In Ecatepec de Morelos, Mexico City's roughest and most populated suburb, most residents travel to work in the inner city. Navigating the notoriously congested traffic on the main road through the favela-like neighborhood takes at least an hour. But now there's another option. Today, nearly 30,000 commuters every day soar above the rooftops of the one of the busiest areas of Mexico.

In 2016 Mexicolaunched its first public cable car service, the Mexicable, a suspended urban gondola. As you swiftly drift in one of the Mexicable's colorful cabins (which can hold around 10 people each) a 3-mile journey through the ropeway's seven stations can take as little 17 minutes and costs just 6 pesos, around 30 cents.

This novelty has also brought more security to the crime-riddled community. The colorful houses dotting the metropolitan area are now covered in fascinating street art created by famous local and international artists thanks to the Mexicable project. Many of the murals are painted on the rooftops, enlivening the already exciting omnipresent view passengers get from the cable car. 

The government's investment of more than 1,500 million pesos into the public infrastructure project also contributes to the constant battle with pollution in large cities, as the gondola line uses solar energy to operate. This is the first cable car in Mexico to serve as public transportation and follows the example of other heavily populated Latin American cities like Medellin and Rio de Janeiro. It's worth making the trip to Ecatepec to escape the bustle of Mexico City and glimpse an exceptional view of this fascinating area.  

The Arno, a river that connects the northern Italian city of Pisa with the Mediterranean Sea—and, going inland, Florence—has been a thoroughfare for commerce for centuries. 

Over the past month, it's also been a thoroughfare for a dolphin.

Residents in Pisa have spotted what's assumed to be the same dolphin several times on the river, with the first such sighting on New Year's Eve, according to the Local. 

For a while, the sightings were infrequent, but, lately, the dolphin's been seen more frequently as it's traveled farther and farther inward, getting closer to Pisa's city center, which is about five miles from the river's mouth. 

Officials said they would keep an eye on the dolphin, but that it appeared to be in good health. They also noted that the noise from bridges overhead and the decreased brackishness of the water (compared to the Mediterranean) had not scared off the animal yet, suggesting that, whatever it's doing, it's doing intentionally. 

"This is a very rare event and such a dolphin sighting has not been recorded in Tuscany before," a regional environmental agency said, according to the Local.

Maybe then, like the rest of us, the dolphin just decided it needed an extended break.

In the years leading up to the Second World War, isolationist sentiment coursed pretty strongly throughout the United States. Some Americans feared that immigrants were a threat to the country. Sound familiar? Then you'll have no trouble understanding the reasons why the map below, titled America–A Nation of One People From Many Countries, was published in 1940 by the Council Against Intolerance in America. 

“With the exception of the Indian, all Americans or their forefathers came here from other countries,” the illustrator Emma Bourne inscribed on the map. The Council Against Intolerance commissioned Bourne's work in an effort to remind Americans that the U.S. had always defined itself as a country of varied national origins and religious backgrounds. 

Bourne illustrates America's unique ethnic and religious diversity by erasing state borderlines and showing the nation as one unit. Long red ribbons weave through the landscape to show clusters of immigrant groups and where they settled, from Japanese in the West to Italians in the East. At the bottom left is an inset scroll listing famous Americans in literature, science, industry, and the arts alongside their ethnic backgrounds, including George Gershwin and Albert Einstein, who became a U.S. citizen the year the map was published. At the time, the map served as an educational poster in line with the Council Against Intolerance’s argument that prejudice could undermine national unity during wartime.

The map is “a relatively early example of an idea that’s become popular in recent decades,” as Dara Lind writes over at Vox. “That diversity itself is what makes America strong, and that difference is something to be celebrated rather than eliminated.”  

“Maps of this kind were not particularly common and especially not at this scale,” says Ian Fowler, the director of Osher Map Library at the University of Southern Maine, who notes that the physical map itself is quite large. “While this map does borrow stylistic elements from pictorial maps produced during the 1920s and ‘30s, it is very unique in its emphasis and display of information.”

Between the late 1930s through the mid-1940s, the Council Against Intolerance’s educational department produced an array of materials, including books, manuals, and posters used in adult reading groups. Founded by the left-leaning Jewish author James Waterman Wise, the New York City-based organization fought against“prejudice by calling attention to American ideals, heroes, and traditions.”

“The map accomplishes these objectives by showing a United States without state boundaries,” says Fowler. “It uses the history of immigrants to heighten awareness of the strengths of cultural diversity and to show visually the diversity present in the country.”

Bourne also emphasizes the range of religions present during this era, along with staple industries in each state, including a giant potato in Idaho, a huge fish in Washington, and large lobster in Maine. Detailed figures of people at work are meant to show how immigrants are active in creating a prosperous America, explains Fowler.

“It’s important to note that everyone on the map is engaged in industry or labor, which I conjecture is on purpose to show that immigrants are not ‘lazy,’ which was (and unfortunately still is) a damaging stereotype used by nativists and isolationists,” he says.

For all its strengths, the map struggles to represent African American populations, and leaves no space for Native American populations. This aspect of the map compelled the poet Langston Hughes to annotate his copy with a burning cross and a reference to the Ku Klux Klan near the cotton workers in the South. The map and the Council Against Intolerance’s activity also caught the attention of Eleanor Roosevelt, who later wrote about both favorably in her newspaper column, My Day.

“Unfortunately, the depiction of the immigrant as evil and as a scapegoat for the problems facing the United States is something that has persisted throughout our history and still pollutes our social and political discourse,” says Fowler.

Map Monday highlights interesting and unusual cartographic pursuits from around the world and through time. Read more Map Monday posts.

A magnificent castle overlooks the river Nabão. It is known as a convent, but it was built in 1160 as a headquarters for the Knights Templar, the formidable Catholic military that answered to the Pope. Even when the Moors took much of Spain and Portugal in the late 1200s, the Knights Templar held onto the castle in Tomar.

When sovereigns feared the Pope had too much power, they annihilated the Knights Templar. In France, many were burned at the stake. In Portugal however, King Denis I took pity, and instead renamed the knights the Order of Christ. This new order would answer to the King, but was later demilitarized and converted to an entirely religious order.

The subsequent heads of the Order added on to the castle in the centuries to follow. Additions included cloisters, connecting corridors, an aqueduct, and an expanded chapel, not to mention decadent ironworks, paintings, and tapestries. All of these were built in the various prevailing styles of the day, from Romanesque to Gothic to Renaissance. The greatest architectural draw is the Manueline chapel, an ornate architectural style found only in Portugal.

Today, the Convento de Cristo is preserved as a museum. It has been a World Heritage site since 1983. The striking architecture, beautiful gardens, and unparalleled view offered by the hilltop castle don't disappoint.

Have you ever made yourself a big batch of pancakes, settled down in front of your plate, uncorked a big bottle of maple syrup—and severely overpoured, drowning your breakfast and setting you on a weeklong sugar high?

That's a little like what happened on Interstate 91 yesterday. According to USA Today, an entire barrel of maple syrup fell off a truck and spilled into the road late Monday afternoon, necessitating a massive cleanup.

On Twitter, the Vermont State Police reported that the spill was at exit 27, and that the fire department was hosing off the sticky stuff. Jealous Twitterers responded quickly. "It's like the most Vermont thing to happen in Vermont," said @AssignGuy. "Did anybody put out an amber alert?" asked @SmartAssStehmey.

For whatever reason, no one volunteered to go out there and help. Maybe they hadn't had breakfast yet.

(For more instances of high-speed food waste, check out our 2016 truck spill map.)

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.

On January 27, President Donald Trump signed a sweeping executive order that, among other provisions, barred all refugees from entering the United States for 120 days (and banned Syrian refugees indefinitely). As the ban, currently stayed by order of a federal judge, makes its way up through the U.S. court system, refugees all over the world watch closely, their futures hanging in the balance. 

The current refugee crisis is the largest the world has ever seen—but it's far from unprecedented. Back in the 1920s, civil war in Russia and genocide in the Ottoman Empire left millions of families stateless, seeking asylum in countries already stretched thin by the ravages of war. Charged with preventing catastrophe, an idealistic explorer named Fridtjof Nansen changed hundreds of thousands of lives with a piece of paper: the Nansen Passport. Although it stopped short of granting citizenship, the Nansen Passport allowed its holders to cross borders to find work, and protected them from deportation. Some experts are calling for a similar solution today.

Born in Norway in 1861, Nansen was an unlikely diplomat. A zoologist by training, he made a name for himself as a polar explorer—in 1888, he led the first team to cross Greenland by foot, and four years later, he traversed the Arctic Ocean by purposefully freezing his ship into an ice floe. When he aged out of constant adventuring, Nansen brokered his considerable fame into a political career, initially representing Norway in disputes with Sweden, and later serving as the country's ambassador to Britain.

At the end of World War I, Nansen threw himself into existing efforts to create an international peacemaking body—what would eventually become the Paris Peace Conference, and then the League of Nations. In 1920, the League put Nansen in charge of a particularly tricky post-war problem: figuring out what to do with those displaced by conflict.

As the new High Commissioner for the Repatriation of Prisoners-of-War, Nansen negotiated for the return of hundreds of thousands of POWs held in Germany and Siberia. While working to secure their release, Nansen's eyes were opened to another horror of war. "Never in my life have I been brought into touch with so formidable an amount of suffering," he told the League in November of 1920, urging his fellow members to "prevent for evermore" the type of conflict that originally led to it.

But those gears were already in motion, and another displacement crisis loomed. In December of 1921, it hit: Vladimir Lenin, whose Bolshevik army had shocked the world by winning the Russian Civil War, revoked citizenship from Russian expatriates who had fled the country during the conflict. This left some 800,000 people stateless, dispersed throughout Eastern Europe. "The legal status of these people was vague and the majority of them were without means of subsistence," wrote Fosse and Fox. "It was considered unacceptable that in the 20th century there should be such a huge number of men, women and children living in Europe unprotected by any system recognized by international law."

Once again, the League of Nations put Nansen on the case, appointing him High Commissioner for Russian Refugees. He quickly began breaking down the problem. Neighboring countries, especially those who were dealing with their own conflicts, balked at the prospect of taking in tens of thousands of poor, stateless people. But if the refugees were sent back to now-Soviet Russia, they could face political persecution, imprisonment, and even execution. 

Nansen's instincts initially leaned toward repatriation, figuring that states should be made to accept their own citizens. But when he began investigating the problem personally, his opinion shifted. After one small group of refugees was sent back to the U.S.S.R. from Bulgaria, many were shot by Soviet authorities.

This did not stop Bulgaria: fearing Communism, they began forcibly deporting people, beginning with a group of 250, which they shipped off over the Black Sea in a small boat. When the ship reached the U.S.S.R., it was not allowed to land, so the refugees turned towards Turkey, which also rebuffed them. Panicked, many began leaping into the sea. Everywhere he went, Nansen was met by stories like this—of frightened countries, who feared foreign influence and their own dwindling employment, and of even more frightened refugees, who just wanted someplace to live.

At first, Nansen brokered individual arrangements. He sent some groups to Czechoslovakia and the United States, ensured that refugee camps had clothing and provisions, and made universities in those countries that belonged to the League of Nations promise to educate Russian students. But the problem outstripped this pace of action. What refugees really needed was a way to make lives for themselves—to travel, so as to find opportunity, and to work, so as to establish themselves in their new homes. They needed some kind of identity document. 

In March of 1922, at the Council of the League of Nations, Nansen proposed such a document: a "Nansen Passport," which would allow refugees to travel and protect them from deportation. The passport was simple—it featured the holder's identity, nationality, and race—but it served its purpose well. Its holder could move between countries to find work or family members, and they could not be deported. "This was the first time that stateless people had any sort of legal identity," wrote Annemarie Sammartino in The Impossible Border: Germany and the East, 1914-1922.

This solution was by no means perfect. Unlike a regular passport, the Nansen Passport did not confer upon its holder the rights of citizenship—for example, it didn't guarantee the right of return to the country that issued it. But as it slowly gained credence, it became more and more helpful to those who held it. By 1923, 39 governments recognized it. Two decades later, that number was up to 52, and the passports were issued to Armenian, Assyrian, and Turkish refugees as well. Sales of "Nansen stamps," required annually to renew the passport, paid into refugee relief funds.

Nansen died in 1930, of an influenza-induced heart attack after going skiing against his doctor's wishes. Immediately afterwards, the League of Nations set up the Nansen International Office for Refugees, which continued his work until 1938, when it was absorbed into a larger committee. That same year, the Office received the Nobel Peace Prize. By then, they had provided Nansen passports to about 450,000 stateless people, including writer Vladimir Nabokov, composer Igor Stravinksy, and ballerina Anna Pavlova. "There is no doubt that by and large, the Nansen certificate is the greatest thing that has happened for the individual refugee," wrote journalist Dorothy Thompson, also in 1938. "It returned his lost identity."

Today, global conflict, human rights abuses, and climate change have created tens of millions of refugees worldwide. Although Nansen's legacy lives on in the form of the United Nations Refugee Agency, and in the Refugee Travel Documents currently issued in 145 countries, some experts think these provisions are not enough. "Only a rapid effort to revamp global refugee laws will permit a peaceful and managed transition from chaos — and the xenophobia and violence it can generate — to a semblance of world order," wrote Michael Soussan, a former UN humanitarian worker, in Pacifc Standard in late 2015. "Refugees need and deserve real passports … The world body must live up to the challenge."

Scientists knew, just by looking at them, that geckos of the newly discovered species Geckolepis megalepis were probably distinct from other fish-scaled geckos. Their scales were just that big—larger than any other gecko’s.

But no one had proven they were a separate species, in part because it was so difficult to catch these geckos without their scales falling off.

Many lizards let go of part their anatomy (tails, etc.) in order to escape predators. But geckos in the fish-scale genus have scales that are adapted to tear off with exceptional ease. Touch one of these lizards, basically, and their scales will fall off. One 19th century researcher resorted to catching lizards with cotton balls—and still lost some scales.

There were a number of species already identified in this genus, but though scientists had observed a number of geckos with particular large scales, they had not yet established officially that they were a distinct species. As a team of researchers reports in a new paper in PeerJ, their suspicions were correct—these geckos are a species of their own.

The scales grow back relatively quickly, with a few weeks, but in the meantime the lizards are (fair warning—this image is not for everyone) showing a lot of gooey skin.

There is another problem with these lizards losing their scales all the time. Often species are identified by the unique patterns of their scales, but because these geckos lose their scales so frequently, the pattern is blurred. The researchers instead had to identify this large-scaled lizards as a new species by identifying unique characteristics in their skull.

As dramatic as it is to lose all your scales so easily, it does seem like an excellent escape strategy. If someone with bad intentions was trying to grab you inappropriately, wouldn't it be great to just slough of your scales and run free?

Whether daydreaming of an escape to a Far East Zen paradise or enrolling at Starfleet Academy, a stroll through this traditional Japanese Garden, part of a not-so-glamorous water reclamation plant in the San Fernando Valley, will instantly transport you in either direction.

Appropriately named Suiho-en, or the “Garden of Water and Fragrance,” this gorgeous (and sometimes smelly) six-and-a-half acre oasis sits next to a Van Nuys water treatment plant, where wastewater is processed and purified for the city of Los Angeles, and also used to maintain the lush, perfectly manicured garden.

The idea to install a garden next to the plant belonged to a city engineer named Donald C. Tillman (they named the plant for him), and was made a reality in the early 1980s by Dr. Koichi Kawana, a renowned landscape designer, architect and long-time professor of Japanese design at UCLA. A native of Hokkaido, Japan, Dr. Kawana aspired to combine traditional Japanese principles with local horticulture and the contemporary surroundings of the San Fernando Valley, according to a personal doctrine he coined “mystic profundity.”

The garden has enchanting waterfalls, a variety of symbolic trees, winding pathways and an abundance of wildlife. Dr. Kawana also built a large aristocratic Shoin building, a working teahouse and tea garden (run by weekend volunteers), a storybook-inspired zig-zag bridge over an iris pond, and four types of traditional stone lanterns, hand-carved by artisans in Japan.

In addition to classic Japanese architecture, one of the most prominent features is the dazzling and futuristic administration building. It has starred in a number of Hollywood productions, perhaps most famously as Star Trek’s Starfleet Academy (minus the 24^th century CGI buildings, officers and Golden Gate Bridge).

Designed to bloom in all four seasons, the garden draws casual visitors, professional photographers, weddings, and—of course—the colorful cosplayers of LA’s Anime Expo.

When it was built in 1761, Jefferson Pools was a "gentlemen" bathhouse, uniquely built in an octagonal shape with a large hole in the roof to let the steam out. The women's bathhouse nextdoor came several decades later in the same fashion. Today, the original structures still stand, beautiful yet decaying.

The bathhouses were built over the year-round 98-degree natural pools in the aptly named Warm Springs, Virginia.

Legend has it that an American Indian first found the pools after traveling a long way and, after bathing in the warm waters, was instantly rejuvenated. It was then known as a sacred place. Soon after, spa houses began being built throughout the 16th century following the European style. These spa houses become even more popular in the following century in places where wealthy southerners would "take the waters" for relaxation.

But it was the healing promises of the mineral-rich waters that brought Thomas Jefferson to the pools, where he soaked daily for three weeks to try and help his rheumatism. It's ironic that the pools were named after him, though, as local historians claimed he found the spa quite boring.

Boring or not, the Jefferson Pools are still open today. For $17 an hour, the usually nude guests can experience the warm tickling bubbles, slight sulfur smell, and turquoise waters so clear you can see the bottom. The original wood structure of the bathhouse has fallen victim to the elements for over the last 250 years, however. But an organization is working to preserve this rotting wonder, so guests can bathe in the warm springs just as Thomas Jefferson did decades ago—except that he didn't have the floating pool noodles. 

The only suspension bridge ever built in Cleveland was also the victim of 1960s racial conflict. Though this pedestrian bridge still stands today, it has not been usable in more than 50 years.

The Sidaway bridge was built to span the Kingsbury Run valley and connect Kinsman and Jackowo, two ethnic European neighborhoods on Cleveland's east side. The original bridge, built in 1909, was replaced by a suspension bridge in 1930 when railroads required more clearance.

Around the same time, Kingsbury Run became infamous as the site where four dismembered bodies of the "Cleveland Torso Killer" were discovered. The "Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run" was never found.

The area only gained more disrepute. In 1966, racial tension boiled over with riots in the Hough neighborhood. By this time, the population in Kinsman had become predominantly African American. Schoolchildren from Kinsman used the Sidaway Bridge to cross over to an elementary school in Jackowo. During the riots, someone ripped up planks and set the bridge on fire in a symbolic and physical attempt to keep black children out of white schools.

The city decided to close the bridge, rather than repair it. Cleveland's failure to reopen the bridge was later cited as evidence leading to the forced desegregation of the city's schools. Over 50 years after its partial destruction, the Sidaway Bridge still stands as the only suspension bridge in the city's history, and an unintended monument to segregation in the city.

If you go deep into the Amazon, in the Brazilian state of Acre, and you look in the right spot, you'll eventually find lots of geoglyphs: shapes dug into the dirt that are recognizable from high above. 

Archaeologists have known about these geoglyphs, some of which are estimated to be up to 2,000 years old, for decades. But this week, a group of scientists shared a remarkable new finding about them: the ground beneath the Amazon's geoglyphs, and the forests that surround them, had likely been altered by humans a couple of millennia before that. 

The discovery could upend our understanding of how the rainforest developed, whether it did so largely on its own—as some have argued—or whether humans (perhaps inadvertently) assisted, by clearing large swaths of forest for their own ends. 

"There's been a very big debate circling for decades now about how pristine or man-made the Amazonian forests are," Jenny Watling, a co-author of a study published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, told Live Science. 

At two geoglyph sites, known as Fazenda Colorada and Jaco Sá, Watling and her colleagues found 4,000-year-old charcoal samples after digging five-foot holes. And while that might not be particularly unusual—forests naturally burn and catch fire regularly—the researchers said that the charcoal's age coincided with the time humans first moved to the area. 

Why would humans of that era burn down the forest? One possibility is that they were trying to encourage the growth of palm trees, which are among the first to grow after a forest burns. Palm trees have long been sources of both food and sturdy building materials for humans.

It's probably not a coincidence, Watling told Live Science, that when humans left these sites some 650 years ago, palm trees again declined. The forest, in a way, was returning to its natural state. 

Little Limestone Lake is located in the northern Manitoba Lowlands, where temperatures can get as low as -20°F, but it often looks as though it belongs in the Caribbean. That's not because it shares certain characteristics with the islands to the south, it’s because Little Limestone Lake is the world's largest and most outstanding example of a marl lake.

Marl is a calcium carbonate-rich deposit. When temperatures are high, it’s formed as calcite and separates out of the water, creating crystals and leading to a milky turquoise hue. When it’s cold, the calcite dissolves, the marl decreases, and the water is perfectly clear.

The ever-changing levels in calcium carbonate rich marl causes dramatic color changes in the lake. It can range from dull blue-grey to brilliant aquamarine to sky blue throughout the course of a day. The source of the calcite is underground limestone deposits—which have been slowly dissolving into the water for centuries.

The roughly 10,000-acre lake is part of Little Limestone Lake Provincial Park, a nonoperational park whose designation is meant to conserve and protect the area. It’s home to a variety of trees, plants and wildlife, from bears and ducks to walleye and whitefish.

The landscape features sinkholes, caves, and other features typical of so-called “karst” (or limestone) geology—the result of the rock being eroded over time.

Unknown to most passersby, there's a 12-foot-tall replica of the Washington Monument under a manhole near the actual monument.

Officially known as "Bench Mark A," this underground oddity is actually a Geodetic Control Point that’s used by surveyors. It’s part of the network of a million control points across the country that helps the National Geodetic Survey (NGS) synchronize all of the government’s maps.  

According to NGS modernization manager Dru Smith, “Geodetic control points provide starting points for any map or measurement. It has to be more accurate than any measurement you do on top of it, so we pick things that tend to be extremely stable.”

Usually that means metal caps or rods that are driven down into the ground, but this quirky control point mirrors the form of its next-door neighbor.

“All the surveys we’ve done, going back to the early 1900s, have used it,” says Smith. Most recently, it was used in the aftermath of the 2011 Washington earthquake. Measurements over the past century have shown that the Washington Monument has sunk 6.2 cm into the marshy soil below, at an average rate of 0.5 mm per year.

The mini monument was placed in the 1880s as a part of a trans-continental leveling program. The ground level here was much lower at that time, with large parts of the Washington Monument foundation still visible above ground (see fourth image above). The mini monument was above ground for a time, before being encased in a brick chimney and buried. Outside of surveying circles, it’s been largely forgotten.

In the Tokyo metropolitan area, where nearly everything is crammed for space, about 40,000 square feet of land is designated for Nishi Rokugo Park, one of the strangest and most innovative playgrounds world-round—made nearly entirely out of tires. 

Nishi Rokugo Park is filled with more than 3,000 rubber tires recycled from the nearby Kawasaki manufacturing plants. As you enter, an enormous, two-story Godzilla made from stacked tires will greet you with a cheesy set of canine teeth, a walk-through 66-foot tail, and human-sized hands at the end of its tire-studded arms.

After walking atop an endless row of half-submerged tires, playground-goers will find even more peculiar sculptures, including a 16-tier tire rocket and a quirky tire robot.

Naturally, there's a giant tire swing, which hovers in the middle of the park. Further along is climbable jungle gym of multicolored poles with—you guessed it—tires wedged in between. Perhaps the most fun (and adult-sized) activity at Nishi Rokugo is the tire slide, where sleds are replaced with stray tires that can be ridden down a concrete tire tubing hill.

Unlike most playgrounds, Nishi Rokugo Park is not used solely by children; elderly Japanese men and women often frequent the park to enjoy the scene and admire the tire sculptures. Free and open around the clock, Nishi Rokugo will never tire out your sense of fun.

In an act of extreme silliness, American astronaut Tim Kopra threw a football in the International Space Station that, NASA says, is the "longest Hail Mary pass ever," or 564,664 yards. 

The pass was thrown in zero gravity, only went about 80 yards, and wasn't caught by anyone—it hit a part of the space station. But, yes, the ball did travel 564,664 yards, if you take into account that the space station orbits the Earth at 17,500 miles per hour.

It's unclear when Kopra accomplished this feat, since he returned from space in June. But NASA released footage of it over the weekend, in anticipation of the Super Bowl. The sporting event took place in Houston, home of NASA's Johnson Space Center, to which Tom Hanks was referring to when he mentioned in Apollo 13 that there might be a "problem."

Had Kopra wanted to "throw" the ball farther, he, in theory, could have thrown it at a slower speed, meaning that it would have taken even longer to reach its end, meaning that it would have traveled even longer than 564,664 yards. Maybe next time. 

In the early days of color television, if you wanted to change the channel or crank up the volume, you had to get up out of your easy chair like some kind of schmuck, walk a few paces while muttering complaints, and stab your finger in the direction of a button or knob.

Then the RCA Corporation changed everything. In 1961 it introduced the first remotely controlled color TV. The product came with a rectangular remote capable of adjusting seven functions, named one-by-one in the advertisement's highly energetic voiceover. ("Tint! Color! Brightness! Volume! Fine tuning! Channel selection! On-off!")

The remote control, or "wireless wizard," as it was called in the almost-six-minute commercial, was marketed as “the ultimate in performance and convenience.” But all the buttons were replicated on the TV itself just in case it got lost between the couch cushions.

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. 

Franklin D. Roosevelt had Hyde Park. Lyndon Johnson had his ranches. The first President Bush had a house in Kennebunkport, Maine, and the second a ranch in Crawford, Texas. Even after they’re elected, U.S. presidents often keep their private homes as retreats from the White House; America’s newest president, Donald Trump, has at least two.

Since his election in November, President Trump and his family have spent time at his Fifth Avenue apartment, where the First Lady and their son continue to live, and Mar-a-Lago, the president’s Florida resort. In the decades since the Kennedy assassination, when presidential protection became more rigorous, no president has kept a home in the thick of a city as big as New York, and critics havequestioned the millions of dollars being spent on securing the president's apartment in Trump Tower.

The Secret Service is required to protect the president wherever he goes. But Congress has, in the past, been sensitive to the costs of that protection, especially when it involves the president's private property. How much should be spent? Is there a limit? In the 1970s, in fact, after reports of “excesses and abuses” of public money spent at President Nixon’s private residences, Congress went so far as to pass a law that aimed to limit public spending on securing a president’s private property.

The main restriction? Presidents are supposed to pick just one private property for the Secret Service to secure.

Richard M. Nixon bought his house in Key Biscayne, Florida, not long before winning the 1968 election. The house was on the waterfront of the small island, looking across the bay to Miami, and it had a private beach—it was a nice place to escape the strains of running the country.

Months later, President Nixon bought a second new property, a more extensive oceanfront estate in San Clemente, California, about halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego. It was on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and the Secret Service soon built a wall around its six acres. The press named the estate “the Western White House.”

Reporters were intensely curious about both properties. They wanted to know how the president financed their purchase and what the government was spending on securing them. By 1973, Congress had the General Accounting Office (later renamed the Government Accountability Office) investigating expenditures at the president’s properties and the history of spending public money on private land.

There were few historical records to go on: the costs of presidential security were rarely itemized. When President Franklin Roosevelt traveled to Hyde Park, for instance, protection came mostly from the Secret Service and, during World War II, military personnel, who would guard inner and outer perimeters. The military also installed “a simple anti-intrusion alarm system” on the property. At President Truman’s home in Independence, Missouri, the Secret Service turned part of the garage into a command post, had a wrought-iron fence built around the property, and installed a simple alarm system. President Eisenhower had a farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, with similar security: “A milk house was remodeled to serve as the command post and the guardhouses were merely telephone booths obtained, apparently without charge, from a telephone company,” the GAO found.

After the Kennedy assassination, though, protection for the president, as well as the president’s family, became more stringent. While Lyndon B. Johnson was in office the government spent about $120,000 (approximately $825,000 in today’s dollars) on securing his Texas properties. The Secret Service had a lighting system built on the perimeter of the LBJ Ranch and guardhouses installed throughout the property. They also installed lights to enable helicopter landings. At the Haywood Ranch, where LBJ’s famous amphibious car lived, the government paid to renovate a boathouse for use by the Secret Service, too.

The work done on Nixon’s properties wasn’t so different in kind from protections installed for previous presidents. Both properties were protected by a barrier—a hedge and fence at Key Biscayne, the wall and fence at San Clemente, guard posts, and electronic alarm systems. At Key Biscayne, the house also had bullet-resistant glass windows installed. But while the alarm technology available had dramatically improved since the 1930s, it was also expensive. Some of the largest line items were for state-of-the-art alarm systems.

In total, the government spent more than $1 million on improving Nixon's private estates, including $224,000 on landscaping and paving at Nixon’s two properties. (That's more than $5.4 million, total, in today's dollars.) Most of the work was for security purposes, although some items, such as the flagpoles requested by a military aide, were not. The GAO did find, though, that some of the spending was excessive. “It appears that the Government did some landscape maintenance at both residences which should have been done at the President's expense,” the office reported. 

These investigations spurred Congress to put limits on such spending, even after Nixon had been removed from office. In 1976, the legislature had passed a bill meant “to prevent the excessive and questionable capital improvements made to the private property of Secret Service protectees.” It required that Secret Service protectees—who include the president and vice president’s families—designate just one property as their primary private residence. (If protectees lived together, they were still limited to one property.) For any additional property, there was a cap on spending, of $10,000, without additional approval from Congress. 

President Gerald Ford signed the bill into law, over the objections of the Secret Service, which wanted no limit on what it could spend to protect a president. President Carter was the first president to be bound by the new restriction: he selected his home in Plains, Georgia, as his primary residence. President Reagan selected his California ranch; his empty house in Los Angeles was protected by Secret Service agents for months while it was being sold. The Secret Service later told the Associated Press that their costs in California did not exceed the $10,000 threshold, though the AP noted that "the law was unclear about whether salaries are included in the $10,000 limit."

Over time, that threshold crept up, to $75,000 in 1985 and $200,000 in 1995. In 1989, Congress also added a provision to the law intended to help out the small police force of Kennebunkport, which had quickly exhausted its overtime budget dealing with visits by the first President Bush. The new provision allowed up to $160,000 to reimburse state and local governments for expenses associated with such visits—provided they had a population of fewer than 7,000 people. (That amount was later increased to $300,000.)

In theory, investing in security at the president’s private residence is efficient. “If you’re going to be going back to that place, it’s probably worth the investment,” says Pat O’Carroll, the executive director of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, who served in the Secret Service. If it’s secured, the Secret Service can be assured of its safety whenever the president returns. 

Since the law's been passed, though, no one has tested its limits as President Trump has. The federal government has agreed to give New York City $7 million to cover the extra costs of helping to secure Trump Tower for the weeks between the election and the inauguration, but the city's best hope of getting more financial assistance for securing the tower, the cost of which is estimated to be hundreds of thousands of dollars a day, is for Congress to appropriate extra funds for that purpose. Palm Beach County is also looking for help covering the cost of the president's Mar-a-Lago visits. No matter what, though, the country will spend more on protecting President Trump's private properties than it has on any other president in history.

Cool & Book in Brussels is far more than just a bookstore. It's the size of a supermarket and divided into eight different sections, heavily decorated with kitsch and glamour.

A full Airstream caravan sits inside the travel section, while myriads of superhero toys adorn the walls of the comic book entryway. Marklin's largest model railway track winds through the children's section. Ornate furniture and vinyl records decorate the inside of the Rock n' Roll room. A few more steps further, and you'll find the greenhouse for the store's nature collection, and then you'll see a small, refurbished Fiat inside the cooking section, La Cucina. Lastly, a British section ends the shop, and spills out to the outdoor dining area where you can grab a drink and a snack.

If you were looking for a day of entertainment in 1930s Munich, you might find yourself on a field cheering loudly over the roar of motorcycle engines. In this 1934 video, archived by British Pathé, performers and acrobats execute daring tricks and skillful driving maneuvers on motorcycles, sidecars, and automobiles.

In the 1930s, Germany was home to the leading motorcycle manufacturers, earning the title of the country with the highest density of motorcycles in world in 1933. The spectacle in Munich shows off these zippy vehicles as well as the skills of the motorcyclists. Each of the acts is a "clever and amusing display," just as the voiceover describes.

The motorcyclist in the very first act navigates a series of obstacles, elevating the sidecar and swerving the bike around a track. At the 20-second mark, he even quickly jumps off of the still running motorcycle, crawls under a set of tables, and hopes back on with ease.

At the 50-second mark, a series of performers donning Roman gladiator attire ride on bikes attached like horses and carry chariots across the field. There's even a comical "crazy scientist" working a strange machine. After fiddling with the contraption, it explodes in a giant puff of smoke.

And for the grand finale, an impressive human pyramid of several male gymnasts rolls out onto the field. They balance carefully on two motorcycles (oddly driven by what appears to be two people dressed in a bear and jaguar costume). The three-tiered hanger apparatus rotates as the motorcycles slowly drive around delighting the audience.

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.

Moonshine stills, an 1880s hearse, UFOs, pro- and anti-Vietnam War bumper stickers, Victorian hair art, a tugboat, antique bobbin lace, a one-room schoolhouse from 1912, logging equipment, Native American art, tanks, fishing lures, phonographs, and an A-7D Corsair jet plane. These are just a sliver of the artifacts on view at the Miracle of America Museum, an in-depth and thoughtful tour of the U.S. as seen through its stuff. 

The breadth and variety of the eclectic museum's exhibits, which take up 35 buildings and much of the land surrounding, have earned it the nickname of "Smithsonian of the West." Its owners and operators, Gil and Joanne Mangels, are collectors in the most extreme sense of the word.

Vehicles of all shapes and sizes make up a sizable portion of the collection. More than 3,000 motorcycles, some very rare, draw bikers from the highway to the museum. There are World War II and Vietnam-era trucks and helicopters, which patrons are allowed to climb in and steer. In fact, much of the sprawling museum is hands on. Kids are allowed to play with vintage coin-operated games, including player pianos and mini barrel trains. During summer, workshops on blacksmithing, lacemaking, and other arcane activities are presented using authentic tools.