Barcelona's Estació de França is sunlit and bright. The train station is designed in clean classical lines with black and white marble floors. It is one of those stations that feels timeless, conjuring romanticism. But the first Saturday of every month it transforms into something even more unique: a market for model trains. 

The market is clearly for connoisseurs. Vendors hawk not only model trains, but also engine pieces and small little lamps and other accessories. Some of the model trains are carrying cargo varying from perfectly crafted logs to coal pieces. Every single part necessary for a train is available here in triplicate—in tiny form. 

This is also a market for train enthusiasts in general. There are antique conductors hats on offer as well as old train lamps, and old books about the history of trains and railways. Sadly, the model train market has been on the decline for the past two decades as devotees age. Indeed the Estació de França market has a nostalgic feeling. It seems as though it is one of the last breaths of a subculture that once captured the hearts and minds of thousands of children in the 1950s and '60s.

It is well worth an afternoon visit to see the lovingly crafted tracks, train models, and miniature scenery of the classic station's model trains.

Consider for a moment these words from George Orwell’s 1938 “Homage to Catalonia":

“I defy anyone to be thrown as I was among the Spanish working class—I ought perhaps to say the Catalan working class—and not be struck by their essential decency; above all, their straightforwardness and generosity. A Spaniard’s generosity, in the ordinary sense of the word, is at times almost embarrassing. If you ask him for a cigarette he will force whole packet upon you. And beyond this there is generosity in a deeper sense, a real largeness of spirit, which I have met with again and again in the most unpromising circumstances.”

Short of making a trip to Barcelona—indeed, back in time to Barcelona—this spirit can be found in a used bookstore in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Kensington, Maryland. 

Located within the Kensington Row Bookshop, the La Fundació Paulí Bellet, Pauli Bellet Foundation's Catalan Library offers one of the largest collection of Catalan-language materials outside of Spain. A miniature of Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi’s "Sagrada Familia" is encased in glass. A verse fragment by beloved author Jacint Verdaguer is painted on the wall. 

The foundation was established in 1987 to promote Catalan literature and culture in the U.S., and to be a meeting place for the Catalan community in the Washington, DC. area. It was created in honor of and named for Pauli Bellet, a monk from Montserrat (a sacred mountain outside Barcelona) who relocated to D.C. to teach at Catholic University. It was created by his friend, fellow professor, and fellow Catalan Josep M. Sola-Sole, who moved to D.C. with his wife Montserrat (named after the mountain) in the early 1960s and formed the nucleus of a small expatriate community. 

At the time, Francisco Franco was imposing harsh measures on the Catalan people to get them to give up their language and culture. Montserrat remembers posters in the street, demanding, “Don’t bark! Speak Spanish!” The independence movement continues to this day, with a resurgence recently put down by the Spain’s constitutional court.

The foundation has been in its present location since the bookstore opened in 2002. Josep Sola-Sole died the following year, and his daughter Elisenda now runs the store and the foundation. She says people are very surprised when they find a room full of a language they never heard of before.

The largest manmade sandstone caves in Europe, known as Pekelné Doly, or "Mines of Hell," lie in a forested area near the Svitavka River. Dug in the 18th century to collect sand for the production of glass for mirrors, the mining operation excavated tunnels a whopping 11,500 square feet in total, supported by sturdy rock columns.

In World War II, the caverns were used as a clandestine rapid-fire munitions factory, but following the end of the war the caves were abandoned. That is until a motorcycle club moved in.

Motoklub Pekelné Doly takes its name from its headquarters. Their sigil is a bat, and they refer to the opening and closing of the caverns for the season as the "waking" and "sleeping" of the bat. The bikers use the caves not just as a meeting place, but as a riding ground too: Bikes can be raced inside on the roads painted throughout the tunnels. There is even a fully stocked underground bar which bikers can ride right up to, though non-alcoholic beverages are preferable for "drivers and abstainers."

Pekelné Doly is no den of iniquity. The club hosts community events and offers the caves for private events. There is ample parking for cars and bikes alike onsite, and the club serves food as well as drinks to all those who wish to come explore the old quarry. Their emphasis is on road safety for motorbikes and vehicles alike, and their motto is "jezdi v klidu!," "ride in peace!"

On a cold January night in 1924, a young woman flaunting a stylish bobbed haircut slinked into the Thomas Roulston grocery store in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. She was dolled up in a fine sealskin coat, beaded gray dress, black shoes, and stockings. Just as the male clerk was wrapping up her order of a dozen eggs, she suddenly whipped out a .25 automatic pistol from her fur coat and shouted: “Stick ‘em up! Quick!”

“Then up they went, both arms together, like one of those monkey’s you buy on a stick with a string at the ten cent store,” the woman would later recount. “I thought, ‘Gee, that would make a pretty toy for my baby.’”

The grocer and five other clerks had become the first victims of the eventually infamous "Bobbed Haired Bandit"—a now-forgotten criminal who was an icon of liberated women in 1920s New York. For three and a half months in 1924, married couple Celia and Edward Cooney embarked on a series of armed robberies around Brooklyn, inspiring tabloid news stories, satirical cartoons, and political and cultural agendas. Depending on what paper you read, the Bobbed Haired Bandit was a ruthless libertine, a heroine of the lower class, a weak woman controlled by her husband, or a trailblazer of the feminist movement.

The “Bobbed-Haired Bandit and Her Tall Companion” can be thought of as an early iteration of the 1930s gangsters Bonnie and Clyde, says Andrew Mattson, co-author of The Bobbed Haired Bandit: A True Story of Crime and Celebrity in 1920s New York. Ultimately though, it was Celia’s five-foot frame, fashionable 1920s style, and “baby automatic” that stole newspaper headlines.

“She became such a big sensation in the papers because she was a woman with a gun driving a fast car, and that was exciting, that was titillating,” says Mattson. “She was a bobbed-haired woman in the 1920s, so she became a symbol of everything that was wrong with ‘women these days.’”

The era of Prohibition in the early 20th century was a period marked by poverty, deep schisms in social class, gangs, and high crime rates. While it wasn’t uncommon for women to be involved in an array of criminal activities, they were almost always accomplices to men. A woman might carry and conceal a gun, but the male gangster would usually be the one doing the shooting. And yet, according to witnesses and victims, the Bobbed Haired Bandit seemed to be in charge, says Mattson.

“This was a narrative that was attached to a lot of the fears of the era,” he says. “This was the era of the flapper, women smoking, women getting the vote, women driving cars, and doing nontraditional jobs. [Robbery] was another nontraditional job that women were moving into.”

Some New Yorkers saw her as a celebration of female empowerment, while others saw her as a symptom of the corrupted modern woman. But while the newspapers drew up their own picture of the Bobbed Haired Bandit, Celia Cooney never intended on being a bold figure for women’s rights.

Celia was born in a basement in a New York City apartment. She and her eight older siblings were neglected by their parents. Both parents were uneducated, and their father drank heavily. According to reports at the time in The New York Times and New York World, the children were sent out to beg on the streets and were eventually placed under the care of their aunt.

At the age of 16, Celia became independent and began her career as a laundry worker in 1919. She married Ed Cooney on May 18, 1923. The 20-year-old bride and 25-year-old auto repairman were maintaining a mediocre but happy lifestyle in a small room in Bedford, when Celia became pregnant. She dreamed of providing a well-furnished home for her husband and family—the kind she saw in the movies, magazines, and shop windows.

Celia later revealed that “this was something she was doing not because she was a female bandit queen,” says Mattson. “She was stealing money so she could buy a bedroom set and a dine-net set for her home. She very much saw herself as a traditional wife and mother-to-be.”

The Cooneys targeted mostly smaller victims—drug stores, groceries, and markets in Brooklyn. Each job was orchestrated in a similar manner: Celia would be the first to draw her weapon as Ed stood menacingly at six-feet-tall near the back of the shop with two guns. Ed collected the money from the cash register (usually amounting to a few hundred dollars) and drove them off in a mad dash. The papers usually played up Celia’s role in the robberies, while Ed took the side seat.

The Bobbed Haired Bandit became a local celebrity and household name. Iterations of “Bobbed Bandit” and “Gun Girl” were plastered in headlines of almost every local paper from the Daily News, New York Post, Brooklyn Eagle, and New York Times. She was even worked into vaudeville routines, songs, and poems, such as this one published in the Brooklyn Standard Union:

Still she progresses.
The girl with the bob 
Is right on the job
And, in the Holdup Clan
She has proven that she
The equal can be
Of any bandit man

“How Celia was portrayed had less to do with her and more to do with the presumed biases of the audience of the papers and the editor’s and reporter’s attitudes about gender,” says Stephen Duncombe, co-author of The Bobbed Haired Bandit.

Some of the papers even used her to mock how the city’s mayor and police force were powerless and ineffective in controlling a crime-ridden New York. Faced with such ridicule, police set up a massive hunt for the Bobbed Haired Bandit, placing roadblocks and arresting and stopping all bobbed-haired women who looked suspicious. The singer Ella Fitzgerald, who sported the popular bob and drove a car, was even stopped on 59th Street and accused of being the infamous bandit, says Mattson.

“The police would claim they had caught the Bobbed Haired Bandit, only to have it turn out it was another woman [criminal],” says Duncombe. The police even imprisoned one Helen Quigley for a month and a half, causing Celia and Ed to leave behind a note at their next stint that mocked their failed efforts:

“You dirty fish-peddling bums, leave this innocent girl alone and get the right ones, which is nobody else but us, and we are going to give Mr. Hogan, the manager of Roulston’s, another visit, as we got two checks we couldn’t cash, and also ask Bohack’s manager did I ruin his cash register. Also I will visit him again, as I broke a perfectly good automatic on it. We defy you fellows to catch us.”

The Cooneys’ robberies came to an alarming halt on April 1, 1924, at the National Biscuit Company's payroll office. The cashier there tried to make a grab for Celia, who stumbled back and fell over a chair. Thinking she had been struck or cut, Ed fired two shots, injuring the cashier (many of the papers incorrectly stated at first that Celia had been the shooter). It was the first and only time anyone had been hurt in one of their robberies.

The pair fled in a panic, leaving behind $8,000 in an open safe. They moved to Florida, where Celia gave birth to Katherine. However, the baby became ill and died eight days after she was born. The Cooneys were eventually identified and caught after the police searched maternity wards in Florida.

They both pleaded guilty and were sentenced to a maximum of 20 years in prison. Paroled after seven years, Ed and Celia had two sons, Patrick and Edward Jr., who would not learn of their mother’s bandit past until her death on July 13, 1992. She had kept her and Ed’s string of robberies a secret for 50 years.

“It was a terrible, terrible shock,” her son Ed told Mattson and Duncombe. “I mean I just never dreamed that any of this had taken place.”

When the Bobbed Haired Bandit and Her Tall Companion were at last captured, the mystery and allure of their tale quickly vanished. Celia Cooney had been portrayed as a vicious, gun-bearing woman overturning moral convention, but in reality she'd taken up robbery so she could live a middle-class life as a mother and wife. She later outwardly rejected the idea that she was a gender revolutionary, says Mattson. Unintentionally, Celia and the Bobbed Haired Bandit became a lightning rod for debates of the time.

“We really liked Celia Cooney. It’s really hard not to fall for her,” says Mattson. “She really is both a character and a heroine. While she was breaking the law, she was the little person of the working class who you could identify with.”

If a burglar is on the loose, what better way to catch them than with a gun that launches a hundred square-foot nylon net? At least, that's what one inventor thought in 1969.

In the video above, archived by British Pathé, an inventor by the name of Colin Brown shows how his device "net-a-thief" can easily capture a robber who had stolen five penny stamps from the post office. At the pull of a trigger, the projectile instrument, or net gun, launches four weights that are attached to the netting. When the net traps the robber, the weights swing around the victim's body, rendering him immobile.

"It's not as easy as it might seem to get out of a hundred square-feet of nylon netting," says the narrator.

While you certainly can catch an adult human with a net gun today, the devices are not typically used to entrap robbers. Rather, they are a popular option to humanely trap animals, and even drones hovering in zones they shouldn't be in. 

It may be "simple, cheap, and effective," but net guns sadly never caught on as a primary way to capture criminals. 

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.

Picture this short scene in your mind: A sleepy country house sits by the side of the road, birds chirping. Suddenly, a bad guy of some sort—maybe a masked burglar, or a mustached knave—enters stage right and tiptoes through the yard, up to the home's window. He peeks inside, gathering information, and then quickly backpedals, shuffling out of the frame again.

Now visualize the same thing, but try putting a score under it. As the ne'er-do-well sneaks around, what music do you hear in your mind? Does it sound something...like this?

If so, you're certainly not alone. This tune, called the Mysterioso Pizzicato, is a musical go-to for sneaky situations, forever associated with thieves, creeps, stalkers and spies. Along with its villainous name, the Mysterioso Pizzicato has a fittingly roguish backstory—to reach its current level of ubiquity, it has had to muzzle history, defy experts, and slip past hundreds of its more musically interesting peers.

No one is quite sure who wrote the Mysterioso Pizzicato. Some think it was J. Bodewalt Lampe, a ragtime arranger most famous for his takes on dance-craze songs like the "Turkey Trot." Others credit J.S. Zamecnik, a composer who wrote scores for silent films at Cleveland, Ohio's Hippodrome Theater. But most agree that the piece started out life around 1916, as a silent film "mood."

"Moods"—short riffs written to pair with different filmed scenarios—were a way for silent film accompanists to combat a unique type of job drudgery. "Movie theaters were open 10 to 12 hours a day, seven days a week," explains Ben Model, a silent film composer and a resident accompanist at the Museum of Modern Art. "You'd get tired of playing the same pieces."

 In the mid-1910s, sheet music publishers, sensing a need, began churning out folios stuffed with variations on musical tropes, for accompanists to pick and choose between. "There would be an agitato"—a hurried, choppy tune, perhaps for an action scene—"and a love theme, and a march," says Model. "And there would be a mysterioso."

Eventually, composers wrote hundreds of these mysteriosos. Although each was a little different, they had certain things in common—they were minor-key, slow, and "just sound[ed] scary," Model says. In a 1912 issue of The Moving Picture News, silent film theater director Ernst Luz describes the mysterioso as "the most beautiful effect of all." "It should be used for such dramatic action, usually quiet, wherein the ensuing action is in doubt," he wrote.

"Cue sheets"—instructions detailing what type of mood should be played during different scenes—give an idea of the mysterioso's specific use. In A Transplanted Prairie Flower, a comedy-drama from 1913, a mysterioso is recommended for the part where Mary, a country transplant new to New York, sleeps in a chair in her city apartment, until she wakes up and sees burglars trying to sneak in. Andy and the Redskins, also from 1913, requires a "mysterioso of Indian character." No matter what the theme of the film, there was always a scene ripe for a mysterioso, says Model.

Strangely, though, very few of these thousands of scenes seemed to require the Mysterioso Pizzicato specifically. Although it was occasionally mentioned in educational articles about film music, players seemed to eschew it. "I've only ever seen it listed once on a cue sheet," says Kendra Leonard, director of the Silent Film Sound and Music Archive. Although Model says people hum the tune at him incessantly, he's never come across it in an actual silent film score. Neither has Rodney Sauer, score compiler and pianist for the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra.

How, then, did it get so popular? The answer likely lies with a different, but related art form—parodies of silent films. When sound came to the movies in the late 1930s, new filmmakers were happy to poke their suddenly outdated predecessors in the ribs. "Warner Bros would make these movies that would make fun of silent films, with corny narration and creepy old music," says Model. (Early cartoons did the same thing—a minute into the clip below, from Van Beuren Studios' Making 'Em Move, a visitor to the cartoon factory walks down a foreboding hallway as the Mysterioso Pizzicato plays.)

There was just one problem: a lot of the tropes these send-ups drew on (people tied to train tracks, caped villains, pie fights) often weren't from silent films at all, but from Victorian-era stage melodramas. Outdated plot points and outdated technology were conflated to form a strange, hybrid genre, which the hip new crowds loved to spoof.

Some of these parodies must have picked up the Mysterioso Pizzicato precisely because it was goofy and over-the-top. Max Steiner, a more serious sound film composer, also began using it somewhat ironically—for instance, in 1944's The Adventures of Mark Twain, it plays under a scene in which the young Twain sneaks up on some frogs.

By now, the Mysterioso Pizzicato has developed a life of its own, showing up everywhere from monster movies to Frank Zappa live performances. Meanwhile, modern-day accompanists largely refuse to embrace it. Model calls the riff "corny and shticky" and hardly, if ever, uses it in his own playing—"many of [the other mysteriosos] are much better," he says. Sauer agrees: "It would be hard to use the piece un-ironically," he writes in an email.

But the Mysterioso Pizzicato doesn't need their help. Somehow, it worms into our ears all by itself—the mark of a true sneak.

At the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, it was long known that the human figure in one of the museum’s most famous exhibits had real human teeth. Recently, though, a CT scan revealed that the figure’s head was sculpted onto a real human skull, reports the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

The exhibit shows a man on camelback fighting off three Barbary lions. The diorama was displayed for many years under the title “Arab Courier Attacked by Lions,” but the museum recently changed the title to “Lion Attacking a Dromedary,” a translation of the original French title.

The museum worked with the local medical examiner’s office to scan the entire exhibit as part of a restoration. The head is the only part of the man that’s built using human bones; the rest of the figure is a mannequin.

The diorama’s creator, Edouard Verreaux, worked with his brother Jules to collect and trade natural history specimens in the 1830s and 40s. They were working at a time when it was acceptable in Europe to steal and display human body parts from non-white people, who were often considered less than human. The Verreaux brothers' most infamous piece of taxidermy was made from the skin and skull of an African man, whose body Jules Verreaux secretly exhumed after witnessing the man’s burial.

The museum staff told the Post-Gazette that since there’s little information about the origins of the skull in this diorama, the museum is not considering repatriation. A curator also suggested to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that it could have been stolen from the catacombs of Paris.

The piece reflects a style of 19th century taxidermy that’s long been outdated and was considered tacky even in its day. As the Post-Gazette reports, the piece was originally acquired by the American Museum of Natural History but put in storage after being judged“too theatrical, too gauche, and thus not scientifically worthy of museum display.”

In recent decades, museums have been working to repatriate the human remains in their collections, in recognition that past racism in science need not have a place in modern museums. The remains of the man the Verreaux brothers taxidermied, for instance, were returned to Botswana in the ‘90s. Some museums, though, have chosen to keep or keep on display human remains, even after tribal governments have requested that they be returned.

Items that don’t have a clear provenance are more difficult to handle. In a 2011 report on the Smithsonian’s repatriation efforts, the Government Accountability Office noted that the relevant law “does not discuss how to handle human remains and objects that cannot be culturally affiliated.” The two museums considered in the report had different approaches to those items. The Natural History museum retained these objects; the American Indian Museum worked with tribes to take a custodial role for items that didn’t have obvious provenance. “The American Indian Museum’s philosophy is to ultimately not have any human remains or associated funerary objects within its collection,” the GAO reported.

The Carnegie Museum of Natural History intends to put the skull back on display and is planning a symposium to discuss its "historical and intellectual context."

Brooklyn once had a trolley system as novel and iconic to the borough as the subways are to New York City today, although many New Yorkers might be unaware it ever existed. Even the trolley car graveyard, a massive pit where the retired trains were interred at the end of the Canarsie line, is now entirely buried without a trace.

But in the late-19th and mid-20th centuries, the streets of Brooklyn were full of trolleys. Before they relocated to Los Angeles, the Dodgers played in Brooklyn from 1884 to 1957. Their original name? The "Trolley Dodgers," for the practice of jumping out of the path of speeding electric streetcars. Trolleys were a public service that was somewhere between luxury and utility. Wealthy socialites would rent entire cars to host after hours cocktail parties in.

When automobiles took over the streets, streetcars were replaced by buses and personal vehicles. The trolley cars were phased out of use. Some were sent to other cities and countries as far as South America. Others were sold off to museums. But many of the Brooklyn trolleys were sunk into a pit about the size of a city block at the end of the Canarsie line in the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company yard.

The giant grave comprised of seven acres, about 35 feet deep—it had to be in order to submerge the cars. The tracks led right to the edge of the pit, and from there the trolleys would topple to the bottom.

Trolleys were interred in the pit up until 1939. After that the pit remained open, used as a swimming hole by local kids. Some of the scrap metal from the sunken trolleys was used for tanks and artillery during World War II. Eventually the pit was filled in to make more room for the developing neighborhood. Most of the old timers who remembered the trolleys are gone now, meaning that the residents of East 99th Street may be unaware of the historic treasure buried beneath them.

Before you read any further, let's make this clear—save for a few bumps and bruises, all of the puppies involved in this incident are fine.

Okay, here we go: a van filled with 104 puppies crashed in upstate New York on Tuesday afternoon, NBC News reports.

The puppies—schnauzers, boxes, golden retrievers, and terriers—were on their way to mall pet stores when the van's driver lost control and skidded into a ditch.

New York State Police officers came to the rescue, along with the Finger Lakes SPCA. They set up a triage area in a nearby towing facility, and checked each puppy for injuries. A few with minor ones were treated at a local veterinary hospital, and have since been adopted.

The rest were housed briefly at the FLSPCA and a nearby veterinary hospital before being returned to the transport company. Concerned citizens took to the FLSPCA's Facebook page to ask whether this was the right choice, as it's possible the puppies came from a mill.

"We know of no means to legally confiscate animals only because there is a strong likelihood that a puppy came from [a puppy mill]," the organization responded. Let's hope wherever they ended up is better than that ditch.

Wat Pa Thewapithak, a hellish amusement park located at a Buddhist temple, isn't the only terrifying theme park of its kind. There are Buddhist Hell parksin Singapore, in Vietnam, and all throughout Thailand. Many of the parks are operated by Buddhist temples, where they function as a cautionary tale.

Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike visit the hell parks to see the torture that awaits them in the next life in Naraka, the realm of hell where the worst of the worst spend eons as retribution for bad karma. 

If the generally terrible quality of the statuary isn't enough to frighten you by itself, perhaps its depictions of all the tortures of the hell awaiting unfaithful believers will do the trick. Witness skeletons, demons, corpses, and other monstrosities; behold a variety of tortures (eyes gouged out, entrails spilled, limbs hacked off, torsos impaled).

Each gruesome diorama has a small box where, at the insertion of a 1 baht coin, tinny screams, macabre laughter, and sonorous diatribes will blast from a small loudspeaker. Some of the dioramas are even automated, as the 1 baht coin will also activate motors that will jerkily tug the highly visible strings attached to the statues. 

While there are large and presumably educational banners posted frequently throughout the park, those unable to read Thai will find them unhelpful. Even more unfortunately, caged animals are kept in dark, dingy corners. 

The miniature Angkor Wat labyrinth, on the other hand, is well worth the 90 seconds it takes to duck through its child-size doorways, as it is strewn with some decent recreations of Apsara's and other Buddhist and Hindu iconography, as well as, for an unknown reason, the bust of a stoic Native American chief. 

As with all tourist attractions in Thailand, food and drink vendors abound on site.

This statue honors a Mormon pioneer, whose faith, courage, and physical indomitability made her a local hero.

She was born Ellen Purcell, but known to family and friends as Nellie, in England in 1846. When she was 9, she, her older sister Maggie, and their parents joined the Latter-Day Saints Church and travelled to the United States to settle in Salt Lake Valley. They traveled with the Edward Martin Company, one of the many parties of Mormon handcart pioneers to settle in Utah.

During the journey, an early snowstorm hit. First Nellie and Maggie's father died, and their mother followed five days later. As the two girls walked through the snow, Nellie's bare feet became frostbitten. They fell behind the company and would have died if not for a rescue party sent by Brigham Young himself from Salt Lake City. By the time she reached Utah, both of her legs were amputated below the knee with a butcher knife, a saw, and no anesthesia. Her stumps never fully healed.

When Nellie was 24, she moved to Cedar City and married William Unthank. The couple had six children. Mrs. Unthank would do chores and care for her family, not allowing her disability to slow her down. She covered her stumps with a leather apron and crawled about her house. She and her children even cleaned the entire Latter Day Saints meeting house once a year as thanks for their support.

In 1991, a statue of a youthful Nellie as a young, smiling girl with legs was dedicated at the site of her former family home on what is now the campus of Southern Utah University.

Here he comes, creeping through a shadowy alley. It looks like he’s getting away, until a police spotlight captures him against a stark brick wall. In a black domino mask, striped shirt, flat cap, and holding a sack of purloined goods, it’s a BURGLAR!

We can all see the stereotype in our mind’s eye, but where did this cartoonish image come from? The very first instance of the stereotypical burglar is a bit unclear, but the various elements of the figure can be found springing up around the 1800s, though the roots of some costume elements go back even further.

The oldest element of the villainous caricature is the domino mask, which can be traced back to the masquerades of the 17th century. In Venice during the 1600s, elaborate costume balls allowed their mainly upper-class attendees to don masks to obscure their identities so they could be removed from the rigid expectations of their social class. This encouraged an air of clandestine intrigue that is still associated with carnival masks.

Many of the traditional masks of the time were elaborate, full-face masks, but the smaller half-masks, which only covered the eyes and sometimes the nose, were also a popular option, for both men and women. Also in the 17th century, the trickster character of the harlequin came into prominence, and was most often depicted wearing a smaller domino mask, which only surrounded the eyes.

As the tradition of the masquerade spread throughout Europe, the mask eventually became simplified into a black strip that laid across the eyes, with holes cut out so that the wearer could still see. This basic mask, whether directly descended from the world of the masquerade or created simply out of necessity, became associated with ne'er-do-wells who wanted to hide their identity. Depictions of a burglar wearing a simple domino mask can be found as early as 1871, in an advertisement encouraging women to arm themselves for home self-defense. Although the figure in this advertisement is wearing a suit as opposed to the striped outfit that would become more iconic, the early seeds of the trope are plain to see.

Speaking of that striped shirt, they too came from the 1800s. The striped burglar's shirt was originally inspired by the striped, duotone uniform of prison inmates. The striped uniform was introduced as part of what we now call the “Auburn System” of penal management, which began being practiced around 1820. Under this system, prisoners were largely kept in solitary confinement, and made to perform hard labor in complete silence. The uniforms introduced with this system consisted of shirts and pants in matching, horizontal black-and-white/gray stripes, and were meant to make the inmates instantly recognizable, much like some brightly colored prison uniforms do today. The zebra-stripe style of inmate uniform spread throughout the New York penal system to prisons like Sing Sing, and across much of the rest of the country.

It wasn’t until the turn of the century that views surrounding prison uniforms began to shift away from the stripes, towards a more basic style that would not stigmatize the incarcerated laborers quite so immediately (though it’s worth noting that some modern correctional facilities have gone back to dressing inmates in stripes). However, after nearly a century of criminals wearing such a distinctive pattern, the damage was done, and images of criminals in stripes had become part of the cultural lexicon, appearing in photos and political cartoons.

Once the pattern was synonymous with criminality, it wasn’t a huge leap to having a cartoonish burglar wear the stripes. It’s a bit ironic that the stripes real convicts were made to wear so they could be identified would come to represent burglars in the middle of a crime.

Then there is the sack of loot these cartoon crooks are so often seen absconding with, which would also seem to originate in the 1800s, but is probably not rooted in much reality. The origin of the burglar’s bag, which in depictions from the U.K. often bears the word “swag” (yes, pretty much like we would use it today when referring to free promotional items), or in the U.S. with a more universal dollar symbol, leads back to a satirical children’s lyric called Burglar Bill. In this 1888 poem, a burglar breaks into a house and runs into a precocious young girl who convinces him not to rob their house, sending him into a repentant reverie. One early line in the poem, describing the robber entering the home goes:

He is furnished with a “jemmy,”
Centre-bit, and carpet-bag,
For the latter “comes in handy,”   
So he says, “to stow the swag.”

While the tools are a bit archaic (a “jemmy” would be akin to a crowbar, and although a “centre bit” is a bit of a mystery, it is described in one reference from 1889 as a “spinner”), the swag bag is easily recognizable as the inspiration for the burglar’s bag.

On its own, each element of the iconic burglar image has its roots in image of criminal life, but it’s hard to pin down the first time they were all brought together. Silent film expert Fritzi Kramer, creator of the Movies Silently blog, isn’t aware of any instances of the trope appearing in early silent films, although she does point out another key element of the figure: his hat.

“I'm afraid I've never seen the burglar outfit in a silent film,” she says. “The cloth cap was quite common but that was standard working class headgear for both men and women. Also, five o'clock shadows were quite the thing.” This flat cap has been a common bit of headgear for centuries, but it is now often found adorning depictions of crooks and criminals, almost more often than the striped top. In many modern depictions, the flat cap is sometimes replaced with a beanie.  

A likely culprit for creating the iconic burglar image may actually be a children’s book from the 1970s, loosely based on the aforementioned poem, Burglar Bill. Released in 1977, this Burglar Bill was a children’s book by Allan Ahlberg and Janet Ahlberg, and focused on the titular character as he finds a baby and reforms his ways. In the book, the titular figure is illustrated wearing each element of the classic outfit: the domino mask, the striped shirt, the loot bag, and even the cloth flat cap. When he meets another burglar, she too is wearing the domino mask and striped shirt, instantly recognizable as a burglar.

Today, classic elements of the burglar’s look can still be seen in places ranging from the Beagle Boys of DuckTales fame, in their domino masks and flat caps, to the Hamburglar in his striped suit. Actual depictions of the cartoon villain combining all of these iconic elements are rarer since the figure is by its very nature generic, but that low brow criminal figure is still skulking around the collective consciousness.        

District Six, or "Distrik Ses" in Afrikaans, was a bohemian, mixed neighborhood in every sense of the word. It was crowded with a multiracial blend of working class people, Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike, many of whom were descended from freed slaves and immigrants. In the mid–20th century, a population of roughly 60,000 lived there. Unfortunately, District Six was also at the epicenter of apartheid in Cape Town, and still bears its scars.

During the apartheid regime of the 1960s and '70s, the segregating Group Areas Act saw all the non-white residents of District Six evicted and relocated further outside the city. It was called "slum clearing," but the true intention was to fill the desirably located neighborhood with white residents and high rises. 

District Six became a symbol of apartheid oppression. A group called Hands Off District Six protested the redevelopment of their bulldozed neighborhood. It remained empty. When anti-apartheid legislation came to fruition, reparations were paid to the resettled residents of the district. Some of them, along with their descendants, have been permitted to move back to the area. Others have been given financial compensation, but righting the wrongs is slow and still ongoing.

The excellent and sobering District Six Museum provides context as well as rotating exhibits on the residents who were forcibly removed from their homes. Another highlight is St. Mark's Anglican Church, built in 1867. The government was unable to bulldoze the historic religious building, and instead offered its clergy a resettlement stipend. They declined, and St. Mark's continued to host the same community in the original location, now driving from all over Cape Town to attend service.

What's left of District Six is now part of the Zonnebloem neighborhood. A new generation has begun to rebuild there, but a small patch of land sits empty and deserted, a reminder of the cultural destruction that occurred.

In the first season of the hit TV show Westworld, a key character chooses to wear a white hat when he enters the western-themed park. Compared to his black-hatted companion, he starts out a gentleman: he doesn't want to drink or sleep with a prostitute or randomly shoot the park's robotic "hosts." But (spoiler alert) over the course of his journey, his white hat becomes dirtied and dark, until, at a transformative moment, he switches it for a black hat.

This is some heavy-handed symbolism, but it's supposed to harken back to a classic, familiar trope. This is a western, and in westerns, everyone knows, good guys wear white hats and bad guys wear black.

But even in the fictional American West, good and evil are not so clearcut, it turns out. Go digging into the history of black hats vs. white hats, and you'll find that good guys wore black, bad guys wore white. "There is no trope or consistency in who wears white or black," says Peter Stanfield, who's studied the B-westerns of the 1930s. The black vs. white dichotomy was never quite so clean as it's now remembered.

If there is a starting point of the idea that bad guys wear black hats, it's at the very beginning of Western films. In 1903, Edwin S. Porter shot The Great Train Robbery in Milltown, New Jersey, far from the actual West. In the film's twelve minutes, a group of gangsters hold up a bank, rob a train, and eventually receive their comeuppance. There's no clear hat symbolism in the film; the gangsters all wear hats, some lighter than others.

But there's one moment in The Great Train Robbery that's more memorable than the rest—the moment at the end, where all of a sudden the camera clearly shows the face of one the gangsters, in close-up, pointing his gun at the audience. He shoots. One, two, six times. He's wearing a black hat. 

That moment became famous. The moment in the James Bond prologue, where he shoots directly at camera, takes inspiration from that shot; Goodfellas, Tombstone, and Breaking Bad all contain homages. But it's harder to trace the influence of the black hat and harder still to find the first good guy to wear a white hat. "Out of all of the Westerns I have seen, there are very, very few of those movies where white hats are worn, either by good guys or bad guys," says Kevin Stoehr, co-author of Ride, Boldly Ride: The Evolution of the American Western—perhaps because white cowboy hats weren't particularly realistic. "You can imagine how dirty a white hat would have become in the dusty landscape." 

Of the film scholars I contacted, no one was able to say exactly where the idea that good guys wear white and bad guys wear black came from—there's no influential movie that kicked off the convention. If it does have a starting point, it's somewhere in the 1930s, when low-budget B-Westerns became part of Hollywood's bread and butter. Tom Mix, one of the early Western stars, often (but not always) wore a white hat, and singing cowboys, including, most notably, Gene Autry, may have been more likely to wear them than other cowboys. Perhaps the most famous white-hat-wearing cowboy, the Lone Ranger, debuted on the radio during this decade and first rode onto the screen in 1938.

There are plenty of examples from Westerns film that do fit the white hat/black hat convention. Here, in Gangsters of the Frontier, for instance, a group of four bad guys comes in wielding guns; hero Tex Ritter, wearing a white hat, intervenes.

But there are also plenty of examples that don't fit the convention. In that same scene, there's a guy caught between the bad guys and Ritter who's also wearing a dark hat, as a default.  In John Ford's 3 Bad Men, the villainous sheriff wears white, and the good-hearted outlaws wear black. In scenes of battles, there's often a mix of lighter hats and darker hats, all fighting the same enemy. In a song from around the same time, Mississippi John Hurt sings of a character of ambiguous morality who kills a man for snatching the milk-white Stetson hat from his head. Roy Rogers often wore a white hat, but Eddie Dean, "the greatest cowboy singer of all time," switched it up. Good guy Hopalong Cassidy wore dark clothes. In this golden age of Westerns, good and evil weren't color coded: there was plenty of room for moral ambiguity. 

Somewhere along the line, though, it became an accepted fact that good guys once wore white and bad guys once wore black. It's always easy to imagine that the past was simpler, and modern films sometimes use white hat/black hat symbolism in a heavy-handed way, as an homage to this imagined past. In 3:10 to Yuma, for instance, Christian Bale's good guy wears a white hat, while Russell Crowe's bad guy wears a black one.

In this century, the black hat/white hat terminology is also used to delineate between people who break into computer networks with malicious or good intentions. That story is a little bit less clear cut than it seems, too. In early hacking circles, there was a whole separate term to refer to malicious hacking: those people were called crackers. Across the internet, Richard Stallman, who founded the GNU Project and Free Software Foundation, is often credited with coining the term "black hat" hacker, but he says that's not correct.

"I have never used terms "X-hat hacker" because I reject the use of 'hacking' to refer to breaking security," he says. Where did the term come from then? "I don't know where," he says.

On all fronts, it turns out, it's not so simple to divide people into black and white.

Ever drive past the seemingly out of place gas station next to the Watergate hotel? That's the old 1932 Higgins Service Station, more widely known in recent years as the Watergate Exxon. It is one of Washington, D.C.'s most iconic gas stations.

Gas stations were an entirely new building type at the turn of the century, and oil companies were still experimenting with which architectural styles best suited their business. Two competing approaches emerged early on: classical and domestic.

Domestic style fueling stations first appeared in New York along the Westchester County parkway system. The modest cottage-like buildings drew praise for unobtrusively blending into the parkway landscape. The Higgins Service Station draws from this tradition, with its rough-hewn stone facade and slate roof. Nine bay windows and two (nonfunctional) chimneys contribute to the cottage vibe. (For an example of Classical, check out this article about the fancy Embassy Gulf Service Station in Dupont Circle.)

The neighborhood around the Higgins Service Station was very different before construction of the monumental Kennedy Center and Watergate Hotel complex, dominated by industrial buildings.  Ownership of the Higgins Service Station passed through three families until it was swallowed up by Exxon sometime after 1992. There is another interesting story about the modern Exxon station and how it acquired a nationally known, horrible reputation.

In 19 BC, Herod the Great expanded the Temple on the Mount by flattening a plateau on the hillside and enclosing it with four stone walls. These walls still remain, the only original part of the historic temple, now regarded as a holy site for Jews who know it as the Kotel and leave prayers on tiny paper scrolls in its crevices. Lesser known is the tunnel beneath the wall, which may hold some ancient secrets.

When the Western Wall was built, in order for the retaining wall to support itself at least half of its height had to be underground. It's estimated that some 10,000 laborers carried out the work of digging the tunnels and building the walls around the new temple. 

This massive piece of infrastructure was uncovered in the 19th century, when researchers from Britain unearthed the tunnels. However weren't able to discern what they were because the excavation was halted by political conflict. For 50 years the tunnels remained an unexplained mystery, but in 1967 Israel's Ministry of Religion picked up the project of excavating the entire length of the wall. In addition to dating the wall, excavators found various structures that illustrated and uncovered pieces of Jerusalem history. 

One such discovery is Warren's Gate (named for one of the original British researchers), a clandestine entrance to the temple from underground. When Jerusalem was overtaken by Muslims during the Crusades, Jews were allowed to pray in the tunnels. The Gate was and is a popular place to pray because it is believed to be the closest point of access to the Holy of Holies within the temple.

The tunnels were also public works. They contained numerous channels that supplied water to the temple, as well as a pool that may have been a bath or cistern. There is also architectural evidence that both the Romans and the Muslim Caliphates that ruled Jerusalem performed reconstruction on the tunnels, indicating they used them as thoroughfares.

The tunnels today are open to the public, attracting history lovers who marvel at the precision of this ancient architecture and the faithful glad for the close access to the holy wall. Paper prayers can be found tucked into cracks even this far below ground. The Western Wall Tunnels are still slowly being excavated, and new artifacts, from ancient coins to earthenware, are still being found. 

Nearly every language and every culture has what are called “filled pauses,” a notoriously difficult-to-define concept that generally refers to sounds or words that a speaker uses when, well, not exactly speaking. In American English, the most common are “uh” and “um.”

Until about 20 years ago, few linguists paid filled pauses much attention. They were seen as not very interesting, a mere expulsion of sound to take up space while the speaker figures out what to say next. (In Russian, filled pauses are called “parasite sounds,” which is kind of rude.) But since then, interest in filled pauses has exploded. There are conferences about them. Researchers around the globe, in dozens of different languages, dedicate themselves to studying them. And yet they still remain poorly understood, especially as new forms of discourse begin popping up.

When a Twitter user writes, “Is this what Trump meant by having Mexico pay for a wall? Because uh...it doesn’t work like that” followed by an emoji of a frog and then an emoji of a cup of coffee, it throws everything into doubt. Like most other things about filled pauses, the Twitter usage is simultaneously transparent and opaque: we know exactly what it means, but when asked to explain it, or analyze it? It turns out we really don’t know.

But researchers digging into the weird world of filled pauses have turned up some crazy, fascinating stuff. Some have taken sentences full of “ums” and “uhs” and edited them out to find out if people react more positively to someone who doesn’t use them. (They do.) Some are putting people in MRI machines to find out what weird neural stuff is going on when people use filled pauses. (Definitely some stuff.) And in Japan, researchers are trying to puzzle out how and why Japanese filled pauses are so unusual.

There is a wide and contentious debate about what a filled pause even is. Ralph Rose, a professor at Waseda University in Tokyo who maintains a site called the Filled Pause Research Center, says he tends to use different definitions based on whatever he’s studying at that moment. “I can’t give a definition that I would say most researchers would agree on,” he says. Generally speaking, filled pauses are filed under a broader umbrella of “hesitation markers,” which are words or sounds that indicate...well, something.

Some filled pauses, in some situations, might be used to indicate a delay. They tell the listener, hey, I’m not totally sure what’s coming next, but I’m not done speaking, so don’t interrupt me. Some filled pauses are actually words in their own right: in English, “like,” “you know,” and “so” can be used as filled pauses. Those words have meanings, but when used to fill a pause, they’re not exactly to be interpreted as having the meaning they’d normally have. When someone says, “And then we went to...you know...the grocery store,” they’re not asking you to chime in and confirm that you do in fact know that we went to the grocery store. It’s just there, taking up time. Sometimes those words aren’t even pronounced the same way; “like,” for example, is more likely to have its final “k” sound dropped when the word is used as a filled pause.

Sometimes, as in the Twitter use, they’re used to signal something to the reader (or listener, as the case may be). In that tweet above? That’s signaling that the conclusion (“it doesn’t work like that”) should be obvious. That’s a completely different use case than using it to indicate a delay.

Words, for example “like,” might indicate that the statement that follows it shouldn’t be taken totally seriously. “You know” could be used like the Canadian “eh,” to encourage solidarity between speaker and listener.

Though some researchers have insisted that filled pauses are individual words in their own right, with distinct meanings, many believe that there’s something more fundamental about them. With a few exceptions, filled pauses exist in every language, and are weirdly similar. In English, it’s “uh” or “um,” in Mandarin it’s “en,” in French it’s “euh,” in Hindi it’s “hoonm,” in Swedish “ohm.”

These are all very similar; essentially, they’re a centered vowel which may or may not be followed by a nasal consonant. Let’s unpack that for a sec: one way vowels are described by linguists is in terms of where the tongue is in the mouth when the vowel is made. You can kind of look at the position of the tongue when making all the available vowels in a given language, and if you take, roughly, the middle one? That’s a centered vowel. A nasal consonant is one that’s expressed through the nose rather than the mouth; in English, those are “m” and “n.”

There are very few elements of language that are consistent amongst English, Mandarin, French, Hindi, and Swedish. And yet this one is pretty much the same.

We don’t really know where filled pauses came from, partly because, Twitter aside for the moment, they are oral sounds, and very unlikely to be found in historical written records. (Scholars have the same problem with swear words.) “Despite the lack of records about historical filler usage, it’s probably safe to assume that fillers have always been a part of human language,” says Katharine Hilton, a linguist at Stanford University who studies (among other things) filled pauses. “The reason for this is because they’re very useful words and communicate a lot of information to the listener.” The very earliest recordings of the human voice show that Thomas Edison was an avid user of “uh” and “um.” That’s about as far back as our data goes, but it seems fair to assume they go back further than that. These non-words, these mistakes, these errors: these are basic building blocks of language.

Rose’s research, of late, focuses on second-language acquisition, especially on native Japanese speakers who are learning English. If we ignore the filled pauses that are basically repurposed words (“like,” “well,” “so”), the rest are often surprisingly similar from language to language. But Japanese is different. Studies, says Rose, indicate that filled pauses in Japanese are more common than they are in English.

The most common filled pauses in Japanese, says Rose, are “ano” and “eto,” the latter of which is sometimes used without the final syllable as just “eh.” “Ano” is a repurposed word, meaning something like “that,” as in “that book,” and tends to be used in situations that call for more politeness. So far, not too crazy.

Here’s where it gets fun. Japanese has only five vowels: ah, ee, ooh, eh, and oh. (English is a particularly murderous language in terms of the quantity of vowels.) “There are some speakers who will use any of the other vowels as filled pauses,” says Rose. “The interesting fact, for most of these speakers, is that it happens to be the last vowel that they spoke.”

The equivalent of this in English would sound insane (but also sort of musical). Take this sentence: “So then I went back...uh...to my hometown...um….to see my friends...uh...who I haven’t seen in awhile.” Kind of a lot of filled pauses in that sentence, but that’s roughly how it’d look in English.

In Japanese? It would be more like: “So then I went back...ahhh...to my hometown...oww...to see my friends...ehh...who I haven’t seen in awhile.” How fun is that?

The reasons why people use filled pauses are tough to figure out on a case-by-case basis; largely, they’re seen as involuntary. But there are some theories about why Japanese has such an intense setup of filled pauses. One of those is that, basically, Japanese is a hard language to speak.

This comes back to something called “long-distance dependencies.” In a given sentence, you could say it has a long-distance dependency if the first word in the sentence is directly tied to a word much later on in the sentence, even the last word. English doesn’t do this very often; our setup is usually in the order of subject, then verb, then object.

Let’s take this sentence: “John saw the man who was reading a book.”

It’s a modular sentence, easy to break down. The action (saw) immediately follows the entity doing the action (John).

In Japanese, the structure of that same sentence would be more like this: “John book reading man saw.” Look how far apart the subject and the verb are! In order to speak that sentence, you basically have to know, and keep in your mind, the entire thought. You can’t stumble along as you can in English, where each subject is tied to the action it performs. By the time you get to the end, you may have forgotten what the action was supposed to be, or by whom it was done. “In English, it’s more, just, ‘I can’t remember the next word,’ rather than ‘I can’t remember what the subject of this sentence is,’” says Rose. Japanese syntax requires you to keep a whole mess of stuff in your head for a long period of time. That can be troublesome! So maybe you need a sec to remember where you were going—hence, a higher rate of filled pauses.

Filled pause research is still a fairly new linguistic subject, and not everyone is caught up. Rose, in his work in second-language acquisition, believes that filled pauses should be a significant part of language classes. After all, these...things...are going to be some of the most common sounds a student is likely to hear. They aren’t meaningless, and they aren’t standard: shouldn’t learning them be standard? “Some language programs actually actively discourage filled pauses,” he says. “The advice was, don’t use them. Because if you use them too much, you sound stupid. I was floored when I read that.” There is no evidence, anywhere, that the use of filled pauses is correlated in any way with any measure of intelligence. (Rose, in fact, describes himself as “a frequent ummer.”)

But this stuff is extremely important. What could be more jarring to, say, a native speaker of English than to hear a new Japanese student say, “Could you hand me that...eeeeh-to…book?” The same would be true of an English speaker using “uh” or “um” in his or her new Japanese. It doesn’t only draw attention to your difficulty with the language: it could even negatively impact comprehension, as whoever the student is speaking to would have no idea what the student is doing. In any case, Japan’s amazing, weird filled pauses—as well as the new-ish sarcastic Twitter use—are firm messages. “Uh” isn’t just a noise.

If you've been in the mood to scream at the moon lately, perhaps this time-lapse video of a howling wolf emerging from a blob of clay will provide some catharsis. Or at least offer a bit of creative inspiration for a weekend project.

The seven-hour sculpting process—depicted here in under four minutes—begins with a wire frame and ends with a carefully detailed animal carved out of oil-based clay. Artist WieselRobot, an Austrian sculptor's apprentice, has also carved howling wolves out of wood.

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

Last weekend, a spate of dozens of tornadoes (many of them deadly) raged across the South, including in east Texas, where, on Saturday, Charlesetta Williams, 75, was home watching TV when her son spotted one approaching their home. 

He told her to get in the home's bathtub for protection, and then got in with her. What happened next was some kind of act of destiny. 

"We heard a boom,” she told KYTX. “We were laying in the bathtub in the bathroom, and we heard a boom. Then when we woke up, we were in the yard."

Both Williams and her son survived with just a few bruises and scratches, but their house was mostly destroyed. 

A lifelong resident of east Texas, Williams is used to the area's occasionally volatile weather, but this was something new. 

“I’m a tell you I don’t wanna ride now through another one," she told KSLA.

The four giant presidents carved into Mount Rushmore make up one of the more absurd American monuments. However, when chiseling away at the rock face, sculptor Gutzon Borglum had a lot more in mind than is immediately apparent.

Borglum's initial plan was to sculpt the outline of the Louisiana Purchase and inscribe it with the most important events between George Washington's and Teddy Roosevelt's presidencies. When that fell through, Borglum started in on a new, equally valiant endeavor. He wanted to create a Hall of Records to house important American documents for posterity.

This grand time capsule was to be 80 feet tall and 100 feet long, lined with brass cabinets containing copies of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and other historic American contributions to art, science, and industry. The hall would be carved into the canyon behind the heads, and would be accessible via an 800-foot staircase.

Work began in 1938 with workers blasting a 70-foot-long cavern using dynamite. The government was suspect of the project, and insisted that Borglum finish the heads before he continued working on the Hall of Records. But Borglum died unexpectedly in 1941, and though his son put the finishing touches on the sculptural portraits (originally intended to depict the presidents to their waists), the Hall of Records project was abandoned.

The unfinished hall sat empty and untouched for decades. Then in 1998, 16 porcelain panels were placed inside the chamber. They describe the construction of the Mount Rushmore Memorial and why those presidents were chosen, and document a history of the United States. These are intended not for the general public, but as a time capsule for people of the distant future, as the sculptor intended.

The panels are sealed inside a teak box inside a titanium vault, covered by a 1,200-pound granite slab carved with a quote from Borglum's original plans: "...let us place there, carved high, as close to heaven as we can, the words of our leaders, their faces, to show posterity what manner of men they were. Then breathe a prayer that these records will endure until the wind and rain alone shall wear them away."

As for Borglum's initial plan of an inscribed Louisiana Purchase sculpture, it was met with several obstacles. First, at the scale he intended it would have been impossible to sculpt the descriptions large enough for anyone to read. Second, Borglum had measured incorrectly when planning out the presidential heads (which is why Jefferson peeks out from behind Washington's shoulder), and so Lincoln had to be pushed over to where the Louisiana Purchase was supposed to go.