The modern use of the term "easter egg"—not the holiday treat but rather a hidden joke or surprise item inserted in a piece of media—originated with Atari in 1979, when a developer snuck his name into a game hoping to get some recognition as the creator. But these surprise treats, hidden to all but those who look closely enough, aren’t only lurking in the digital world. Some of the best easter eggs are snuck into the physical architecture around us.
The excellent thing about architectural easter eggs, be they tongue-in-cheek, carved out of spite, or simply placed as a fun treat awaiting an observant eye, is that they endure in the landscape around us, becoming a sneaky and often confusing part of history. Here are five hidden carvings that dot historic structures with a bit of human nature.
On the southern window of Brno’s Church of St. James, one sculptural element of the impressive church seems somewhat out of place: an indecent little two-headed man cheekily displaying his bare butt to the world.
There are two legends attributed to the little man, both involving the competition between this Gothic church and a nearby cathedral. The spires of the two churches both towered high, but St. James’ ended up being taller by roughly 30 feet. As the story goes, the naked man and his bottom were added on as a middle finger from the winning church to the losing one. Alas, some historians claim the legends are apocryphal, and that the rude sculpture is merely a strange but not uncommon piece of Gothic adornment.
The Church of the Jacobins is a Gothic mass of brick and stone, decorated inside with elaborate trompe l’oeil walls and soaring pillars. Most famously, it houses the remains of St. Thomas Aquinas. A lot less famously, it has a strange little carving of a person seemingly crushed by a pillar near the golden reliquary where the saintly remains are entombed.
Just behind the altar is a double column that sits on a square base. Look down towards the floor and you’ll see, sticking out, a peculiar pair of bony hands and chubby crossed feet, their meaning and origin unknown. It is all too easy to miss to the casual passer-by. Some of the church tour guides don’t even know the crushed little man is there.
The sixth-largest cathedral in the world, this stunning neo-Gothic construction is a functioning place of worship as well as a popular tourist destination. Nearly half a million people enter through its doors each year, many of them just to admire its breathtaking beauty. It’s perhaps fitting, then, that the cathedral offers a bit of tongue-in-cheek eye candy for the dedicated architecture enthusiast—a well-hidden, but very official, carving of Star Wars villain Darth Vader perched high among its many spires.
This great Florentine cathedral has many details that are often invisible at first glance. Among them, on the left side, is a stone bull’s head.
While no one is sure exactly why the bull was put in place, there are some prevailing theories. Local legend says that during the construction of the cathedral, one of the stonemasons had an affair with the wife of a rich shopkeeper in the area. When her husband discovered the betrayal, he decided to lodge a complaint directly to the ecclesiastical court, which ended the affair.
Heartbroken, the stonemason decided to take revenge by creating a passive-aggressive symbol of his love. The mason placed the bull’s head so that the animal’s horns were pointing right toward the shop of the husband as a concrete reminder—pun intended—of who his wife truly loved.
The centuries-old Cathedral of Salamanca has several unusual carvings, but none so surprising as an astronaut. The little space man is an approved and modern addition to the Gothic cathedral, which underwent restoration work in 1992.
Among the other recently added images are a dragon eating ice cream, a lynx, a bull, and a crayfish. Despite there being clear documentation of the astronaut being a recent addition, it has already fueled ideas of ancient space travel and alien interventions.
In the alley of Cinco de Mayo Road there's a doorway leading underground that looks to be an entrance to a subway. But in Puebla there are no subways. It is in fact the tiny entrance to a recently discovered secret of the city, a tunnel system used to connect a fort with the baroque city of Puebla.
The underground tunnel system dates back to 1531, but wasn't unearthed and opened to the public until 2016. It had been covered for decades, and the archeologist who unearthed the tunnel discovered antiques in the mud. Today it operates as a free museum that doubles as a citywide thoroughfare.
Many Mexican cities have legends about secret tunnels lying just beneath the streets, used during the revolution either by royalty or even during the inquisition. Grandparents would tell these folk stories to children. The discovery of the Puebla tunnel lends some credence to the folklore.
The tunnel—tall enough that a person could comfortably ride through on horseback—originates in the historic center of Puebla and lets out to the Loreto fort, where the Cinco de Mayo battle occurred. Archeologists first discerned that it was a complex sewer system, but another discovery led them to believe that people also used the tunnels for secret travel.
Along with toys, marbles, and antique kitchen goods, a lot of guns, bullets, and gunpowder were found trapped in the mud. The weaponry was mostly from the mid-19th century, around the time of the Battle of Puebla conflict between Mexico and France. Investigators believe these tunnels may have been used by soldiers during the war of Mexican liberation, though they also could have been used by clergy or even common folk.
The tour across the tunnel includes a guided visit by archaeologists who worked in the project and displays where one can see the items that lay in the mud for so long. The tunnel museum is known as "Secrets of Puebla," an apt name for the mysterious tunnels that lay hidden beneath the city for so long.
The date on this simple stone church is 1862, but its story began a few years earlier. It was 1856, and Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, an abolitionist preacher and brother of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” author Harriet Beecher Stowe, had organized a contingent of colonists to set out for Kansas.
The status of the new Kansas Territory hung in the balance of a political battle between free and slave states, and Beecher was determined to tip the scale. He assembled a group of his Connecticut followers to light out for the Territory, with the goal of swelling the vote on the side of a free Kansas. Beecher armed the parishioners with Bibles, and rifles as well.
They were called the New Haven Colony but became better known as the Beecher Rifle Colony, organizing a congregation in Wabounsee County. With little money, a proper church took time to build, but by 1862 a simple limestone structure went up on the open prairie. It was named the Beecher Bible and Rifle Church, and although devoid of embellishment in its design, there was maybe a touch of embellishment in its lore.
Legend has it that when additional funds were raised by Beecher for more rifles—specifically Sharps, earning the nickname “Beecher’s Bibles”—they were sent to the colony hidden in the bottom of wooden crates marked “Bibles.” It’s tough to corroborate the story, but it’s not all that unlikely. There is at least one confirmed case of rifles being smuggled into Kansas in a crate marked “books,” so a crate marked “Bibles” might just have easily made the journey.
Imagine if underneath major metropolises there were spherical nuclear shelters that contained more cities—mini-Manhattans buried thousands of feet in the ground.
In the 1960s, architect and city planner Oscar Newman rendered what such a fantasy would look like beneath New York City.
In the December 1969 issue of Esquire, Newman published a peculiar map of a colossal nuclear city deep below New York. The purely imaginary proposal, titled Plan for an underground nuclear shelter, was complete with an entire labyrinth of buildings encased in a metal sphere along with a helicopter, Coca-Cola ad, and air filters.
Newman’s take on the limited space of New York City and the atomic world of the 1960s gives “the opportunity to explore the notion of living in this entirely different environment,” says Katharine Harmon, author of You Are Here: NYC: Mapping the Soul of the City.
The vibrant, sci-fi city Newman depicted does not follow traditional cartographic conventions. Plan for an underground nuclear shelter falls under what Harmon calls “creative cartography.”
“This encompasses innovative mapping and mapping of the imagination, and includes ‘maps’ that can be called illustrations—any visual that navigates a place or idea or state of mind,” she says. “I would classify Newman’s map as pictorial, and illustrating a fantastical idea.”
During the 1960s, the Cold War and prospect of nuclear weapons being deployed served as alarming inspiration for artists and writers. Plots in science fiction and artistic renderings featured post-nuclear apocalyptic universes, emulating real fears within society. Newman was no different. The map was inspired after he had heard about the 1962 Storax Sedan nuclear test—a shallow underground mining test that created a massive crater in Nevada. The crater is the largest man-made crater in the United States.
Newman also had intimate knowledge of the layout and architectural facets of New York. In 1972, he published the book Defensible Space in which he used New York as a case study to examine crime rates in high-rise apartment buildings and housing projects. He imagined how a subterranean miniature city under New York might look and function if giant chunks of earth were cleared using advanced nuclear equipment.
The nuclear shelter is a miniature copy of the city above it. The top half of the sphere would be inhabitable, structured to support streets and buildings that appear to arranged radially. Beneath the mini-city is a grid network that provides energy and allows the city to function. A small helicopter can be seen hovering in the upper left corner of the sphere, perhaps monitoring the city from above.
Harmon appreciates the “wackiness” of the nuanced details in the map, such as the lone projected Coca-Cola ad on the ceiling of the sphere and the Q-tip-shaped air filters. The dome has a series of connected tubes that project the filters above ground so that people below can get fresh air—the blue-green structures new additions to Manhattan’s original skyline.
Circulating fresh air into the underground city was one of Newman’s primary concerns, as he wrote: “The real problem … in an underground city would be lack of view and fresh air, but consider its easy access to the surface and the fact that, even as things are, our air should be filtered and what most of us see from our windows is someone else’s wall.”
It’s clear that such a proposal is implausible, and it’s likely that Newman drew the map for Esquire as a riff or joke on his urban planning, says Harmon. John Ptak, blogger of JF Ptak Science Books, calls it “a terrifically bad idea.” On his blog, Ptak reviewed the impracticalities of pursuing Newman’s plan:
"The author of this plan speculated on building this spherical city in Manhattan bedrock—a structure which so far as I can determine would have a volume of 1.2 cubic miles (5 km3) with its top beginning some 1,200 feet under Times Square. It's an impressive hole "just" to dig—it would be a goodly chunk of the volume of Lake Mead. And it would make the world's largest man-made hole—the Bingham Copper Mine in Utah—seem like the very beginning efforts to digging this beast out to begin with."
Newman did not detail what exactly the cities would be used for: alleviating overcrowding; alternative space in the event of nuclear war; or luxury futuristic get-away. While Newman’s atomic city map may be categorized as sci-fi fantasy, it does inform us of 1960s nuclear culture.
“Maps enable us to explore other territories, including products of other imaginations,” says Harmon. “Newman uses illustration skills to illuminate a concept both ‘practical’ (a solution for protecting a large population from nuclear war) and wildly impractical (nuclear detonations as the means for creating the cavity), serious and whimsical.”
Map Monday highlights interesting and unusual cartographic pursuits from around the world and through time. Read more Map Monday posts.
The Empress is the most famous hotel in Victoria, maybe in all of British Columbia. It has a long and storied history, full of everything a grand hotel needs—elegance, high tea, a touch of royalty, and a healthy dose of scandal.
There are a few more reasons to come to the Empress, ones that no other hotel has, such as scores of miniature dioramas, the world’s smallest operational sawmill, and some of the largest doll houses on Earth.
Miniature World consists of over 85 exquisitely detailed scenes in tiny scale, including castles, a full-on circus, an imagining of Camelot, a Dickensian Londontown, a cosmic interpretation of the year 2201, and the Great Canadian Railway. To counteract all the minis, there is a collection of doll houses, two that claim to be the world’s largest. (How one determines where a “doll house” ends and a “playhouse” begins is an open question).
George Devlin opened the museum in 1971, and the creators continue to expand their assortment of strange, diminutive landscapes.
A couple of months ago, at a city-owned lot in Bradenton, Florida, resident John Lundin started noticing something strange.
The lot had always attracted homeless residents as well as some illegal dumping, but Lundin said that what he began seeing was more striking: used toilet paper.
“I hate to say I’ve been analyzing the garbage, but I have," Lundin told the Miami Herald. "Something strikes me about this as being almost professional in the consistent way it’s done.”
Bradenton's public works department has cleaned up after each dumping episode, while also trimming a few trees to make lot more presentable. But city officials don't have many more answers than Lundin, leading them to speculate on who or what is behind the toilet paper.
“I question the motivation behind this and who is trying to make who look bad and for what reason,” City Administrator Carl Callahan told the Herald.
Some think the dumping might be related to local politics and the recent election, or its perhaps rooted in a failed library project proposed for the site years ago, though, in any case, Lundin said that the toilet paper dumpings have been tapering off a bit in 2017.
“I don’t know if this person was just running out of garbage or just got tired because it seems like a lot of work to carry all that garbage in here every night," Lundin told the Herald. "Or maybe he’s just stocking up.”
Cold War tensions spiked in 1977 as the Soviet Union broke ground on its new embassy compound by the U.S. Naval Observatory. Media reports fearfully prophesied about the spy implications of the project.
"Laser-beam listening devices now are being installed by Soviet technicians. They have a clear line of sight to the White House and the Capitol. Aimed at windowpanes, the superbugs will be able to pick up conversations in all the rooms with north-facing windows," the Orlando Sentinel wrote in 1985.
The United States intelligence community responded with a surveillance counterattack. Operating under the moniker Operation Monopoly, the FBI and NSA purchased the three-bedroom house next door and began to tunnel under the communist envoys.
The name Monopoly is great, because it referenced the two real estate deals while simultaneously trolling the Soviet's economic worldview.
The envisioned subterranean listening spot would let agents eavesdrop on electronic communications in the building above. The plan seemed workable—the United States had a track record of pulling off comparable missions in East Berlin and outside Moscow.
However, costs began to add up as the tunnel progressed further and further toward the embassy. The total bill for this 300-foot passageway likely amounted to "several hundred million dollars," according to a 2001 New York Times article.
Operation Monopoly ended up failing on two fronts. First were the technical problems like flooding and buggy NSA equipment. The Spy Museum quotes FBI assistant director John F. Lewis as saying that the tunnel produced “no information of any kind.” Secondly, the covert construction project was betrayed to the Soviet’s by Robert Hanssen, a double agent at the FBI (although this leak only came to light in 2001).
An article in the Washington Post last February located the exact house at the intersection of Fulton Street and Bellevue Terrace (they also wrote that the tunnel had been sealed with concrete). An in person visit in August 2016 revealed that the house has recently been demolished and all that remains are the concrete foundations.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
I have a song stuck in my head right now. A jingle, really.
It’s been stuck in my head for the last 15 years, at least. It’s probably stuck in your head, too—and if you’re near Chicago, it’s been stuck in your head since the days of disco.
It’s the work of a man who spent decades trying to sell us carpet. Hardwood flooring too, maybe windows as well, but mostly carpet. You might know the tune. It goes like this: “FIVE EIGHT EIGHT, TWO THREE HUNDRED, EMPIIIIIIIIIIIIRE.”
Because of this man and the fact I can’t get this stupid song out of my head, I feel compelled to write about carpet, which—despite the hipsters embracing hardwood flooring, remains the most popular type of surface found in a home.
According to statistics from from Marketing Insights, the carpet industry, represented 41.9 percent of all flooring surfaces as of 2015. While significantly more popular than any kind of flooring, it saw declines that year, falling in comparison to hardwood flooring (13.8 percent), ceramic (13.1 percent) and vinyl flooring (11.3 percent). Carpet remains the most popular kind of flooring, but it’s losing ground.
But it’s also covered a lot of ground. It goes back thousands of years.
Carpet has a long and storied history, with one of its earliest examples coming from Siberia.
The Pazyryk Carpet, which was excavated from a burial mound in 1947, was an incredible find at the time, as it was a nearly-2,500-year-old carpet that was largely intact, due to its being frozen in a block of ice. The details captured on the fabric, which is believed to be the world’s oldest pile carpet, are impressive—24 cross-shaped figures, 28 men on horseback, 24 deer. While the carpet’s colors have faded, the details can still be made out.
Clearly, carpet has come a long way from that early, fairly pristine example. As you might have learned from history class, parts of the world like China, Iran, North Africa, and Afghanistan each have distinctive styles of carpet that tell significant stories about the ancient cultures in each of those regions. (If you really want to dive into the history behind these different styles, there’s actually a website titled CarpetEncyclopedia.com, which is my new favorite website.)
Of course, the industrial revolution played an important role in the uptake of carpet globally. Improved manufacturing processes certainly helped—most notably, Erastus Bigelow’s invention of the power loom in 1839. (And it wasn’t even the most impressive thing Bigelow did! He also founded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which means that he’s indirectly responsible for the Bose Wave.)
But it wasn’t just improved manufacturing that played a role, even if it did help us mass-manufacture Oriental rugs. Perhaps the most important innovation in the world of carpet came out of Dalton, Georgia, once known as the bedsheet capital of the world. A key invention that came out the bedsheet industry, says the Dalton-based Carpet and Rug Institute, was the invention of the mechanized tufting machine in the 1930s. It was a byproduct of minimum wage laws that were getting too high to make hand-built tufted bed sheets tenable.
It also had the side effect of making carpets made of tufted fabric into a natural next step for the industry.
“Machinery was developed for making chenille rugs and was widened, creating larger rugs and broadloom carpet,” the institute notes on its website. “At the same time, machinery was changing; developments of new fibers accelerated the growth of broadloom carpet.”
Eventually, Dalton’s primary industry, helped along by the eventual uptake of synthetic materials, transferred to the puffy carpet you’re surrounded by everywhere in your empty apartment.
Another major innovation in carpet that can be mostly credited to the industrial era is the wall-to-wall, or fitted, carpet.
The carpet style had some precedent in Europe, where it had seen uptake in the 18th century. Reflecting that point, Louis XVI gave George Washington a fitted carpet for his home at Mount Vernon as a welcome-to-the-global-neighborhood gift of sorts. (With the U.S. seal woven into the rug, it wasn’t like the French leader intended it for anyone else.) Washington, concerned about accepting gifts, wouldn’t take it himself.
But in 1897, Sarah Yates Whelen, whose great-grandfather came into ownership of this rug as a result of this problem, gave it back to to the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association for its original purpose, explaining its history in a letter:
This carpet was made by order of Louis XVI of France, for George Washington, President of the United States, and was sent over during the first years of his administration, when Philadelphia was the National Capital. As he was not allowed to receive present from foreign powers, the carpet was sold to my-great grandfather, Judge Jasper Yates, and remained in the old family mansion at Lancaster until about thirty years ago, when it came into my possession.
As I consider Mt. Vernon the proper place for such a relic, if the ladies of the Association will do me the honor of accepting it I will send it at once to your care to the address you may designate. In giving this carpet to the association, I request that it be places it will not be used continuously and that a card of explanation be placed upon it.
(Imagine what it must have been like for this family, having to constantly explain where they got this weird carpet from.)
It also helped that we actually figured out a way to clean our carpets while they were still on the floor.
That part, however, wasn’t easy. The rise of carpet created a major problem for the the public, which suddenly had these massive pieces of fabric to clean. And we didn’t have vacuums way back when. We tried all sorts of things to keep our carpets pristine, including:
Druggets. Before it was possible to Stanley Steem carpet, it was very common to use heavy pieces of wool called druggets, which were designed to help protect the expensive rugs in areas of heavy use. They were also called “crumb cloths.” Essentially, you were covering the carpet with another carpet you didn’t really care about.
Used tea leaves. After tea leaves were spent, it was common to take those leaves and sprinkle them on the floor, only to sweep them off after. In the 19th century, damp tea leaves were recommended for this purpose. The 1899 book The Expert Cleaner: A Handbook of Practical Information for All Who Like Clean Homes, Tidy Apparel, Wholesome Food, and Healthful Surroundings (what a title!) explains it like this: “If the carpet is of dark color or yellow tints, damp tea-leaves scattered over it before sweeping will improve the colors and give it a fresh, clean look.” Today, dry ones are recommended instead, and for a different purpose—reducing odor and bacteria.
Beating. J.R. Burrows & Company has a lengthy list of historic carpet-cleaning techniques collected from vintage publications, and is very much worth a read. Perhaps the most interesting such technique highlighted involved literally beating the carpets—putting the rugs on a clothesline and taking a large paddle to the carpet to beat out the crumbs and dust. “There was a time when all work of this kind, done by hand, was preferred; but in the absence of men who do it thoroughly, and the lack of available space for such operations, the improved carpet-beating machines are heartily recommended,” stated the 1884 publication Carpet Notes. Vacuums couldn’t come soon enough.
Uh, contraptions. The greatest carpet-related patent you’ll ever find was created by a guy named Warren P. Miller, who created what could be best described as an inverted vacuum. Essentially, the 1883 invention involved rolling up the carpet onto a machine that would then blow off the carpet. “It is the object of the present invention to provide an apparatus by which the dust and other loose impurities can be easily and effectually removed from carpets and other fabrics without the necessity of shaking, beating, or otherwise operating upon-them in a manner which is more or less damaging,” the filing, which looks hopelessly convoluted in comparison to modern solutions, stated.
Carpet sweepers. The turning point in the complicated process of cleaning carpets came in 1876, when Michigan inventor Melville Bissell invented a mechanical sweeper with built in rotating brushes. This device could pick up many more particles than a broom could, and the general idea behind the carpet sweeper would be the basis for nearly every other popular carpet-cleaning product that came after. Well, minus whatever Warren P. Miller built.
The carpet sweeper eventually gave way to the vacuum, which then gave way to more elaborate ways of cleaning carpet. One of those methods was popularized by a guy named Jack A. Bates, who came up with the idea for a service that could elaborate clean carpet with the help of a whole lot of hot water.
The name of his company? Stanley Steemer. The company’s big idea started with just a $2,300 equipment investment, but eventually the company needed many more investments, because the equipment didn’t always meet Bates' exacting standards.
“My dad always had big ideas. We just needed follow-through. We had bought some (carpet-cleaning) equipment, but it fell apart,” noted Wesley Bates, Jack’s son, in a interview with the Columbus Dispatch. “So we said, ‘Fine, we’ll build it ourselves.’ We went through a lot of trial, tribulation, arguments. It was unbelievable.”
The company, whose name is designed to evoke steam-driven automobiles, gradually grew into the country’s largest carpet-cleaning business, with more than 300 franchisees in 48 states.
Stanley Steemer and similar companies rely on a hot-water extraction process (which pushes out dirt and stains with really hot water, then sucks it back up) to clean carpet. It’s often referred to as “steam cleaning,” but it’s sort of a misnomer, because it’s water, not steam, that’s doing the cleaning. (The reason you need a company to do this for you is that the equipment isn’t cheap.)
Anyway, going back to the beginning, I have to ask: What’s the deal with that Empire jingle, anyway? Why is it so annoyingly tuneful as a jingle?
Empire didn’t always have that jingle. Starting in 1959 as a Chicago-based plastic covering company, it eventually moved into carpet and wood flooring, the two things for which it is best known today.
In the 1970s, the company crossed paths with an ad copywriter named Lynn Hauldren, who had to promote this brand all over Chicagoland. The jingle was his idea (he even sang it, with the help of a male-female barber-shop quartet), though it wasn’t his idea to show up in the commercials—that was Empire founder Seymour Cohen’s idea.
“If I’m not mistaken I think we auditioned several dozen actors for the part before Seymour said to me, ‘You do the commercial, Lynn,’” Hauldren told the Chicago Tribune in 1997. “So I did, and I still insist the first … 50 or so we filmed are unwatchable today.”
The commercials are interesting, because it’s a rare example of a TV ad concept expanding from a local audience, at a cost of $30 per commercial in the 1970s, to a national one. Not that it was a perfect transition. There were slight creative challenges when Empire had to change its branding to account for the national audience (it was originally just “588-2300 Empire,” now it’s “1-800-588-2300 Empire … Today,” reflecting the company’s now-awkward name). But it worked. He became a mascot.
Hauldren died in 2011, but he survives in a virtual form, selling carpet installation to the masses like the Orville Redenbacher of flooring.
On a lonely stretch of road north of Prosser, Washington, at the "base" of a small incline, if you shift your car into neutral you will, as if by magic, begin rolling uphill.
The reasons given for this strange occurrence range all across the paranormal spectrum, from aliens to ghosts. In fact, the phenomenon is actually an optical illusion, known as a "magnetic hill," "anti-gravity hill" or simply "gravity hill."
In these "mystery spots"—located all over the world—what appears to be an uphill incline is actually part of a larger downhill incline, misinterpreted by our brains because of the way the slopes are situated mixed with little or no view of the horizon line. So it looks as if objects are defying gravity, a natural illusion that's been tricking and wowing onlookers at these curious spots for centuries.
Finding Washington's Gravity Hill is no easy feat, but you'll know for sure when you've found it—some lover of the strange was kind enough to paint a starting line.
The cyanometer, invented in the 18th century by the Swiss scientist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, had one evanescent purpose: to measure the blueness of the sky.
In 1760, when he was 20 years old, Saussure traveled from his home in Geneva to the base of Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in the Alps. Saussure, a brilliant student from a wealthy family, had already finished his studies at the Academy of Geneva, where he would soon be made a professor, at just 22 years old.
But at this moment he was free to explore, and he was captivated by the mountain, which had never been climbed—not all the way to its top, 15,774 feet above sea level. The young scientist dreamed of standing at the summit, and he offered a generous reward, of an unspecified amount, to the first person who reached it.
Twenty-seven years later, Saussure stood at the top of Mont Blanc. The year before, in 1786, a crystal hunter and a doctor had made it to the summit, and now, with the help of a mountaineering team, Saussure had reached the pinnacle, too.
At the time, mountain climbers had observed that as they climbed higher, the sky turned a deeper blue. “Ce phénomène m’avoit souvent frappé,” Saussure wrote. “This phenomenon had often struck me,” and as he prepared to summit Mont Blanc, he wanted a way to measure the color of the sky. He brought with him pieces of paper colored different shades of blue, to hold up against the sky and match its color.
In the next few years, Saussure refined this idea into a tool for measuring blueness, his cyanomètre, a circle of paper swatches dyed in increasingly deep blues, shading from white to black. Using this tool, which in its most advanced iteration included 52 blues, he showed how the color of the sky changed with elevation.
The color he had measured at the top of Mont Blanc, he later determined, corresponded to a blue of the 39th degree; that measurement was later surpassed by the famous geographer Alexander von Humboldt, who took his cyanometer on journeys across the Atlantic, to the Caribbean, the Canary Islands, and South America, measuring the color of the sky all the while. In 1802, Humboldt took the tool on an ascent of the Andean mountain Chimborazo, where he set a new record, at the 46th degree of blue, for the darkest sky ever measured.
Saussure had a theory for what these gradations might show. He believed the color of the sky was related to the color of moist particles found in the atmosphere and that these color measurements might show that to be true. But the many measurements made with his tool yielded little insight, and the cyanometer fell out of favor as a scientific tool. When the true cause of the sky’s blueness, the scattering of light, was discovered decades later, in the 1860s, Saussure’s circle of blue had already fallen into obscurity.
Today, the Musée d’histoire des sciences Genève has an 18th-century cyanometer among its holdings, but there is occasional interest in reviving Saussure’s poetic idea in new contexts. In 2009, a German artist created a “new cyanometer,” and last year the artist Martin Bricelj Baraga brought a modern cyanometer to a public square in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, for a six-month installation. Ljubljana’s cyanometer broadcast data about air quality, but it did what Saussure originally intended—it allowed people to note the particular blueness of the sky and its subtle changes over the course of a day.
There is only one place in Nevada where you will find a shrunken human head, taxidermy animals, Egyptian tomb artifacts, antique firearms, and well-endowed Polynesian fertility statues under one roof. The Wilbur D. May Museum houses the private collection of its namesake, who traveled the world throughout the 20th century collecting oddities and exotic wonders.
Wilbur D. May was born in 1898, an heir to a successful department store chain. However, Wilbur found himself unhappy in routine business work. Despite many attempts to make a go at taking over his father's business, he found himself inevitably drawn to adventure in exotic locales instead.
He volunteered as an ambulance driver early in World War I, and later took lengthy vacations from his father's business to hunt big game in Africa and Asia. In a fluke, he actually made money off of the stock market crash of 1929. He invested in burgeoning oil industries at the advice of a hunting acquaintance and increased his fortune. He used his wealth to continue traveling the world, breeding racehorses and Boston Terriers, flying airplanes, and sponsoring world travels for youth groups.
Like many eccentric millionaires, Wilbur was a collector. Throughout his travels he traded with locals for artifacts which he brought home to his ranch in Reno. Upon his death the massive accumulation was converted into a museum. The motley mix of artifacts runs the gamut of history. You'll travel the world as Wilbur did, seeing the assortment of things he picked up in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific.
There's fine china and silver, giant elephant tusks, 6th century BCE figurines, African tribal masks, Japanese swords, snuff bottles, American Western art, and more. You name it, Wilbur brought it back with him and it's on display in his museum. The highlight is his shockingly large collection of trophy mounts from the golden era of safari, displayed in a recreated version of his trophy room, where nearly 200 pieces of taxidermy (mostly heads) decorate fill the walls.
The museum has an old-school cabinet of curiosity vibe. You get the feeling as you walk through that it is a collection out of place, a relic from a time when cultural artifacts were up for grabs for travelers who had the money. Wilbur was a man of his time. His museum offers visitors a chance to step into the shoes of an eccentric millionaire and his impressive collection.
Some of us like a good stroll through the grass. So do giant alligators, apparently.
The Lakeland PD, which calls the alligator "HUGE GINORMUS VERY LARGE," reports that Lakeland local Kim Joiner captured the alligator on its constitutional at Circle B Bar Reserve, a wildlife preserve in Lakeland, not far from Tampa.
"He was the biggest gator I have seen out there. I have been going out there for years too," Joiner told local news.
The gator is estimated to be about 15 feet long; if that's accurate, the alligator, who has been nicknamed Humpback, could be of record size. Currently, the Florida state record for longest alligator is held by a male alligator who was 14 feet, 3-1/2 inches long, according to the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. The largest alligator ever caught was 15 feet, 9 inches long and was captured in 2014 by a family in Alabama. That alligator is now on display at the Montgomery Zoo.
Washington is an African-American city with all-too-few monuments to its greatest African-American citizens. Cedar Hill is one of the finest. Abolitionist, author, political giant, and escaped slave Frederick Douglass spent the last 17 years of his life at this estate in the hills of Anacostia. Just across the Anacostia River from the Capitol and White House, but still within city boundaries, Cedar Hill was a pilgrimage spot for the journalists, fans, and power players who came to visit Douglass from 1877 until his death in 1895.
The grounds of Cedar Hill are lovely—it sits on top of one of the highest and steepest hills in Anacostia, with incredible views of downtown—but you can only go inside the house on a free guided tour with a National Park Service ranger. It's worth making the reservation. Douglass paid $6,700 for the house—$1.3 million in 2017 dollars, according to the guide—and it's showy and lots of fun. The walls are lined with portraits of great abolitionists—John Brown, Wendell Phillips—and of Douglass and his wives and children.
The house has the huge easy chair where the Lion of Anacostia received visitors, the desk where he wrote his famous speeches, the household gadgets he liked to collect (at least four different kinds of iron), and his very own dumbbells. The bedroom of his first wife, Anna, was sealed up after she died, but is open now. When he married his secretary Helen Pitts a couple of years after Anna's death, she took the bedroom next door, which still has Helen's typewriter and sewing machine. The ranger, with deep enthusiasm, may even point out the exact spot in the foyer where Douglass dropped dead in 1895.
Not on the tour, but visible on the grounds, is Douglass's Growlery, a stone cottage that he kept as a private study.
There are over 900 churches in the city of Rome, but this one is far different from all the others.
In 2004 the Church of the Great Martyr Saint Catherine became the first Russian Orthodox church built in the holy city since 1054, when the churches split in an event known as “The Great Schism.” The 950 years in between saw less than accommodating stances between the two factions of Christian faith, though things have been warming up for some time now.
In the late 19th century, plans were made to build an Orthodox church in Rome, but was delayed over a century by two world wars and a communist government in Italy. Finally, approval was granted by the city in 2001 to build the church on the grounds of the Russian embassy to the Vatican. The church was given a blessing by Patriarch Alexy II.
The church is unapologetically Russian in its architecture, a striking departure from the classical Italian buildings throughout Rome. After the completion of the traditional onion-shaped dome, artists from Russia were brought in to paint the inside of the sanctuary. The relics of Saint Helen, a 1st century saint venerated by both churches, were placed inside by a Catholic cardinal. Years later, on the celebration of Saint Catherine's feast day, a relic of Saint Alexius was also lain in the church.
The rift between the two faiths is not as great as it used to be. Important representatives of both faiths attended the opening ceremony in 2004 and the consecration in 2009. Catholic Romans attend the liturgies at St. Catherine given in Italian, and though there are only a few hundred of them, the Russian Orthodoxes disperse to the many Catholic churches in Rome in a show of reaching a hand across the aisle.
Police in Xi'an, capital of China's Shaanxi Province recently raided an illegal replica of the world-famous Terracotta Army, and leveled it to rubble. That’s what happens when you try to fool tourists.
As reported in The Irish Times, the counterfeit soldiers were discovered at the Suyuanqinhuangling resort in Lintong, not a great far from the actual historic statuary army. The large resort, covering 600 square meters actually had a pretty good scam going until the cops got tipped off thanks to an online complaint.
The resort was working in conjunction with local guides and taxi drivers to bring gullible tourists to their attraction instead of the real deal. These con artists would then collect a commission on delivering their marks. In addition to scamming visitors out of an authentic experience, a local official also noted that it hurt tourism in the area in general.
Officers destroyed around 40 statues, leveling them to bits. Hopefully this will send a message to other imposter tourist attractions: watch your back.
Anyone that looks out the plane window during arrival or take off at the Adolfo Suárez Madrid–Barajas Airport will see the huge white cross painted on a hill right beside the runway. It gives some passengers a feeling of unease, as some believe it to be a plane crash memorial. In fact the cross is for victims of a different sort of tragedy.
The Spanish Civil War, fought between General Francisco Franco's Nationalists and left-wing Republicans, lasted from 1936 to 1939. Both sides committed grave atrocities during the war, one of the worst of which became known as the“Paracuellos Massacres.”
In the Battle of Madrid in 1936, the Nationalists attacked civilians with airstrikes from German bombers. At the same time the Republicans (supported by the Russians) incarcerated thousands of political prisoners in Madrid, among them civilians, Catholic priests and soldiers. As the Nationalist troops approached, the Republicans felt pressure to dispose of their enemies. Their solution was mass executions. Starting in the early morning hours of November 7, 1936 prisoners were informed that they would be released from imprisonment in groups. They were brought to the fields near “Paracuellos del Jarama,” where they were shot and buried in mass graves. The executions continued until December 4.
How many Spaniards were killed at the hands of their fellow countrymen is unknown. Numbers vary largely among historians. While some say it was a thousand in total, others say it was about a thousand in the first two days. Most numbers vary between 2,000 and 5,000. The magazine El Alcazar in 1977 put the number at 12,000. In the same year, César Vidal's Matanzas en el Madrid Republicano included a list of 12,000 victim names. An official number will never be known, as most of the bodies cannot be found.
The white cross visible from the runway of Madrid Airport marks the site of the Paracuellos Massacres. What can't be seen from the runway is the Cementerio de los Mártires at the foot of the hill, the Paracuellos Civil War Cemetery. Six hundred crosses mark the graves of the bodies that were discovered, and stand in memory of the many more whose fate is unknown.
In the summer of 1974, a pod of pilot whales swimming near California's Catalina Island heard some unexpected sounds. Coming through the water was a familiar set of messages—swooping whistles, keening cries, and zippy chirps. It sounded like a pilot whale, but not one they had ever heard before, and talking absolute gibberish. As they swam up to investigate, they must have realized their mistake. This wasn't a pilot whale. It was a U.S. Navy submarine—150 feet long, made of titanium, and speaking their language.
Look back into U.S. military history, and you'll find a menagerie of animals—bomb-carrying bats; bioengineered spy cats; pigeons trained to rescue soldiers lost at sea. A newly declassified report housed at Government Attic reveals another attempt at zoological mastery: Project COMBO, a plan to let U.S. submarines have underwater conversations by disguising them as whale sounds.
During the Cold War, military researchers had to figure out how to look, listen, and communicate deep beneath the sea. For inspiration, they often turned to marine creatures. The U.S. studied beluga whales, which echolocate, to beef up their own sonar capabilities. They trained a bottlenosed dolphin named Taffy to carry equipment and lead divers to safety. The Soviet Union had, essentially, suicide-bomber dolphins, which would dive under ships with bombs strapped to their backs. Scientists on both sides thought bioluminescent plankton might help with submarine detection.
Project COMBO was an attempt to address a perplexing Cold War problem: It's difficult to communicate quietly with a submarine. High-frequency radio waves, the messaging medium of choice for armies and navies, don't travel well through salt water. Low-frequency ones are better, but sending them out requires massive broadcast antennae, so most submarines can only receive messages in this format, and can't answer back. And although regular sound waves broadcast well, they can be easily intercepted—even sending a simple "hello" to a friend risks giving away your position to an enemy.
In 1959, experts at the Naval Electronics Laboratory realized that some denizens of the deep were communicating just fine underwater, and over great distances: whales and seals. If American submarines could make their own animal calls, and associate each with a simple message, they could talk to each other without blowing their own cover. A certain click might mean "I'm a friend," while a particular whistle was "follow me." The messages would be "but a small portion of the total biological chorus," the recently declassified report assured. The Soviets, used to the undersea cacophony, wouldn't suspect a thing.
So once again, the military set out to steal some animal secrets. In 1965, researchers took to the seas, studying species and recording sounds to determine which would best suit their purposes. For maximum effectiveness, they were looking for "cosmopolitan" whales, comfortable in all parts of the ocean. The sounds had to be relevant throughout the year—no mating calls, for example. "Well-known dialects" should be avoided, too, in case a savvy interceptor noticed, say, a Caribbean-accented whale in the Pacific.
The Navy came up with a three-part longlist of whale and seal species whose sounds would work best. For large whales—a good option in noisy seas—the humpback came out on top, thanks to its large menu of "howls, moans, grunts, cries, yelps, and low-frequency pulses," and a tendency to sing for hours at a time. The wide-ranging pilot whale won out among small ones. (Orcas, with their "raucous screams," came in second.) Thanks to their small, coast-hugging ranges, the pinnipeds—seals and sea lions—were all wildcards, suitable only for specific regional conversation.
For the test, the Navy chose the pilot whale, which offered a variety of warbles, whistles, and squeaks. Using their recordings, a minicomputer, and sound generation software, they synthesized six different pilot whale sounds, although they imagined more were possible—maybe even a "code of the day," they wrote. They also synthesized a background "ocean chorus," which served as extra camouflage in case the real ocean was too quite.
On the receiving side, submarines were already equipped with spectrographs, which transform incoming sound waves into visual charts. Since the coded pilot whale sounds were synthesized, and therefore identical, receiving and decoding them was merely a matter of recognizing a particular pattern as it came through the machine. A real whale's call, with its unique combinations of pitch and timbre, would produce a slightly different readout, and could be weeded out as noise with the help of recognition software.
In the summer of 1973, with everything in place, the Navy hit the ocean with the new sounds. Positioning themselves off of Catalina Island, 150 feet underwater, they blasted their squeaky, warbly codes through a transmitter. The receiver, placed at varying distances away, plucked the messages out of the noise flawlessly. Another test, in the fall, went deeper down and extended the range. In June of 1974, they sent out a real submarine, the USS Dolphin, which successfully transmitted sounds to a receiving ship—and, in a true vote of confidence, attracted a pod of pilot whales.
After these testing successes, researchers were left with a lot of work to do. Although they had the pilot whale on lock, they wanted to expand their repertoire by inventing "techniques and equipment to synthesize large whale sounds and small whale screams." They still had to create scalable versions of their tools, including the call generator and the spectrograph-recognizer. Looking ahead, more problems loomed: the researchers figured this was a good enough idea that the Soviets would steal it, at which point American submariners would need to add another skill to their arsenal. "Fleet sonarmen must become more familiar with bioacoustic signals," they wrote—inspiring thoughts of submarine soldiers, facing long days underwater, taking up sonic seal- and whale-watching.
But their hopes, alas, were too high. "It was never successful," writes Dr. Christopher Willes Clark, founder of the Cornell Bioacoustics Research Program, in an email. "The process of projecting coded 'whale' sounds out to functional distances is not viable." Despite the promise of those initial tests, the technological barriers proved too large to overcome, and subsequent attempts in future years also failed. By now, Clark writes, there are better ways to accomplish the same goal—laser communication, for instance.
Even if the technology had worked out, a few sentences in the report betray another concern that could have sunk the project: for whale sound signals to be properly clandestine, there need to be actual whales around to camouflage them. Although the report points out the necessity of tracking whale numbers, it assumes that "conservation measures should guarantee populations at least as large as present ones." Instead, in the years since 1975, plenty of whale populations—including the screaming orca and the prolifically musical humpback—have declined, partly due to Navy research, which, until recently, was killing them with ultra-loud sonar. Even if Project COMBO failed, we can learn from it: If we want to secure ourselves with whale technology, we've got to protect them, too.
Naturecultures is a weekly column that explores the changing relationships between humanity and wilder things. Have something you want covered (or uncovered)? Send tips to cara@atlasobscura.com.
Right now, there's a curious low industrial hum emanating from what used to be a fish market built in 1769. At De Vishal gallery in Haarlem, Netherlands, a large nine-pipe organ operated by burning candles purrs a continuous concert.
In the video, Dutch artist Ronald van der Meijs shows his elaborate musical mechanism. Inspired by the Muller Organ housed at Grote Kerk church next to the gallery, the series of pipes looks like a massive artillery weapon connected to wooden beam air ducts. The intricate system requires careful maintenance—van der Meijs changes out the candles multiple times a day as they burn.
For the pipe organ, "the candles are the musicians," van der Meijs explains. The candles vary in size. As the wax melts, the pitch of each pipe shifts slowly and irregularly. The shortening of the candles causes a vertical movement in each mechanism, pulling a wheel connected to a brass valve at the front end of each pipe. Opening the valves allows for different toned pitches.
As you approach the instrument, the humming sound becomes more intense. Even though the low tones change pitch as the candles melt, it's so slow and subtle that you probably won't catch it. To hear the whole concert, you may have to sit and listen to the soothing earthly tones for hours.
You can bask in the meditative sound of van der Meijs' pipe organ in person at De Vishal until January 22.
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 December 14th, two Russian cargo ships set out from the port of Arkhangelsk, near the country's western border, about 3000 miles to Pevek, its northernmost point. With the help of two icebreakers, they arrived on January 7th, successfully delivering supplies for a floating power plant. Satisfied, they turned around and began chugging back.
And then, 24 miles into their return journey, they got stuck.
The cargo ships and icebreakers alike are "trapped by sudden thick ice... in some of Russia's most exposed waters," the Siberian Times reports. The ice is currently one meter thick. The crew, which has plenty of food, water and fuel, is hanging tight until a helicopter can help pinpoint an escape route. They expect to get out within the week.
This particular crossing hadn't been attempted since the Soviet era. Carriers had hoped to pull it off this year to prove that, thanks to climate change, shipping lanes can stay open year-round. But for now, it seems, the ice had its revenge.
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.
One of the top actors of his day, Booth assassinated President Lincoln on April 14, 1865 before being killed himself. But Booth had quite a journey on the way to death.
After shooting the president, Booth jumped to the stage from Lincoln's box at Ford's Theater shouting, breaking his leg in the process, and proceeded to escape through Maryland to Northern Virginia.
While on the lam, Booth had his leg treated by a doctor who would later be tried for conspiracy. He and fellow conspirator David Herold hid in the swamps for nearly a week. By April 26, federal officers had cornered the men, who were hiding in a tobacco barn. Booth was coaxed out when only when the barn was lit on fire, but refused to surrender. As he ran out with guns up, Sergeant Thomas P. "Boston" Corbett shot him. The soldier maintained that he had only meant to disarm the man, but Booth only lived a few hours after the officers dragged his body to the farmhouse porch.
Booth's body was sewn into a horse blanket and transported back to Washington, D.C. on the Potomac River. He was autopsied in the Navy Yard and identified by, among other things, a tattoo on his wrist of his initials.
First he was buried in the Old Penitentiary, along with his co-conspirators who were hanged there. Booth's remains were exhumed and reburied in a warehouse of the Penitentiary in 1867. Finally in 1869, his remains were exhumed a third time and released to his family.
The assassin's body was transported to Baltimore, the city of his youth, and buried in the Booth family plot in Green Mount Cemetery. The family plot is easy to find due to Junius Brutus Booth's towering obelisk. But the Booth family, John Wilkes' brother Edwin in particular, believed that an elaborate headstone for John Wilkes might attract unwanted attention and vandalism. Visitors today believe the small, plain, unmarked headstone denotes John Wilkes Booth's final resting spot. In lieu of flowers or stones, people leave pennies behind on the headstone, as if to give Lincoln the final word.
