In 2008, when the Norwegian Government and the Global Crop Diversity Trust teamed up to open the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, they thought they were planning far ahead. The vault—essentially a massive safe deposit box for the world's seeds, kept safe and cold by Arctic ice—is meant to guard against future disasters, like nuclear war or climate change. If such a horror ever necessitates a total agricultural restart, these seeds will be, in the words of their caretakers, "the final back-up."
But the future has a funny way of sneaking up on you. In 2015—much sooner than anticipated—the vault was turned from ark to library, issuing hundreds of thousands of seed samples to the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA). Today, ICARDA is returning the seeds, successfully completing what amounts to the Vault's first real-world run.
ICARDA made their original deposit in 2008, sending hundreds of thousands of seed samples north to the vault from their primary bank in Aleppo, Syria. They figured they would stay there until some global cataclysm. But in 2012, in the face of a mounting civil war, ICARDA was forced to move their headquarters from Aleppo to Beirut. Although the Aleppo vault remained functional, it became increasingly difficult for the scientists to retrieve seeds from it.
So in September of 2015, ICARDA asked Svalbard for their seeds back to ensure they had enough to work with in Beirut despite their limited access to Aleppo. Over the next 17 months, researchers duplicated and distributed the seeds, until, finally, their set was complete. Today, they re-deposited 15,420 samples in the Svalbard vault, including legumes, winter cereals, and forage species, ICARDA reports.
It's certainly not encouraging that, a mere seven years after its creation, global unrest forced the Vault's doors open. "We did not expect a retrieval this early," Crop Trust spokesman Brian Lainoff admitted to NPR back 2015. But in some ways, it was a helpful test run. As the Director General of ICARDA, Aly Abousabaa, put it "we are demonstrating today that we can rely on our gene banks and their safety duplications, despite adverse circumstances, so we can get one step closer to a food-secure world." If we're going to keep the future of plants locked in a box in the Arctic, it's good to know that it works.
Last week, police in Edmonton set aside 24 hours to conduct a crackdown—dubbed the "Big Ticket Event"—on dangerous driving. Their efforts resulted in 2,442 citations for traffic violations, all recorded between last Wednesday and Thursday.
The police department's press release on the operation included one violation that stuck out: a person who was issued a ticket for "having a live ferret around their neck."
An Edmonton police official tells Atlas Obscura that she didn't have any "additional information" on the matter, except to say that the driver was issued a distracted driving ticket, the penalties for which are a fine equivalent to around $217, in addition to points on one's license.
The crackdown was enforced in part using a new distracted-driving law that went into effect in Alberta last year. Interacting with your pet is not specifically outlawed, but the province has said the issue was their "most frequently asked question."
The answer?
"In situations where the driver becomes too involved with their pet, police could reasonably argue that the distraction is comparable to the specifically banned activities of reading, writing, and grooming, and lay a charge," the Canadian province writes on their web site.
Perhaps you think your ferret-handling skills are pretty good, and, in this multitasking world we live in, you can safely drive while dealing with a furry, alive animal near your eyes and ears. But beware, the Edmonton police probably disagree.
For years, computers have provided humans with an endless supply of depictions of cats—cat pictures, cat gifs, cat videos, cat memes. If you really think about it, it's only fair that they should get a shot at creating them themselves. Enter edges2cats, a program that takes your squiggles and turns 'em into cats. Or, at least, tries:
Edges2cats is the brainkitten of programmer Christopher Hesse, who released it a few days ago, along with similar programs "edges2shoes" and "edges2handbags." (Those two are slightly less disturbing.) All of them use what is called "image-to-image translation," in which an AI is trained to transform a simple image—like lines and circles—into a more complicated one, with colors and textures.
This is fairly similar to Google's infamous image recognition network, which is learning to identify everyday objects by looking at tons and tons of labeled pictures. Instead of enjoying exposure to a lot of different images, though, edges2cats has only ever seen Shutterstock photos of cats. Because of that, it thinks everything is meant to be a cat—even a random scribble—and generously helps it along.
Despite edges2cats's obvious utility, it is not for everything. When Atlas Obscura tried to transform our logo, it didn't go so hot:
If you want to try your luck, you can find this nightmare cat generator here: https://affinelayer.com/pixsrv/. Have fun, and be careful.
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.
Ronnie’s Sex Shop, located in the rural bush of South Africa, is known as the “oddest pub in South Africa,” and not without reason. Complete with odd decor, a ceiling covered in clothing, and a strange name born out of a prank, the bar attracts pub-goers from around the world for its weird etymology and sense of humor.
One day in the 1970s, in the Western Cape province of South Africa, Ronnie Price decided to open a farm stand on Cape Route 62 to sell his fruits and vegetables. To announce his farm stand to passerby, Ronnie painted “Ronnie’s Shop” in red paint on the white facade of his roadside cottage.
But as a practical joke, a few of Ronnie’s buddies bought some red paint and renamed the cottage “Ronnie’s Sex Shop.” At first, Ronnie wasn’t pleased with the prank, but his mind changed when a friend of his suggested, “why don’t you just open a pub?”
When Ronnie realized the brilliance of his friends’ idea, he converted the farm stand into a fully stocked bar, serving coffee in the morning and booze at night. Hung across the bar’s ceiling are over 100 t-shirts, bras, and pairs of underwear with writing on them for decoration. Strewn across the pub are a variety of random objects, including teddy bears, clown wigs, and baby dolls.
Today, nearly four decades later, Ronnie still runs the bar. The interior of the bar’s white building is covered from wall to wall in graffiti with personal sex stories of its visitors, with “I had sex here” written on one of the benches. Home to road trippers and motorcyclists from around the world (as well as a handful of local farmers), Ronnie’s Sex Shop even offers accommodation for those who’ve had one too many.
Two soaring figures flank a 142-foot flagpole at the Hoover Dam Visitors Center, aged to the gunmetal patina that clings to bronze after years in the elements. The figures are ripped with muscles, raising their arms to extended wings that double their height, hitting over 30 feet, while their toes have been rubbed smooth and golden by millions of hands looking for good luck.
The figures are sentries at the entrance to Hoover Dam, part angel, part symbol of the strength of man, they are the work of a sculptor named Oskar J.W. Hansen, a Norwegian immigrant who came to the United States after some time in the merchant marines. He became a citizen and joined the Army, and after he left the service, embarked on a long career as an artist and sculptor.
As the dam was nearing completion, Hansen entered a sculpture competition for the public areas, and his design won. Soon the largest single-cast bronzes in the world (at the time) were installed on the Nevada side of what would later be called Hoover Dam.
Sitting on a base of highly polished jet-black stone, the figures are so large, and the stones so heavy, an ingenious method of installation was used to get their placement just right. The square stones were lowered by crane onto big blocks of ice, which then slowly melted in the Nevada sun. The slow melt allowed for engineers to make minute adjustments in order to keep every aspect perfectly level and perfectly plumb.
Hansen’s design included a 14-story flagpole, installed between the figures and anchored deep into the bedrock below. On the ground in front of the sculptures Hansen added a dramatic terrazzo floor of his own Art Deco design, a “star map” that was aligned exactly to the placement of the Nevada skies on the very day President Franklin Roosevelt was to dedicate the dam: September 30, 1935.
But before that presidential dedication, before construction had even begun, Hansen spoke at the unveiling of another of his designs. It would be seven years before his Winged Figures would become a reality, but he seemed to presciently speak of his symbolic angels in 1928: “Man has always sought to express and preserve the magnitude of his exploits in symbols… They form the connecting link between the spiritual and the material world. They are the shadows cast by the realities of the soul.”
When the Century III mall in the south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania opened in 1979, it was the third-largest enclosed shopping center on Earth. With three stories and over 200 stores, it was the place to shop, hang, eat, and make mischief involving the indoor fountain.
Not anymore. In the early 2000s, local competition, a sagging economy, and retailer bankruptcies caused Century III to struggle. Tenant after tenant shut their doors for good, giving shoppers had fewer reasons to make the trek. In 2014, anchor retailer Sears closed, followed by fellow anchor Macy's in 2016.
Century III is now a dead mall—not entirely abandoned, but mostly deserted, and hauntingly so. A few big-name stores, such as JCPenney, Dick's Sporting Goods, and Bath & Body Works, are clinging on, but great swathes of the mall are boarded up and bereft of people.
The above video tour, created by Dan Bell as part of his Dead Mall Series on YouTube, gives a sense of what it's like to walk through this retail graveyard.
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.
A classified government document opens with “an odd sequence of events relating to parapsychology has occurred within the last month” and concluded with an alarming question about psychics nuking cities so that they became lost in time and space. If this sounds like a plot out of science fiction, it is - but it’s also a NSA memo from 1977.
The first “event” raised by the NSA note is a CIA report which mentioned KGB research into parapsychology. According to this, the KGB used hobbyists and non-governmental researchers to talk to western scientists. This allowed the KGB to collect useful information without putting themselves into a position to accidentally leak confidential information to westerners. According to the NSA note, this tactic yielded “high grade western scientific data.”
The next event described by the NSA note was what appeared to be a Russian provocation, though exactly what sort was a matter of some debate. In June 1977, an American journalist was detained in Russia for receiving a Soviet paper on parapsychology. The paper allegedly documented “PSI” (i.e. psychic) particles within the living cell, allegedly providing a physical basis for parapsychology.
This struck American intelligence as being a form of entrapment, though the goal was uncertain. Some thought it was an effort to provoke radio chatter which the Soviets could trace to get a better idea of the U.S.’s interest and activities. Another theory was that it was simply a warning to the West to stay away from sensitive Soviet research. A third theory was that it was “a double-think ploy to pretend interest in a clumsy manner to make us think that this was really just a deception to trick the West into believing there was interest when there really was none.” While this last theory might sound paranoid, this is how denial and deception operate - and it’s something that Russian counterintelligence has long excelled at.
The section concluded with a note that there had supposedly been a successful demonstration of “telekinetic power” in a Soviet military sponsored research lab, and the alleged discovery of a new type of energy “perhaps even more important than that of Atomic energy.”
The third event was the apparent postulation by “some physicists along with the famous evolutionist, Teilhard de Chardin” that the universe was more of a “great thought” than a “great machine.” According to this view, “the ‘unified field’ on ground of reality is awareness.” The note cited telekinetic experiments and postulated that “awareness focusing” could produce “a new form of energy that moves or perhaps alters matter.”
The report cited British scientists experiencing “poltergeist phenomena” after testing Uri Geller. Objects allegedly left the room, some of which apparently reappeared later. Supposedly, this didn’t surprise unnamed scientists who found it no harder to believe that objects could disappear and reappear than it was to believe in the “detected particles emerging from energy and dissolving or disappearing back into energy.”
From these premises, two types of telekinetic weapons were hypothesized: a telekinetic time bomb and the equivalent of a psychic nuke that could dislodge a city in time and space.
The first involved a member of the command and control staff being kidnapped and subjected to trauma that would allow him to be “suggestively programmed to develop telekinetic effects under stress at work.” The theory was that when an emergency situation arose and the officer was subjected to stress, objects would begin to move and disappear independently “and communications would become impossible.”
The second hypothetical weapon was even more elaborate and potentially terrifying. Citing a prediction of “a massive change which will alter the direction, time, space and energy-matter relationship of our world,” the note wondered what would happen if a group of psychics were brought together. If ten people who were “evidencing disruptive telekinetic phenomena” were brought into one area, would it “cause a chain reaction, causing much matter to reverse direction and sink back into a sea of energy or be displaced in time and space”? The memo concluded by wondering if such an event reach a “critical mass” and affect an entire city.
By an interesting coincidence, the “Philadelphia Experiment” hoax bears some superficial resemblance to the theorized weapon in the NSA note. According various versions of the hoax, the USS Eldridge was temporarily rendered invisible or transported through time and space. The incident is even listed on NSA’s webpage of paranormal topics that they don’t have records on. However, there were other papers prepared on the perceived potential of weaponizing psychic abilities, some of which will be explored later. For now, you can read the NSA note here.
This afternoon, an international team of scientists announced the discovery of not one, not two, but seven roughly Earth-sized exoplanets closely orbiting a dwarf star called Trappist-1. The discovery of this pocket-sized solar system vastly accelerates the quest for life outside our own, the researchers said during a NASA press conference.
Three of the planets—called Trappist-1d, e, and f—are in the star's "habitable zone," meaning their temperatures are in the right range to potentially harbor liquid water on their surfaces. "Having three of these planets in this habitable zone is very promising for the search for life," said Michaël Gillon, the lead author of the relevant study, upcoming in the journal Nature. Early measurements have also indicated that two of the planets, at least, are rocky (like Earth) rather than gassy (like Neptune).
Compared to the star that Earth orbits around, Trappist-1 is tiny—if our sun were a basketball, Trappist-1 would be a golf ball. But it has its planets in a much tighter orbit—it takes the closest planet, Trappist-1b, a mere 1.5 days to go around the star, while the furthest, Trappist-1h, takes about 20 days. This closeness makes up for the star's coolness, and creates possible conditions for organic life.
But before we start sky-fishing for aliens, there are still a number of items to check off the life list. Researchers are particularly interested in the chemical compositions of the planets' atmospheres. The presence of oxygen would indicate the possibility of life, while a particular cocktail of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and methane would make it almost certain.
Even if these three planets turn out to be dead as doornails, the implications of their discovery are still massive, researchers say. In the past, we've assumed that Earth-like planets could only be found around sun-like stars.
But if Trappist-1 is able to collect sizeable, rocky planets in its habitable zone, there's no reason to assume that other tiny stars can't, too. The universe could be full of tightly-packed solar systems with potentially viable planets. "These questions, about 'are we alone?', are being answered as we speak, in this decade and the next decades," said Thomas Zurbuchen, of NASA.
In the meantime, humanity's collective imagination is certainly alive, and speeding along at full blast. A website collecting creative works inspired by the discovery already has two short stories, a graphic novel, and a Dr. Seuss-style poem.
Researchers are happily indulging hypotheticals about the Trappist-1 living experience—the planets probably don't have moons, the sunlight is likely salmon-colored and about as bright as moonglow, and one side of each planet remains dark at all times, they say. NASA has even released a potential tourism poster, based on the fact that the Trappist-1 planets are just a hop away from one another.
If there's one thing we can expect—from Trappist-1 or whatever comes next—it's that what we eventually find will outstrip even our wildest imaginings. "It's very likely nature is way more beautiful and way more amazing than what we've animated here," said Zurbuchen, gesturing at artistic renderings of the Trappist-1 system—sleek, blue-dappled planets dancing around their tiny star. "It's always that way."
One million residents of Washington D.C., Maryland and Virginia get their drinking water from the Dalecarlia Reservoir, a remarkable 150-year-old system that works entirely on gravity power. Overlooking the reservoir is a beautiful old tower, completed in 1927 as a major step forward for water quality in the district.
The chemical treatment tower at the Dalecarlia Reservoir (originally known as the Washington Aqueduct’s Receiving Reservoir) has an industrial vibe par excellence, and boasts awesome views of the aquatic infrastructure below to boot.
Water enters the reservoirthrough a nine-mile underground conduit located under the median of Macarthur Boulevard (originally named Conduit Road). The original design cleaned the “raw water” in huge pools where sediment was filtered out, also by gravity, and the resulting clear water was piped out into the city.
The tower and adjoining filter building represented an exciting water treatment innovation: chemical filtration. A Washington Post report from 1927 gleefully described the “Super-Purity” provided by the “immense” filtration facilities. The public was once free to wander around Dalecarlia Reservoir but that came to an end amidst concerns of sabotage during World War II. Today you can view it through a fence from the sidewalk or the Capital Crescent Trail.
The Virgin of Guadalupe is sometimes called the “Patron Saint of Mexico,” and devotional altars to the holy woman can be found all across the country. But now she might also be referred to as the “Patron Saint of Illegal Gas,” after police in the town of San Martin Texmelucan—about 70 miles east of Mexico City—discovered an illegal fuel pump hidden within one of her shrines.
Fuel smuggling is a long-standing issue in the country, with smugglers tapping legitimate fuel pipelines and diverting some of it to makeshift fill-up stations, and now it seems like the smugglers are trying some holy new tactics to hide their stolen gas lines.
According to the Associated Press, local police discovered the secret gas line by following a trail of fuel to what appeared to be a regular altar to the Virgin. When they got closer, they noticed that there was a strange red hose poking out of it. There were also a handful of suspicious “customers” who took off running as the cops got wise to the scheme.
All said, they rounded up six people who were looking to fill up at the tap. Assumedly, the Virgin’s altar was stripped of its material gifts.
Chicago is known worldwide for its wealth of jazz history, and the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge on the north side of the Windy City is the the cream of the crop. Located in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood, the Green Mill Lounge is home to more than 100 years of history, a century of world-famous musicians and American mobsters alike.
Named as a nod to Paris’ Moulin Rouge (‘Red Mill’), the Green Mill Lounge was a popular hotspot for Chicagoan film artists to hang out after a long day of work. Located four blocks away from Essanay Studios, the Green Mill hosted the likes of Frank Sinatra and Charlie Chaplin. Over time, the lounge featured jazz greats such as Von Freeman and Kurt Elling and was decorated with a full-sized nude statue of Ceres, the Goddess of Harvest, which still stands in the lounge today.
But during the Prohibition Era of the 1920s and early 30s, things began to turn sinister. Jack McGurn of the Chicago Outfit, the mafia run by Al Capone, took over the lounge and made it a speakeasy for Chicago’s mobsters. The lounge rules were strict: Whenever Capone entered the room, the bandleader would stop whatever he was playing and perform Capone’s favorite, Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” And when singer Joe E. Lewis left the lounge for a higher paying job, he was slashed in the throat by McGurn (although he managed to survive), inspiring the 1957 film The Joker Is Wild.
Under the ownership of McGurn, Capone made the Green Mill his lounge of choice. His favorite seat still exists in the lounge today, strategically located to offer the mobster views of both the front and back entrances in case of danger.
What many guests of the Green Mill are unaware of, as it is hidden from plain sight in the lounge, is that beneath the bar there is a network of underground tunnels. The tunnels, originally created to transport coal for the Green Mill’s boilers, were purportedly used by the mafia to store and traffic illicit booze. Local rumor also has it that Capone used the tunnels as a secret escape route when the cops came around, adding to the Green Mill's historical intrigue.
Today, the Green Mill is less famous for its gang activity and better known for its jazz venues. Featuring premier jazz musicians and a classic neon “Green Mill” sign, the lounge truly takes guests back to the 1940s. The Green Mill is also home to the Uptown Poetry Slam, the first poetry slam in the world.
In London, the first ever mosque built explicitly as a house of worship was the Fazl Mosque in Southfields, which opened in 1926. But decades before, an immigrant from South Africa opened the city’s first-ever mosque, a makeshift space in his Camden apartment, dedicated to prayer and learning.
Haji Mohammed Dollie came to England in 1894 with his wife and two sons, reports Londonist. He quickly became connected to the city’s small Muslim community, which numbered a few hundred people at the time.
AbdulMaalik Tailor, a tour guide who specializes in London’s Muslim history, first read about Dollie in a biography of Abdullah Quilliam, who had opened England’s first mosque, in Liverpool, in 1887. Tailor started researching Dollie, and he found newspaper accounts telling the story of how Dollie had opened London’s first mosque in 1895. One 1899 story reported:
Gradually the parents themselves took to assembling in Mr Doullie's [sic] house for worship. Gladly did he suffer the intrusion and gladly did he set apart his drawing room, first at Albert-street and now at Euston-road, for the purposes of a mosque.
But there was no other details about the mosque’s location. Recently, though Tailor tracked down a record at the Camden Local Studies and Archives Center that listed Dollie and his address. When Dollie lived there, the street would have been filled with horses and carriages; now it’s a quiet street of row houses with a Whole Foods around the corner and a hidden piece of history tucked into its past.
A plaque that has been shared thousands of times online commemorates a drunken fight between Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, all over the Oxford comma. Only problem is... the story isn't true.
The plaque recounts a fight in 1968 between the two authors, who “came to blows over a disagreement regarding the Oxford comma.” Claiming the altercation even showed up in Kerouac's novel “Doctor Sax,” as well as a local police report, the whole affair smacks of exactly the kind of fight the two iconoclasts might actually have engaged in.
While writers and editors have been known to come to blows over the use of the Oxford comma (that is, whether or not to add a comma in a list before a final “and”), there are a few issues with the report. It notes the fight as happening at the Lowell Athenaeum (which never existed), it sites that the incident appeared in "Dr. Sax" (which was published nine years earlier, in 1959), and Burroughs never actually showed his face in Lowell, Massachusetts, let alone hung out there with Kerouac.
The plaque, one of a few faux historical markers at Mill No. 5, is a marketing creation of Constantine Valhouli and Jim Lichoulas III, to help promote their commercial venture, a conversion of old industrial space into a hive of new businesses, galleries, studios and tech labs. The developers really intended it as a goof—little did they anticipate how quickly two dead writers could create an online viral ruse.
As new technologies revolutionize and streamline our lives, more and more traditional crafts are falling by the wayside or becoming the domain of hobbyists. Among those that were once ubiquitous, but are becoming more obscure is the art of knot tying—once an essential skill in professions ranging from sailing to farming and today becoming a more and more specialized craft, as the number of people who use the traditional methods of knotting dwindle.
But there are still those, such as the members of the International Guild of Knot Tyers, who are working to make sure that these disappearing skills don’t unravel. The Guild was started in 1982 by Des Pawson, an expert knot tier, and Geoffrey Budworth, a police officer who was no slouch in the knotting department either. Uniting over a love of a new knot that was invented in the 1970s, the Hunter’s Bend, the duo soon came upon the idea of seeking out other knot enthusiasts. Eventually the Guild was formed, becoming an official U.K. charity, complete with government oversight.
“I became interested in knots when I was young, partly as a boy scout and partly as a sailor,” says Colin Byfleet, who is currently serving as the IKTG’s Secretary to the Trustees. “I’m about 74 now, and as I was coming up on retirement, I was living in France at the time, I met a group of people who were demonstrating knots, and that’s where it all started. I thoroughly enjoyed it.”
Byfleet’s lifelong interest in knots may have led him to his involvement with the Guild, but people come from a variety of different points of appreciation for the craft.
Byfleet, for instance, says that he’s most interested in the math and science behind knots, including how modeling projected knots can lead to surprising discoveries about their geometry. He says there are a number of mathematicians who are part of the Guild: “We have a spectrum, from a pure mathematician, all the way through to people who may be unemployed and just do it for fun.”
Expert knotting is generally considered to belong to the maritime world, but members of the Guild use their knowhow for a wide variety of uses. A deep knowledge of knots is needed everywhere from the rigging of Cirque du Soleil acrobats to law enforcement agencies who use forensic knotting, studying and identifying knots to help solve criminal cases in the same way one might study handwriting. “It’s a bit like folding your arms," says Byfleet. "Even if you tie simple knots, you tend to tie them the same way.”
Some members of the Guild prefer to focus on the related craft of rope-making, which in and of itself is a very particular art. Byfleet told us that he knows of Guild members whose focus is on church bell ropes, which need to be made in such a way that they stretch when pulled, making the sound of the bell less harsh and more musical.
While members might join the IGKT for different reasons, the Guild’s goal is always education, getting the word out about the joy of knots, and passing on the craft. They hold around 100-200 events around the world each year, where experts and aficionados come to hold seminars and show off their skills. While there is no directly competitive aspect to the events, the Guild does hold a handful of exhibitions each year to let the most skilled knot tyers, who can create knots with the most finesse and speed, show off their stuff. In an effort to get more kids interested in knots, they’ve also held speed tying contests, which Byfleet says were a pretty big hit.
The Guild isn’t a massive organization, but it does have a healthy roster of around 1,000 devoted members, spread across the world. As Byfleet says, there are an infinite number of knots, so it’s possible that that the Guild will continue to grow. Most standard types of knots, though, have already been catalogued in such books as The Ashley Book of Knots—the closest thing the Guild has to a bible.
With the rise of the internet, where people can share their techniques and skills at the touch of a button, Byfleet says that he can see a day when the Guild no longer serves a purpose, since knot knowledge is now readily available, and communication between experts has never been easier. But it doesn’t seem to bother him. “It might [disappear,] but it wouldn’t worry me if it did, because its purpose is being fulfilled anyway." As he says, learning something from an actual person is still better than just picking it up on the internet.
When Charlotte Carmody went to speak about twilight sleep, shebrought her “painless baby" with her. In churches and in department stores across the United States, in front of crowds of women who had been rallied by the Twilight Sleep Association, she told her story.
After reading a 1914 magazine article about the possibility of painless childbirth, Carmody had made a pilgrimage across the Atlantic Ocean, to a clinic in Freiburg, Germany, for her own delivery. When she went into labor, the German doctors gave her a combination of drugs; the next moment she remembered was waking up more than 12 hours later.
“Perhaps the baby will come tomorrow,” she thought to herself. It was only after a moment that she realized: “I felt lighter, and sat up easily, and my figure had changed.”
Minutes later, a nurse handed over her son. She named him Charlemagne, although at first she didn't believe he was hers: She didn’t remember his birth. “The twilight sleep” had swallowed the experience up and blanked it from her mind.
In later years, twilight sleep, in which women were put into a drug-induced trance, would come to exemplify America’s “knock ‘em out, drag ‘em out” era of childbirth, when women were given little choice about being medicated into a stupor during labor. But in 1914 and 1915, twilight sleep was a cause célèbre among American feminists, who formed twilight sleep associations and tried to spread the gospel. Like today’s home-birth movement, the movement promoting twilight sleep called for women to take control of their birth experiences and speak up against doctors who would deny them this choice.
Carmody, an early adopter of twilight sleep, was one of its fiercest advocates. “If you women want twilight sleep you will have to fight for it,” she told women rallying for the cause, “for the mass of doctors are opposed to it."
But while the feminists running the twilight sleep movement were trying to gain control of their bodies, the method they advocated was turned against them and used to rob laboring women of agency.
The push for twilight sleep started with a McClure’s Magazine article published in June 1914 by Marguerite Tracy and Constance Leupp, who had traveled to Freiburg and come back with glowing reviews of “a new and painless method of childbirth.” This method was safe and successful, they reported, and women from all over the world—from India, Russia, South Africa, and North and South America—were coming to the “odd old town” to experience twilight sleep. One person who had delivered a baby at the clinic declared “she would never again have the blessing of a baby without the attendant blessing of the Twilight Sleep,” the journalists wrote.
Tracy and Leupp described twilight sleep as “a very fine balance in the states of consciousness," which required "special knowledge of the use of drugs that cause it.” Once a woman had gone into labor, she was given a combination of morphine to dull the pain and scopolamine to dull her memory of the experience. (Today, scopolamine is sometimes called the "zombie drug" because its users become susceptible to suggestion but retain no memory of their actions.)
These drugs had been used in the past as anesthetics, but few doctors had adopted them with enthusiasm. But the German clinic, the McClure’s article reported, had reached a technical breakthrough with scopolamine, which allowed the doctors to administer it with more precision and therefore with more success. Women who they treated with these drugs would retain muscle control and would follow orders from doctors, but would remember none of it.
There were some strange conditions that went along with the use of these drugs. Because the women’s state of suspension was precarious, women in twilight sleep were kept in padded, crib-like beds, with eye masks blocking out the light and cotton balls in their ears blocking out sound. Sometimes they were fitted into straight-jacket-like shirts that limited the movement of their arms. When the birth was over, women also often experienced a moment of dissociation, as Carmody did: Had they really had a baby? Was the baby they’d been handed really theirs?
But to Tracy and Leupp, the benefits of this method were obvious. At the time, there was a growing concern, roughly analogous to today’s worry about the overuse of C-sections, that doctors were too quick to use forceps, which could increase risk and prolong women’s recovery time. The Freiburg clinic rarely used forceps in deliveries. The clearest selling point to the journalists, though, was women's experience: They awoke from Twilight Sleep without a memory of the pain of childbirth and were soon out of bed, getting to know their new child.
Carmody was the first woman to travel to Freiburg to give birth after the McClure’s article was published, and she came back with glowing reviews. But she barely beat the rush of American women to Freiburg. Tracy and Leupp’s article, McClure’s later reported, had attracted more attention than any other the magazine had ever published.
Advocates of twilight sleep didn’t want American women to have to travel to Germany to obtain this treatment, though. They started demanding that doctors and hospitals in America give women this option, and they formed the National Twilight Sleep Association to further their cause.
Led by Mrs. C. Temple Emmet, a member of the wealthy Astor family and the first American ever to have a baby at Freiburg, the association quickly formed plans for expansion by sending lecturers around the country and organizing branch associations. Not all of its leaders were from the wealthiest ranks of Americans; the association’s board included an elementary school teacher, a dental nurse, and the wife of a miner. At Twilight Sleep Talks women would extol the virtues of “painless childbirth.”
“I was so happy,” one women declared. “The night of my confinement will always be a night dropped out of my life,” says another. The association celebrated when a “tenement house mother” gave a twilight sleep speech on the corner of her street.
The twilight sleep movement was immediately controversial, though. While feminist women pushed for access to the technique, doctors fought back. They “refused to be ‘stampeded by these misguided ladies,'" historian Judith Walzer Leavitt wrote, in her account of the movement. Doctors wrote in the popular and academic press about the dangers of twilight sleep and argued that one popular article shouldn’t guide medical practice. But the practice also had advocates in the medical community, and soon American doctors were also traveling to Freiburg to train in twilight sleep techniques.
But, as innovators today might say, twilight sleep didn’t scale well. Even in the original McClure’s article, Tracy and Leupp wrote that the Freiburg method was almost impossible to practice in large hospitals, where space and the attention of doctors was at a premium. As twilight sleep was practiced at Freiburg, a woman ideally had her own room, to minimize the chance she’d be disoriented, and the doctor paid close attention to her progress through the whole course of her labor. At Freiburg, the clinic was only able to accomplish this level of care by tripling their delivery room staff, thanks to the support of the Grand Duke of Baden. When doctors and hospitals in America started adopting this technique, they usually were not able devote that same attention to individual women, and the outcomes suffered.
There was also a gruesome aspect to twilight sleep. Although women did not remember having pain during childbirth, they were still experiencing pain. That’s part of the reason their beds were padded and the women's arms constrained—they would writhe and yell during labor. The doctors at the time understood this: "There is as much [pain] as in the ordinary childbirth,” one doctor told The New York Times. “The only difference is that the patient does not remember having the sensation of pain."
Women who took the drugs did sometimes have memories of their labor and the attendant agony. One twilight sleep patient remembered telling the doctor, “I am having a very bad pain.”
“You are having a very bad pain,” he replied. In her memory, the experience was impersonal and far away. But for non-drugged observers, seeing the women’s pain could be horrific. One twilight sleep hospital on Riverside Drive was almost shut down by noise complaints from neighbors, who could hear the laboring women screaming.
For the women who advocated for twilight sleep, though, blacking this out of their memory was considered desirable. “It was an attempt to gain control over the birthing process,” wrote Leavitt, the historian. “Because many of the twilight sleep leaders were active feminists, they spoke in the idiom of the women’s movement.” While to later generations, twilight sleep was a horrifying treatment, in which zombified women were divorced from the experience of giving birth, to this generation, it was a new form of freedom, a way to erase the work and potential trauma of labor.
The twilight sleep movement was short-lived. The McClure’s article was published just before the start of World War I, and soon German technology and ideas were viewed with suspicion. More devastating, though, was the death of Charlotte Carmody, in 1915, while giving birth to her next child, in a hospital in Brooklyn that had adopted twilight sleep. She died of a hemorrhage, and her husband and doctor were both clear that twilight sleep techniques were not to blame. But her death cast a pall on the movement; her own neighbor started an Anti-Twilight Sleep Association. The department store rallies stopped, and the associations soon disbanded.
Twilight sleep, though, stuck around in its own zombified form. Doctors found it convenient to drug women and restrict access to the delivery room, and for decades women were given little choice about whether they’d be knocked out during labor. Scopolamine remained in use until the 1960s, when a new round of journalism about the practice exposed its more gruesome side, including the burns women would have on their wrists from being tied down. What had started as a dream for women, in which the pain of childbirth was wiped away upon waking, had become a nightmare.
Irvine is in southern California, about 40 miles from Los Angeles. Being in Orange County, the city had no other color choice for their huge helium balloon ride, the centerpiece of Orange County's Great Park.
The giant orange orb looks like a hot air balloon, but with a twist—it’s safely filled with helium (no hydrogen danger here) so it’s completely silent. Owned and operated as a community ride attraction by the city, the big, bright ball is one of the largest helium balloons in the United States.
Big Orange has been around since 2007, and was the first of its kind. As tall as a 12-story building, the tethered inflatable can host up to 30 people in its steel gondola, while rising 400 feet straight up to some pretty breathtaking scenery.
On a good, clear day, you can see 40 miles in every direction, taking in the Pacific Ocean and Catalina Island to the west, the San Gabriel Mountains to the north, and even Disneyland, just up the 5.
On the Scottish island of Unst, boatmen once told stories of an English widow who journeyed out to a tiny, rocky islet on the northernmost point of the British Isles. Lady Jane Franklin would gaze north across the sea and “send [her] love on wings of prayer” to her long-lost husband Sir John Franklin, the famed Arctic explorer and naval officer who set sail in 1845 in search of the Northwest Passage.
“Those who were there said she stood for some minutes on the somber rock, quite silent, tears falling slowly, and her hands stretched out towards the north,” Jessie Saxby, an author of the region, wrote.
While some stories portray Lady Franklin as a weeping widow and devoted wife, she was much more than that. Lady Franklin was an unrelenting force who propelled the search for her husband, along the way establishing herself as an important figure in polar exploration during the late 19th century.
In 1845, John Franklin led two ships, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, carrying 129 crewmembers, into the uncharted territory of the Arctic. They never returned. The lost expedition remains one of the greatest ongoing mysteries in the history of polar exploration. This is in part due to Franklin’s second wife, Lady Jane Franklin, a tenacious, well-traveled woman who fueled a series of polar missions to locate the expedition and find out the fate of her husband. As one newspaper of the era put it, “What the nation would not do, a woman did.”
“The first few [search parties] were created by the British Navy, but when they were unsuccessful, she pushed for American involvement and she actually bought her own ship later on,” says Douglas Kondziolka, a neurosurgeon and professor at New York University Langone Medical Center, who recently presented his collection of Arctic and Antarctic exploration books and documents at the New York Academy of Medicine.
While Franklin may have physically explored the vast frozen land, Lady Franklin had funded voyages that significantly contributed to charting the Arctic.
Lady Franklin was born Jane Griffin in London on December 4, 1791. Her mother died when she was young and her father was a wealthy silk manufacturer. Growing up, she received the limited education available at the time but her father encouraged her to pursue her curiosities. She was self-taught, a prolific diarist and “fiercely energetic,” Johnson wrote. In 1828, at the age of 37, she married John Franklin, who by that time had already journeyed to the Arctic twice. A year later he was knighted for his 1825 expedition, which charted thousands of miles.
Atypical of women at the time, Lady Franklin was an explorer and adventurer herself. Some scholars have called her one of the most traveled women of the Victorian era.
“Few women of her class and era had the opportunity to stamp their presence on so many parts of the world,” wrote Penny Russell in Victorian Studies.
At a young age, Lady Franklin toured countries throughout western Europe with her father and two sisters. She later explored areas of Northern America, countries in Asia, and colonies of South Australia and New Zealand. She once descended down a crater in Hawaii, became the first woman to climb Mount Wellington, and even has a mountain named after her in Victoria, Australia. During her adventures, Lady Franklin faced storms and near-starvation at sea, and experienced travel by many modes of transport, from naval ships, camels, to palanquins and sedan chairs, wrote Russell. When Franklin was stationed in the Mediterranean in 1830, Lady Franklin accompanied him and traveled around Greece and northern Africa with growing independence, said Russell, and had even ventured with only two or three servants.
In 1836, Franklin was appointed governor of the Australian penal colony Van Diemen’s Land—modern-day Tasmania. Because of her husband’s political position, Lady Franklin was able to be involved in the growth and development of the colony. She was extremely passionate about science and education.
“Settler locals soon learned to loathe her for cheerfully replacing balls with public lectures on botany, science and ethnography,” wrote Johnson.
She built a sandstone Greek temple to house a natural history museum, bought 130 acres of land for a horticulture garden, and published a scientific journal. Her “hobbies of hobbies,” she once said, was the foundation of a state college. Lady Franklin was also involved with reforming conditions of female prisons, and—controversially—took two Aboriginal children into temporary care.
“Colonists were appalled by her obvious interest in their affairs, and almost from the moment of her arrival she was mercilessly satirized in the colonial press,” wrote Russell.
The Franklins returned to England when John Franklin was recruited for another expedition to find the Northwest Passage, the sea route through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago that would allow a much shorter voyage from Europe to Asia. While the warming climate has opened the Northwest Passage today, explorers in the 19th century didn’t know that the thick, year-round sea ice made the path impossible to sail through.
Despite being a seasoned Arctic explorer, Franklin and his two ships became trapped in the frozen, desolate land. After three years and no sign of Franklin, the British Navy began sending out search parties and even posted a reward for the crew who found evidence.
“Books were published about the Franklin expedition and the public became very interested in this search for the next 25 to 30 years,” Kondziolka says. “That stimulated a lot of additional people to get involved.”
The most avid and relentless instigator behind the search was Lady Franklin. She wrote to newspapers, rallied helpers and other explorers, pushed government officials, and roused public sympathy for the missing men, wrote Russell.
Previous explorers and crew had survived for four to six years—if they met Inuit, people thought maybe they could stay alive for 10 or 11 years, says Kondziolka. But as the years passed by and there were still no telltale signs of what had happened to Franklin, the British government began to wane in its effort despite Lady Franklin’s petitions and letters to the prime minister and even the U.S. president. Instead of giving up, she took matters into her own hands and funded seven missions to retrieve evidence of her husband’s location, recruiting the help of American explorers.
“One of the things later on, from her perspective, was if her husband found the Northwest Passage before he died and therefore should be given the glory of finding it,” says Kondziolka. The various explorers she commissioned hunted for relics, until in 1859 Francis Leopold McClintock returned on Lady Franklin’s ship the Fox with some dismal news. In a tin under a pile of rocks, preserved by permafrost, was a message that stated (in about six different languages) that Franklin had died within a year of the expedition.
Wanting to retrieve Franklin’s missing written records, Lady Franklin continued to send vessels to the Arctic until her death. She commissioned one final search that set sail on June 1875 only weeks before she died on July 18, 1875.
More than 150 years later, the spirit of Lady Franklin’s search for her lost husband still lives on. In September 2016, the HMS Terror was finally located in its watery grave near King William Island in the Canadian Arctic.
Explorers aboard Lady Franklin's vessels, dispatched to find evidence of her husband's fate, also made many of their own discoveries and documentations. They recorded flora and fauna of the Canadian Arctic, surveyed the west coast of Greenland, and Sir Robert McClure found the Northwest Passage on a Franklin search expedition supported by the British Navy in 1850. Her involvement inspired explorers to reach the most northern tips of the earth.
“She was very responsible for some of the key players, such as getting the Americans involved in polar exploration,” says Kondziolka. “Asking them for help started off a 30-year process of one American expedition after another which eventually led to the accomplishment of going to the North Pole in 1908. That really started with her.”
As we're all learning these days, if you want to help enact political change, it pays to agitate on a local level. Go meet up with your representatives and make them aware of your policy priorities! Arrange a meetup with your friends and send postcards to your Congressperson! Or, go a little further: call your mayor and request that he set up an exorcism to banish that new, pesky ghost from the town hall!
Such are the demands currently faced by Leandro Martín—the mayor of Vegas del Genil, a small town outside of Granada, Spain—after news leaked last week of a council member's spooky after-hours experience, The Local reports. The council member, who wishes to remain anonymous, first raised the alarm after he worked late one night in the town hall. "I heard a strange rustling sound in the hallway, like someone was dragging files across the floor," the council member recounted to Ideal.
Fearing a burglar, he crept into the hallway and took a cell phone picture of what initially seemed to be an empty hallway. Examining the photo in his office, the council member "saw what appeared to be a ghostly apparition of a child," The Local reports. He quickly locked himself in the room "in a state of panic" and WhatsApped the photo to his fellow council members, one of whom came to the office to escort him home.
The mayor was quick to dismiss these concerns—but the true believers aren't letting up. Council members insist that the hallway is colder than normal, even though a mechanic checked the heating and found everything working fine.
One brought in a Reiki practitioner, who reported feeling "a presence," The Local says. Citizens are also calling the mayor left and right, demanding an exorcism or, at the very least, an investigation.
Despite this constituent pressure, "earthly matters" remain the town's top concern, the mayor told El Mundo.
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 the small town of Cobough, Ontario, not far from Toronto, a child found a chicken in the bathroom at McDonald’s.
The boy, age 5, came running out of the restroom to report his discovery, the Northumberland News reports, while his mom was ordering him a Happy Meal.
After some initial skepticism from the adults, they found the kid was correct: there was a live, brown chicken in the bathroom.
No one knows where the chicken came from. (Perhaps a customer abandoned it there?) The McDonald’s staff called Municipal Animal Services, which took the chicken away before it could be turned into extra fresh chicken nuggets.
A week and a half ago, the Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire (IRSN), a French agency tasked with investigating nuclear threats, issued a cryptic press release on its website.
A spike in iodine-131, an isotope that is a product of nuclear fission (like, for instance, after the explosion of a nuclear bomb), had been detected across Europe, IRSN said.
The isotope, which has medical uses but can also be very dangerous, had been detected "in tiny amounts in the ground-level atmosphere in Europe," the agency said, in countries from Norway to Spain.
They also produced a scary-looking map:
And then, four days later, The Aviationist reported that an American plane, the WC-135 Constant Phoenix, also known as a nuclear "sniffer" for its ability to detect and analyze fallout residue, had been deployed to Britain, possibly—officials didn't say—to aid in investigating the reported iodine-131 spike.
Yet, a few days after that report, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization, or the CTBTO, an international organization established by the (still not ratified) Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, said, no, levels of iodine-131 were normal across Europe, or at least compared to what they have been historically.
The CTBTO also noted that had there been a secret nuclear test, perhaps by Russia, as many had been speculating, we would've seen higher levels of not just iodine-131, but a range of nuclear fission products.
Finally, yesterday, The Aviationist reported that the American nuclear sniffer had taken off, en route, apparently, for Norway, its mission still unknown. An Air Force spokesman told The Independent that the plane was merely in Europe for a "a preplanned rotational deployment scheduled far in advance."
So what's going on here?
Probably not a secret nuclear test, for one thing. As the CTBTO notes, if that were the case, a lot more than just higher levels of iodine-131 would show up.
An accidental leak from a pharmaceutical or medical facility, however, is one possibility, as is some kind of release from a nuclear submarine, Russian or otherwise.
But the strongest possibility remains: nothing. Ever since iodine-131 was discovered in 1938, we've used it for a wide range of things, like fighting thyroid cancer, which means that it's ever present in labs and hospitals and other places across the globe.
It's also, as the CTBTO says, detected at trace levels "across the world," meaning that this minor spike, if it even exists, wouldn't be much of a threat, since we are already coexisting with it, whether you realize it or not.
