Of all the oddities in St. Augustine, Florida, the Moorish, Alhambra Palace-inspired Villa Zorayda Museum may possess the oddest.
Built in 1883 by a millionaire merchant, the eccentric residence was sold in 1913 to Abraham S. Mussallem, and avid collector who expanded the museum's assemblage of rare and historic artifacts that came with the unusual house. As an expert in both oriental rugs and Egyptian relics, Mussallem came into possession of an unusual find, a mummified human foot wrapped inside of a rug, which was taken from a pyramid or other archaeological site.
Even more fascinating than the mummified foot was the rug itself, which depicts a large stylized feline, much like the African wild cat. Mussallem determined the textile to be over 2,400 years old, making it, arguably, the oldest rug in the world. (There are Persian rugs that also claim that distinction). Oldest or not, an examination of the rug confirmed that it is woven entirely from cat hair.
But what would a stolen Egyptian rug containing human remains be without a curse? Sure enough, it's said that anyone who sets foot carelessly on the rug will die shortly thereafter. While no human being has stepped on it in recent memory, during the last restoration of the rug, a dead cat is rumored to have been found stretched out on the front steps of the museum.
Thankfully the rug now hangs on the wall of a special room on the second floor, where no hapless tourist can walk on it. It is displayed proudly behind its original contents, the mummified foot.
He and Gilbert had met on a houseboat in 1938. The war had started the next year. Gilbert had not wanted to go; he had tried to fake epilepsy to get out of it. But he was conscripted and became Gunner H.G. Bradley.
Gordon wrote him often. Usually he would sign his letters “G,” and when Mark Hignett of the Oswestry Town Museum first acquired three of their letters, he assumed it was a correspondence between a man and a woman. Only after he began collecting more did he realized that “G” was Gordon and that he had discovered something much rarer, a series of love letters between two men, written at a time when homosexuality was still criminalized in Britain.
Letters like these are rare because so many of them were destroyed, and, as the BBC reports, Gordon did ask his boyfriend to destroy these, too. “Do one thing for me in deadly seriousness,” he wrote. “I want all my letters destroyed. Please darling do this for me. Til then and forever I worship you."
But Gilbert kept the letters. After he died in 2008, they were collected by a cleaning company and sold to dealer of military mail, as the BBC reports. Hignett eventually spent more than $1,200 tracking down 300 of the two men’s letters on eBay. He plans to write a book detailing the whole love story.
No one knew exactly where the alligator came from, but wherever it was, it probably contributed to its unusual colors. Alligators don't naturally turn orange, but environmental influences can change their skin to that color.
Now, another orange alligator has appeared, this one in North Carolina. Myrtle Beach Onlinereports that in Calabash, North Carolina, residents have spotted another orange alligator, who they have named, inexplicably, Donny.
So far there's no indication that the two alligators are connected in any way, but since it is rare to come across an orange alligator, it's easy to imagine these two were hanging out together in the wrong neighborhood. Eventually, they'll shed their orange skin and return to normal alligator color.
Situated in Montana's Yellowstone Country, Madison Buffalo Jump State park was named for the ancient buffalo jump, an indigenous hunting tactic used by Native American tribes. After driving far from civilization and hiking through the historic land, visitors can take in the park's wide-open vista from an observation platform. Here, it's easy to picture the excited activity of a buffalo jump.
This grassy valley, framed on one side by the Madison River, was a perfect grazing land for herds of buffalo. The singular cliff jutting out of the plains made it an ideal hunting ground for the Native American tribes, for whom the buffalo was an indispensable resource, supplying food, clothing, and shelter.
The native tribes hunted their prey without guns or even horses, but by strategically using the natural landscape. A young boy would dress in the pelt of a buffalo calf and lure the animals to the edge of the cliff, while athletic young men trained as runners would shepherd the herd from behind. The bison would plummet to their deaths in a frenzy. At the bottom of the hill, pelts, meat, and bones could be harvested from the fallen animals.
The Madison buffalo jump was utilized by tribes from across the plains. The Hidatsa, Shoshone, Lakota, Dakota, Nez Perce, Bannock, Arapaho, Salish, Cheyenne, Blackfeet, Crow, Gros Ventres, Cree and Assiniboine all used this cliff to hunt bison, sometimes simultaneously, which required cooperation between peoples despite their cultural differences.
Plains Indians who had never before used horses or guns began using them to hunt when westward expansion brought these goods to the tribes. The buffalo jump method of hunting waned in the mid-17th century, though the site remained significant to the tribes who had used it in their past.
Today the state park provides education on the site's significant history. There are remnants of the Native American life to be found all around the park, including tipi rings with scattered relics such as arrowheads. There is also a pile of buffalo bone shards from herds that met their end at the foot of the cliff so many years ago.
Last year, as corpse flowers stunk up conservatories around the country, Seattle's specimen, Dougsley, committed an embarrassing gaffe: it failed to bloom. After opening up only halfway, the massive tropical flower began to decompose, failing to smell even a little bit bad.
"Dougsley appears to have been a dud, and has been removed from the building," the Seattle Volunteer Park Conservatory posted afterwards.
Although the city still stings from this snub, the other plants have been making up for it, Capitol Hill Seattle reports. For instance, right now, the Conservatory is home to its first blooming jade vine.
The eerie plant, which suspends itself from a tree, is covered with claw-shaped flowers the color and texture of mint toothpaste. In the wild, it's pollinated by bats, which hang upside down off its flowers and drink the nectar inside. Cultivating it indoors requires a constant flow of moist air, and a lot of patience—this one has been growing for several years.
According to a post on the Conservatory's Facebook, the jade vine will hang around through mid-March. Although it has big shoes to fill—"Does it smell or eat bugs?" one skeptic wondered on Twitter—we are confident that it will win over the haters.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
In front of the Seattle Art Museum, a towering, industrial piece of moving kinetic art slowly pounds his hammer up and down. Stretching 48 feet in the air and weighing in at 26,000 pounds, Hammering Man labors for 20 hours a day, using the tremendous might of his metallic left arm to amuse and entertain all visitors to the museum.
Designed by sculptor Jonathan Borofsky, Seattle’s Hammering Man sculpture was built to honor the working class men and women of the world. In the words of Borofsky, “he or she is the village craftsman, the South African coal miner, the computer operator, the farmer or the aerospace worker—the people who produce the commodities on which we depend.”
And what a strong, sturdy monument it is. Unlike Superman, Hammering Man is a literal “Man of Steel,” made of stainless steel and aluminum and pounding his hammer four times every minute through the use of an electric motor lodged inside its thin body. The Hammering Man labors around the clock throughout the day except for from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. and of course, on Labor Day.
Ironically, the hours of labor to construct Seattle’s Hammering Man in 1991 were ultimately fruitless. On September 28, 1991, a lift-strap supporting the sculpture snapped, demolishing the worker's progress and delaying the sculpture's completion by a full year. But the Hammering Man has been successfully operating every since 1992, racking up a total of over 42 million hammer hits.
In addition to hard work, Hammering Man has also inspired political statements. To protest President Bill Clinton, a local artist attached a ball and chain to the Hammering Man on Labor Day of 1993, claiming, “supposedly ‘Hammering Man’ represents the workers, but the workers are getting hammered.”
Hammering Man is a worldwide phenomenon. Outside of Seattle, there are other Hammering Men spread across the globe, including Los Angeles, New York, Seoul, South Korea, and two Hammering Men in Frankfurt, Germany.
This little store in Dresden is the "World's Most Beautiful Milk Shop," an official title bestowed upon it by the Guinness Book of World Records. That claim might be hard to verify, but there can't be many contenders rivaling the sumptuousness of Pfunds Molkerei.
The milk shop was opened in 1880 by Paul Gustav Leander Pfund, and was fortunate to survive the heavy bombing during World War II that destroyed most of the city. Little has changed inside the shop since then, although much has changed outside, namely the inventions of refrigeration and pasteurization that have made milk easier to keep at home.
But today Dresdenites aren't just walking into this splendid dairy shop for a tall glass of milk. Now, they come for the atmosphere. The entire interior is decorated with with hand-painted Villeroy & Boch ceramic tiles. The shop is covered floor to ceiling with dancing angels, chubby babies, cows, and woodland creatures. It's all accented in gold and blue, and lit by chandeliers, which might delude some into thinking this is a luxury jewelry shop, rather than one selling milk.
The wares inside haven't changed much either. Pfunds Molkerei still sells milk and boasts one of the country's finest cheese selections (though they were forced to limit it to a mere three state-sanctioned brands during the socialist years of East Germany). The cafe upstairs sells dairy-based delicacies, like tortellini with spinach and grated feta or pork in pepper cream sauce. The shop also offers chocolates, milk soaps, and cream-based liquors, though it can be hard to reach them through the hordes of German milk-lovers.
The Balancing Bluebottle wasn’t exactly a hit when it first premiered at the Palace Theatre in London in autumn 1908. The star of this short silent film was a common fly turned circus performer, filmed so closely and clearly you could see the hairs on its body, and projected to monstrous size on the film screen. Stuck on its back to a tiny wooden podium, the fly went through its tricks: Rapidly twirling a matchstick, then a piece of bread, a blade of grass, and finally, a ball twice its size while another fly balanced on top.
It was remarkable—so remarkable that it had to be a trick, viewers concluded. After all, the film was being shown at the Palace, a music hall that went in big for vaudeville-type entertainment, and viewers were used to rudimentary cinema “magic” and special effects.
A month later, on November 11, 1908, the film was presented by its maker, 28-year-old amateur naturalist F. Percy Smith, at a meeting of the Royal Photographic Society. The presentation lent the film the authenticity and a context it lacked in its initial showing at the Palace—it was real, nothing faked, and no insects were harmed in the making—and placed it at the fore of a new kind of cinematic experiment: Using a “cinematograph” to offer access to a previously hidden world of nature. Dozens of reports in the press followed. So, too, did a “fortnight’s nervous breakdown” for Smith, whose shy nature might have been better suited to patiently filming flies glued to miniature podiums than dealing with reporters.
The Acrobatic Fly, the 1910 rerelease of The Balancing Bluebottle and on the only surviving footage from the original film.
The Balancing Bluebottle isn’t something we’d pay to see on an iMax screen now. But at the time, the film represented the cutting edge of what was possible in cinema: Using a hand-cranked camera to turn out magnified images of the previously cloistered worlds of the animals, plants, insects, and even microbial creatures around us. After the juggling fly, Smith further expanded the realm of possibility with more technical innovations, including time-lapse, micro-cinematography, and underwater filming. And as he did, he would set the mold for how modern-day nature and science documentaries look, sound, and feel.
Frank Percy Smith was born in 1880 in Islington, a north London neighborhood then witnessing the flight of the middle class to the suburbs. There are few biographical sources available on Smith, but in 1993, Mark Burgess published a thorough and loving piece on Smith in the Quekett Journal of Microscopy; many of the details here are from his account. From an early age, Smith was a tinkerer—he built his first microscope as a teenager, attaching an eyepiece and an objective to a plant sprayer he found in the garden and using a broom handle as a tripod. His particular interest was in British spiders, and he spent hours collecting them in Epping Forest, a short train journey out of London.
Despite Smith’s attraction to natural history, his family pressured him, an only child, to take a job as a clerk for the Board of Education; he began work at the age of 14. He did it—and even designed time-saving devices, such as a rotary duplicator made from a cocoa tin—but he didn’t like it. When he wasn’t working, he was collecting spiders and examining them under his microscope, or reading up on natural history. In 1899, Smith, 19, joined the Quekett Microscopical Club, founded in 1865 for microscope enthusiasts. Soon after, he was supplementing his small income with lectures, aided by “magic lantern” projections of photographs he took himself.
His first experiments with cinematography began in 1908, all because of a pet fly. According to Burgess’s report, “To abate the crushing boredom of his job, [Smith] befriended a bluebottle.” The fly was kept on a leash and fed with milk; Smith took an incredibly magnified picture of the fly drinking, its long, spongy tongue absorbing the milk, and showed it around his office. The story goes that one of his officemates showed the picture to Charles Urban, an early film producer and distributor who specialized in what were called “interest” films, factual films about interesting topics. In May 1908, Urban lent Smith a cine-camera and two rolls of 35mm film, and said, “Show me what you can do.”
Smith came back with footage of dragonflies, wood ants fighting, and ants milking an aphid; he was promptly given another two rolls of film. Now, Smith was working—part-time—for the man who, if he didn’t invent modern, cinematic edu-tainment, certainly did quite a lot to promote it.
“We owe quite a lot of Charles Urban’s particular business acumen, that he saw the scientific side of these spectacular entertainments … It’s representing the world of wonders more or less as a music hall act,” says Dr. Tim Boon, chief curator at the Science Museum of London and author of Films of Fact, a history of science in film.
That cinema, itself a kind of technological marvel, could be used to explain or describe science was an idea present from the very early days of moving pictures, when there was a clear impulse to depict fact rather than fiction. But though travelogues and newsreels had a place in popular entertainment, much of the scientific footage was confined to scientific circles. Urban’s innovation was in realizing that laypeople would be interested as well.
In 1903, he’d exhibited a series of films shot by zoologist and filmmaker F. Martin Duncan at the Alhambra Theatre in Leicester Square, London. The program included the one-minute Cheese Mites, in which a scientific gentleman at lunch discovers, with his handy microscope, a whole world of hairy-limbed, crab-like beasts cavorting on his Stilton. These films necessarily occupied the same physical entertainment space as sentimental songs and bawdy comedy shows—music halls were one of the few places with projectors.
Urban’s partnership with Smith was natural—Smith was himself the product of a self-taught, amateur education in natural sciences. The fly films were Smith’s first release with Urban; Smith later wrote that the fly, that “unconscious little laughter-raiser,” was filmed “as the result of a technical scientific experiment,” an effort to “demonstrate, in the most graphic manner possible, its great strength and power of endurance.” He defended the film, explaining, “A certain element of novelty or humor was often a great assistance” in “introducing educational pictures to the public.”
With Urban’s backing, Smith was well on his way to becoming something unprecedented in his day: A filmmaker. In 1909, Smith began experimenting with stop-motion animation in To DemonstrateHow Spiders Fly, featuring a mechanical spider throwing a thread of silk to the wind to “fly.”
His next great achievement was The Birth of a Flower in 1910, a series of time-lapse—which he called “time magnification”—films of tulips, lilies, roses, and others blooming. That year, Smith—now married—left his position at the Board of Education to become a full-time “photographic expert” in “kinematography”, as he was recorded in the 1911 census. Later that year, Smith and his wife moved to Southgate, a semi-rural North London suburb on the verge of a population boom. The move afforded him more space; his studio there was a large conservatory he’d built to the back of the house, filled with his cobbled-together devices and any creatures he might have been filming.
It’s difficult to overstate the challenges Smith faced in getting the footage he was getting with the technology available at the time. His camera was hand-cranked and large, and his extreme close-ups meant that any vibration could ruin a shot. The film stock required intensely bright light, which was often harmful to the sometimes microscopic organisms he was trying to film. Filming underwater, through a glass observation chamber sunk into a pond, was a damp, dirty business. But he was relentlessly inventive. He rigged up alarms to his time-lapse devices to tell him when to change the film or if something had gone wrong. He was proficient and imaginative in animation—in one 1912 film, he used modeling clay and stop motion to make a lizard melt into a boot. He was patient with recalcitrant animals, but not above poking a porcupine with a stick to get it to show its quills, pushing a badger off a rock wall, or setting a ferret on a small snake, as a test reel shows. And he was persistent, trying for months, even years, to capture the bud opening, the otter catching a pike, the microscopic worlds of organic life hidden in pond water.
But then the war came and cinema-goers had less time for nature. Smith was drafted as a cameraman for the Royal Naval Air Service, eventually filming the surrender of the German fleet from an airship. Even after the war, there wasn’t a lot of call for his work; Urban, who was American, had since moved back to New York. So when Harry Bruce Woolfe, a film producer and businessman, came calling, Smith jumped on board. Woolfe’s company, British Instructional Films, was regularly turning out “interest” films about the recent war, travel, science, and nature; in 1922, Woolfe launched the Secrets of Nature series, short films dedicated to subjects like the life cycle of the newt or insect “infants.” He approached Smith in 1924 to handle insects, aquatic, botanical, and microscopic subjects.
Smith dusted off his machines and got to work. One of his first releases with Woolfe’s outfit, Battle of the Ants, was a staged battle between two nests of wood ants, set up by the Royal Zoological Society. “It was like watching a football match between several thousand players all wearing the same jersey,” Smith recalled. The film was typical of the work Smith would do for the Secrets series: Tightly focused and suffused with a gentle wit and clear affection for his subjects.“He’s got this great line, ‘If anyone ever calls something a pest, then I make a film about it and it becomes beautiful,’” says Dr. Oliver Gaycken, film studies professor at the University of Maryland and author of Devices of Curiosity, about the development of science films in early cinema. “He’s got this kind of devotion to the ugly, the overlooked, and his basic thesis is that the act of filming requires an act of understanding, which makes you love the thing.”
Smith’s devotion to his craft is underscored by the fact that most of his films were shot in his home; his conservatory studio had long since expanded to take up much of the house. The garden was choked with weeds, his frequent film subjects. Insects were everywhere, inside and out. By the later 1920s, the house was being eaten alive by mold of various kinds. It had started with the plates of rotting food and jars of pond water were everywhere, the stars of whatever he was filming; the mold spread, eventually stripping the paint and paper off one whole wall and never fully leaving the drawing room. This became a problem by the end of the decade: His reputation as a cinematic scientist, buoyed by Secrets of Nature, was enough that visiting dignitaries and important people wanted to visit him in his lab and studio. The executives at British Instructional Film, however, aware of the squalor, constructed a fake set for Smith at their studios.
By the end of its run in 1933, Smith had made a third of the 144 Secrets of Nature films, meaning that though he was not the only nature filmmaker, his style of film was fairly influential. His films were in many ways typical of the way nature and wildlife documentary worked then and, some would say, works now. In Battle of the Ants, for example, the titular battle was staged for the benefit of viewers; it would not have happened without intervention by the filmmaker and scientists. While Smith’s work was patiently observational, he was also aware that there needed to be some action—the ants needed to be doing something, we want to see the porcupine’s quills or the ferret take down a snake.
To what degree Smith was responsible for the jocularly anthropomorphizing commentary that accompanied his Secrets of Nature films is unclear; more likely, it was written by producer and editor Mary Field. But he was certainly party to the effort to humanize organisms. This is perhaps best illustrated in his 1931 film, Magic Myxies, a title he came up with after recognizing that a film about myxomycetes, a peculiar, seemingly sentient eukaryotic organism also known as “slime mold,” would need all the help it could get. On discussing the reproductive activities of the “myxie,” the narrator, in plummy, chummy tones, says, “If the Myxie has been so bad tempered that it has failed to find a partner, it is not allowed to become one of the party, but is eaten up. This is a far greater encouragement to matrimony than any tax on bachelors!"
The audience’s expectations of what a film about nature should look like were now set, especially given how popular the series proved to be with audiences and therefore distributors. The Secrets of Nature formula, however, relied on and perpetuated some problematic elements, many of which remain today.
“Unfortunately, in some ways, the manipulation of reality in nature films, with animals in wildlife films, hasn’t really disappeared,” says Professor Larry Engel, a wildlife and nature documentary filmmaker with more than 250 films to his credit and a professor at American University’s film school. “That’s not only disrespectful and unfair to that species, the shark, the porcupine, the tarantula, but it’s also immoral vis-à-vis the viewer, because you’re misleading, you’re lying.” Similarly, the inclination to anthropomorphize, to project human emotions and motivations onto animals, has also not gone away. “That’s where Percy’s generation came from, from sort of an environmental imperialism,” Engel says. “That’s where our industry is, sadly. Not much has changed.”
Smith’s work was the start of a thread that winds through modern-day nature and wildlife documentaries, how we expect them to look and sound like, the sorts of stories they tell—and, perhaps more positively, their mission. Smith wanted to use new technology to make natural science accessible to everyone, to make it astonishing and exciting. “I have always endeavored to administer the powder of instruction in the jam of entertainment,” Smith later said. In that, he certainly succeeded.
Despite his quasi-celebrity status, very little is known about Smith’s private life. “There’s a kind of psychological portrait that I’ve sort of glimpsed the little chunks of that is quite touching. Somebody who was sensitive, shy, who devoted his time and attention to these things that most people would not find interesting or valuable at all,” Gaycken says.
But in the 1930s and ‘40s, Smith was plagued by an intermittent illness; it was quite possibly depression. He seemed to feel himself to be a person out of place in time. “The world now sacrifices everything to speed; quiet seems to be regarded as a detestable condition to be expurgated by any means which applied science can devise,” Smith wrote in the 1930s, “and this state of affairs does not encourage the production of the type of individual who can satisfy himself in an investigation of the hidden beauties of Nature.”
On March 24, 1945, Frank Percy Smith died. The potted biography on the back of See How They Grow, the book that accompanied his film series on plants’ life cycles, claimed that he had been killed in wartime bombing. This is false: Smith, according to the judgement of the coroner, put his head in the gas oven in the kitchen of his Southgate home and killed himself “whilst the balance of his mind was disturbed." Smith was survived by his wife, Kate, and their daughter, but his reputation as one of Britain’s foremost cinematic scientists barely lasted a generation. His technical innovations were largely adopted by other cinematographers, but without tacit acknowledgement of who’d made them; the machines themselves were lost. His name was largely forgotten.
Smith is only now receiving the attention that he deserves for his contributions to science and nature filmmaking, attention he didn’t seek out in his lifetime. “His legacy has not been properly evaluated and will continue to grow ... because there’s a lot of information about him that still hasn’t been evaluated, brought to light,” says Gaycken. “We’ll have to wait.”
Nineteen films of the Secrets of Nature series, including some of Smith’s, were released on DVD in 2010 by the British Film Institute (although not, sadly, to a major sales windfall). In 2013, the BBC aired Edwardian Insects on Film, a look at Smith’s life by a modern-day documentary filmmaker trying to recreate Smith’s iconic bluebottle footage (no flies were harmed in the making of his film). That same year, Tim Boon participated in a half-hour BBC radio program on Smith. This year, Minute Bodies, an edit of Smith’s films put to a musical score by Tindersticks frontman Stuart Staples, will be making the film festival circuit.
Whatever Smith’s legacy turns out to be, it is clear that without him, modern wildlife and nature documentary could look very different. “We wouldn’t have the same natural history television if Percy Smith hadn’t been making those films between the two world wars,” says Boon. “What we would have, Lord knows.”
At 2,063 feet, the KVLY-TV mast is the tallest structure in the Western Hemisphere, and the fourth-tallest structure in the world today. But because it is supported by guy wires, and is not a self-supporting structure, it's often left off of lists proclaiming the world's tallest buildings or towers.
Upon its completion in 1963, this sky-high radio mast was the tallest structure in the world, until it was surpassed by the Warsaw Radio Mast about a decade later. When the Warsaw mast collapsed unexpectedly in 1991, the KVLY-TV mast reclaimed its title, until the completion of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai in 2010.
Adding to the superlatives, the mast was the first manmade structure to exceed 2,000 feet in height. The structure itself takes up 160 acres of land with its guy anchors. Owned by Gray Television of Atlanta, Georgia, the tower broadcasts at 356 kW on channel 44 for television station KVLY-TV (channel 11 PSIP, an NBC/CBS affiliate), based in Fargo, North Dakota. The tower provides a broadcast area of roughly 9,700 square miles.
Five miles to the southeast stands the KRDK-TV mast, which is currently the fifth-tallest structure in the world. This mast, completed in 1966, has collapsed and been rebuilt twice: once in 1968, when a Marine helicopter crashed into it, killing all four onboard, and once in 1997, during an ice storm with 70 mph winds.
In June 1994, some fossils from Ontario's Kwataboahegan Formation—a cross-section of earth that is hundreds of millions of years old—were recovered, and, for the next several years, stashed at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.
That was until recently, when some researchers had a fresh look at them, finding something that's a bit terrifying: evidence of the 400-million-year-old existence of a giant worm with a disturbingly large set of jaws.
The researchers, from the University of Bristol in Great Britain and the University of Lund, in Sweden, published their findings today in Scientific Reports.
"Giant," in this case, is a bit relative, as this worm's jaws would've been close to a half-inch, and it would've been up to three feet in length.
Still, that's larger than the worms we see today, and large enough that, should you find yourself alone in the outdoors, any encounter might get dicey, very quickly.
But in a time before humans, this old worm got by on squid, octopus, and small fish, the researchers said. It is named Websteroprion armstrongi, after Derek K. Armstrong, the guy who first discovered the fossil in 1994, in addition to Alex Webster, the bass player for the death metal band Cannibal Corpse because, researchers said, Webster is a "giant" in his field and they are apparently big fans.
"This is fitting also since, beside our appetite for evolution and paleontology, all three authors have a profound interest in music and are keen hobby musicians," one researcher said.
But decades ago, long before Amazon Prime and same-day fish delivery services, when the American shipping industry was still in its infancy, it was similar, if wholly different kinds of companies that helped shepherd home delivery into adolescence: mail-order catalogs, from Sears & Roebuck and Montgomery Ward, namely, two shops you might have heard of.
Both companies' catalogs, each debuting in the late 19th century, successfully capitalized on the expansion of the country's mail and package delivery systems, in particular the novel service of postal delivery to rural addresses. They also coincided with the rise of the American shipping industry, beginning a symbiotic relationship that persists with giants like Amazon today.
Aaron Montgomery Ward, who founded his namesake company in 1872, was the first out of the gate, setting the stage for the mail-order business by delivering products through the budding rail system. As long as you could get to the closest rail station to pick it up, the idea went, Montgomery Ward could help you save a few bucks and get a better selection than the nearby general store—though that move wasn’t obvious right off the bat.
“The original plan of conducting our business, suggested by the growing combination of farmers to deal directly with a house near the base of supplies, was to ship goods by Express, collect on delivery (i.e. C.O.D.) only,” the company explained in a 1875 catalog, “But as time passed and strangers became friends, the necessity of reducing the expenses of transportation became apparent, and we allowed goods to go by Freight to Granges, when the Grange seal was affixed to the order.”
("Grange," by the way, refers to the National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry, a major fraternal organization representing farmers. Its influence, highlighted by its mark on the shipments sent via the rail system, was key to both the success of mail-order houses like Montgomery Ward and the later success of the rural mail system.)
Ward’s business succeeded, despite the fact that he had an early setback after his inventory was destroyed by the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
While Montgomery Ward was growing, a rail employee elsewhere was learning the system from the inside. From his early vantage point at a rail station in North Redwood, Minnesota, Richard W. Sears noticed that wholesalers sometimes had more supply than demand for their products, and took advantage of this at one point by buying a number of watches from a wholesaler below cost, then selling them at a tidy profit. It would soon become an important way for Sears to fill its eventual catalogs.
Sears and his colleague, watchmaker Alvah C. Roebuck, eventually moved far beyond watches, and, by the 1890s, Sears was beginning to outpace Montgomery Ward. Still, both were sizable at this point—and were about to become even bigger, thanks to the federal government at the time.
The biggest problem that mail-order catalogs faced at the turn of the 20th century was the fact that their intended audience—often rural, as that was 65 percent of the U.S. population at the time—didn’t have easy access to mail delivery. Outside of cities, the infrastructure just wasn’t there, and often people had to pay just to get someone to simply deliver their mail to them—let alone parcels, which the U.S. Postal Service didn’t handle at the time.
The solution to this problem was something called rural free delivery, which was heavily pushed by farmers’ advocacy groups. Despite the growing desire to create mail delivery in rural areas, there was much pushback on the issue within Congress due to the high cost, and as a result, the idea only came about in baby steps before finally rolling out wide in 1902.
And with that, mail-order businesses like Sears and Montgomery Ward could now get their catalogs to people around the country.
But it wasn’t an automatic change, of course. This need to get mail to rural areas was a major driver behind infrastructure building, leading to the creation of roads, eventually allowing cars to drive on those roads to deliver mail. Things improved enough that, by 1913, the U.S. Post Office itself was delivering domestic post packages.
Parcel post, which both Sears and Montgomery Ward lobbied heavily for, didn't come overnight, however. Traditional retailers fought the catalog giants on the issue in the political realm, which was part of the reason why domestic parcels came about 26 full years after foreign ones did. But once they did get off the ground, they helped redefine the companies' respective businesses. In the first year the service was available, Sears' sales increased fivefold, and its revenues soon surged.
The commercial machine of home delivery continues to alter the way shipping services and the U.S. Postal Service do business, of course.
More than a century after Sears made his discovery about wholesalers, for example, a businessman who had spent time on Wall Street and dabbled in internet-based technology traveled across the country, inspired by a Supreme Court ruling that changed the parameters of interstate commerce. Simply, the 1992 case Quill Corp. v. North Dakota set the rules so that businesses with no physical presence in a state were not required to collect taxes on sales they made.
Maybe it’s a cliché, but in Australia, sometimes you can’t even enjoy a nice meal without a giant lizard barging in. Luckily, there are fearless waitresses like Samia Lila who will take care of that free of charge.
As seen in a video that is making its way around the internet, Lila, a server at the Mimosa Winery in Murrah, Australia was able to wrangle a massive lizard, dragging it out of the restaurant by the tail. The colossal reptile, a goanna which was first thought to be a large dog, had sauntered onto the open-air deck where diners were enjoying a meal, but Lila just grabbed it and slid it out of the restaurant, while the beast squirmed.
The crowd of diners at the restaurant seemed pleased at Lila’s heroism, clapping and cheering as she went, but according to the Huffington Post, some people who saw the video were critical of the server’s handling of the beast, saying that it was cruel to drag the creature out by its tail.
Lila has said that she certainly didn’t want to hurt the animal, and it did not seem to be damaged by the eviction. Besides, next time you need to get a small dragon out of your brunch date, let's see you grab it by the head.
In 1899 a member of the D.C. Library board unexpectedly ran into Andrew Carnegie in a waiting room at the White House. The lucky chance encounter led to an on-the-spot $250,000 donation (written on the back of an envelope) and gave birth to Washington’s first central library.
Prior to this point, the district's meagre library was based out of a small three-story row house, and the idea of public lending libraries had only recently started to gain traction in the U.S. Traditionally, libraries were private collections guarded by universities and museums.
The beaux-arts Carnegie Library of Washington, D.C. opened in 1903 and ended up costing a grand total of $350,000, more than $8 million in 2017 dollars. The self-described “University for the People” was the first racially integrated public building in the city and embodied Carnegie’s commitment to philanthropy and self improvement.
The eye-catching facade is composed of Vermont marble, hung on structural steel provided by the Carnegie Steel Company. The interior is filled with natural light via four huge skylights that punctuate the building’s green slate roof. The main focal point inside is a grand staircase that twists and connects the main vestibule with ground level entryways.
The D.C. Public Library wasn’t a one-off donation for Andrew Carnegie; he also financed projects in Washington such as the Pan American Union Building, the Carnegie Institution, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (not to mention 1,678 other libraries across the United States).
Over the next six decades the D.C. library’s collection expanded in size from 65,000 to over 500,000. In 1972 the severely overcrowded Carnegie building was replaced by the nearby Martin Luther King Jr. building (which is an architectural gem in its own right.) The Carnegie building has been used for a variety of purposes over the years, including a stint as UDC’s graduate library and museum dedicated to D.C. history. It is currently home to the offices of the historical society, and an occasional event space.
Most people don't go to the beach expecting to find human remains in the sand, but that's exactly what happens relatively frequently at Raisins Clairs Beach in Saint François, Guadeloupe. Over the past few decades, beachgoers have found bones, teeth, skulls, coffin nails, and, in the 1990s, even a metal bondage collar. It wasn’t until 2013, however, when a large storm surge washed away many meters of the shore, that a likely slave cemetery containing 500 to 1,000 graves was discovered.
Between 2013 and 2014, Guadeloupe’s Department of Cultural Affairs and its National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research launched two rounds of excavations at this otherwise tourist-friendly beach. Among the discoveries was a male human jaw containing incisors that had been sharpened into points, a clue to the deceased's origins being African. They also unearthed signs that the bodies had been buried between the 18th and 19th centuries, further indicating that this site had once been used as a place to bury slaves.
Dominique Bonnissent, regional conservator of the Archaeological Prefecture Department of the Guadeloupe Region of France, tells Atlas Obscura that once the teams determined that the site housed the remains of slaves, no future excavations were planned. “It was the will of the community,” she said, “to preserve this emblematic cemetery.”
What should be done, though, with the human remains and artifacts that had already been excavated? Some people in the community hoped that the nearby Edgar Clerc Archaeological Museum, which specializes in the pre-Columbian history of the Caribbean, or the Memorial ACTe, a slavery museum and memorial that opened in 2015, might be able to house them permanently. Yet according to Bonnissent, neither location had the capacity to properly store archeological artifacts, so instead, the state created a new archeological depository specifically for these remains.
In the midst of making these sensitive decisions, another large storm hit Guadeloupe in 2015, sweeping away more of the beach. Images soon circulated on social media that showed more bones than ever poking through the sand, and many locals were alarmed. In November of the same year, Joël Nankin, an artist living in the area, mobilized a group to take action.
Under pressure from these locals, many of whom formed an association called Silence and Oblivion, in 2015 the government installed an anti-storm surge system at Raisins Clairs, and Bonnissent says erosion is no longer an issue. “There are no more visible bones because they’ve been protected by geotextile formwork,” she says. Sand has also been brought in to refill what was washed away, and Bonnissent suggests that remaining graves are now “protected from swells and trampling by visitors.”
Geotextile formwork is a flexible, cost effective, and durable in situ solution, and for now it will likely protect the cemetery against most storms. Climate change has, however, increased the number and severity of storms throughout the Caribbean, and no formwork is failure-proof.
In 2016, Silence and Oblivion helped to organize Bòdlanmè pa lwen on Raisins Clairs. During this round table event, about 50 public authorities, archeologists, and community members came together to discuss the issues surrounding the cemetery and the development of a memorial project. For the most part, say participants, the conversations have been congenial and solution-oriented, and the government and community have found ways to work together.
Tourists and locals alike still frequent Raisin Clairs, and on most days the white stretch of beach is filled with people swimming, sunbathing, or dozing in the shade beneath seaside raisiniers, a species of tree that grows along this shore bearing fruit that resembles grapes. Food trucks operate just off the beach, and there's even a restaurant where beachgoers can enjoy locally caught seafood while taking in gorgeous views of the ocean.
The cemetery is now marked by two signs indicating its location. Still, despite efforts to respect and defend the space, it’s likely that future storms will continue to churn up bones, teeth, and other culturally important artifacts. Beachgoers should not only take care where they throw down their blankets—they may also want to take a moment of silence for the dead.
Thousand of men left their homes behind to fight in the Great War. But the daily life of the soldiers was about more than fighting. Much time was passed behind the front line as well, in encampments and occupied villages. The unique museum displays the more mundane side of a soldier’s life, curated to give you a feel of day-to-day life of the soldiers of World War I.
The collections features items from soldiers' personal lives, such as combs, coins, bottles, artificial legs, name tags, and watches, each with a personal story behind them. The owner of the museum, Jan Paul de Vries, welcomes you in, telling his story about how he started collecting and how his private collection was eventually turned into a museum. Each object in the collection has its own story and De Vries will passionately tell it.
On September 30, 1785, Thomas Hutchins, the first and only Geographer of the United States, set out to divide the country’s western lands into neat, square parcels.
The project Hutchins and his team were embarking on was technically innovative and massively ambitious, but it began in a small way, at a wooden post staked on the north bank of the Ohio River, at the western border of Pennsylvania. With a couple of simple measurement tools and a compass, the men started their work, measuring and marking out a line due west into Ohio.
That four mile line was the beginning of the Public Land Survey, which would eventually measure off close to 1.5 billion acres into squares running six miles per side.
Though it’s taken for granted today, the systematic division of land in the United States still defines the country’s geographical fate. In its early stages, the survey pit Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton against one another, with their competing visions of who should own and profit from America’s land, and it enabled America’s great land grab from the native people in the continent’s western reaches. More than 230 years later, the same system still governs distributions of mineral rights on public lands and underlies digital mapping systems. It is yet to be entirely finished, and its legacy is hidden across the American landscape.
In 1881, Ohio and Pennsylvania erected a marker to commemorate the beginning of the land survey; there's also a plaque at the true starting point. The marker was made a National Historic Landmark in 1965.
Seinfeld fans who want to re-create their favorite scenes in Monk’s Café need only travel to Manhattan’s Upper West Side to find the perfect place. It won’t look familiar on the inside, but the blue and red neon wrapping the corner will let them know they are in the right place.
Tom’s Restaurant, or the façade anyway, stood in for "Monk’s" coffee shop, located on Broadway at 112th Street, near Columbia University. Although the walls are now covered with Seinfeld memorabilia, when the images of the exterior were first taken for the show (including the “Tom’s” part of the name, which was later cropped out), the owner’s sons asked what they were for. The response: “It’s just for some pilot.”
Since the 1940s, like many diners in New York, Tom’s has been in the hands of the same Greek-American family. It’s a diner-style eatery, with classic menu items like burgers, fries, BLTs, and milkshakes. It’s a frequent stop for Columbia students and their parents, even hosting Senator John McCain and his daughter Meghan when she was attending the university.
Seinfeld was not the diner’s first brush with show business. In 1978, it was seen in an episode of “The Bionic Woman,” and in 1982 Suzanne Vega wrote about it in the song “Tom’s Diner.” It has also been featured as part of “Kramer’s Reality Tour,” run by Kenny Kramer, the inspiration for Jerry’s neighbor. And for one last Seinfeld hurrah, in 2014 it was used to film a Super Bowl commercial, featuring Jerry, George, and Jerry’s nemesis…. Newman.
Over President’s Day weekend, a crowd gathered at the National Mall in D.C., and around 11 p.m. one of those people was defacing national monuments. Park police discovered strange graffiti first at the Lincoln Memorial, where there were two messages found, and later at the Washington Monument, the World War II Memorial, the D.C. War Memorial, and on a nearby power box.
Because the handwriting and the messages are similar, park police believe one person was responsible for all the messages.
Their content was mystifying. The messages referenced the JFK assassination and the 9/11 attacks. “Jackie shot JFK,” read one message. Another message read“blood test is a lie… leukemia, cancer and HIV.”
These message were written in tight, small spaces, about the span of a person’s hand. The National Park Service is cleaning them with a mild paint-stripper that’s fine to use on old stone; there’s no news yet as to who did this but police are searching for the culprit.
If you were standing by the Lion’s Gate, in the Old City walls of Jerusalem, you might hear this call to prayer:
If you were standing in New Delhi, more than 3,000 miles away, you might hear this one, the same idea shaped by its location:
These are two of close to 200 sounds collected by Cities and Memory, a field recording and sound art project, for its newest and largest collection, Sacred Spaces. The collection includes sounds of prayers, bells, churches, temples, organs, and songs, recorded in 34 countries and organized both by geography and category. You can listen to calls to prayer from around the world, discover the resonances of organs across the U.K., or compare the sounds of a shamanic chant in Peru, a prayer wheel in Kathmandu, and a quinceañera mass in Mexico.
The Sacred Spaces collection began after the U.K.’s Churches Conservation Trust asked Stuart Fowkes, the project’s founder, to document some of the sounds of the churches they care for. Some of these historic churches date back to the 1100s and 1200s, and they’re no longer actively used. Fowkes would coax some sound out of the organs, some 20 feet tall, and a few times got to ring the church bell.
“You go into these old churches, and there’s just a rope,” he says. “You start to pull on it, and the whole church fills with the sound of this ringing bell. You realize that even with a single bell, it’s much harder than it looks, because you have to get the rhythm exactly right, otherwise you get this weird stuttering effect. You have to get into the groove of it. It’s surprisingly hard work.”
Fowkes realized quickly that the project of capturing the sounds of Christian spaces in England could be expanded far and wide around the world. He was expecting the project would draw out the differences among the world’s religions, but instead he found that the collection of sounds highlighted their similarities. A church bell and a call to prayer serve the same function—organizing people’s days, telling them when it’s time to pray.
At the same time, though, these sounds are specificity tied to the place where they’re from. The bells of Villa del Conte, for instance, are so familiar to the people living in this small town in northern Italy that they can distinguish the sound of that bell from any other, says Fowkes. “It’s like an auxiliary heartbeat or the fingerprint of the town,” he says.
One of the features of Cities and Memory is its remixed "memory" versions of each sound clip, reimagined by a sound artist. These versions are meant to invoke the possibilities of places meshed with memory and personality: One person's experience of a place or sound doesn't necessary match with another's. Even the most universal sound is filtered through an individual experience.
The inputs we get these days are different than in the past, though, and some of the sacred sounds collected here are in danger of being drowned out. In Pendock, England, the medieval town that once surrounded the church has disappeared, and the building stands near a motorway. When Fowkes went inside the church to record its organ, the sounds of the motorway intruded on the recording, even through the stone walls of the church. And at the Westerkerk, in Amsterdam, the church bell was barely audible over the sound of the traffic.
“Think about bells in the Middle Ages,” says Fowkes. “The bell would be the loudest sound, outside the sound of a battle or an earthquake that anyone had ever heard. The bell was designed to be the loudest possible sound. Now, you go to a modern city, and the bell is barely audible over traffic.” When we listen to the world, it roars. In some of these sacred spaces, it's still possible to hear the sounds associated with contemplation for hundreds of years.
On the Svalbard Islands of northern Norway there lies the town of Longyearbyen, the northernmost town in the world with a significant population size (there are a few research bases further north). The former coal mining town is now the cultural and commercial center of the Svalbard Islands, featuring the northernmost ATM, church, museum, post office, radio station, airport, and university in the world.
Due to the town’s precarious latitude—at 78 degrees North—there are a few strange practices that all people living in Longyearbyen must abide by. The most bizarre may be that it is illegal to be buried here.
The permafrost and sub-zero temperatures in Longyearbyen make it so that any dead bodies lying six feet under are perfectly preserved, as if mummified. Therefore, the government of Svalbard requires that any dead bodies must be flown by plane or shipped by boat to mainland Norway for burial. This law has been in effect since 1950.
The freezing temperature also requires that all houses must be built on stilts, so that when the island’s layer of permafrost melts in the summer houses don't sink and slide away. Cats are banned from the city, in order to protect endangered Arctic birds, and due to the impending threat of polar bear attacks in the frigid Arctic Circle, all residents are required to carry a high-powered rifle at all times.
Every year, on March 8 at 12:15 p.m., the people of Longyearbyen celebrate “Solfestuka,” a holiday honoring the town’s first glimpse of the sun in over four months. With a complete absence of the sun for a third of every year, it’s always certain to be a long year in Longyearbyen.
