At almost 650 feet high, the cone of this long-dormant volcano is the highest natural point in the Auckland region. But that's not its only claim to fame—the stone observation platform at its peak was built with the help of an elephant.
The volcano's last eruption is thought to have been around 28,000 years ago. It spewed lava from three different cones to form the land upon which Auckland now sits. The peak, which goes by both its Māori and English names, is the highest point in the city, making it a popular destination. The 160-foot-deep crater Te Ipu-a-Mataaho ("The Bowl of Mataaho") is named after a deity said to live inside it, guarding the secrets of the earth.
In the late 19th century, much of one side of the mountain was quarried to build some of Auckland's earliest homes, prisons and other structures in the region, as well as the platform atop the peak. The laborers were mostly Māori men and prisoners, but one was a royal elephant.
Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh, was to finish his 1870s tour of the Royal Navy in Auckland. When passing through Nepal, the prince was gifted a three-year-old elephant by Sir Jung Bahadoor. Alfred named the elephant Tom, and took him along to New Zealand, much to the delight of Auckland residents who had likely never seen such a creature before.
Over the course of the prince's stay the elephant was kept in the royal barracks. But his strength and size weren't put to waste. While on board the ship from Sri Lanka to New Zealand, Tom carried 300 tons of coal across the vessel, much to the delight of the sailors. He was put to similar work on Mt. Eden's platform, hauling heavy basalt up the mountainside. The royal pachyderm was rewarded for his labor with candy and beer.
Today, the mountaintop platform remains one of Auckland's most popular tourist sites for its beautiful views of the city and surrounding area. Tom's life didn't last quite so long, but his memory still remains. He did not stay in New Zealand, but relocated to several British zoos before his death in 1882 at the Dublin Zoo. The zoo held onto his remains, and in 2010 they were purchased by the Trinity College Zoological Museum, where they are now on display.
In October 1999, Ukraine’s secret service showed up at the home and office of Sergei Piontkovski, a marine biologist, and started raiding his files. They were looking for information about plankton.
Piontkovski was a leading scientist at the Institute of Biology of Southern Seas in Sevastopol, Ukraine, and since the fall of the Soviet Union, he had been working with colleagues in the West to analyze huge troves of ocean data that Soviet ships had collected around the world during the Cold War. The investigation focused on the grant money that Piontkovski and his colleagues had received from western institutions, but the New Scientistreported at the time that there could be another reason for the Security Bureau’s interest in the scientists and their plankton data—some of their studies focused on tiny bioluminescent organisms that could help military forces detect enemy submarines.
For decades, during the Cold War, both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. had a military interest in bioluminescent organisms, which use a chemical reaction to produce a brief glow when they’re stimulated. The light of tiny ocean creatures had revealed on occasion the locations of submarines in World War I, and both militaries imagined that they might be able to use this natural phenomenon more systematically in anti-submarine warfare.
But despite those serendipitous illuminations of otherwise stealthy submarines, harnessing bioluminescence for human purposes proved somewhat elusive. While the Navy’s interest expanded scientific understanding of this phenomenon, the light of the ocean’s tiny creatures was difficult to bend to a military will.
In November 1918, toward the end of the Great War, a British ship gliding on the surface of the ocean, off the coast of Spain, noticed a strange shape down in the water. It was blue, glowing, and suspiciously large. The ship attacked. The hunch that the sailors had found something suspicious was correct: they had destroyed a German submarine that had agitated a field of bioluminescent plankton, which lit up and gave away its position.
Sailors had long noticed the transcendent light of “milky seas,” where glowing plankton gathered en masse and lit the water up. The Arabian Sea was known to glow, as were the seas around parts of Indonesia. But there was little known about the bioluminescent properties of the ocean in general. Scientists did not yet know how abundant bioluminescent organisms were, where they might be found, or how brightly their light shone. In 1966, when the U.S. Naval Oceanographic Office published a study that collected for the first time reports of bioluminescence going back centuries, the office’s commander wrote that the study of these organisms had gone “sadly neglected for a long time.”
In the second half of 20th century, though, the U.S. military had a pressing reason to learn more about these creatures. Facing down the Soviet superpower, the Navy had to plan how to transport ships full of men, tanks, and other war equipment across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe, if World War III had broken out as a ground war. To cross the ocean, these ships would have to pass by Soviet submarines, hidden as well as they could be. Any method of detecting them could be of use.
The U.S. had a defensive interest in bioluminescence, too. “A lot of the research into anti-submarine warfare had to do with how the Soviets might detect our submarines,” says Donald Daniel, a security expert who in the 1980s wrote a guide to anti-submarine warfare. “The United States did an excellent job of silencing its submarines, and we were looking at different detection strategies largely because we wondered what they could get us with, if they couldn’t get us with acoustics.”
The Soviet Union, it turned out, was also interested in bioluminescence. From 1970 to 1990, ships equipped with monitoring equipment were cruising the open waters of the oceans, surveying their characteristics. Back then, large portions of the ocean were still a mystery: it was in these same years that satellites launched into space starting giving the first comprehensive scientific overviews of the world’s watery reaches. Soviet scientists on these long cruises were casting bioluminescent sensors into the water, where they would capture a certain volume, agitate the water to set the organisms aglow, and measure their light.
At the same time, the U.S. Navy was working to better understand bioluminescence in its own way. After a preliminary assessment of its possibilities in 1970, the Navy worked to better understand where and when they might find bioluminescence. The U.S. strategy used more limited surveying to try to develop a model for how bioluminescent organisms acted and where they would show up. Ultimately, the goal was to monitor the oceans’ bioluminescence by air or from space, and catch the subtle signals that would indicate the movement of ships.
By the end of the Cold War, neither side had succeeded in turning bioluminescence into a strategic advantage, though. “While it was an interesting idea, in terms of practical relevance, it was turning out to be way too hard,” says Daniel. The light-sensing technology wasn’t quite good enough to be of use; distinguishing bioluminescence sparked by whales or schools of fish from bioluminescence from submarine movement proved difficult.
In the 1990s, Soviet scientists like Piontkovski started collaborating with British and American institutions who were interested in the same problems they were. In 1997, for instance, Piontkovski worked with scientists in the U.K. and the U.S. to analyze the bioluminescence data collected over 20 years of Soviet Ocean surveys. At the same time, even with the Cold War over, scientists were making progress in understanding the ocean’s bioluminescent qualities and how bioluminescent organisms themselves worked. The Navy had developed standardized instruments to measure bioluminescence, a huge boon for researchers. Through the 2000s Naval researchers were still expanding a database of bioluminescence measurements, and funding was still going to scientists to develop models that could predict what the bioluminescent signature of a ship might look like.
The next step in creating a predictive system would have involved creating a program that could take particular inputs and spit out a hypothetical bioluminescent signal for a given object. “That kind of fell apart,” says Michael Latz, a scientist who had worked on this idea, with government funding. “I don’t think that part has happened.” Funding for this sort of work has also dried up, and a recent government research project to create “better predictability of bioluminescent organism” finished work in 2014. “We are not currently doing any research on the topic,” a spokesperson for the Office of Naval Research says. Despite all the Navy’s efforts, bioluminescent organisms never quite cooperated, it seems.
From 1931 to 2009 nearly every Air Force fighter plane spent some time undergoing tests at the Full-Scale Wind Tunnel in Hampton, Virginia. While most wind tunnels test scale models, a NASA history of this unique facility glowingly recalls that its tremendous size allowed for the use of “actual airplanes at operational flight speeds.”
The crown jewel of the facility was the pair of 35-foot wooden propellers, 10 feet larger than those on the Titanic, and capable of generating 120 mph hurricane force winds. Their electricity demands were so great that NASA had to build an onsite power plant to prevent area outages.
The fans connected to an “elliptic throat” that sloped inward like a funnel and directed a blast of air into the test area. Once the wind passed over an airplane, two tunnels on opposite sides carried it back around in an infinite loop.
The Full Scale Wind Tunnel helped aeronautical engineers tweak their designs for maximum performance. The Air and Space Museum Aeronautics curator, John Anderson, described how some of the “drag cleanup tests” were conducted:
“For these tests, a given airplane in its full operational configuration would be systematically stripped one-by-one of its external appendages, and rough contours smoothed over with putty, until just the smooth basic shape remained. The aerodynamic drag was measured at each stage, identifying the drag due to each item. In this fashion, those items causing the most drag were identified and modified so as to lower the overall drag of the airplane.”
Testing of this sort helped deliver breakthroughs like retractable landing gear and variable sweep wings.
In addition to testing full scale aircraft models, NASA frequently opened its “Cave of Winds” up to other government customers. Scale models of a nuclear submarine, the Mercury spacecraft, and even a airship hanger building underwent optimization at the Full Scale Wind Tunnel.
Beginning in the 1980s, NASA came under pressure from federal budget makers to reduce spending. The wind tunnel's subsonic capabilities had lost much of its relevance in the jet age, and the facility was labeled disposable. NASA at one point explored converting the wind tunnel into a museum, but post-9/11 security requirements and its location on the Langley Air Force Base made that impossible. The Full Scale Wind Tunnel was demolished in May 2011. Today the site is a surface parking lot.
After a community group in Shropshire, England, decided to have a donated piano tuned, the tuner made an incredible discovery. Inside the upright piano, first sold in 1906, there was a hidden stash of gold.
The group immediately reported the find to authorities, and the gold has been taken to the British Museum. Authorities aren’t giving out details about what exactly was found, but it’s supposed to be “highly unusual in nature” and “made mostly of gold.” (One source mentions coins.) Whatever it is, it is apparently remarkable.
“They laid this stuff out and I was like 'whoa', I'm an archaeologist and I'm used to dealing with treasure but I'm more used to medieval broaches,” the British Museum’s Peter Reavill told reporters.
The United Kingdom actually has a law to deal with discoveries like these, the Treasure Act of 1996. For the hidden gold to officially be declared treasure, “it must be substantially made of gold or silver and have been deliberately concealed by the owner with a view to later recovery,” the Shropshire Star reports.
If the original owner is not found and the hoard is declared treasure, then it will belong to the Crown. The museum will be able to buy it, and the tuner and the piano owners will get a reward—a finder’s fee, essentially. But authorities are still trying to trace the piano’s ownership history and find the original owners of the gold. If they do, perhaps we’ll find out what exactly is in this giant pile of gold—and why it was hidden in the first place.
A couple kilometers after crossing the Daintree River, a metal spider web gate pokes between the trees. A horseshoe driveway brings guests up to a timber cottage, where you'll find the Daintree Entomological Museum, the largest collection of rare and bizarre insects in Australia.
An immense vase of fresh leafy branches stands near the welcome desk. Leaf and stick insects—some larger than a hand—cling to the branches, seemingly able to escape their exhibit at any moment. A drabby toad the size of a dinner plate breathes quietly in a box. Specially built cases with rows of pinned insects line all of two or three square rooms, leaving only narrow paths for visitors to tread.
The collection is the life’s work of Australian naturalist Stephen Lamond, designed, built, and funded by Lamond himself. Lamond travelled extensively, collecting insects from around Australia and the rest of the world—at least one case dedicated to beetles from Kazakhstan. Any lack in labelling is compensated for by the organization of the collection’s more than 150,000 specimens.
The vast size of Lamond’s collection allows visitors to see not only how species differ, but how much size, color, and shape can vary within a species. Robust cases of beetles, butterflies, and spiders allow even a casual hiker to appreciate evolution at work.
On the afternoon of April 22, 1954, reporters massed at a press conference in Bonn, Germany. They’d been invited to meet one Nikolai Evgenievich Khokhlov, a captain in the Soviet Union’s newly minted security force, the KGB. Well, a former captain. Khokhlov had arrived in Germany tasked with assassinating the leader of an anticommunist organization. Instead he defected, tipping off the target and surrendering himself to U.S. agents. He was now no longer at the center of a murder plot, but a media event.
The 32-year-old Khokhlov was a “slight, scholarly-appearing blond young man. He was neatly dressed in a dark blue suit. He wore glasses,” reported TheNew York Times. The Times reporter observed that the defector was self-possessed and calm, “adroitly” fielding questions in Russian.
Though Khokhlov’s press conference came just weeks after another high-profile defection of a KGB official in Australia, his actions were thrilling enough to grab headlines. Even better, he had brought with him the exotic murder weapons constructed for the plot: two seemingly normal cigarette cases. “But they are ideal weapons for an assassin,” wrote the Associated Press at the time, “because of their innocent appearance, lightness and efficiency.” Flip the lid of the case back, and it revealed what appeared to be rows of run-of-the mill smokes. But press a concealed button, and a tiny four-inch-long pistol hidden inside would fire hollow-nosed bullets spiked with potassium cyanide. Upon being fired, the “resulting noise is no louder than the snap of the fingers and might pass unnoticed in the moderate conversation in a normal office,” wrote the AP.
Khokhlov later testified before the U.S. Congress about Soviet intelligence activities and became something of a media star. His story inspired a four-part series in the Saturday Evening Post called “I Would Not Murder for the Soviets,” and in 1957 he published a memoir, In the Name of Conscience. That was also the same year the KGB made an attempt on his life. After giving a speech in Frankfurt, Khokhlov had been served a cup of coffee, which he wrote in his memoir “did not seem to me as good as usual.” Soon he felt tired, and a “strange weight oppressed” his heart and stomach. Khokhlov collapsed in a parking lot. He had been dosed with thallium, a slow-acting poison that causes considerable pain before killing its victim. Khokhlov was lucky, though, and ultimately recovered after weeks in the hospital. His poisoning had coincided with the successful launch of Sputnik, and he reflected upon this in his book. “I, too, was an exhibit of the achievements of Soviet science,” he wrote. “Totally bald, so disfigured by scars and spots that those who had known me did not at first recognize me, confined to a rigid diet, I was nevertheless also living proof that Soviet science, the science of killing, is not omnipotent.”
Having defected from the KGB, survived a poisoning attempt, and spent years in the media spotlight, it might be natural to assume Khokhlov was ready for some peace and quiet. And he did eventually fall into the life of an academic, beginning studies at Duke University in the 1960s. But in the end, it’s clear Khokhlov was never meant to lead an ordinary life.
While studying psychology at Duke, Khokhlov found himself in the orbit of one of the university’s most eclectic personalities, Joseph Banks Rhine, or J.B. Rhine. Rhine was a botanist from Pennsylvania who went on to study psychology at Harvard and became fascinated by what he called “extra-sensory perception”—the idea that the human mind had powers beyond the known senses. He studied clairvoyance, ESP, and telepathy, and eventually founded the Institute for Parapsychology at Duke. The lab (which still exists today as the independent Rhine Research Center) has the distinction of inspiring the scene in Ghostbusters where Bill Murray’s Peter Venkman tests his students’ clairvoyant capacities with a deck of marked cards. (In a weird coincidence, the assassination plot that sparked Khokhlov’s defection was called Operation Rhine.)
It was under Rhine’s tutelage that Khokhlov’s interest in the paranormal flourished, and it was also how he found himself at the Institute for Parapsychology on September 1, 1966, presenting a paper called “The Relationship of Parapsychology to Communism.” A number of paranormal researchers had assembled at the institute, whose base was a stately white house with a porch and balcony.
“In Soviet Russia considerable interest has been aroused in research in parapsychology,” Khokhlov began. Russian character, Khokhlov told the Institute’s attentive dinner guests, made for a people “specifically sensitive to matters relative to the mystical side of the human psyche” and “to a world beyond the sober reality of sense.” He then lectured the group about Russian scientists who had undertaken studies of ESP dating back to the late 1800s. He told them that the Soviet government actively encouraged such study, and name-checked prominent Russians (from astrophysicists to philosophers) who supported parapsychological inquiry. He described studies in which subjects had been able to perceive images from over a distance of nearly 2,000 miles. He concluded his talk on a hopeful note, saying, “The fate of the world today depends on the common understanding by the whole human race of what a human being really is. Here we are, on this side of the Iron Curtain, a small group of parapsychologists, trying to enlarge the common notion of man. And there are they, men of science and spirit, who are striving for the same higher goal.”
Rhine published the paper in a book, Parapsychology Today, and offered the ex-KGB officer a position on his staff once he had earned his doctorate. But Khokhlov declined. He later wrote in an email to the author Stacy Horn, who chronicled the goings-on at the Institute in her book Unbelievable, that he had lost faith in Rhine’s propensity for “pure statistical manipulations without touching the inevitable issue of human consciousness and its metaphysical essence.”
Khokhlov eventually went west, to California, hotbed of all things metaphysical. He became a professor at California State University, San Bernardino, where he continued to study parapsychology. There he hosted talks on psychic phenomena (“If you think you’re a psychic, or just interested, come and feel the vibes next Tuesday,” read a notice for one of his workshops in the school newspaper.) He taught courses in experimental hypnosis, and delivered lectures on spiritual life. He gave interviews on parapsychology and on his KGB years to David Brinkley and 60 Minutes. The U.S. government even tapped him to study parapsychology in the Soviet Union on its behalf.
Khokhlov became a U.S. citizen in 1970. In 1992, Russian President Boris Yeltsin pardoned him.
Over the years, his interests expanded beyond parapsychology. He learned computer programming and dedicated himself to environmentalism, eventually launching a “computerized carpool” that matched students with others nearby so they could commute to school together.
In 2007, the man who had fled Soviet Russia and survived a poisoning succumbed to a heart attack at 84. His papers, including his work on parapsychology, reside at the Hoover Institute, a think tank at Stanford University.
In Khokhlov’s writing, it’s easy to see a direct line between his abhorrence of the Soviet system and his attraction to the ethereal promises of the paranormal.
“Nothing can arrest the disintegration of inhuman rule,” wrote Khokhlov in his 1957 memoir. “The very qualities that communism has attempted to read out of existence—conscience, honor, loyalty to God’s commandments—are making for its collapse. In the final analysis, these elements will prove stronger than the rational ‘material’ forces.”
Tres Chimbadas Lake in southeast Peru is about 30 miles from the border with Bolivia. It’s a small oxbow, a little over a mile long and less than 12 feet deep. The landscape of the lake is serene, but it’s mad with wildlife.
Jungle photography and catch-and-release piranha fishing are two big draws for Tres Chimbadas, and many people come for the giant river otters. They are the longest of all weasels, stretching over five feet from their whiskered faces to their flippy flat tails. Unlike other otters, they are a social bunch, and otter families come to the lake year after year to build their dens, and occasionally check out the eco-tourists.
Despite the otters’ gruff and determined faces (trust—they’re cut when they’re pups), they are fairly subdued, if a bit territorial. Most important to keep in mind as a visitor, they are extremely endangered. Luckily lake guides take great care and caution when in their frisky presence, steering clear of babies and keeping noise down to a whisper.
The other main attraction is bird watching, and their names are just as apt to send you to Dr. Seuss as to your field guide. There’s the Wattled Jacana and Horned Screamer, a Rufescent Tiger Heron and White-cheeked Tody-tyrant, the sweetly shy Undulated Tinamou and the devoted Black-capped Donacobius. These little guys mate for life.
Hey, you: Are you looking for a part-time job? Do you love caves and have a "Christian outlook"? Are you willing to relocate to Austria?
If so, the town of Saalfelden has an empty hermitage with your name on it, the Local reports.
The hermitage, which is over 350 years old, is built into a natural cave just above Lichtenberg castle. Although it lacks heat and running water, it's rich in spiritual comforts: it's apparently very peaceful inside, there is a chapel right next door, and no computer or television is allowed.
The town is hiring an occupant for April through November, after which it's too cold to live up there. Besides the aforementioned Christian outlook, qualifications include self-sufficiency, "peace with [one's] self," and friendliness—in a twist, a main hermit duty is greeting and speaking with the cave's many visitors.
The position tends to be hotly contested. In 1970, a local who didn't get the job shot at the door of the hermitage in anger, proving that he would have been the wrong choice.
If this is the opportunity you've been waiting for, you can send your CV, a cover letter, and a current photo to the address here.
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.
In April of 2015, farmer Pham Dinh Huyen of Quang Binh, Vietnam set to work on his new fishpond. He had barely started digging when his shovel hit a rock. He pried it out and put it aside, but then he hit another, and another. Eventually, he had 20—large, oblong slabs of various sizes, some of them pointed at the ends.
So he did what you do when, in Vietnam, you find a bunch of weird rocks all together—he hit each one with the flat of his shovel, and listened. And lo and behold, they rang out clearly, in varying tones. He called his local museum, and they confirmed his suspicions—Huyen's future fishpond was a musical graveyard. He had dug up one of Vietnam's many ancient lithophones.
Rocks, to most of us, seem cold, inert, and boring. Across time and all over the globe, though, people have taken them and made them sing. The lithophone—a set of ringing stones carved and arranged to allow for musical performance—can be found everywhere from Scandinavia to Indonesia, says Mike Adcock, a musician and lithophone enthusiast who has spent years compiling a book on the subject. In Argentina, they're carved out of quartz; in Namibia, pounded into large boulders. Some researchers even think Stonehenge is a giant lithophone.
In Vietnam, they're called đàn đá'. Most are chunks of volcanic rock or of schist, a kind of layered slate, that have been carved into a more sonorous shape. Experts think they date back anywhere from 3000 to 10,000 years—younger than the pan pipe, but older than anything with strings. As more and more pop up all over Vietnam, archeologists attempt to solve the many mysteries that dog them, and musicians figure out how to add their unique tones to an already-rich folk tradition.
The first đàn đá discovery occured in 1949, when a group of construction workers in the Central Highlands dug up eleven stone slabs. The stones were vertically oriented and huddled together, and word of the strange find soon spread to a nearby town, Ndut Lien Krak, where ethnologist Georges Condominas was living and working. As Adcock describes in a recent paper, Condominas was drinking rice beer with some friends when they got to talking about the stones, and, intrigued, he asked to go see them. He obtained permission to bring them with him back to France, where he sent them to the Musée de l'Homme.
Archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists puzzled over the stones, until someone decided to put them in order from largest to smallest, and lay them over a pair of supports, like a xylophone. "It immediately became apparent…that this was undoubtedly a musical instrument," New Scientist wrote in 1957. "It was possible to play tunes on them ranging from a simplified version of Claire de Lune to Pop Goes the Weasel." The markings on them were identified as remnants of the tuning process.
This initial đàn đá is, like so many colonial-era artifacts, still in Paris. But since its identification, more and more have turned up. Experts seek them out on archaeological digs, but laypeople also find them while planting yams and, like Huyen, building fishponds. A musician named Pham Van Phuong, who actively seeks them, has found five separate sets in one stream, and other amateurs go out đàn đá-hunting in their spare time, the way New Englanders look for arrowheads."It's like people lugging around metal detectors," Adcock says. "Everyone wants to go out and find something really genuine and discover it."
This discovery is, in some ways, the easy part. Much harder is looking back in time and trying to figure out who used the stones, and exactly what for. Some minority groups in Vietnam have long kept ringing stones to scare animals and birds away from crops—but these are structured as wind chimes or hanging gongs, different from the lithophones, which are often found laid out and accompanied by mallets. Other clues come from comparing the tones available in đàn đá to those of better-known ancient musical traditions, like Javanese gamelan music. It's possible that ancient emigrates to Vietnam held these scales and songs in their heads, and sought to recreate them with the materials of their new environment.
But it's difficult to know for sure. "One of the things about instruments is there's very little evidence," says Adcock. "You can see rock paintings, and there's no doubt that's a picture of a bison." But for most of human history, music was lost to time as soon as it was made: "We've got nothing to go on except circumstantial evidence, and markings on a stone."
This hasn't stopped people from embracing this new old tradition. Folk musicians have incorporated the đàn đá into tunes and styles that didn't originally include it, playing fast and melodious, rather than ringing and repetitive. "They're creating a revival, rather than recreating one," says Adcock. Newly built, portable dàn đá can be found in instrument shops across the country. One enthusiast in Ho Chi Minh City has built a giant twelve-stone lithophone, tuned just like a piano. He keeps it in his office, at a luxury toilet engineering firm, and plays it for guests.
Not everyone is convinced that the đàn đá's deserves this place in the pantheon. The specimen at the Musée de l'Homme came with its own skeptic, Fritz A. Kuttner, a musicologist who maintained for decades that it wasn't an instrument at all. "Any long and fairly thin stones will emit some kind of sound," he wrote in 1953. "To qualify as lithophones… shaped stones have to show some evidence, not just of shaping, but of acoustical and mathematical knowledge and skills." Because the stones are not tuned to any known tone system, Kuttner argues, they shouldn't make the cut. Other modern Western scholars, like anthropologist Roger Blench, have told Adcock that the đàn đá's utilitarian role as a crop protection device disqualifies it from ancient instrument status. Adcock rebuffs this, saying these critics are hamstrung by reliance on conservative, Western-centric definitions of music.
Granted, Adcock says, some of the discoveries are hard to swallow. People have claimed to find hundreds of stones at once, which Adcock says is unlikely. Phan Tri Dung, the luxury toilet engineer from Ho Chi Minh City claims his instrument is a recreation rather than an invention, and that it's proof that ancient Vietnamese music was built around the Western scale, against the conclusions of most of the country's musicologists. Although his instrument is amazing, Adcock says, his conclusions are probably not accurate. A certain number of the many finds likely fall under this category.
Others, though, are rock solid. Experts in Vietnam have authenticated at least 200 different stones over the past few decades, and some now reside in museums and shops. Others have been sold to collectors and historians, who, by comparing different instruments and keeping careful track of their pedigrees, can draw new conclusions about their origin and evolution.
Adcock himself has not learned how to authenticate individual instruments. But he is most convinced by the argument from human nature, both compelling and difficult to prove—that everyone who has access to a noisemaker eventually wants to experiment with it. "I think we can assume that people who are making sound, that they would have been making whatever equivalent to music there was at that time," he says. "Why wouldn't they have? It's fun." He should know—since beginning to study lithophones, he has started a band, carving his own instruments out of roof slate. Someday, someone will dig one of them up and wonder what he was thinking.
Driving along Rock Creek Parkway, near Georgetown in Washington, D.C., you may glance out your car window and notice this odd masonry structure with a small plaque in front. Located right off the highway onramp, these are the remains of the old Godey Lime Kilns.
Constructed in 1864 by William H. Godey for $2,500, the kilns were used to break down limestone into lime and plaster that were needed at construction sites across the city. Washington historian John Lockwood explains how the Godey Lime Kiln Company "used limestone from quarries near Seneca and brought it to the kilns via the C&O Canal. The limestone then was fed into the top of each kiln's chimney at night."
The kilns closed for good in 1908, after sprawling railroad networks and industrialization made it more economically viable to process limestone in large factories and ship it out on trains, rather than having many kilns local to communities. The invention of Portland Cement was the death knell for the once-booming lime trade.
The lime kilns fell into disrepair over the next several decades. They were partially restored, for historical preservation, in 1967. In 1973 the kilns were added to the National Register of Historic Places. Although there were originally four kilns at the site, two were torn down to make room for the Whitehurst Freeway. The ground was also raised during this construction, covering up the bottoms of the two remaining kilns. Today they live on as perhaps the most pedestrian-inaccessible historical attraction in Washington, D.C.
On the Kyushu Island of southwestern Japan you'll find a hotel run almost entirely by robots. At the Henn-Na Hotel, located in Japan’s Dutch-themed Huis Ten Bosch Theme Park, all receptionists, bellhops, and concierges greet guests with the sweet, soothing mechanical voice of artificial intelligence.
Called “the most efficient hotel in the world,” the Henn-Na Hotel (“Henn-Na” translates to “strange" in English) is a prime example of AI replacing traditionally human-occupied jobs. Over 90% of the staff consists of autonomous robots, a total of 186 machines.
Upon entering, three front desk clerks will be waiting for you: an eerily realistic female robot and two eager velociraptors dressed as bellhops. After checking in, a mechanical arm will place your luggage in a drawer and a one-foot robotized concierge will explain breakfast times and other hotel information. The red porter robot will then escort you to your room.
To unlock the door, no key is needed—simply place your face in front of a sensor and facial-recognition technology will open the door (or at least in theory). Upon entering the room, you will meet Churi-chan, a pink and green miniature robot which offers wakeup calls, will tell you the weather, and can even control the lights. Strange indeed.
Earlier this week, a Reddit user with an unprintable name discovered a weird thing about their boots: They left swastika tracks behind.
"There was an angle I didn't get to see when ordering my new work boots..." The user wrote, posting the picture above.
The post drew over 5,000 comments, and, within 24 hours, the attention of the boots' maker, a company known as Conal International Trading Inc., according to the Houston Chronicle.
Conal subsequently recalled the boots, called Polar Fox Boots, because, according to the company at least, the whole swastika thing was a design flaw.
Puerto Maldonado is a small city along the banks of the Tambopata and Madre De Dios, rivers that eventually make their way to the Amazon after tripping through the Beni, the Mamore and the Madeira. Here in southeast Peru the rainforest is thick and remote, and there are a few surprises in this provincial capital, including a 13-story obelisk called El Mirador De La Biodiversidad, the Biodiversity Tower.
The mirador, or lookout tower, does have the eco-friendly official name, but everyone knows it as the Obelisco. For a few soles (a dollar or two), after checking out the sculptures and small museum, a climb to the top will reward you with the best view of the city, the confluence of the rivers, the sweep of the surrounding jungle, and an almost guaranteed moody sunset.
The Obelisco was the vision of Santos Kaway Komori, a former mayor who had the strangely futuristic spire built to represent the abundant castaña, a tree that produces both rock-hard lumber and valuable Peruvian Brazil nuts. He also wanted to highlight the major industries of the region: mining, rubber cultivation, logging, and nut harvesting. The tower opened in 2003, complete with both 3D and bas relief impressions by local artists of these four industries, and their connections to the indigenous culture.
The tower might look more like a place for air traffic controllers than it does a castaña tree, but there’s no denying it’s had a positive impact on local tourism, giving visitors a rare rainforest panorama.
Do you remember Weepuls? A booming public relations trend in the 1970s and 1980s, they could often be found sitting on car dashboards, or clinging to the tops of computer monitors. For a time, fuzzy little pompoms with googly eyes were the only way to advertise. Even if you didn’t know what they were called or where they came from, you're likely to have run into more than a few of them.
Weepuls, for those who may still be a bit baffled, are a customizable promotional tool created in the 1970s. Your average Weepul consists of a little round ball of colored fuzz, with a pair of eyes glued to it, plus two little antennae. They're mounted on flat sticker-bottomed feet, to which is usually attached a little paper or fabric banner. Inexpensive, whimsical, and able to promote pretty much anything, Weepuls enjoyed a couple of decades of ubiquity in the age of physical advertising. And while today they're not exactly ubiquitous, Weepuls are still alive and kicking.
The company that originally invented the Weepul is still the official producer and trademark holder of the promotional toy. According to a 2013 account of their creation forwarded to us by current Vice President of U.S. Operations for Weepuline, LLC, Michael Crooks, the original Weepul was created on a whim by a bored toy company employee in 1971.
Tom Blundell, having recently left service in the U.S. Army, was working at his parents’ plush toy company, BIPO. Heading out on a week-long vacation, Blundell’s parents left him in charge of the facility while they were gone, and as a young executive, he quickly grew bored. Looking to fill the time, he started fiddling with some of the raw parts laying around the office. He glued some googly eyes to a little pompom that they usually used for a nose on one of their dolls. To keep it from toppling over, he gave it feet, splayed in a parade rest “V” he had learned in the Army. It was a fun way to kill some time, but Blundell placed his new creation on the desk and promptly forgot about it.
When his parents got back from their trip, they immediately called Blundell over the weekend, saying that they needed to talk about his creation. He figured he might be in trouble for goofing off, and was in for a dressing down, but when he got to the office on Monday, his father was elated. He saw the puffball as the company’s next big product. A cheap, easy-to-make toy that could sell in the millions. In Blundell’s own words, which are surprisingly personal given that he’s talking about the creation of a tiny bit of promotional swag, “I had managed to dodge many bullets while I was in Vietnam but I had just dodged the biggest one ever, the wrath of my father.”
Blundell’s mother suggested the addition of the antennae, and the tiny creatures were off to the races. They were dubbed “Weepuls,” a portmanteau of “wee people,” a name they scavenged from an earlier doll that never made it off the ground.
At first, the fuzzballs were sold to variety stores such as Kmart and Woolworths, as little toys. But a few years after their original launch, the company started adding the now-standard banners to the feet, which originally included generic catchphrases such as “Smile” or “Have a great day!” In 1976, after Blundell graduated college, he purchased BIPO from his parents and began pushing Weepuls into the world of advertising and promotion. By 1979, Blundell had introduced the customizable ribbon, and began showing the Weepuls at advertising trade shows.
In 2013, Blundell sold BIPO, which was renamed Weepuline, LLC. He claims that between 1971 and 2012, they had manufactured over 400,000,000 Weepuls.
The success of Weepuls in the American market didn’t go unnoticed, and a version of the little toys hit the Netherlands in the 1980s under the name “Wuppies.” This Dutch version of the product caught fire with the help of the children’s singer Father Abraham. Abraham created an entire album of songs to promote the fuzzy figures. One of the songs, “Wij Zijn de Wuppies,” or “We Are The Wuppies,” became a small hit in 1981, making it to number 14 on the charts in the Netherlands.
Decades later, the promotional company Interall Group brought Wuppies back to celebrate Holland's appearance in the 2006 World Cup, producing some 15 million of the things for sale in partnership with the Dutch grocery chain Albert Heijn. The Wuppies were given away with a set purchase amount and could be collected and traded for larger Wuppies. The promotion proved so popular that there were reports of people breaking into cars to steal the coveted large-size Wuppies.
Back in the U.S., the original Weepul never quite experienced the same fevered resurgence in popularity, but it never stopped innovating either. The standard alien puffball has been elaborated on over the years, and can now be ordered in dozens of different colors, patterns, sizes, and textures. Simple additions such as little cardboard arms and funny hats have made them yet more customizable and expressive, and product upgrades such as Crooks’ own idea to create tear away banners that can act as coupons, have kept them viable.
The official Weepuls catalogue now features around 200 variations, including versions decrying smoking and bullying, Weepuls shaped like animals or computers, and matching wedding sets, all still hand crafted. In 2016, Weepuline even proudly introduced paired Weepuls to celebrate same-sex marriage. Their brand keeps growing, even if you'd long since forgotten about them.
Chef Alfredo di Lelio invented Fettucine Alfredo in 1914 for his pregnant wife who had terrible morning sickness. It was so delicious he added it to the menu of his small restaurant in Rome. While honeymooning in 1920, silent film stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks happened to eat there and so loved the dish that they asked for the recipe. They brought it back to America, to the restaurant of the new bohemians of Los Angeles: Musso and Frank Grill.
For decades Hollywood legends have hung out at Musso and Frank Grill. It opened in 1919 and is completely entwined with stories of the stars who have dined there. Charlie Chaplin ate there so much he had his own booth, and the menu still features his favorite dish, grilled lamb kidneys with bacon.
The menu, much like the decor, has not changed since the restaurant's early days; old fashioned victuals like chicken pot pie and Lobster Thermidor are standard fare. If that's not your taste, the adjoining bar has served it's classic martinis to everyone who is anyone in Hollywood. This includes Greta Garbo, Rudolph Valentino, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Elizabeth Taylor, Jimmy Stewart, and Marilyn Monroe, and the list goes on.
The restaurant's back room hosted the glitziest private parties but also became a second home to some of the greatest writers in American history. Regulars included influential writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, John O'Hara, T.S. Elliot, and Dorothy Parker. It was said to be so packed with literati that everyone there was either someone you should know, or someone you would eventually know. Even after the backroom closed, the list of writers and stars who sipped drinks at the bar is legendary.
You may not see any stars from your red leather booth at Musso and Frank's, but you will feel the history of all that is Hollywood. The classic interior, the long wooden bar, to the waiters in the same red dinner jackets they've worn since the restaurant's opening. Try the Fettuccine Alfredo, it's delicious.
In February 2015, skiers and visitors at Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada may have spotted a man in a pair of snowshoes trudging back and forth though deep snow. The footprints he left behind made up detailed shapes of a howling wolf, a maple leaf, and a massive snowflake on the slopes of the Rocky Mountains. They are three examples of Simon Beck's "Snow Art"—temporary geometrical masterpieces that can only be fully appreciated from above.
This video, produced by Banff & Lake Louise, shows a cinematic montage of Beck's process. It was his first artistic venture on North American snow, having left behind other fractal art in snowy fields of the French Alps and Norway. He's even made pieces on sandy beaches.
Previously an engineer and mapmaker, Beck goes to extreme efforts to execute these complex, large-scale pieces. He uses a map drawing of the design, a baseplate compass, a prismatic compass, and dons warm socks, boots, and snowshoes. A single creation could take about 11 hours, thousands of steps, and total up to 25 miles of walking, according toSlate. At the 50-second mark, you can watch a time-lapse of Beck stomping out the outline of a wolf. The approximately 1,500-foot snowflake (his largest-sized drawing at the date of the video) took Beck over six hours of trekking through snow.
Beck has completed 240 drawings in the past 12 years, reportedAccuWeather in 2016. While these intricate images in the snow are beautiful, there is also a deeper meaning within his work. “There’s also an environmental message,” Beck told AccuWeather. “Snow is beautiful; we need snow. We need winter and we shouldn’t wreck it too much.”
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.
Today, machine-made voices talk to us all the time. They act as personal assistants for our cell phones, manage our smart homes, and, occasionally, call from unrecognizable phone numbers to tell us we are final contenders in big-money sweepstakes.
Electronic voices may be commonplace now, but the road to speech synthesis is littered with the remains of devices that promised to bring us the voice of the future—but didn't last beyond their novelty value.
One of the most fascinating relics of this quest for electric speech is Bell Labs’ Voder, the first device to bring us wholly synthetic speech. Even if it sounded like a robot demon.
The Voder, which debuted in the 1930s, was the creation of acoustic visionary and Bell Labs inventor Homer Dudley. In the late 1920s, Dudley had created the much more well-known “channel” vocoder, which coded human speech across telephone lines by turning incoming speech into electronic signals, then replicated it on the other end using electric sounds meant to mimic a person's voice.
The Voder went one step further: it produced speech without the input of the human voice. Operators played it like a futuristic organ, but instead of creating music, it created talk. As a feature article in the Smithsonian’s Science News Letter from January 1939 described it, the Voder was the “first device that actually creates human speech.”
The wonder expressed in the article is tempered a little by future shock. "[The authors] slip between personifying it and calling it an 'it.' So there’s definitely an anxiety about whether there’s a human intelligence here," says Lilia Kilburn, an MIT anthropologist who studies interactions between people and sonic technologies, and who has researched the cultural significance of the Voder and numerous other voice synthesis machines. "It’s interesting to hear how technologies like Amazon’s Echo are discussed with the same strange cocktail of fear and reverence now."
The Voder was a beast to operate. The machine could create 20 or so different electric buzzes and chirps, which the operator would manipulate using 10 keys, a wrist plate, and a pedal. The spectrum of buzzes and hisses could be orchestrated to mimic speech using the 10 keys to play a range of sounds, which could switch between voiced (anything that uses the vocal cords, like "uuuuh") and unvoiced sounds (sounds that don't use the vocal cords, like "sssss") with a click of the wrist bar, while the pedal would affect the pitch of the “voice,” which could create a range of inflections.
Creating words with the Voder required thinking about the various sounds that combine to create a single word, and the subtle changes that affect its meaning. It was a difficult and unnatural process, and only between 20-30 people ever even learned how to use it.
As Kilburn says, like the vocoder, and many other early speech synthesis technologies, the voice produced by the Voder was most often meant to be male, but the device was primarily operated by female phone operators. In fact, according to that same 1939 Science News Letter, Riesz and the other engineers had named the Voder, “Pedro,” after Brazilian emperor Dom Pedro, who was said to have listened to a telephone and exclaimed, "My God! It talks!"
All difficulty aside, when the Voder was finally unveiled at Bell Labs during the 1939 New York World’s Fair (the same world's fair that featured Elektro, The Smoking Robot), it certainly seemed like something straight out of the future. For the first time, a robot was speaking all on its own. Or that's how the presenters spoke about it.
The device was demonstrated by Mrs. Helen Harper, who was the central operator of the Voder and trained all of the other users. In an audio recording of a demonstration of the machine, Harper says that it took her around a year to learn how to operate it herself.
Harper was seated behind a sleek console, with a towering art deco image of a shouting man emblazoned on the wall behind her. While Harper ran the Voder keys, a presenter would walk people through the Voder’s vocal capabilities. During the presentation, Harper made the Voder say the same sentence in a number of different inflections, utter a phrase in French, imitate the wobbly effect of an elderly person’s voice, and even do an impression of a cow.
The Voder’s speech came out a little hard to understand, and even a bit unsettling. According to Kilburn, even more than the voice itself, the concept of a talking machine must have seemed somewhat uncanny. "That’s so spooky to people," says Kilburn. "We speak automatically, but we don’t like to think that something can speak automatically for us."
The Voder was shown again during San Francisco’s Golden Gate International Exposition in late 1939, but after that, the machine disappeared almost instantly. The machine was never meant as a commercial product but rather as a sort of proof-of-concept showcasing the astounding work taking place at Bell Labs at the time.
Nonetheless, Pedro the Voder can still be remembered as a fascinating glimpse at the roots behind vocal synthesis technology that we take for granted today in technologies such as Siri—not to mention the last time anyone attempted to play the human voice like a piano.
When a flood hits a city, it’s all hands on deck. Last weekend, as the Truckee River in Reno overflowed, emergency crews and contractors rushed out to evacuate homes, built barriers, and sandbag roads.
This time, one particular set of helpers stood out: heavy-machine operators, sent to snatch huge pieces of debris out of the water with even huger pieces of equipment.
As the Reno Gazette-Journal reports, these operators are the first line of defense in a flood. Without them, flotsam can pile up quickly, straining bridges and causing the water to rise further. Passers-by quickly renamed them the “bridge ninjas,” and shot footage of them nimbly yanking everything from logs topicnic benches out of the rushing water. They’d load up a nearby dump truck, and then cart it all away. (More videos of their smooth moves are available in this tweet roundup, also from RGJ.)
“It’s like bobbing for apples,” one operator, Chad Olson, told the outlet. Another, Jim Duncan, compared it to a video game, though with slightly higher stakes—if the excavator’s claw hits a pillar, it could tear the bridge apart.
No bridges were harmed, though. After about 20 hours of work, the ninjas plucked their last log, with no trouble. This display of skill may have something to do with how much they enjoy the job: “I would do it all day long,” says Duncan. “It’s fun.”
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.
The meticulously recreated Trading Room is one of the few extant remains of the historic Chicago Stock Exchange building. Designed in the 1890s by famed architects Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler, the space was almost lost to the wrecking ball in a misguided 1970s urban redevelopment scheme.
The Trading Room is a double-story, 100 x 75-foot institution of Midwestern finance. The ornate hall was once the scene of commodity deals that set the price of vegetables and meat across the country. Its decorative flourishes include beautiful organic wall stenciling (a now-forgotten craft that once defined Chicago design), and intricate stained glass skylights.
It’s a quiet and contemplative space today, but when it was in operation the Trading Room was the scene of frenzied activity. A Chicago Tribune reporter in 1960 described how “the shouts of the white coated, gray coated, and tan coated men” imparted a “sense excitement and tension even tho [sic] you don’t understand precisely what they are doing.”
By the 1970s the old Stock Exchange building had fallen into disrepair and was deemed “economically unviable” by its owners. According to Chicago historian Richard Cahan, the preservation and relocation of the Trading Room was “the price paid for the demolition permit.”
Photographer Richard Nickel and architect John Vinci were instrumental in the salvage work. Cahan records the challenge they faced when work began on November 8, 1971:
“The ceiling was dirty and peeling. Many of the stenciled canvases had fallen off or been ripped off for souvenirs. Dirt from decades of neglect had piled up so high that mice or rats had carved paths through it. It took a great leap of the imagination to see the beauty here. Even the gilded capitals looked like cheap plaster. But Vinci and Nickel knew the true beauty of this huge and foreboding place. ‘I think of it sort of like a holy room,” said Nickel after the work had began. ‘The more you are in here the more you are in awe of it.”
Over the course of three months they documented the room and then unscrewed, pried and sawed off every bit they could carry. The entire thing was rebuilt inside the Art Institute’s new wing in 1976. Nickel was tragically killed in 1972 accident inside the old Stock Exchange and never lived to see the completed Trading Room.
Clay licks are steep walls of red clay caused by erosion along riverbanks. The name comes from the animals they attract: parrots who flock there by the hundreds to eat the clay every morning.
Scientists don't know exactly why parrots do this, but they suspect it has to do with mineral deficiencies. Whatever the case, the birds' strange habit provides human visitors to the Tambopata National Reserve a rare chance to see this many exotic parrots up close and personal. The clay lick here is the largest in the world, meaning that it provides birdwatchers with the chance to see more of the colorful parrots than anywhere else.
The bright reds and blues of the parrots' feathers stand out against the muddy wall. The birds are mostly macaws, though smaller parrots and mealies of all sorts group at the clay lick as well. The sound of flapping wings and screeching birds is apparently deafening, which only adds to the view.
