a large fan base, not everyone’s a fan. Brian Hickey, a writer for Philly Voice, recently went on a harsh anti-pickles diatribe due to his sheer frustration that they’re included by default with many sandwiches.
“Some of you like pickles. I get that. But you are not decent people, at least not if you think it’s OK for a restaurant to force pickles upon those of us whose stomachs turn at the mere sight or—worstly—smell of those squishy, acidic intruders,” Hickey wrote in his blog post last month.
When asked if he saw any positives about pickles, he simply responded, “nope.” Some people love pickles, others hate ‘em. (I fall firmly in the “love” camp.)
The interesting thing about pickles is that, for decades, it was largely treated as a regional phenomenon in the United States—a family-owned thing that wasn’t really encumbered by advertising. Unlike the cheese curl, they didn’t immediately go national.
That left an opening for a big brand like Heinz to own the market, and there was a period where they were relatively dominant. But in the early 1970s, Vlasic, which started out as a family-owned firm, made a big play—a play that redefined the industry and made pickles as important a part of every pantry as cereal or baking soda. Before the Michigan-based company came along, pickles in many cases were a strongly regional product, sold in much the same way as milk.
But with the company’s factories growing along with its fortunes, it was able to take its Polish-style pickles national in part through well-considered manufacturing strategies—for example, pickles that were too large to be used whole in traditional jars would get reused in other contexts, like relish or as dill spears.
“If you buy a farmer’s crop, you get a mixture of cucumbers. You have to use it all. It’s like the meat business, where they use all of the pig except the squeal,” explained Bob Vlasic, the longtime head of Vlasic and son of company founder Joseph Vlasic, explained in a 1973 Detroit Free Press article.
A big element of Vlasic’s growth was its decision to advertise—a bit of a change from most of its competitors, the largest of which, Heinz, effectively treated its pickle business as a sidebar to the main condiment business. According to a Funding Universe analysis, Vlasic and Heinz each held around 10 percent of the national pickle market in 1970. Around that time, Vlasic introduced its popular animated stork mascot.
Why a stork? Credit an old wives' tale. The company decided to play off the idea that pregnant women crave pickles and created a mascot with a wink and a nod—something highlighted by this commercial.
The company’s clever marketing helped it blow past Heinz—while the condiment-maker stayed at 10 percent of the market in 1977, Vlasic’s share of the pickle market grew to a quarter.
But Vlasic has had its share of ups and downs since. In 1978, beset by the price of pickles, it sold itself to Campbell’s Soup, in one of the soup-maker’s largest-ever acquisitions. Two decades later, Campbell’s spun it off, and in 2001, the company filed for bankruptcy.
Initially, it looked like Heinz, which had lost its footing against Vlasic in the pickle aisle, would swoop in, but a new buyer took over and was able to use the firm as a centerpiece of a new food empire, Pinnacle Foods. Pinnacle itself was acquired by Hillshire Brands in 2014.
The stork is still around, but maybe not as prominent as it once was. (It only has roughly 26 more Twitter followers than I do.)
But for a brief time in the 1970s, Vlasic turned pickles into a buzzworthy product by marketing the hell out of them.
“Most of our competitors were manufacturing oriented, generations of fine pickle makers and proud of it,” Bob Vlasic told Forbes in 1997. “We came in exactly the opposite, as marketers who manufactured to have something to sell.”
The industry stagnation that led Vlasic to take over the pickle aisle in the ‘70s hasn’t really faded away. Pickles are tasty, but kind of boring. The pickle sector is mature. It’s hard to make a mass-market pickle hip.
Heck, one of the techniques Bob Vlasic used to convince the public to eat more pickles was downright cheesy. In 1974, Vlasic was credited as the author of a book titled Bob Vlasic’s 101 Pickle Jokes.
The book featured illustrations from well-known cartoonist Don Orehek. According to a 1975 mention of the book in Cosmopolitan, the title had sold 250,000 copies in its first year. People in the ‘70s loved cheesy pickle jokes, apparently.
(How cheesy are we talking? Well, here’s a sample joke: “Who was that pickle-o I saw you with last night? That was no pickle, that was my fife!”)
If that’s the high-water-mark for innovation in pickle marketing, it makes sense that the leaders in the market, including Heinz and Claussen, haven’t really done a lot to move the pickle forward in the past few decades.
But there has been some attempts at evolution in the pickle market, even, as any hipster would tell you, at the artisanal level. Firms like Brooklyn Brine have experimented with offbeat cukes like the Off-Centered Beer Pickle (which, excitingly, infuses Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA into its pickles) and with highly ethical business approaches, like paying its workers $16 an hour.
High-priced pickles have been easy to mock, but some, like NPR reporter Adam Davidson, have been quick to defend the firms’ business acumen.
“Instead of rolling our eyes at self-conscious Brooklyn hipsters pickling everything in sight, we might look to them as guides to the future of the American economy,” Davidson write in a 2012 New York Times Magazine essay. “Just don’t tell them that. It would break their hearts to be called model 21st-century capitalists.”
In the case of Heinz, at least, they appear to be noticing the desire for a cuke rethink. Last year, the conglomerate—which has attempted to move beyond dill with two new flavors—Spicy Garlic and Sweet & Spicy.
A driving factor behind this shift, reports the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, is segment stagnation. Despite pickles being a $1 billion business, the segment isn’t growing.
As steeped in tradition (and salty vinegar) as pickles are, the question naturally arises: Do pickles need to be the biggest market segment in the grocery store, or even the condiment aisle? Can we embrace tiny cucumbers without the veneer of big business?
And when is someone going to come out with 101 MORE Pickle Jokes? Because that’s a book I would buy.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
One-hundred-and-thirty-seven-years ago, someone carved a tunnel in the base of a massive sequoia tree in Calaveras County, California. For all the years since then you could walk through it, or just look at it, and think about the impact humans have had on the world's natural resources.
But on Sunday, nature exacted its own retribution, felling the tree in a storm.
According to the Los Angeles Times, visitors used to be able to drive through the tree, though, lately, it's been open only to hikers. The tree was known as the Pioneer Cabin Tree, and was one of several that were carved out in the 1800s to promote tourism.
But according to the National Park Service, carved out trees had their time and place.
"Sequoias which are standing healthy and whole are worth far more," the park service said.
Do yourself a favor and skip straight to minute 3:30 of this life-changing video.
You'll see little Pepto-Bismal-colored pink bloops glide out of this snail's somewhere-or-other. What you've just witnessed is the egg-laying process of a female apple snail. Who knew?
Unlike most other types of snail, apple snails are not hermaphrodites, and cannot self-fertilize. The male and female must mate, a ritual that can last between two and 12 hours.
If you currently own an apple snail and notice that none of your snail's eggs are transforming into baby snails, there is an online resource for that. For more general apple snail FAQs, see here.
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.
Football is big at Florida State University, and steeped in tradition. There's the wearing of team colors, tailgating with friends, planting of the spear with Chief Osceola and Renegade, the war chant and tomahawk chop, and 24/7 pounding of the war drum before a big game. Then there's one particularly unusual tradition: the Sod Cemetery.
In 1962, during a pep talk at a practice before a matchup against the University of Georgia, professor and athletic board member Dean Coyle Moore challenged players to “bring back some sod from between the hedges at Georgia.”
Team captain Gene McDowell took the statement literally: He pulled a handful of grass from the field after the 18-0 victory, and presented it to Moore at the next practice. Moore and FSU coach Bill Peterson buried the sod on the practice field. A monument was later put in place to commemorate the victory, and the tradition of the Sod Cemetery had begun.
The rules of the "Sod Games" are straightforward. Team captains collect a piece of the sod from fields where FSU wins for all road games where the Seminoles are considered the underdogs, all games at the University of Florida, and all ACC title and bowl games. Tradition surrounding the burials have been written up by the current cemetery keeper, instructing how to remove the sod (a big pair of scissors), the ceremonies held when the sod is buried (in tiny coffins), and how to place the bronze markers (headstones) to commemorate the games.
Visitors to Doak Campbell Stadium can witness the cemetery, which is located outside the gates of the practice field.
If Lieutenant Commander Spock is known for one thing, it's his signature Vulcan handsign for "Live Long and Prosper." But if he's known for a few more things, one of them is definitely his mastery of three-dimensional chess.
Though the board game may look like a sci-fi creation, 3-D chess is actually something that exists on planet Earth—and it was invented many decades before Star Trek.
Three-dimensional chess can refer to any type of chess in which the pieces can move vertically as well as horizontally, usually across a series of stacked boards. Most famously, this variant has appeared as a part of the Star Trek universe, where it is usually referred to as Tridimensional Chess. “I thought, ‘Hm. Interesting.’ But I didn’t pay much attention to it,” says Dr. Leroy Dubeck, President of the U.S. Chess Federation from 1969-1972, when Bobby Fischer won the world championship.
But while the prop designers who came up with Star Trek’s multi-level chess game probably just envisioned it as a futuristic kind of advanced strategy game, an actual version of three-dimensional chess has existed since at least the early 19th century.
Possibly the first version of three-dimensional chess was a German game, created by a doctor, occultist, and sometime inventor named Dr. Ferdinand Maack. In the 1900s, Maack worked on versions of three-dimensional chess throughout his life, later collaborating with his son on variations of the game, with at least one lost variant featuring game pieces fashioned after an okapi. Today he is best remembered for Raumschach, which ironically translates to “space chess,” although the futuristic association with three-dimensional chess wouldn’t come until later.
First unveiled around 1907, the game was inspired by Maack’s belief that if chess were to represent the strategy of actual warfare, then there must also be a representation of aerial and underwater attack, which could be represented by movement up and down a stack of playing fields. After some experimentation, Maack decided that the most effective configuration for the game was five 5X5 chess grids stacked in a tower.
Players start with their pieces lined up on opposite ends of either the top two tiers, or the bottom two. All of the traditional chess (sometimes called “orthochess”) stations are represented—king, queen, bishop, rook, and pawn—but there is also a special piece called the unicorn, the movement of which is tailored to a three-dimensional space. While the other pieces move in an approximation of their same pattern in two-dimensional chess, the unicorn moves diagonally and vertically through the corners of the squares. The win condition of the game is the same as in orthochess: to put the opponent’s king in check, with no further legal moves. It’s just far more difficult.
Unfortunately, despite Maack's belief in the game, Raumschach never took hold. Dubeck, a lifelong chess master had never even heard of it. But three-dimensional chess, at least in the popular imagination, was far from dead. Other types of tiered chess games have been proposed over the decades, but none saw much popular or commercial success. Save for the fictional version aboard the starship Enterprise.
In the first season of the original Star Trek, Tridimensional Chess was introduced as the popular game of the future. In the episode “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” the very first scene presents Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Commander Spock as they play a familiar but multi-tiered game that Kirk simply calls, “chess.” The board is split into flying tiers of different-sized grids, and it certainly looks like a set of chess from the future.
The game reappears in subsequent episodes of the series, and a similar but even more futuristic version shows up on Star Trek: The Next Generation. No gameplay guidelines were ever set down on screen, but fans and experts began to create their own rules for the game by the late-1970s. The rules of Tridimensional Chess differ from author to author, but many have gone to great lengths to make the strange board work as a serious chess variation. Some ambitious players have even created variations of “standard” Tridimensional Chess, with in-jokey names like “The Borg Queen,” “Warp Factor,” and “Kobayashi Maru.”
Dubeck himself even worked on a version of official rules to accompany a licensed replica of the game, although the only thing he really remembers about them is that they weren’t exactly tournament ready. “Anyone who’s actually interested in chess, they’re going to want to stick with the usual board," he says. “The purpose of this would be to sell it to Star Trek fans who would want it sitting at their table, to show off that they got a set.”
Given the continued experimentation with three-dimensional chess variants, as well as the popularity of Tridimensional Chess (even as a prop), why hasn’t the variation taken off? Where are the international three-dimensional chess tournaments? How come Tridimensional Chess hasn’t seen a Quidditch-like league spring up among fans and players (beyond something like this small Facebook group)?
For the most part it has to do with a lack of other players or availability. Given the extreme challenge of mastering a game like three-dimensional chess, there is almost no professional payoff, other than love of the game.
According to Dubeck, becoming a 3-D chess wiz could even make you worse at traditional chess. “If you start fooling around with something three-dimensional, it may be confusing your mind while playing at regular chess, so it may actually work negatively,” he says. “Therefore, why should I spend time on something I can’t use, which in fact may make me a worse chess player?”
Dubeck isn’t confident that a major chess variation will ever truly take off, due in large part to the struggle to make it commercially viable. Respectfully, doctor, Spock would disagree.
In 1985, the Astoria opened in London as a live music venue, where for decades some of Britain’s greatest bands played for packed houses and London’s LGBTQ nightlife thrived. But before this spot on Charing Cross Road was a nightclub, it had been a theater, a cinema/ballroom, and back in the 18th and 19th centuries, a warehouse for Crosse & Blackwell, one of the country’s pioneering food production companies.
The ketchup wasn’t the sugary, tomato-y ketchup that Americans love today. It was mushroom ketchup, an earlier iteration of the umami-heavy sauce, similar to a mild soy sauce. (Atlas Obscura has experimented with making mushroom ketchup in the past, and we can report that it is not terrible but not great.)
But the ketchup bottles were just one part of the collection of jars, which may be the “biggest collection of pottery ever discovered in a single feature from an archaeological site in London,” according to a representative of the Museum of London Archaeology. The trove included jars meant for mustard, preserved ginger, and piccalilli, a type of spiced pickle relish, adapted from Indian pickle recipes. There were also earthenware jars meant for marmalade, raspberry jam, and plum jam, the London blog IanVisits reports: Crosse & Blackwell was one of the first companies to industrialize jam products.
When some very old foodstuffs—like, most notably, 2,000-year-old bog butter found in Ireland—are found, there exists the possibility that someone might taste them. In this case, sadly, most of the jars were empty and broken—we'll never know what 18th century ketchup tasted like when aged a good one to two hundreds years.
The "10,000-mile-long wall" (万里长城), or the Great Wall of China as we know it, is one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Every year, thousands of tourists flock to climb the stone stairs at Badaling, just outside of Beijing, with the more adventurous ones going for hikes along the ''wild'' wall sections like Chenjiapu or Qinglongqiao.
The views from those hikes are beautiful indeed. But as you stand atop a 600-year-old wall fortress, contemplating the serpentine white lines that stretch for miles along mountain ridges, the question inevitably pops up: Does the Great Wall of China have a starting point? If so, where?
The answer lies in the small town of Shanhaiguan in Hebei province. Old Dragon's Head is considered to be the start of the Great Wall, built during the Ming Dynasty, and it does resemble a dragon resting its weary head by the Bohai Sea. It served as a military fort, and a strategic defense from both land and sea attacks. Going down towards the sea, there are well-preserved remnants of the original wall, which was built using a mixture of glutinous rice syrup, earth, sand and lime.
One day in 1932, Russian avant-garde artist Vladimir Tatlin ventured from his studio in Moscow’s ancient Novodevichy convent to a country field. After five years of work, he wanted to test what would become his final major creation: a human-powered flying machine.
The apparatus, named Letatlin, (an amalgam of his name and the Russian verb letat’, or “to fly”) consisted of a body basket for the human operator engineered of bent wood and wings spanning almost 10 meters (33 feet) across, sheathed with parachute silk. The bird-shaped contraption was held together with steel cables, leather and whalebone; custom-made metal bearings ensured efficient movement.
Three Letatlins were built, one left purposely as an uncovered skeleton structure for demonstrations: Tatlin expected that this particular model would be useful when industry adapted his design for mass production.
Passenger flights had already existed in Russia for a decade, and a factory in Moscow that year launched serial production of small civilian planes. But Tatlin envisioned his project would become a more tangible, household consumer item for the newly forged Soviet man, giving the masses access to affordable flying equipment that would make airborne commutes as common as bicycle rides. Soviet schools would hold classes for children on mastering the art of flight, he believed.
Tatlin was already in his late 40s at the time, having etched his name in the history of the avant-garde movement as the father of Soviet constructivism, the philosophy that art must construct the new material reality rather than exist abstractly for its own sake.
Tatlin’s projects ranged from the utopian to the mundane, including the tiered revolving Tatlin tower meant to house Communist party officials, an ultra-efficient stove that could heat the entire house with two logs, clothing, and even children’s sleds and sippy cups. Christened the Russian Da Vinci as the movement’s most polymathic member, Tatlin had nursed the idea of Letatlin in his mind since he worked as a sailor in his early 20s, observing seagulls.
“Letatlin is not just a symbol of avant-garde art but one of the entire Soviet era at that time, when there was a feeling that something entirely new was possible,” says Irina Pronina, an expert at the Tretyakov Gallery. It embodies the idea of takeoff and flight, the idea of freedom for the individual to be airborne, she says. “We don’t know the mechanics of flight on Letatlin, but it must be the same principle as flying in your sleep: the sensation of running and then suddenly lifting off the ground.”
Letatlin’s fate is also symbolic of the fate of the entire avant-garde movement, which was squashed by the Soviet government in the 1930s. The process of shutting down creative freedoms had already started by the time Tatlin got around to testing his creation, making it the swan song of avant-garde art in the Soviet Union. He was never able to get it off the ground—the field test had to be aborted due to damage during transportation that could lead the test flyer to crash.
Two of the models have been lost. One, with the exposed wings, miraculously ended up in Russia’s unique but overlooked Central Air Force Museum outside Moscow, an errant, underfunded asset of the defence ministry dedicated to the history of aviation which is kept alive largely by efforts of volunteers. Letatlin’s disintegration prevented it from being transported beyond the premises despite regular requests by major museums. The avant-garde idea of human freedom to fly as a bird was grounded at a graveyard of rusty machines.
“We don’t have the definitive answer to the question if it is possible or not to fly on the Letatlin,” says Pronina, who, together with colleagues, in October loaded the contraption onto three trucks to transport it to Moscow for eventual restoration. She says the fact that it survived decades of spartan storage conditions is a “miracle” and now a team of restorers is brainstorming for the right approach to rescue it from oblivion. “There are reconstruction methods, their supporters say we shouldn’t labor over rusty and torn fabric and use new material, but then the authenticity of this piece, which has its own life and wrinkles, like a human face, will also disappear,” she says.
Though Tatlin inspired generations of other artists, many of which are being showcased around the world as art museums commemorate the centennial of the 1917 Russian Revolution, his original works are rarely present in these retrospectives. “Many of his original works are no longer extant and exist only as later reconstructions,” say the curators of the current exhibit “A Revolutionary Impulse” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Pronina hopes that a restored Letatlin can rekindle interest in Russian avant-garde art, which is mostly sidelined in its home country in favor of more conservative styles. “We want the interest in the avant-garde to go beyond the professional art community,” she says.
“Letatlin is like a wondrous bird, it does not leave anyone indifferent and inspires the simplest of questions: what is it? What was this artist dreaming of?”
