The sports arena known as "The Dee" stands on the site of the old Amphidrome, where in 1903 professional hockey was born. The Amphidrome sadly burned down in 1927, but the new stadium quickly assumed the mantle, and the cherished game is still played here, on the shores of Portage Lake.
The story of how the players of the Portage Lake Hockey Club got paid to skate starts back in Berlin (now Kitchener), Ontario, when Jack “Doc” Gibson and his team were expelled from the Ontario Hockey Association for accepting cash—$10 gold coins to be exact—a sin in the eyes of the staunchly amateur league.
Gibson left Canada for the United States to set up a dental practice in Houghton, Michigan, and there he became the “Father of Professional Hockey.” He established the Portage Lake team, paid all the players, and staged two games against the semi-professional Montreal Wanderers in front of big crowds at the castle-like Amphidrome. The success of this early stab at professional hockey convinced Gibson that a league could be sustained here, and he set up the International Professional Hockey League.
The Portage Lake Hockey Club joined with teams from Pittsburgh, Calumet, and the two Sault Ste. Maries of Michigan and Ontario, but the IPHL would fold after the 1906-07 season. Other professional leagues across Canada and the U.S. started up in its wake, including the National Hockey Association (predecessor of today's NHL), but none could claim the title of being the First.
The new Amphidrome, built in 1943, was named after James R. Dee, the operator of the Houghton Warehouse Company that built the original arena. Today the Dee has historical markers and exhibits about the early days, and is home to the local high school team, the Houghton Gremlins, as well as the Portage Lake Pioneers of the Great Lakes Hockey League.
Sometimes you head out to get some exercise, and you end up making a massive geographic art piece instead. On January 15th, David Chuljian, a dentist in Port Townsend, Washington, decided to take advantage of the cold weather. He brought his skates down to Stranger Lake, a private lake on a friend's property.
Excited to be able to cross the full lake for the first time in years, he decided to try skating a pattern. He criss-crossed north to south, and then east to west. The result was part sine wave, part chain-link fence.
Then—because he had to go on an errand to Seattle anyway—Chuljian hopped in his Cessna with his girlfriend, Susan Disman, and asked her to snap some photos from above. "From the ground, [the lines are] noticeably crooked, but from the air, it has a sort of crop circle look," he told the PT Leader.
It was good that they checked it out so soon: Within 24 hours, the ice melted again, and Stranger Lake got a little less strange.
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.
Within a mere two square miles of the desert outside the Salton Sea there are enough gryphons, gas vents, salses, and mudpots to delight any geological oddity enthusiast.
At the Davis-Schrimpf Seep Field, geothermal mudpots announce themselves by belching gray bubbles from short sludge volcanoes. The bubbling seep fields are caused by the buildup of carbon dioxide beneath the surface of the earth, which pushes to the surface through the water table and sediment. As such, these aren't true volcanoes. They aren't boiling hot, merely warm. They can be quite stinky though, and gas bursts can range from a quiet "blurp" to a noisy eruption.
The salt content of Davis-Schrimpf Seep Field mud is so high that when it dries on the ground it forms a white crystalline top layer. When visitors walk across its surface it crunches like hard snow.
As the story goes, a vagrant wandering the streets of Goldfield in 1908 was rummaging through the trash outside the local library, looking for something to eat. The best sustenance he came across was a jar of book paste.
He would have found the paste surprisingly sweet, because in addition to flour and water, it was 60% alum. Unfortunately, the concentration was deadly.
The legend continues to say that when the townspeople found the deceased drifter, he was buried in Pioneer Cemetery, which was little more than a dirt patch. The grave was topped with a headstone that stated what little they knew about him. It reads, "UNKNOWN MAN DIED EATING LIBRARY PASTE JANUARY 14 1908."
Skeptics point to the fact that the grave's red paint is very bright for being more than a century old. That being said, some ascribe the fresh paint to sympathetic cemetery-goers who regularly paint over the epitaph so that the unknown man can be remembered for years to come. Others say the whole thing is just a local prank. Whatever the case, the grave serves as a cautionary tale: don't eat glue.
Update, 1/26: The Bulletin of Atomic Scientistsannounced Thursday that, thanks largely to the continued threats posed by nuclear weapons and climate change, the Doomsday Clock is now at two and a half minutes to midnight.
"We call on the United States and Russia to take steps in the coming year to reduce existential risk," said Lawrence Krauss, chair of the BAS's Board of Sponsors. "We also call upon all people to speak out and send a loud message to our leaders that we will not allow them to needlessly threaten your future, and the future of your children."
Original story: Every year since 1947, a few dozen esteemed scientists have put their heads together and decided how close we are to the end of the world. Thursday morning, in the face of an unusually intense amount of global political upheaval, they'll take another stab at it.
Invented by former members of the Manhattan Project, the so-called Doomsday Clock isn't really a clock at all, but rather a handy way to visualize the aggregate effects of various threats to humanity: The closer the metaphorical minute hand is to midnight, the closer we are to total destruction.
The clock is overseen by the Bulletin for Atomic Scientists' Science and Security Board, along with their Board of Sponsors, which is stacked with Nobel Laureates. Each year, they consider humanity's greatest ailments and boil them down into a concrete conclusion: are we nearer to doom than we were last year?
Over its 70-year tenure, the clock has gone from a low of two minutes to midnight (in 1953, when thermonuclear tests were prevalent), to a high of 17 minutes to midnight (in 1991, after a global nuclear resolution). Since then, it has ticked steadily upward, gaining a minute or two each year.
In 2016, the board chose to keep it where it had been in 2015, at an ominous 23:57. According to the BAS's executive director, Rachel Bronson, climate change, missile-making, and "other existential threats" played into their calculus in 2016, but were tempered by "some positive news," such as the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear agreement.
Obviously, a lot has happened since then. In a recent press release announcing the forthcoming update to the clock, the board cited "a rise in strident nationalism worldwide, President Donald Trump's comments on nuclear arms and climate issues... a darkening global security landscape... [and] a growing disregard for scientific expertise."
On Thursday, we'll learn how this all shakes out into numbers. Are we still at 23:57? 23:58? Straight-up midnight? According to a poll on the BAS website, the public is not hopeful: at press time, 77 percent of respondents had indicated that the clock should "move to less than three minutes to midnight."
Check out the livestream Thursday at 10 a.m. Eastern—and as soon as we learn the doom diagnosis, we'll update this post.
In the heart of Bucharest, often overlooked by tourists exploring all the wonders of Old Town, is all that remains of Curtea Veche, the Old Princely Court. Today, not much remains of this princely palace and its grounds other than ruins. But amidst the broken masonry and old stone arches, like a sentinel, the bust of Romania’s most notorious ruler, Vlad III Dracula, keeps watch over the medieval court.
Almost 500 years before Irish novelist Bram Stoker immortalized his name, Vlad III Dracula ruled Wallachia, a province of now modern-day Romania.
A bulwark against Ottoman Turkish aggression, Vlad, like his father and namesake, was sworn into the Order of the Dragon, an alliance of Christian rulers who fought against the Ottoman invaders. Known for his brutality on and off the battlefield, Vlad earned the name Tepes or “The Impaler” from the Turks for his preferred method of executing his enemies.
Recognizing the city’s strategic location along the Dimbovita River near Wallachia’s southern border, Vlad III Dracula set up his summer residence in what was then known as “the Citadel of Bucharest," and the city soon became the economic nucleus of Wallachia. Bucharest became the preferred residence of subsequent rulers and eventually the capital of Romania. The princely palace and court, too, gained prominence as the commercial and religious hub of the city.
In 1559, Mircea Ciobanul, then ruler and descendant of Vlad III Dracula, built the palace as well as the nearby Annunciation Church of Saint Anthony. Over the centuries, the palace and the site have undergone additional construction, damage by the Ottomans, and renovation throughout its history. The site is now operated by Muzuel Municipiului Bucuresti and is currently closed for restoration.
The Texas Woofus is a mythological chimera made up of the main staples of Texas livestock. Originally created in 1936 for the Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas, the Woofus features the mane and neck of a horse, a turkey tail, pig body, duck wings, a sheep's head, and of course, a pair of Texas longhorns.
A decorated strip of blanket hangs over each side of the Texas Woofus, which can be seen spouting water from its nozzle on the side of the Swine Building in Dallas' Fair Park today.
This Woofus is a re-creation, however. When the original statue, created by sculptor Lawrence Tenney Stevens, was damaged in 1941, it was taken away and mysteriously disappeared. Some suspect a local Christian group thought it was too pagan and destroyed it.
In 1998 a replacement Woofus was made by David Newton at the behest of the Friends of Fair Park. The fate of the original remains a mystery.
In downtown Minneapolis you'll find a bronze statue honoring Mary Tyler Moore, or rather her character, Mary Richards, tossing her hat skyward in a jubilant expression of independent career-woman optimism.
On The Mary Tyler Moore Show, the beloved actress played a young single television producer for a Minneapolis news station. Though the show was a sitcom, it took a head-on, modern approach to women's liberation. The opening sequence ends with a freeze frame of Mary tossing her hat into the air, on the very downtown corner where the statue was erected in 2002.
The statue—inscribed with the words of the show's iconic theme song, "Who can turn the world on with her smile?"—was removed for sidewalk construction in 2015, and Minneapolitans were assured it would be kept safe in storage for the two years to come. Mary Tyler Moore fans in town and abroad expressed concern at not being able to see the beloved statue for such a long time. It was consequently put back on display in the nearby visitor center, and should be returned to its sidewalk station in 2017.
Small, crumbly, with a bright yellow color and a slightly burned top, Portugal’s rustic pastel de nata—custard tart—is often near the top of foodies' travel guides. But the flaky pastry also has a history as its country’s unlikely savior.
In the years following the international financial crisis of 2008, the Portuguese government was desperate to repay billions of euros of foreign debt. Years of bad investments and fraud-like negotiations had left the country’s banks highly indebted to Spain and Germany. As economists brainstormed for solutions, Álvaro Santos Pereira, the former economy minister, hit on a maverick suggestion in 2012: selling the country’s most traditional sweets to save the economy.
“Why isn’t there a well-known Portuguese custard tart franchise yet?” asked Pereira, who had visions of a global chain that would be as popular as the Nando’s Portuguese flame-grilled chicken restaurants that have expanded to 16 countries.
It was headline heaven for journalists. The small, bright yellow pastry with a slightly burned top, also known as the pastel de nata, was somehow expected to carry the country on its flaky shoulders. The critics came out.
“The drought will end, dams will all fill-up, water will flow, and custard tarts will be exported,” wrote the satirical news website, Inimigo Público, mimicking the minister’s positivity later on.
“People laughed in Portugal, but Santos Pereira was not being ridiculous,” says Filipe Brito, a Portuguese baker in England. “The pastel looks rustic but with a buttery, crisp pastry that hides a subtle egg custard, our tart wins over the global palates.”
Right before Santos Pereira made his plea, Brito had just opened Nata & Co, a pastry shop named after the tarts, in Cardiff, U.K. Since then, Nata & Co has opened two other branches and is going strong.
Despite the naysayers, the buzz following the former economy minister’s comment boosted small businesses with international ambitions. NATA Lisboa, a Lisbon-based franchise starting up at the time, now has stores in the UK, France, Austria and even the United Arab Emirates.
Investing in Portugal’s bakery exports is proving to be profitable, bringing in 191 million euros in 2015 according to the latest reports by market researcher Informa D&B.
But the tarts’ success should not have come as a surprise to anyone. It wasn’t the first time that the Portuguese had turned to the pastel de nata to bail it out of a financial hardship.
In the years following the Liberal Revolution of 1820, one that saw an end to religious orders and resulted in the transition to a constitutional monarchy, the Jerónimos monastery in the Belém district of capital Lisbon was shut down.
Its monks and workers were forced to look beyond their traditional vocations to sustain themselves. In an attempt at survival, someone from the monastery offered his own version of custard tarts for sale in a shop close-by. Those pastries rapidly became known as ‘Pastéis de Belém’.
Almost two centuries later, their heirs carry forward their legacy in Antiga Confeitaria de Belém, Portugal’s huge flagship bakery recommended in tourist manuals worldwide for having the best custard tarts around.
“We sell an average of 20 thousand pastéis de Belém a day," says one of the current owners, Miguel Clarinha. "The number has been growing in the past three to four years in part thanks to the rise of tourism in Portugal and, specifically, Lisbon."
MA research carried out in 2015 for Portugal’s School of Economics and Management (ISEG) on tourists’ custard tart consumption in Antiga Confeitaria de Belém shows that the visitors have often tasted some form of a Portuguese custard tart before.
“Of course, their popularity can attract tourists to Portugal, but it is also important that tourists try the tarts while they’re here so that they want to continue buying them when they return home,” said Professor José Adelino, a lecturer at one of Portugal’s top business schools, Católica Lisbon.
Macau, which used to be a protectorate of Portugal, has been selling an‘egg tart’ variation of the pastel de nata in its KFC fast food branches for over a decade. And Portugal’s now-popular NATA Lisboa franchise opened its latest branch in Abu Dhabi in 2015.
“It answers a lot of people’s questions about whether we could sell our products anywhere in the world,” said founder José Campos in an interview with Portuguese financial portal Dinheiro Vivo.
Santos Pereira may have been laughed at, but his comment allowed Portugal to realize its tart’s potential.
The ceiling of Під Чорним Орлом, or Under the Black Eagle pharmacy, is painted with symbols of air, water, fire, and earth, representing the humors of the body, the preeminent theory of early medicine. Since 1735, Under the Black Eagle has tended to the apothecary needs of Lviv's citizens, making it the oldest operating pharmacy in Ukraine. But since 1966 it has offered more than just medicine.
The front room of the Under the Black Eagle is still a functioning dispensary, and it's here that the pharmacy museum tour begins. Museum visitors can walk through 16 rooms to different historic eras of medicinal care, going back in time as they retreat further into the building.
After paying a small entrance fee to the pharmacist, the pharmacy opens up to a wood-shelved room chock full of antique pharmacy equipment. There are mortars and pestles, various beakers, ornate scales, jars containing tinctures, elixirs, and other medicines, all from the 19th and 20th centuries.
The material room contains the equipment for manufacturing medicine in earlier times (pill machines, drying cupboards, extraction presses, recipe manuals, etc.). In a replica brewery the pharmacy still offers its "iron wine," an ancient iron-boosted beverage said to raise hemoglobin in the blood. An outdoor courtyard with an attached 17th century apartment shows what the yards of Lviv's upper middle class looked in that time period. The pharmacy also boasts one of the most comprehensive medical libraries in Eastern Europe, with over a thousand ancient medical texts and even more books from the 18th to 20th centuries.
In the basement, visitors can see one of the earliest forms of pharmaceutical studies: an alchemist's laboratory. Oak stairs from the courtyard lead to this secret dungeon, where rare plants that would have been used in this seemingly magical room hang around the walls. This exhibit details the beginnings of medicine throughout Ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe.
While things are looking grim for the sciences here in America, a team of British and Czech scientists have recently claimed to have invented the world’s most powerful "super laser." They have named it, “Bivoj.”
According to Science Alert, the "high peak power laser" was created from a joint effort by Britain’s Central Laser Facility, and a state-sponsored program from the Czech Republic known as, HiLASE (High average power pulsed laser). They say their new beam has already set a world record for highest average power output.
At only 1,000 watts, the flat power of the laser itself is nothing to scream about, but the new device can repeatedly pulse this beam for extended periods of time, unlike seemingly more intense “peak power” lasers which can only fire in short bursts. Combining power and sustainability, the new laser still needs to be confirmed by other scientists. The laser was named after a mythical Czech Hercules figure.
Weighing in at 22 tons, the super laser probably won't be the ray gun of the future, but the technology could have a big impact on scientific research, according to Science Alert, for things like particle acceleration.
When researchers started working in 2000 on an encyclopedia of camps and ghettos from the Holocaust, they thought they would find 5,000 examples of labor camps, POW camps, military brothels, ghettos and concentration camps in Nazi-controlled Europe.
This project, initiated by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, sought to fully document places of Nazi persecution. To be included in the project, each entry must be backed up by multiple witness accounts and government documents. Often, the investigation includes gathering evidence from the site itself.
In some ways, this count is conservative. Some sites includes multiple camps—a military brothel inside a POW camp, for instance. Those are counted as one site. Sites with many sub-camps are also counted as one site.
It was clear early on in the project, reports the Times, that the original estimate was too low. By 2001, researchers were estimating they would find more than 10,000 sites. But the number kept growing, thanks to work both by the descendants of Holocaust survivors and the descendants of Germans who participated in the Nazi regime.
“You could not turn a corner in Germany [during the war]… without finding someone there against their will,” Geoffrey Megargee, the project's leader, told the Times.
A lot of things are illegal in Atlantic City—underage gambling, vandalizing hedges, (probably) blowing up the chicken man. Wednesday night, lawmakers worked to add one more thing to the list: releasing helium balloons outdoors.
The Atlantic City Council voted unanimously for the ban, which would slap balloonatics with a $500 fine, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.
This law isn't meant to keep balloons off the streets—it's supposed to keep them out of the oceans, say activists who pushed for it. When released balloons deflate, they often end up in the sea, where they can choke, entangle, or poison marine life.
According to Balloons Blow, Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to balloon ban advocacy, many other cities and states have laws that prohibit or limit outdoor releases. Ventnor, Margate, and Longport, New Jersey—all beach towns next to Atlantic City—already have bans in place, which means this newest one would make a large swath of the Jersey Shore a balloon-free zone.
The law now faces final passage. Meanwhile, there's trouble bussin' in from out of state: the "yes" voters were warned of possible unhappy visits from the Balloon Council. Gonna be a rumble out on the promenade.
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 2005, German economist Stefan Ziemendorff, who was working on a wastewater project in the Amazonas province of of Peru, took a break from his work to go for a hike in Peru's Utcabamba valley in search of one of the region's abundant pre-Incan ruins. When he crossed into a blind ravine, he spied something unexpected: a towering, two-tiered waterfall in the distance that hadn't appeared on any map.
The following March, after he had returned to the site with measuring equipment, Ziemendorff held a press conference to declare to the public that he had discovered the third-tallest waterfall in the world. The two tiers combined, the water plummets 2,531 feet, the height of well over two Eiffel Towers.
Of course, Ziemendorff's "discovery" wasn't actually a discovery at all. The residents of Cocachimba had known about the waterfall since the 1950s. Their town was located practically right beneath it. They knew it as "Gocta," after the sound made by howler monkeys in the region. But they had mostly avoided the towering waterfall due to superstitions surrounding it. The natural wonder simply blended into the background of their daily life.
The pronouncement that Gocta was the third-largest waterfall in the world was met with controversy. Depending on your measurement (Do the the multiple tiers count as one waterfall? Where does the waterfall begin, since it is mostly on a slope?), the falls could be anywhere from the third to the sixteenth largest in the world.
No one is doubting the impressive majesty of Gocta Falls though. The spike in international interest has benefited Cocachimba as well, which now plays host to the many tourists who come to witness the falls.
It may not look like much, but this little display outside the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. is the Master Clock, an incredibly important but little-known cyber system that's maintained by the USNO's Time Service Department. Even if you've never heard of it, chances are that you use its data throughout the day.
The Master Clock is critical to much of the world’s communications, financial, and scientific infrastructure. Mundane parts of daily life like computer clocks and GPS wouldn’t work without its precise timekeeping services.
In the case of GPS, the Master Clock helps carefully measure the travel time of electromagnetic signals between satellites and Earth. Since time is space and space is time, you can’t know one without measuring the other: When you fire up Google Maps to determine your location “an accuracy of 10 nanoseconds (10 one-billionths of a second) corresponds to a position accuracy of 10 feet," according to the Naval Observatory.
The Master Clock isn’t just one timepiece, it’s actually derived from an “intelligent average” of dozens of separate atomic clocks, including Cesiums, Cavity-Tuned Masers and Rubidium Fountains. Each of these types of clocks measures time a little differently and come with their own strengths and weaknesses. Combining that data, the Master Clock is, as the Time Service Department's chief scientist Demetrios Matsakis told Motherboard, "the most precise continuously operating system ever constructed to measure anything."
While the average person likely spends most of their lives trying to avoid being a villain, there are those who make it a point to get out there and unleash their inner baddie.
For live-action role-players (LARPers) who choose to walk the path of darkness, playing the villain isn’t just fun, it’s a good way to learn more about themselves.
LARPing allows players to get together IRL and act out whatever fantasy scenario the organizers dream up. For the majority of LARPers, whether the setting is a high-fantasy kingdom, or a gritty supernatural underworld hidden among city streets, the characters they play tend to fight for the side of good as a matter of narrative expectation.
But those heroes need people to quest against, and that’s where players like Rob Davies and Stuart Edwards come in. Davies and Edwards, Englishmen both, have each been participating in LARPs for over 20 years, and are the co-founders of LARPBook, a website and podcast catering to LARPers. They also like to play the villains.
Being a bad guy, whether it is a cold-blooded hitman or a brutish orc chieftain, takes a special kind of person. “I find it very easy to put things in a box,” says Edwards. “If I want to become a complete and utter bastard, I become a complete and utter bastard.” (Edwards is "a lovely, cuddly, happy, soft guy, normally.”)
An imposing physicality doesn’t hurt. Davies, described by Edwards as “quite a broad chap” with a lot of upper-body strength and long hair that can be collected into an assassin’s ponytail, is often approached to play villains due to his look. But he doesn’t seem to mind. “If you’re playing a mean, nasty, villainous character, it helps if you can physically intimidate the other characters a little bit,” he says.
It’s also important to them that their villains have goals to inform their actions. “Whether or not they are willing to kill children, whether they are willing to eat everyone around them, whether or not they are after complete and utter global domination,” says Edwards.
It is, in part, this clarity of purpose that makes playing villains so attractive. As Davies says, when portraying a hero, you are almost always reactionary, acting within a somewhat rigid moral code, as a result of the villain’s plan. But when you get to be the villain, you’re the one in the know, acting for your own reasons. Most people have less power over their daily lives than their villain characters, and it can be empowering to give in to a little selfish, fictional evil for a weekend.
When you’re playing a villain, you also get to act out all those darker impulses that you know you can’t indulge in your real life. “Logic says that it can’t feel that good to be that bad. But we all like getting away with stuff,” says Edwards. “I feel really naughty when I get away with not paying for a five-pence carrier bag.”
Talking about one of the most memorable villains he ever had the chance to play, a menacing heavy in a modern-day psychological horror LARP, Davies recalls the sense of confidence and power he felt. “It was that willingness to not listen to people and to say what I wanted. To point guns at people a few times. To pull the trigger a few times. Obviously in character.” It might sound extreme, depending on your views about consenting adults engaging in fake violence, but the cathartic feeling of exercising power without the requisite responsibilities is entirely relatable.
Of course all of this villainous behavior, as fulfilling as it might be for the participants, does have its downside, sometimes to the other LARPers, who can take you for the villain you played in the game. “You have to be ready, willing, and capable of not making any friends that day,” says Edwards. “‘Remember me? I was the one who pushed you into the tank of sharks.’”
At the end of the game, for Davies and Edwards, the act of becoming a villain is about more than the simple pleasures of being evil. As with any other fulfilling pastime, they’ve also found that it’s able to enrich their daily lives. Through their villain play, they are ironically able to remind themselves why it’s better to be a nice person in their daily lives. “Everyone is playing a game, and everyone knows everyone is playing a game, but there’s also always an element of a real reaction,” says Davies. “You do rechannel those characters in a positive way.”
For Stewart’s part, he sees the benefits as a way of inoculating himself somewhat to life’s daily annoyances. “It’s a release. Because we go through or daily lives seeing that person who just stole that parking space, that guy who’s just cut in line at the cinema ... knowing that what you want to do in that moment is something bad to that individual, but can’t do it. But in a LARP scenario, you get to, and in fact they encourage you to.”
There are many, many contenders in the race for the title of Holy Grail: stone cups, bronze cups, cups of gold. For some, the whole idea is just a tale told in medieval legend, but for many Christians the Holy Grail—or more accurately, the Holy Chalice—is the very cup used by Jesus during the Last Supper.
If the cup is real, whether it still exists and where exactly it is located are two enduring questions with competing answers. One longstanding claimant is the Holy Chalice of Valencia, stored in the golden "Chapel of the Holy Grail" and guarded behind glass in the city’s Gothic cathedral.
The Valencia Chalice doesn’t actually look like something from the first century, but the holy part is specifically the cup at the top, carved from a chocolatey-red agate; the base, handles, and jewels were added centuries later. How it got to Spain, and into the hands of the cathedral, is a long and complicated history. One theory is that the holy cup was taken by St. Peter to Rome, and some time later by a Vatican soldier to Spain, where it landed at Valencia Cathedral.
The Holy Chalice of the Gospels got mixed up with medieval pursuits of a “Holy Grail” around the time of 13th century Arthurian legends. The “grail” was considered, in different tales, as either a bowl or dish, a platter, or sometimes even just a stone. It was said to have mystical powers of spiritual or material abundance, grace, or eternal youth, and stories of the grail were eventually grafted onto the goblet of the Bible. The Holy Chalice became the Holy Grail, and vice versa.
But even if challengers knock the Valencia Chalice out of the running as the elusive Holy Grail, it’s still a lovely treasure to see.
If today’s complicated dating world disturbs you, imagine being a young woman in love in 17th-century Wales. You can’t wait to begin your life with your beau, but first, you need to prove to your parents that you’re ready to marry—by being bundled up in a sack and put to bed.
This unusual courtship ritual had a standard format. Step one: invite your date home to meet your parents. Step two: watch in horror as your mother ties you up from feet to waist in a heavy sack. Step three: get into your parents’ bed fully clothed next to your date under the watchful eyes of your parents, who place a thick wooden board between you and tuck you in for the night.
This practice would generally keep today’s young person from ever dating again, but bundling seems to have been popular in Ireland, the rural United Kingdom, and the New England colonies from the 16th into the 18th century. William Bingly in his travelogue North Wales described how the “lover steals, under the shadow of the night, to the bed of the fair one, into which (retaining an essential part of his dress) he is admitted without any shyness or reserve.”
In the heyday of bundling, ideas surrounding marriage and bedrooms were far removed from the privacy we currently hold dear. Bedrooms were semi-public spaces until roughly the late 18th century, and were used for anything from giving birth to entertaining guests. Bundling, which usually involved adolescents, just added one more ritual to the bedroom’s list of uses.
When two teens were interested in one another, if both sets of parents approved, the girl’s parents invited the boy to the home, often on Saturday nights, and bundling process began. The bundling bag, a readily available, makeshift chastity device, was normally tied around the lower half of the girl’s body, though some accounts claim that each young person was placed into a bundling bag up to their necks, if possible.
But not everyone was in favor of letting their kids sleep in a bed with the opposite sex. Bundling drew ire from contemporary religious leaders and later from historians in Victorian England. In the 19th century, Henry Reed Stiles writes in his history of Connecticut that bundling “sapped the fountain of morality and tarnished the escutcheons of thousands of families,” though in Holland, where a similar practice was called “queesting”, it was hardly ever abused.
Contemporary preacher Jonathan Edwards outwardly spoke against bundling as a risky practice teetering on the edge of dangerous promiscuity, writing that this seemingly new sexual awakening of common people would “ruin a person's reputation and be looked upon as sufficient evidences of a prostitute" had it happened in any other country; he also worried about pregnancies preceding wedlock.The latter was probably a legitimate fear; pregnancies following bundling weren’t unheard of, and one in 10 of every first child born in colonial America was born eight months after marriage. One poem of the time, reprinted by Stiles, serves as a cautionary tale:
A bundling couple went to bed With all their clothes from foot to head; That the defense might seem complete Each one was wrapped in a sheet But oh, this bundling’s such a witch The man of her did catch the itch, And so provoked was the wretch That she of his a bastard catch’d.
If this happened, of course, the family knew who the child’s father was, and a marriage was often secured immediately to save the daughter’s reputation. In Tudor England’s lower economic classes in particular, premarital sex was less of a social issue; simple contracts signed by the betrothed fathers, along with the town’s general acceptance of the union, was usually enough to officiate marriage.
According to the Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue in 1811, bundling also was “an expedient practiced in America on a scarcity of beds, where, on such occasions, husbands and parents frequently permitted travelers to bundle with their wives and daughters.” More than likely, the head of the household would share his bed first; some people made or bought beds with an easily inserted bundling board so they could rent out half a bed to travelers with ease.
The origins of bundling may have come, as Stiles suggested, from a simple lack of fuel and cash in the cold winter months. Others believe its use as a legitimate marriage bolster originated from the story of Boaz and Ruth in Judeo-Christian religious texts, as social historian Yochi Fischer-Yinon described in his article The Original Bundlers. In the story, wealthy landowner Boaz and maiden Ruth spend a night getting to know one another on a thatched floor by talking and sleeping only, before committing to a happy marriage.
Bundling became so attractive to some parents in the 1960s that it was briefly revived, and was used in religious Christian communities including Amish culture. A tongue-in-cheek article of Christianity Today in 1969 described a student group called “The Society to Bring Back Bundling”, and according to Fischer-Yinon, bundling was seen as “a nostalgic attempt to provide a warm, safe and ‘decent’ alternative to the sexual encounters of young couples taking place in parked cars or deserted places.”
But bundling was a more revolutionary approach to love than it looks to modern couples. Historian Lucy Worsley points out that bundling “was a step along the way towards your spouse being a matter of personal choice rather than someone picked out for you by your parents.” Bundling meant that the virtues of the young couple were maintained, but they could experiment with one another, talk late into the night, and learn what it would be like to spend hours with just one person, waking up next to them in the morning.
Despite its possible benefits and in part because of its definite weirdness, bundling fell out of fashion at the turn of the 19th century. Victorian sensibilities disapproved of premarital bed-sharing for couples, bedrooms became more private spaces, and better heating erased the need for body warmth.
While professional cuddlers have taken up the mantle for public bed-sharing these days, as a business model and cultural practice it's a far cry from the weird dating world of yore. Most of the modern U.K. and U.S. probably don’t mourn the loss, preferring to find their true loves sans bag and board—but for those of you who wish to get back to the good old days of dating, you could always give this style of authentic courtship a try.
Say it's 1820 and you're an uneducated, lower-class chap with nights and weekends free who needs to pick up a few extra quid. You might consider the profitable, if criminal, profession of body snatching.
In the early days of surgery, dissecting a corpse was seen as a heinous defilement of the body, akin to cannibalism in its vulgarity. But the growing field of surgical science demanded bodies for study. The gallows were the only place surgeons could get cadavers. Executed criminals were fair game to slice and dice, as were suicide victims, but not regular law-abiding corpses. Even in the crime-riddled streets of London and Edinburgh, there weren't enough bodies to train the new classes of young surgeons in the growing field.
So intrepid anatomists determined to educate their students would hire a body snatcher. It was a simple case of supply and demand. The surgeons needed bodies to dissect, and out-of-work men knew just where to find them: cemeteries, of course.
People had been robbing graves practically since humanity began burying its dead, usually for jewelry or money, but never had the corpse itself been so valuable. A league of "resurrection men" (so called because they "resurrected" the dead) took to the streets in the dead of night. In middle class cemeteries a watchman could be given a cut to look the other way. In the graveyards of the less prosperous where there was no such guard snatching was considerably easier. Fresh bodies were obviously preferable, so they would browse funerary announcements to find out where the newly dead would be buried.
The resurrectionists would dig a small hole near the head of the coffin then drag the body out with a rope. Clothing and jewelry were left behind; stealing those could be considered a felony, but if they were caught stealing a body it was only a misdemeanor. The grave would be filled back in and mourners might never know a grave was empty.
In The Diary of a Resurrectionist, dated January 13, 1812, a resurrection man details his work over the course of a night:
"Took 2 of the above to Mr Brookes & 1 large & 1 small to Mr Bell. Foetus to Mr Carpue. Small to Mr Framton. Large small to Mr Cline. Met at 5, the Party went to Newington. 2 adults. Took them to St Thomas’s."
"Large" here refers to adults, while "small" refers to children. Clearly, no grave was safe from the body snatcher's shovel. In fact, anatomists would have been glad to receive bodies that were not adult men. Bodies of children and women, particularly pregnant women, were a rare and desirable (if macabre) commodity.
Other entries from the resurrectionist's diary include reference to selling just the extremities of a body to places like St. Thomas' and St. Bartholomew's reputable hospitals, whose body purchases were done on the sly. Their operating surgeons would meet the grave robbers in back doors and alleyways to buy the stolen corpses in the wee hours of night. The operating theatres at St. Thomas and St. Bart's, where stolen cadavers would have been dissected for anatomy lectures, now operate museums dedicated to this crime-enabled medical history.
Body snatchers were the lowest of low criminals. Practically every entry in The Diary of a Resurrectionist ends with, "all got drunk." They were disreputable characters known to congregate in the seedy end of London. One of these sites was commemorated as early as the 1660s in an inscription under the city's Golden Boy statue.
But it wasn't until the infamous Anatomy Murders that grave robbers were labeled as a public menace that had to be stopped.
William Burke and William Hare lived in Edinburgh in 1828. Burke made his money hawking secondhand clothes to paupers, Hare made his by renting his rooms out to lodgers. When one of his tenants was found dead, the pair decided to compensate for the lost wages from the dead lodger by selling his body to the anatomists at Edinburgh University's Surgeon's Square. The esteemed Dr. Robert Knox, father of modern anatomy, paid them £7 for the body. The two resurrectionists were told the surgeons "would be glad to see them again when they had another to dispose of."
Burke and Hare took Knox up on his offer. When a subsequent lodger showed symptoms of cholera, Hare and his wife agreed it would be unseemly to allow her to stay on the premises with other guests. He and Burke smothered the woman and brought her body to the Royal College of Surgeons. This time they were paid £10, and Dr. Knox commended them on the freshness of the body.
Their killing spree went on like this. Burke and Hare would murder unsuspecting lodgers and drifters in their sleep, sometimes sedating them with liquor first, then they would bring them to Dr. Knox. The bodies were used in anatomy lectures, where on more than one occasion students' claims that they recognized the deceased were waved away.
Eventually another lodger found the undelivered body of Burke and Hare's final victim hidden in a haystack. Their business was traced back to the Royal College of Surgeons. Knox claimed innocence of the murders and was exonerated. Burke and Hare were tried and convicted for the killing of 17 people, the former receiving the death sentence while the latter was merely jailed temporarily.
In an ironic twist of fate, Burke's body was donated to the Royal College of Surgeons, supplying the institution one final time. He was dissected before a sold-out lecture, a letter was written in his blood, his skeleton put on display, and his skin was used to bind a book and a wallet.
A media firestorm ensued. Newspapers ran with the salacious story of the two murderers supplying the vicious field of surgery. Copycats followed: The "London Burkers" were arrested in 1831 for a series of similar murders. Mysteriously, just a few years after the Anatomy Murders two young boys discovered dolls depicting Burke and Hare's victims hidden in a park. Who made the dolls or why is still unknown.
The public was terrified by these increased reports of grave robbery. Death rites were sacred for the Georgians, as evidenced by the highly specific mourning customs that evolved over the 19th century. To have your loved one's ceremonious wake and funeral capped off by a disgraceful dismemberment was the ultimate affront to class and society, not to mention just disrespectful and icky. Families feared that body snatchers were coming for their dear deceased, and funneled even more money into funerary costs to protect against grave robbing. These measures included installing permanent mortsafes, giant metal cages atop the graves. An example can still be seen at Greyfriars Cemetery in Edinburgh.
In Scotland two popular solutions arose. One was morthouses, circular buildings in graveyards where coffins would be stored until the bodies inside were too rotten to be of any use to anatomists and their hired snatchers. The second solution was to hire a watchman, either for one specific grave or the entire burial ground. The round, squat buildings constructed to protect the watchmen from the elements are still visible in some cemeteries. The manor cemetery at Boleskine House, for one, features a watchman's shelter, which is linked to the house cellar by a mysterious underground tunnel.
A more unbelievable (and sadly, more difficult to find) anti-grave robbing mechanism was the cemetery gun. It was a spring-loaded revolver, trip wired to shoot at anyone trespassing in a cemetery when they shouldn't be. An example of this rare cemetery gun is on display at the Museum of Mourning Art in Pennsylvania.
A crackdown on body snatching came in the wake of the Burke and Hare murders and London Burkers. British Parliament enacted the Anatomy Act of 1832, loosening restrictions around the procurement of bodies for anatomy courses. In addition to bodies of the executed, bodies of prisoners, orphans, and unclaimed corpses from the morgue were all fair game for anatomy lessons. Additionally, several doctors put out a call to their aging brethren to donate their own bodies to science. A few took up the challenge. Graves were no longer violated in the name of medical progress.
Anatomy labs are no longer the leering event they were in the 19th century. Civilians, as well as dedicated scientists, today donate their bodies after death, and modern med schools frequently include a funeral service to honor the anonymous body on their slabs.
Perhaps no image from the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City is more recognizable than the silent protest of Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the Olympic medalist podium. During the award ceremony, Smith and Carlos, gold and bronze medalists in the 200-meter track event, raised their black-gloved fists in a black power salute, and removed their shoes to symbolize black poverty.
The African-American athletes intended to draw global attention to the plight of people of color in the U.S., spotlighting the injustice and inequality endured by millions of black Americans.
At the time, the political gesture was criticized and even booed by some of the crowd at the stadium. Back in the U.S., Smith and Carlos were ostracized from the sporting establishment, subject to widespread criticism and abuse, and received death threats. But like the movement they came to represent, the protesters persevered. Both Smith and Carlos went on to have successful careers in the NFL and later in teaching and community work.
In 2005, Tommie Smith and John Carlos were honored by their alma mater, San Jose State University, with a sculpture depicting their famous gesture. Rigo 23, a Portuguese-born artist often associated with the Black Power and equal rights movements, constructed the piece in the center of the San Jose State University campus.
The statue stands at 22 feet tall, and notably lacks Australian second place medalist Peter Norman. While Norman stood in solidarity with Smith and Carlos (and suffered back in his native Australia because of it) he declined to be depicted in the installation shortly before his death in 2006. This allows visitors to stand in his spot on the podium, in solidarity with the civil rights movement for years to come.
