There’s a vast network of tunnels underneath Chicago that once handled coal and ashes for dozens of buildings connected at their sub basement levels. The tunnels were in operation from 1904 to 1959, and then forgotten about until a catastrophic flood reminded everyone they were there.
Work began on the tunnels in 1899 under the auspices the Illinois Telephone and Telegraph Company, reorganized in later years as the Chicago Tunnel Company. An enormous quantity of blue clay soil was excavated by hand and used as landfill to build up low lying areas on the waterfront.
The Chicago Tunnel Company had an aggressive (perhaps brash) business strategy, building 60 miles of tunnels before securing a single client. Once the network was complete they approached downtown buildings and offered an array of services, including telephone and telegraph connections, and coal, mail and merchandise deliveries. And the clients did come; tunnel connections were built to the Board of Trade, City Hall, Merchandise Mart, the Federal Reserve Bank, the Chicago Tribune, the Civic Opera House, the Field Museum, and dozen of others. One of the Chicago Tunnel Company’s more inventive products was "tunnel air" (55˚F year round), which they piped into theaters and hotels as natural air conditioning.
For decades, little electric trains used the tunnels to make their deliveries free from the congestion of surface traffic. Operators navigated using street names painted onto the walls, and avoided collisions using nothing more than a “sight and sound system,” in the generous words of Electric Railway Journal. The tunnels saw their peak usage in the 1940’s and 1950’s, but struggled financially because of tremendous capital investments and increased competition from the trucking industry. In 1959 the Chicago Tunnel Company went out of business and sold their fleet of little trains for $64,000 in scrap.
Of course, the tunnels didn’t just go away after that. As memory of this unique bit of infrastructure faded into obscurity the city allowed a few special businesses to continue to use them. The Chicago Tribune, for example, used the tunnels until 1981 to transport newsprint from their paper warehouse to Tribune Tower.
On April 13, 1992 the tunnels jumped back into the headlines in what the press dubbed “The Great Chicago Flood.” City employees driving new river pilings near Kinzie and Canal Street inadvertently punctured a tunnel roof, allowing millions of gallons of water to gush into the network. All the old buildings that had connected to the tunnels decades earlier were flooded, electricity shorted, and records at City Hall were soaked. The incident ended up costing roughly $2 billion in damage. Since then the tunnels have been sealed, and entry is near impossible.
At the heart of the west side of Highgate Cemetery is the Circle of Lebanon. This round of mausoleums creates a massive pot, containing the ancient Cedar of Lebanon.
The tree long predates the graveyard surrounding it. Highgate Cemetery was originally the grounds of Ashurst House. When the manor was sold in 1830 and demolished to make way for St. Michael's Church, the tree was already around 100 to 150 years old. It was left standing as the cemetery developed around it.
Some of the earliest tombs in Highgate were constructed around the cedar in the modish Egyptian style of the 1830s. The outer circle of tombs, built later, are in a more classical style. This circle of mausoleums surrounding the cedar is known as the "Circle of Lebanon," and it created a gigantic pot befitting the size of the tree inside it. The tree, still growing despite its age, is now a sort of bonsai with its roots constrained inside the pot.
The story of Berlin’s Oberhafenkantine starts in Hamburg, where the original Oberhafen-Kantine has been serving dockside meals for nearly a century.
The Hamburg landmark was an inspiration for artist Thomas Passfeld, who built a full-scale replica of the little lunch joint in 2009, taking it on a journey from New York to London, finally landing in Berlin and its current home near the River Spree.
Mimicking the old tradition of the German “Kaffeeklappe” (kind of like a lunch counter or coffee shop), Passfeld’s version is a replica with a few key exceptions: this one isn’t over 90 years old; it’s made entirely from reclaimed wood instead of brick; it’s more of a club and event space than a coffee shop; and it doesn’t tilt at an angle that keeps you holding onto your beer.
Unlike the original that leans at a noticeable angle from years of soil erosion (it’s location next to the River Elbe has meant repeated flooding), Passfeld's inspired version stands straight, but only once it’s set up. This Kaffeeklappe is a moveable feast, able to be dismantled and transported in shipping containers. The artist's goal is to keep it traveling, popping up around the world, bringing some old world charm and grit along with it.
Located at the entrance to Manila Bay, "Isla ng Corregidor" was identified by the Spaniards as a strategic defense location when they arrived in the 16th century. They named it "Island of the Corrector," since this was the place where all ships entering Manila would stop for inspection. Since then the fortress island has been the site of many battles, from the Spanish-American War to the period of American colonialism.
The oldest landmark on the island is the lighthouse dated 1853, but much of this lush tropical island is dominated by ruins that reflect the intense fighting that took place in World War II. In addition to defense and battery buildings, there are shops, a movie theater, and a swimming pool, all from the soldiers stationed here many years ago.
During the Japanese invasion of the Philippines in 1941, Corregidor was the temporary headquarters of the Philippine Government. American and Philippine troops fought desperately to defend the island using tunnels dug into the rock as storage for ammunition and hospitals, but without reinforcements the troops were beaten badly. Corregidor was surrendered to the Japanese by spring of 1942.
In 1945 the tide of war turned against the Japanese. Enduring months of aerial and naval bombardment in the tunnels on the island, they surrendered to American and Philippine forces in February that year.
Even on a bright, sunny day the place is heavy with memories of what happened here. The buildings and fortifications have been left untouched, which would give the impression that the fighting ended just yesterday if it weren't for the greenery that has grown over in the decades since their abandonment. Tour guides on the island report they are still finding detritus from the battles of WWII. They occasionally come across objects in the jungle undergrowth dating back to even earlier, when Philippines and American families were stationed on the island at the turn of the 20th century.
The expansive tunnels below ground are no doubt the eeriest part of the island. These dark corridors are allegedly haunted by Japanese soldiers who took their own lives before defeat, but whether or not you believe that legend, the tunnels are disturbing for the sheer amount of violence that occurred there.
The island is now a designated national monument and war memorial. The ruins have been maintained in memory of the American, Philippine, and Japanese soldiers who fought and died here.
Boston’s beloved neon Citgo sign may have finally run out of gas, if their landlords have anything to say about it. As The Boston Globe is reporting, the huge, historic sign, which has become a landmark for city residents, is now in danger of losing its rooftop realty if it doesn’t pay higher rent.
When Boston University sold the building at 660 Beacon, atop which the sign is perched, last October to New York real estate firm, Related Beal, it was clear that there would need to be some discussion about the iconic logo’s future. The sign sits near the end of the Boston Marathon and is a prominent feature in the backdrop of Fenway Park, making its airspace highly valuable to marketers, and Related Beal knows it. According to the Globe, Citgo currently pays $250,000 a year to keep the sign in place, but Related Beal is asking for ten times that.
Currently the real estate firm is in negotiations with the petroleum company to see if they can reach a compromise. Meanwhile, Boston isn’t taking the possible loss of the sign lying down. The Boston Landmarks Committee is currently reviewing a proposal to give the sign landmark status so that it might have extra protections should the negotiations go south.
Even then, the people of Boston aren’t likely to let the sign go easily either. It was previously saved in the early 1980s by public outcry when Citgo tried to remove the sign themselves.
On March 25, 1878, in an unsigned editorial, TheNew York Times spent a few column inches dragging a public figure through the mud. "Something ought to be done," about this person, they began, "and there is a growing conviction that it had better be done with a hemp rope." Their subject, they alleged, was a public figure "of the most deleterious character," hell-bent on "the destruction of human society"—all words fit for a true enemy. But the Times wasn't skewering a corrupt politician, or even a rival newsmaker. Their target was Thomas Edison, and the provoking incident was his recent invention of the phonograph.
Looking back on Edison now, it's easy to see him as a perpetual hero. Although he had his fair share of scandals—the War of Currents, the Great Phenol Plot, the patent disputes—his modern reputation paints him as a man who single-handedly invented the 20th century with an electric-light halo around his head. But a trip back into the archives reveals that he was not always so revered. Although Edison elicited reams of fawning and excited coverage, the publications of his time also occasionally painted the great man and his inventions as creepy and dangerous—or, more often, just plain laughable.
The late 1870s marked a time of great inventiveness. In 1878 alone, the world was introduced to Alexander Graham Bell's telephone, Eadweard Muybridge's stop-motion photography, and Gustav Kessel's espresso machine, to name just a few world-changing examples. In such a competitive atmosphere, novelty, more than usefulness, was the order of the day. Inventors were expected to prove how revolutionary their new gizmos were, and in turn, publications rewarded them with breathless coverage. At times, to the layperson, "progress seemed like an onslaught of newness for its own sake," writes the media scholar Ivy Roberts in a new paper in Early Popular Visual Culture.
Edison was a big player in this era of discovery. Throughout the winter of 1877 and the spring of 1878, he traveled the world demonstrating his newest invention, the phonograph. Scientific American describes a typical show: Edison put the machine on a table and turned the crank, and the phonograph proceeded to "talk," introducing itself and exchanging various pleasantries with gaping onlookers.
The news media responded swiftly and variously. While plenty of outlets sung the praises of this new techno-talker, others took the opportunity to poke fun. The aforementioned New York Times editorial leans equally on scaremongering and humor, switching between over-the-top mockery and genuine fear. "He has been addicted to electricity for many years," the editorial posits, tongue firmly in cheek, before more seriously alleging that the phonograph, with its ability to record speech, "will eventually destroy all confidence between man and man."
Cartoonists had an especially good time with the phonograph. On March 21, 1878, the front page of the illustrated newspaper TheDaily Graphic featured ten separate sketches of ways phonographic technology might go wrong: greedy thieves might trick elderly millionaires into vocally amending their wills; sketchy neighbors might use opera recordings to lure women out of their homes; and wives might frighten their husbands out of sleep by playing a tape that yells "POLICE! FIRE!" over and over again.
Puck, a New York-based humor magazine, published several illustrations suggesting alternate uses for the technology. In one of them, an angry wife records herself lecturing her absent husband, so that when he finally returns from the bar, he can simply press play and let her sleep. Another cartoon, by George Du Maurier in London's Punch weekly, shows a demure, well-dressed woman on a street corner, silently cranking her own voice out of a phonograph. "How much better if, instead of hirsute Italian organ-grinders parading our streets, we could have fair female phonographers playing… their original voices!" the caption jokes.
Needless to say, this mockery failed to stop Edison, who continued to put out earth-shaking inventions. By the summer of 1878, he had introduced the megaphone, an instrument which, he promised, would vastly expand the scope of what the average human could hear. Although he marketed this as a wholesome device—one that could help the hearing impaired, surveyors, and opera-goers—the press once again latched onto its more scandalous and ridiculous possibilities. As Roberts details, publications from Scientific American to Scribners put out illustrated covers in which gentry are using the megaphone to spy on their faraway rural neighbors. (It didn't help that Edison originally called the megaphone "the telephonoscope"—a name which, as the New York Sun quickly pointed out, is "incongruous and absurd," because "a voice cannot be seen.")
Later that July, Edison traveled west to view a rare solar eclipse, prompting a wave of send-ups from regional papers. In the July 27, 1878, issue of the Denver Tribune, a satirical writer known only as "Gnorts" devoted his column to making fun of Edison. "He is going to accomplish something in a short time more wonderful than all the rest of his grand achievements, and which will greatly astonish all mankind," wrote Gnorts, before detailing this supposed venture: Edison planned to use the unique properties of the eclipse to lasso the sun and pull it closer to Earth, melting the ice caps, enabling the discovery of the North Pole, and ensuring that all of the world's population would have to pay him for heat and light.
"Should the plan above not be satisfactory," concludes Gnorts, "Mr. Edison will then divide the sun into many millions of small ones and lease them out to all who desire suns, upon the same conditions that he at present leases his telephones and phonographs." The inventor was also a boon to advertisers: "Not even Edison, with all his inventive genius and extensive research, can find a fat person that Allen's Anti-Fat will not reduce at a rate of from two to five pounds per week," read one clip in the Cheyenne Daily Leader. And as Edison made his way across the country, the Mercury and the Daily Sun, two rival Wyoming papers, quickly took to comparing each other to his more ridiculous inventions as a form of ribbing.
Even after this journey, Edison didn't rest, and neither did his critics. In September of 1878, he began talking about his plans for the electric lightbulb. Now so canonical it has become the literal symbol of inventiveness, electric light, too, was viewed with some skepticism. According to Roberts, news of its impending arrival was greeted in the London Times with a spirited debate. One October letter to the editor warned that electric lightbulbs would lend a grayish cast to ladies' faces, making them unattractive. "Anything more ghastly and unnatural than the blue-white of the new illumination could scarcely be," agreed another, warning that its "weird blueness" would turn people into "an assemblage of ghosts." "The effect may be poetical if you please," this letter concludes, "But it is the poetry of… mortal decay."
A few months later, George Du Maurier, the cartoonist at Punch, followed his phonograph sendup with an entire Edison-themed series. In one caricature, a mother and father in England watch and speak with their vacationing children, who are far away in the Antipodes, almost as though they're using a 19th century version of Skype. Du Maurier calls this invention "Edison's Telephonoscope"—which, as Roberts points out, hearkens back to to the megaphone's earlier, much-satirized name. In another three-part cartoon, gentlefolk of all ages fly through city streets, hover above country fields, and tumble around a well-appointed parlor, all thanks to "Edison's Anti-Gravitation Underclothing."
"From the perspective of the Victorian reader, 'Edison's Telephonoscope' satirised the inventor's misplaced confidence," writes Roberts. "It encouraged readers to examine both the benefits and drawbacks of technological progress and supersession." As she points out, much of the worry and satire surrounding Edison taps into anxieties about wealth, social class, and access. Who could afford the telephonoscope, if it existed? Would the megaphone truly help everyone, or would rich people use it to spy on their poorer neighbors? And is it so far-fetched to think that—if he could—Edison might privatize the sun? A slightly later cover, from a July 1879 issue of the New York Daily Graphic, continues in that vein: it shows Edison, who at that point was looking for a new way to mine iron ore, as a pointy-hatted wizard searching for precious metals in his backyard.
Today—when the pace of discovery has, if anything, accelerated—new inventions, and their inventors, inspire similar fears and feelings. Smart fridges and private moon journeys are seen as megaphone-esque playthings of the errant rich. Facebook algorithms and cell phone cameras are, like the phonograph, greeted as the likely tools of the coming surveillance state. Although the question of whether any of these perpetual fears will come to fruition—whether this constant influx of technology will bind us, rather than free us—depends on your perspective, one enduring tragedy is clear: after all these decades, we still don't have anti-gravitation underclothing. Perhaps Elon Musk will take that on next.
What might look like a strangely isolated lighthouse in a grassy field is actually a pyramidal tower in the grand tradition of English follies. Situated in Wentworth in Northern England, this unusual structure is in the shape of a tall three-sided pyramid, truncated at the top to house a hexagonal glass-sided cupola that appears to move about, due to an optical illusion.
The tower's name, Hoober Stand, comes from the small settlement of Hoober nearby. The folly was constructed by Henry Flitcroft between 1746 and 1748 for the aristocrat Thomas Watson-Wentworth, Earl of Malton, to celebrate his role in suppressing the Jacobite uprising, an attempt to restore the Catholic Charles Edward Stuart (the "Young Pretender") to the throne. An inscription above the door commemorates the occasion.
The tower is 98 feet tall and topped by a dome-shaped observation turret. A climb up the internal steps to the top offers beautiful views of the English countryside. Though the dome is centered atop the stand, from different perspectives in fields surrounding the tower the dome may appear to change position. It's suggested the optical illusion, making the turret appear to have shifted off-center, is caused by the unusual angles of the tower itself.
Off the coast of Sicily, near the city of Gela, a new expedition to a 2,600-year-old shipwreck has returned with 47 lumps of orichalcum, a rare alloy said to be smelted* on the fabled island of Atlantis, Seeker reports.
The shipwreck dates back to 600 B.C. and was previously explored in 2015, when underwater archaeologists found 39 ingots of the metal. This trip also yielded a jar and two Corinthian helmets.
Orichalcum was supposed to be a shiny alloy, much like brass. It’s known from ancient texts, like Plato, which described it as a rare metal, mined at Atlantis. Plato described a temple to Poseidon that had an entire pillar of orichalcum, Seeker says. LucasArts fans of a certain age may remember it as a feature of the computer game Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.
In 2015, after this shipwreck was discovered, Sicilian officials started describing the metal found there by the same name. The ingots were made from zinc, charcoal and copper, News Corp Australia reported at the time; tradition had it that orichalcum was made of copper, gold and silver. The metal found by the shipwreck, though, matched ancient descriptions of orichalcum, which was supposed to have a red tone to it.
Whether or not the metal found in this particular shipwreck is the orichalcum of old, it is a strange and rare discovery—possibly sent to the sea as an offering to the gods.
*Correction: Not, as previously written, mined, as alloys cannot be mined.
There are two ways to make the climb up Gubbio’s Mt. Ingino to visit the Basilica of Saint Ubaldo. You can hike for 40 nearly-vertical minutes, or you can ride in the Funivia, a kind of cable car where the “car” looks like a human-size birdcage.
However you make the trip, once at the top the 16th century Basilica houses the mummified body of a 12th century Bishop named Ubaldo Baldassini. He is well appointed in white robes and a high, pointy mitre, jewel-encrusted and laid out on a silk pillow. The body is encased in a crystal-walled sarcophagus placed on a tall altar, all backlit by an arched stained glass window.
Gubbio is a medieval hill town in the Umbria region of central Italy, with panoramic views and ancient architecture. Ubaldo was elected as Bishop of Gubbio in the year 1126, and following his death in 1160 he was declared a saint. In addition to a good number of attributed miracles, he is known for his patience and heroic gentleness, celebrated in an annual procession on May 15th, the evening of his death.
On this day, the people of Gubbio make a pilgrimage up to the Basilica with lit candles to honor Ubaldo’s memory, and following the procession is the Festa dei Ceri (also called the Corsa dei Ceri), the Race of the Candles, in which three teams carry 15-foot long (4.5 m) wooden staffs (they represent the candles) over a thousand feet (300 m) of vertical elevation from the center of town up to the Basilica.
In the summer of 1922 a biplane whirred above an amazed crowd gathered in a New York airfield. The pilot, an African-Chocktaw-American woman named Bessie Coleman, made daring figure-eight loops and perilous barrel rolls, smoke swirling across the sky.
The New York Times reported that she flew planes “of many types” on her international flying license, the first woman of color to accomplish this in the world. Coleman, “without any instruction, flew a 220-horsepower Benz motored L. F. G. Plane,” in Europe, the Times impressed, and she had already become skilled in flying “the largest plane ever flown by a woman.”
This was not expected behavior in the 1920s. Men and women of color were not only seen as people who couldn’t fly—they were not supposed to fly. For Bessie Coleman, this was not a barrier. It was a challenge.
Born in Atlanta, Texas, Coleman walked miles to school, where she soon revealed herself to be smart—especially in math. Her mother taught her about strong black figures, and recognizing her intelligence, allowing her to keep her earnings as a laundress so she could finance her education past the eighth grade. She attended the Colored Agricultural and Normal University, now called Langston University, until her funds ran out. Despite this setback, she continued to work and save money until she was able to move to Chicago to join her brothers in 1915.
It’s not entirely certain when Coleman first decided she wanted to fly planes; but the possibility began to seem more real when she worked as a manicurist in the White Sox Barber Shop in Chicago. Her brother, a veteran of the First World War, told her teasing stories about France, where women were allowed to fly planes. She applied to schools in the United States, but no school would take on a woman of color as a student.
France was just the key Coleman needed to begin her next step—she saved up for French classes and learned the language; and on some added encouragement from Robert Abbott, owner of the Chicago Defender, she left. In 1921, Coleman earned an internationally respected license to fly from the Federation Aeronautique Internationale—two years before Amelia Earhart received her own international license.
Back in the United States, however, Coleman had to make a living. The commercial aviation division rejected her bids to work; a more popular career stunt flying called “barnstorming,” presented itself, but again, no one would train her to perform advanced aerial maneuvers in a plane. She made a return trip to Europe, and in 1922, after advanced intensive training in France and Germany, Coleman began a career flying stunts—multiple loops, spins, barrel rolls and dives across the sky for paying crowds.
Despite criticism from the press for her daring, complex aerial maneuvers, and unabashedness, Coleman gained a following and quickly became a sensation in both black and white newspapers. Coleman was a brilliant self-promoter, but fame was only a piece of what she wanted to accomplish. In an interview with the black-owned newspaper Chicago Defender she revealed it felt like her duty to encourage flight for African Americans.
“I made up my mind to try. I tried and I was successful,” she said, adding famously that she “shall never be satisfied until we have men of the Race who can fly. Do you know you have never lived until you have flown?” She then continued “with a charming smile” that after being turned down by the first French school she traveled to, which was afraid to teach women aviation due to past deaths, she ultimately studied flight in the city where “Joan of Arc was held prisoner of the English.”
For the next five years, Coleman was known as Queen Bess—the aviatrix who flew biplanes called “Jennys” and leftover aircraft from the World War I. But this was a small part of Coleman’s dreams—she meant to use her life as a leading example to the world of what women of color and people of color could accomplish. Starting in Houston, Texas and her hometown of Waxahachie, she traveled across the country to lecture audiences in churches, theaters and schools as an authority on aircraft flight while showing videos of her work, pointedly leading by example.
At every turn, Coleman brought her standards to elevate noxious, racist situations. When black spectators in Waxahachie were told to use a segregated entrance, she leveraged her position against the show promoters to let everyone enter the same way. At the time, it was common for women to be offered film roles to further market themselves as they grew famous; but when Coleman found that her role in the movie Shadow and Sunshine required her to act as an offensive African-American trope, she left the contract and didn’t look back. Instead, she made deals with businessmen who wanted flying lessons, and would buy her airplanes in return.
Amid her fame and steady influence on the American public, Coleman’s death was a tragic surprise. In 1926, on an exploratory flight to scout out a parachute jump location, her mechanic flew and lost control of the plane due to a wrench in the engine compartment. Coleman, unbuckled so she could easily scout the area, was thrown to her death from 3,500 feet in the air. Then thousand people mourned at her coffin in Chicago that year, and black pilots from Chicago instituted an annual fly over of her grave. Her life inspired William Powell to found the Bessie Coleman Aero Club and created the first all-black air show, and in 1977 a group of African American women pilots established the Bessie Coleman Aviators Club.
Bessie Coleman did not come to fly circles around spectators easily. In fact, she was warned; by U.S. culture, by race and gender barriers—she was given reasons not to pursue her goals, be outspoken, or use her talents to their fullest. In response, she dealt in possibilities; when she found herself up against the odds, she calculated her next move. Nearly 100 years later, it’s likely that Coleman would have liked to spread the famous message which is attributed to her, to those who persist today: refuse to take no for an answer.
Last week, after an $8,000 rebranding effort, the city of Vancouver unveiled a new logo for itself. Shown at the top of the above image, the new logo says "CITY OF VANCOUVER" in blue and green Gotham typeface.
Although the old logo (shown at the bottom of the image) had a cheeky flower blooming from the top left, this one is no-nonsense, with zero adornments. You can imagine the city blowing the pencil shavings off of it, dusting its hands, and smiling at a job well done.
"@CityofVancouver you really call that a logo? You took the words 'City of Vancouver' and changed the colour, I could do that in 3 seconds," Twitter user @mrtheking16 wrote earlier today. "the new vancouver logo is so bad," @xavthedragon agreed, understatedly. At least one local copy shop decided to offer a similar logo design free with a print order. "Save $8,000!" they wrote on Facebook.
Members of the local design community went so far as to write an open letter to the city expressing their dissatisfaction. "The city has severely failed to produce an inspirational mark that authentically represents [us] and makes us proud," the letter read, in part.
One signatory, creative director Brock Ellis, gave CBC News a more detailed critique. After Gotham's ubiquity during the first Obama campaign, "there was this 'stop using Gotham movement" among designers, he says—in other words, this particular bat signal is all played out.
If you other Metro munis are jealous of Vancouver's $8k proposed logo, here's some I made for you for free. #vanpolipic.twitter.com/jEKC2mhzPQ
Ellis also lacks patience for the city's claim that the simpler logo is easier for non-English speakers to read. "I don't understand how this wordmark can be more easily recognized by people who don't speak English when it consists of three English words," he told the CBC.
Finally, Ellis thinks the design fails the ultimate brand loyalty test: "I can't imagine anyone getting [this logo] tattooed on their body," he said.
Meanwhile, the logo designer for the nearby city of Chilliwack is also angry with Vancouver—because he thinks they ripped off his design, which is slightly better, and at least has some mountains in it.
In an unsurprising twist, Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson announced Tuesday evening that the city will hold off on using the logo for now. "I have asked the City Manager not to put the wordmark on any permanent City assets while we engage with the design community and public," he wrote in a statement. So if you see the logo on any trash cans, know that it’s unauthorized.
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 February 1981, FBI Director William H. Webster received a priority memo from the Bureau’s Alexandria office—a source of known standing had uncovered a possible plot to assassinate Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher during her upcoming visit to the United States.
How had he stumbled upon this information? By quite literally stumbling into it - he had been out drinking at a bar when he overheard two men with “English or Irish accents” doing what can only be described as “plotting.”
The source recalled their suspiciously detailed conversation in suspicious detail …
and gave an equally suspiciously detailed descriptions of the individuals.
As for motive, the source also provided a list of overheard phrases that reads like the word bank for a Northern Ireland conflict word jumble.
The FBI ran the whole thing by their Northern Irish experts, who confirmed that, yes, they were talking about Northern Ireland, and additionally provided background on the “H” mentioned by the two suspects.
So without a moment to lose and Thatcher’s life hanging in the balance, the FBI leapt into action, interviewing bar staff for potential leads on the suspects and informing local Bureau offices to alert for the IRA gearing up to make a move.
Which is where things start to fall apart.
After talking to waitstaff, the FBI was able to track down two suspects that met the source’s description - only they weren’t Irish Separatists plotting to overthrow the yoke of the British opression, but a couple of insurance claims adjusters from New York who had spent the evening getting drunk and talking about insurance claims.
The Bureau even went to the trouble of confirming that neither spoke with an “English or Irish accent.”
At the national level, things didn’t fare much better - what local groups the Bureau talked to all maintained they had nothing planned but peaceful protests …
including the “Squash H” group mentioned by the source, which almost seemed amused to be considered a danger to anybody.
Confidence waning, the FBI tried in vain to convince the source to submit to hypnosis (!) to confirm their recollection of the evening …
and barring that, a polygraph to see if he made the thing up.
While the source refused on both grounds, he did selflessly offer to keep drinking at that bar on the off-chance the suspects return.
With all leads dried up and Thatcher un-murdered, the FBI decided to just quietly close the case.
As for the suspect, for all we know, he’s at that bar, drinking still. Read the full investigation embedded below.
If the world’s oldest surviving globe has taught us anything, it's that just when we think we're starting to figure out how the world works, turns out we barely know anything at all.
Known formally as the Erdapfel (or “Earth Apple”), the oldest globe is an impressive and beautiful artifact, even if its cartographic science is a little off. The Erdapfel dates back to 1492, and is far from the first globe ever created, but it is, so far, the oldest discovered terrestrial globe still in existence.
Round representations of the Earth go back to Ancient Greece, and the earliest spherical maps of the world were being created in the Islamic world in the 13th century or earlier. But none of those are thought to survive. Other than descriptions and flattened maps that would have covered earlier globes, the Erdapfel is the oldest remaining artifact of its kind.
Also called the Behaim Globe, the construction of the Erdapfel is credited to the 15th century polymath Martin Behaim. Behaim, a German, was a well-known geographer, merchant, mariner, and philosopher. It was after his travels across the Known World, to places such as Portugal and the West Coast of Africa, that he returned to his native Nuremberg, where he convinced the city council of his hometown to commission a globe from him.
Behaim may get the credit, but it actually took a number of artisans to complete the project. Unsurprisingly, the Erdapfel’s construction is a fair bit more elegant than the cardboard globes of today. It's made of hardened strips of linen that were formed around a clay ball and then pulled away. These delicate halves were then joined around a wooden frame.
The map art on the surface of the globe took a small team to complete. Foremost among them was the artist Georg Glockendon who, along with the painter Hans Storch, did the actual illustration work. Later, a scribe came in to add some 2,000 place names.
Behaim led the construction and provided the cartographic information that informed the illustrations. He took his vision of the world from a number of sources, ranging from the historic geography of Ptolemy to the explorations of Marco Polo. While the globe turned out to be quite beautiful as an object d’art, its accuracy as a geographic instrument was out of date even in 1492.
The Erdapfel is covered in a cornucopia of beautiful little illustrative details, including over 100 miniature objects and figures. These include flags; saints; kings on their thrones; animals such as elephants, camels, and parrots; fantastic beasts such as a sea-serpent and a mermaid; and boats that share the seas with painted fish.
As to the actual mapped aspects, there's pretty much just one large land mass, representing a Eurasian continent, surrounded by islands and ocean. The measure of the coasts and placement of major geographic features were inaccurate even by the standards of the day, and the globe also featured such elements as the phantom Saint Brendan's Isle, a long-rumored, mythical island that never existed.
Still, Christopher Columbus would not return from his American expedition until a year after the creation of the Erdapfel. In its moment, Behaim’s globe could pass as not wholly unrealistic.
Behaim gave the globe to the Nuremberg city council, which held onto it until the 16th century, when they finally gave it back to the rather disinterested Behaim family, who put it in storage. The family's apathy may have ultimately saved the Erdapfel, however, as it remained essentially forgotten until the 19th century, when later generations rediscovered the artifact. Behaim's descendants lent the globe to the German National Museum in Nuremberg in the early 20th century, and in 1937, it was purchased for the museum at the behest of Adolf Hitler himself, who felt that such an important German artifact should remain in the country.
Since then, the Erdapfel has remained in the hands of the German National Museum. Today, the museum is attempting to create a digital record of the globe’s surface, now darkened from centuries of age and multiple restoration attempts, to share online. Even if Behaim’s globe remains a poor example of cartography, it continues to live on as a strange and lovely vision of the world as we once thought we knew it.
In 1903, a plumber in Saint Petersburg, Florida, did something he would never get away with today. Over a century later people are still enjoying it.
Sunken Gardens offers visitors an escape into a tropical haven of meandering paths, waterfalls, and ponds. Although relatively small, just 4 acres, the twisting trails and dense vegetation give the illusion of a much larger space. Sharp turns open to surprising courtyards and specialized gardens like the Cactus Garden, which includes a tortoise habitat, and the busy butterfly courtyard. The flamingo flock is pretty in pink, while several connected pools support an impressive koi population.
But in 1903 it looked entirely different. That year a local plumber, Mr. George Turner, Sr., purchased a plot of land on what was then the outskirts of St Petersburg, a town of only 1,500 residents. George had a four-acre lake on the property, and being an avid gardener he was more interested in the fertile soil that lay 15 feet down at its bottom. So, putting his plumbing skills to good use, he drained the entire thing, a feat that today would likely be met with horrified outcries from environmentalists and city planners alike. But back then, the newly formed city was busy dredging the bay to expand shipping anyway, and railroads were laid left and right to bring in tourists.
Turner began his below-sea-level garden with the planting of a few citrus trees and a small vegetable garden, adding winding walkways and tropical plants over the years to come. The humid little bubble, sunken below the rest of the neighborhood, created a tiny jungle.
Soon, locals were dropping by to purchase fruits and vegetables from the sunken garden, and by 1920, 25 cents would buy a stroll through the exotic landscape. The 1950s saw the addition of tropical birds. In 1967, the Turner family purchased the adjacent building, formerly the Sanitary Public Market (constructed in 1926) and created the "World's Largest Gift Shop" and the "King of Kings" wax exhibit honoring the story of Jesus. The wax collection was sold in the mid-1990s to the Museum of Religious Arts in Logan, Iowa.
The gardens remained family-owned and open to the public until the 1970s, when a lack of public interest brought about their closure as a tourist stop. Over the next few decades the family did their best to maintain the property with minimal resources. Several buyers expressed interest in the gardens, including a nudist resort, but none bought the place, and the garden grew wild.
In 1998, St. Petersburg declared the gardens a local historic landmark and saved the gardens. After years of restoration, Sunken Gardens is now reopened to the public, in all its lush and tropical glory.
The Nuvvuagittuq Supracrustal Belt (perhaps the best-named geological formation out there) is a stretch of rock in the northern part of Quebec, Canada, on the Hudson Bay. The Nuvvuagittuq Supracrustal Belt is some of the oldest sedimentary rock on the planet—it is between 3.7 billion and 4.29 billion years old.
The belt also includes “one of the oldest—if not the oldest—iron formation known on Earth,” as a team of researchers write in a new paper published in Nature. That makes it a promising site to look for traces of some of the earliest life on earth, and here the researchers have found tiny formations that, they report, “represent the oldest life forms recognized on Earth.”
The rocks of the Nuvvuagittuq Supracrustal Belt show signs that they were once part of a deep-sea hydrothermal vent, the type of place where it’s thought life on Earth first emerged. At contemporary hydrothermal vents, the microbes that live there leave behind recognizable signatures. The researchers describe them as “cylindrical casts” that are “formed by bacterial cells and are undeniably biogenic.” In the ancient rock, they went looking for similar structures and found “tubes and filaments” that seemed like they also could have been created by microbes.
Similar ancient structures have been found before, but in previous cases there have been questions about whether the tubes were created by living organisms or through nonorganic geological processes. The researchers conclude that these new discoveries should be attribute to living organisms by considering the structure of the tubes and the context in which they were found.
That means, they write, that “ancient submarine-hydrothermal vent systems should be viewed as potential sites for the origins of life on Earth, thus primary targets in the search for extraterrestrial life.” Research like this isn’t intended just to understand where all living things on earth came from, though; it is also meant to help humans find life on other planets.
In the waning months of World War II, as the likelihood of a land invasion of the Japanese home islands loomed, the United States’ Joint Intelligence Center, Pacific Ocean Areas (JICPOA) instituted a new psychological warfare unit under the command of Colonel Dana Johnston.
While psychological warfare—propaganda broadcasts, leaflet drops and the like designed to demoralize enemy soldiers and civilian populations—played an important role in the war effort, the occasional head-scratcher of an idea emerged from the murky world of “psy-ops.” In the case of JICPOA’s newly-formed psychological warfare unit, perhaps the most audacious—if not quirky—campaign considered was a mission to dye the revered Mt. Fuji as a psychological blow against the Japanese.
Aside from serving as an unmistakable point-of-reference for American bomber crews, Japan’s iconic Mt. Fuji was frequently invoked in both Allied and Japanese propaganda efforts. An ingrained symbol of Japanese culture with deep spiritual and historical meaning, the image of Fujiyama was seen as a potent tool by propagandists. As Dr. David Fedman, an expert on late-WWII bombing campaigns against Japan at UC Irvine notes, Mt. Fuji was “cast [by the Japanese] as an alpine feature that bound the swelling imperial sphere together … the sacred epicenter of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” Leaflets dropped on the battlefield and the Japanese home islands by the Allies commonly featured renderings of the famed peak—often alongside ominous images of American B-29 bombers—with messages designed to appeal to soldiers’ and civilians’ sense of nostalgia, duty, home and family.
That Mt. Fuji would then become a physical target of Allied psy-ops is not surprising. As detailed in a declassified 1945 memo from Col. Johnston to JICPOA’s commanding officer, General Joseph Twitty, the proposed operation would “give Fujiyama with some color other than that seasonably endowed by nature.” In other words, the plan called for the marshaling of considerable manpower and equipment to dye Mt. Fuji black.
The idea may seem preposterous, but the approach was standard. Dr. Fedman points out that JICPOA embraced a culture of creativity and officers were encouraged to share proposals—“no matter how ludicrous”—that never left the planning stage. In the case of Mt. Fuji, Col. Johnston dutifully explained to General Twitty in his memo that the proposed action would ultimately prove impractical, ineffective and even counter-productive.
Largely covered in snow from October through June, the 12,365-foot peak, Col. Johnston noted, would require frequent missions to re-dye its 370-square-mile surface after each snowfall. Moreover, persistent cloud cover shrouding Mt. Fuji in colder months would limit the visual impact to those in the immediate vicinity of the mountain. While Col. Johnston noted that local “superstitious farmers” might experience a psychological shock at waking up to a newly dyed Mt. Fuji, the broader population would remain unaware of the change.
Col. Johnston further posited that even if successful in the face of logistical hurdles, such an operation might unintentionally provide Japanese propagandists with ammunition of their own. Indeed, Johnston’s memo theorizes that the Japanese government could seize upon the action as an “inhuman act of the beastly enemy.” Not to mention the propaganda value in declaring the proposed action a desecration of a national shrine, “which, in fact,” Col. Johnston conceded parenthetically, “It is.”
Ultimately, the ambitious plan came to naught. It was recommended to General Twitty that JICPOA instead stick with tried and true campaigns of simply dropping leaflets over civilian populations on the home island; invoking Mt. Fuji on paper being the better tactic than physically altering the peak. Aside from sparking an enduring internet urban legend in the early 2000s of an Office of Strategic Services plot to paint the iconic mountain bright red using 30,000 planes and 12 tons of paint, the proposed campaign against Mt. Fuji remains a quaint historical footnote from the closing months of World War II.
Nishiki Market well merits its nickname as “Kyoto’s Kitchen.” It first opened in 1310 as a simple fish market, and has expanded over the centuries to become the best spot for seafood, produce, and local street food in the city.
Walking down the packed narrow alleyway your senses are drawn in a hundred different directions. The entire market is just five blocks long, but over 150 stalls, some barely big enough for a chef to stand in, make it feel much bigger. There are traditional delicacies like freshly pounded mochi, Japanese pickles, sweet red beans prepared in a multitude of ways, and of course, Kyoto’s famous tofu.
Some stalls will offer free samples, while the more expensive items may cost a few yen. Though Americans might balk at the more unusual offerings, just about everything at Nikishi Market will reward an adventurous palate. Baby octopus with a boiled quail egg in its brain cavity, soy donuts, barbecued quail, grilled squid, candied kumquats, and pickled gourds are all for sale, as well as more traditional fare like sushi, tofu, and tea.
A few stalls sell non-comestibles as well. The inexplicably various shoe vendors, and Aritsugu, one of Japan's finest knife-making shops, has had a stall here since the year 1510.
The Associated Press, which was founded over 170 years ago and has won 52 Pulitzer Prizes in its illustrious history, reported Wednesday that a man in Linz, Austria, tried to bring a "sack full" of cockroaches into a court building before being turned away by security.
The unidentified man's motives were unclear, the AP said, raising the prospect that a man with a lot of cockroaches in his possession—and, perhaps, some bad intentions—was at large in Austria's third-largest city.
But, thankfully, the Austrian broadcaster ORF (and Google Translate) can clear up some of the details. The man, ORF reported, brought the cockroaches Tuesday in a "jam jar," not a sack, and told authorities they were for evidence.
Still, officials denied him entry anyway, in part to avoid having the insects get loose inside the building. Some, in fact, during an interview with security, already had.
"Even during the conversation with the security personnel, some animals escaped from the glass, which the [man] immediately crushed on the desk with his bare thumb," ORF reported.
Please be prepared if you need to bring cockroaches to court and maybe also consult a professional.
When Newcomb Mott flew into the small airport in Kirkenes, Norway, in 1965, nothing had ever truly gone wrong in his life.
He was 27 and tall (over six feet), with notably red hair (though it was starting to recede from his high forehead). He was an American man from a well-off family. He had gone to college at Antioch, in Ohio. During his college years, he tried his hand at being a forest ranger in the Berkshires, a copy boy for the Toledo Blade, an assistant in the press gallery of the U.S. House of Representatives, and an elementary school teacher. At the time he landed in Kirkenes, he was working as a college textbook salesman. He'd lived for a time in Mexico, and visited close to 20 other countries. He dreamed of becoming an editor.
Mott was, as one U.S. ambassador would later describe him,“a kind of innocent abroad,” who had come to this isolated place, north of the Arctic Circle, on a whim. He had a confidence characteristic of young, educated, American white men in the 1960s—a feeling that everything would probably work out, because, the great majority of the time, everything did. But when Newcomb Mott illegally crossed the border into the USSR in 1965, aiming to collect a new stamp on his passport, everything did not go right for him.
Within a year of crossing the border, Newcomb Mott was dead, killed either by fellow prisoners or by government agents, although the Soviet government officially ruled his death a suicide. Under different circumstances, he might have been given a fine and set free after a few days or weeks. But borders are fraught places, where the rules can shift quickly and individual choices, the power of the state, and politics can turn small mistakes into tragedies.
As a purveyor of academic textbooks, Mott got summers off, and he had been traveling around Scandinavia as he neared the end of his trip. He'd been planning to take a bus from Finland to a different town in Norway, but a Finnair employee convinced him to fly to Kirkenes, a small Lapland town just miles from the Soviet border. Earlier in his trip, Mott had looked into going to the USSR, but found it too complicated. Now, with the border so close, the allure of stepping foot in one more country tempted him.
There wasn’t much to see in that isolated part of the world. Kirkenes, a pretty enough place in summer, was full of neat, bright houses, a charming shopping street, and not much else. Mott didn’t have enough time to take a boat across the nearby fjord, and he started considering the possibility of visiting Boris Gleb, a tourist outpost across the border. There wasn’t much to see there, either—just a low-slung building where Norwegians went to buy cheap vodka and, nearby, a 17th century church named after Boris and Gleb, two princes who were murdered by their brother in the 11th century and later canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church. But at minimum, he'd be able to say he had visited the USSR.
The small stretch of border between Norway and the USSR, just 121 miles, had only recently been opened up, in a limited way. Norwegians were allowed to cross without a visa, an enticement for them to spend their foreign currency on vodka and other goods stocked at the Soviet outpost. (There was some implication, too, that perhaps Boris Gleb might attract Communist sympathizers looking to get into espionage work.)
But Americans still needed a visa. That's what Mott was told at the hotel where he was staying, but as DeWitt S. Copp reported in his 1968 book, Incident at Boris Gleb, he decided to try to cross the border anyway. If the Soviet border guards wouldn’t let him through, “he would then ask them to stamp his passport to prove that he had been there, and so be one up on his brother Rusty, with whom he had a running contest on countries visited,” writes Copp. Either way, Mott intended to be back in Norway by the afternoon, to catch his flight out.
The next morning, he got on the bus for Boris Gleb. Mott didn’t speak either Norwegian or Russian, and that was the beginning of his difficulties that day. Instead of taking the bus to the border, he got off when the bus driver opened the door, pointed down a road, and said “Boris Gleb.” He still might have ended up at an official border crosspoint, but instead, through a combination of misunderstanding a Russian sign and miscommunicating with two Norwegian locals, he ended up at an unguarded part of the border and decided to cross. A short time later, he arrived in Boris Gleb, cheerfully greeted the guards there, showed them his passport, and was immediately apprehended.
Mott never denied that he had broken a law by crossing the border, but he did maintain that he never intended to do anything illegal. Even after he was detained, he was optimistic that the problem would soon be sorted out. He wasn’t wrong to think so: although there was no way for him to know this, there had been a couple incidents in the past, one involving a German and another an American, where the illegal border crosser had been let go relatively quickly. But that would not be Mott’s story.
The first Soviet authorities to question Mott asked him repeatedly: Do you belong to the CIA? Do you know anyone who does? But they seem to have given up the idea rather quickly that he might be a spy. (American papers were less convinced: an Amherst newspaper was still arguing that Mott may have been a member of the CIA after he had died.) Instead, they were interested in trading him for one.
A couple of years before, Igor A. Ivanov had been arrested for espionage and, by the end of 1964, convicted of the crime. The Soviet government had tried once, unsuccessfully, to trade an American detained in the USSR for Ivanov; with Mott, they saw another opportunity. The U.S., though, wasn’t interested in that sort of trade. From the government’s perspective, trading Ivanov for Mott would give the Soviet government an opening: every time they wanted one of their imprisoned spies shipped back to the USSR, they would only have to arrest an American on some pretense and threaten to punish them harshly.
Even outside the State Department, which was helping Mott as he was brought to trial, the U.S. government was paying attention to the case. The CIA was, at the very least, collecting news coverage and likely working other sources to find out more. The case was included in at least one intelligence bulletin and one presidential intelligence report, and in both cases the version of the documents now available to the public have had information withheld, either because releasing it would reveal an intelligence source or harm the U.S.’s relationship with a foreign government.
Despite the State Department’s efforts to have Mott released, his case went to trial after he had been detained for two months, and he was found guilty. The punishment for illegal border crossing was one to three years in prison; Mott was sentenced to 18 months in a corrective labor camp. “He wept at the verdict,” UPI reported, but when he was sentenced, reacted “without any display of emotion,” according to the AP.
Mott had been kept in a prison not far from Boris Gleb while his case was appealed, but in January he was put on a train to be transferred to a labor camp. He may have known he was in danger: in his book, Copp argues that some unusual passages in Mott’s last letter were intended to try to communicate a threat to the State Department. He died on the train: the Soviet government reported his death to American diplomats as a suicide. But two autopsies, one after his parents were able to recover his body, showed more than 60 wounds on his body. He'd been stabbed to death.
It’s never been clear exactly who killed Mott and what the Soviet government’s involvement was. One American writer suggested that perhaps the Soviets were punishing America for refusing to trade Mott for Ivanov. Another thought that, even if Mott were not a spy, perhaps he had inadvertently seen a Soviet intelligence operation he should not have. Whatever the reason for his death, it's a cautionary tale. Explore, yes, by all means, just not near politically fraught international borders, even if you are a white man from America, with all the privilege in the world to marshal.
— BBC Scotland News (@BBCScotlandNews) March 1, 2017
Most people could only be so lucky as to receive the kind of funeral that two goldfish in the Scottish isle of Orkney were given by some elementary school kids (or primary school, as they say there) who were learning about Vikings.
The pair of classroom mascots, Bubbles and Freddy, belonged to the 3rd and 4th grade classes of the Papdale School in the town of Kirkwall, according to the BBC. The fish had been with the students for a few months, but died about a week before the kids were due to learn about the Vikings, so it was decided that they would send the pets to Valhalla with a Viking funeral.
As they shared on their classroom blog, the students created a small fleet of miniature boats to send off the deceased, fashioning coffin boats out of cereal boxes and egg crates. They also wrote and recited their favorite memories about Bubbles and Freddy. Finally, they led a funeral procession to a nearby stream where the boats were put in the water, and the lead vessel was set on fire (it’s unclear whether the actual fish bodies were aboard).
May Bubbles and Freddy forever swim in the halls of their warrior heaven.
