Police in Canterbury, New Zealand, early Monday posted the above picture on Facebook, along with the following description:
At approximately 2:20am this morning these two men entered the BP in Rolleston armed with a hammer and a knife.
They have smashed a glass shelf which startled the attendant, who retreated to the staff room, where another colleague was having their break.
The two offenders have then left the service station with an unknown amount of confectionery.
Police did not comment on the shark in the room, as it were, but astute observers will notice that while one alleged thief is wearing traditional thief clothing—almost all black, though he's docked points for wearing shorts—another alleged thief is wearing a shark suit.
Now, listen. Perhaps shark man was merely trying to match the ridiculousness of his outfit—which, again, was a shark suit—to the ridiculousness of the alleged crime, which was stealing an "unknown amount of confectionary."
But that doesn't explain why he brought a hammer to a candy fight, or, indeed, remembered to wear black gloves, each decision suggesting this duo had bigger ambitions in mind.
Still, as the saying goes, life is what happens when you're making other plans, and life, for this man, at 2:20 a.m. on a Monday morning in New Zealand, meant a shark suit, a hammer, and some candy. And, now, being wanted by the police.
The original sewerage system in the city of Cologne in western Germany goes way back. It was built during the Roman era, in the first century C.E., and remained almost unchanged for 1,800 years. But as the 19th century pressed on, and the population of the city expanded, the old reliable sewers were overwhelmed.
After some particularly odorous years, the sewers of Cologne were finally modernized, and in 1890, with much fanfare, the new and improved system of waste disposal was on-line. So impressive were the miles of tunnels and channels that Kaiser Wilhelm II was slated to attend the grand opening. In honor of presenting this subterranean splendor to the Emperor of Germany, the city had two elaborate chandeliers installed in a kind of ceremonial hall.
The Chandelier Hall (in German, the Kronleuchtersaal) is actually a structure for stormwater overflow, which they equipped with two 12-armed chandeliers in order to impress the emperor. Wilhelm actually didn’t show, but the chandeliers remained in place until the end of the 1980s. Having rotted out from years hanging in a sewer, they were then replaced by a single white-painted electrified version, a replica of the originals.
The sewers of Cologne are open to the public for monthly tours from early spring through the fall. And given the impressive acoustics created by the network of chambers and connecting tunnels around the Chandelier Hall, a regular concert series has been going on since the year 2000. It’s a great opportunity to keep your ears open, and maybe your nose closed.
Eric Nordstrom of Urban Remains has been exploring Chicago’s Congress Theater, which was built in 1926 and is currently under renovation. Earlier this year, Nordstrom, whose business reclaims objects from old buildings, started working his way through the old theater, finding newspapers, pipes, tools, and blueprints left there since the 1920s.
These objects had collected in air circulation chambers, called plenums, beneath the theater’s balcony. They should have been cleaned; instead they became “a time capsule containing decades worth of refuse,” as Nordstrom told DNAInfo.
He spent 8 hours in the the theater; elsewhere he found more blueprints, as well as hip flasks and old cigarette packs. “There’s so much to share,” he wrote on Facebook.
Sometime in the recent past, a group of educators and schoolkids set out on a boating field trip in Macaronesia and cruised into something unusual. Three whales, with rounded bodies and tapered heads, began bobbing around their inflatable boat, coming up to breathe and then diving back down again.
Someone quickly dove into the water with a GoPro, and it’s a good thing they did. These weren’t your average whales—they were True’s beaked whales, a deep-diving species never before filmed in the wild.
“These are whales that very few people in the world have ever seen,” marine biologist Natacha Aguilar de Soto, who identified the footage, told New Scientist. True’s beaked whales dive for hours at a time, surfacing only briefly to breathe, so they’re tough for humans to catch sight of. They also dive very deep—generally over half a mile below the surface—likely in order to eat squid.
Even though we haven’t seen much of the True’s beaked whale, once these guys were caught on video, there was no mistaking them, says Aguilar de Soto. True’s beaked whales have distinctive white patches on their heads, which scientists sometimes call “white beanies” because they look like little caps. They also have small indents in the sides of their bodies, where they tuck their flippers during deep dives.
Experts hope that studying this video footage will help them identify True’s beaked whales when they encounter them at sea. In the meantime, they’re very, very jealous of this group of schoolchildren.
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.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
Plastic, barring all the environmental problems and health concerns that might come with it, is awesome as a moldable product. It shows up in all sorts of places, from laptop cases, to CDs, to bottles.
It's also used to hold lemon juice—in containers that, when you think about them, are a bit strange, since most of them are also actually shaped like lemons. These first started appearing decades ago in the post-World War II plastic boom, and haven't stopped showing up in stores or the back of your refrigerator since.
Last week, in the U.K., where many are sold under the brand name Jif, fans again celebrated what, there, has become the juice containers' unofficial holiday: Shrove Tuesday (here known as Fat Tuesday or Mardi Gras), when many Brits traditionally make pancakes flavored with a bit of lemon juice.
But back to the lemon-shaped containers: Where, in fact, did they come from? Other fruit juices don't get their own fruit-shaped containers, after all (except, sure, limes, though for our purposes here we'll count them in the same family as lemons).
It turns out that the lemon-shaped backstory involves some things you might expect, like a disputed claim of who exactly invented them, but also one thing you probably don't: a heated and precedent-setting legal battle in Great Britain.
The history of the lemon-shaped plastic container, in other words, is more complicated than you probably think.
“This same lemon juice, contained in glass bottles, has been selling in groceries for years,” Hughes wrote. “Now it has received fresh impetus because a year or two ago some smart container designer persuaded its manufacturers to sell it in lemon-like containers which help justify the claim to real lemon juice.”
In the years following World War II, Pugh was the chief plastics designer for a company named Cascelloid, which was the only company in the United Kingdom—and one of only two companies in the world at the time—that had a machine that was able to blow plastic bottles into a molded shape.
Pugh built the design at the behest of a British firm, Edward Hack, Ltd., in the 1950s, and a number of American companies quickly copied the idea. (A legal document suggests they originally came from Italy in the post-World War II era, but Pugh is responsible for the modern form.)
According to The Independent, Pugh created a mold out of a combination of wood and lemon peel, recreated that mold with plaster, played with the shape as much as possible, and eventually came up with the perfect form.
This was one of many molded plastic products that Pugh’s team designed in the roughly two decades he worked with Cascelloid. He was an artist of sorts, and his medium was molded plastic.
“He was patient and a perfectionist,” his obituary says. “In similar vein he made amusing plastic fruits, a gaudy tomato-shaped ketchup bottle for cafe tables, and a range of nasal sprays.”
In terms of combining form and function, though, the lemon hit all the bases—beyond its visual appeal, you also only usually need a little lemon juice at a time, meaning that lemon juice required a container that could safely store the juice for long periods of time.
Initially, the juice was sold in the containers under the Hax brand name, but, later, after the product was acquired by the British company Reckitt & Colman (now known as Reckitt Benckiser), and the product's name was changed to what it's now sold as: Jif. (Yes, like the peanut butter.)
And, over the years, Jif lemons became hugely popular in the U.K., specifically around Shrove Tuesday, which, according to a 2012 Marketing article, accounts for 71 percent of Jif’s sales for the entire year.
Reckitt & Colman had this market mostly to itself for decades, but by the mid-1980s, perhaps inevitably, competitors came calling, including one in particular, the American company Borden, that would set the stage for a huge legal battle.
The initial challenge came in 1985, when Borden, which was already doing pretty well selling lemon juice under the brand name ReaLemon, saw Jif's success in the U.K. and decided that it wanted in.
Both companies sold lemon-shaped juice containers, but Borden's entry into the British market meant that Jif owners Reckitt & Colman could challenge them on legal grounds on their home turf.
A subsequent lawsuit highlighted a problem for Reckitt & Colman: The design of its lemon made its product distinctive in plastic form, but effectively impossible to trademark.
“The purity of this idea, though, exposed the brand to imitation and costly litigation,” brand consultant Silas Amos said in a 2012 Marketing article. “Perhaps adding one ‘twist’ to the lemon design might have turned an obvious idea into a more distinctive (and protectable) brand?”
That, eventually, made Reckitt & Colman Ltd. v Borden Inc, decided by the House of Lords in 1990, an important part of British case law, as it created a test for proving whether a product deserved legal protection despite otherwise being generic—a concept known in British law as “passing off.”
The gist of the three-part test, as formulated by Lord Oliver of Aylmerton:
There must be an existing reputation that the public carries with the original product or design. (check)
The competing product creates confusion or misrepresentation in the market, whether intentional or not. (check)
There are signs that the confusion created by the competing product negatively impacts the bottom line of the original one. (double-check)
Reckitt & Colman easily hit all three parts of this test.
“[A]lthough the common law will protect goodwill against misrepresentation by recognising a monopoly in a particular get-up, it will not recognise a monopoly in the article itself,” Lord Oliver wrote in his legal opinion. “Thus A can compete with B by copying his goods provided that he does not do so in such a way as to suggest that his goods are those of B."
Borden, then, wasn’t barred from making a plastic lemon that looked like a real one, but they did have to ensure that its design and marketing were distinctive from Jif's and not simply intended to create market confusion.
Such cases on both sides of the Atlantic are notoriously difficult to win, but Reckitt & Colman had a generation of goodwill and history on its side, even if, in the end, it couldn't ensure that the lemon-shaped lemon juice container was theirs and theirs only.
You still can’t trademark nature, in other words, even if sometimes your particular squeeze on it is what sets you apart.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
We’re pretty far from the utopian future of Star Trek, but in at least one regard, we're making baby steps toward establishing a real-world Starfleet. Within the U.S. Army and Air Force, there's a little-known training path that can earn you an honest-to-goodness Space Badge—and it looks like something right out of Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future (if a bit more militarized).
American astronauts who have gone to space earn a specific set of flight wings and medals depending on whether they are with one of the branches of the military or are a civilian. Space Operations Badges are only available to members of the Army and the Air Force. “The badge is a very unique badge. You can’t push on it, nobody’s gonna beam you up,” says Mike Connolly, director of the Army Space Personnel Development Office. Connolly is retired military, but now serves the Army in space operations, and has himself earned one of the rare badges. “I’m actually a civilian, so I’ve earned my Space Badge, but I don’t wear it anymore.”
While it may look futuristic, the accolade has actually been around for a while. It was originally introduced as the Air Force Space and Missile Badge back in the 1990s. This first badge had a somewhat more standard military design, with intricate laurel wreaths surrounding the outside of the central symbol, which incorporated a complicated design consisting of a globe with shooting stars ringing it. In higher ranks it was topped by a star, or a star surrounded by a smaller laurel wreath. Overall, it incorporated classical military imagery with a retro-futuristic symbol of “space” that would have been at home at a World’s Fair in the 1930s.
The badge was given a sleek-looking update in 2005, and renamed the Air Force Space Badge. Gone was the dense traditional design, replaced by stark Art Nouveau-esque wings accentuating that star-ringed globe. It comes in three editions based on someone’s level of training or experience in space operations. Just as before, on the Senior Space Badge a star is added to the top of the globe, and on the Master edition, that star is ringed in a laurel wreath.
Like its previous incarnation, at first this badge was only available to Air Force personnel who became adequately trained or worked in a space operations billet. Then around 2006, members of the Army became eligible to earn the badge as well, and in 2011, they officially made it a joint badge between the Air Force and Army, renaming it the Space Operations Badge, or just the Space Badge.
Earning one of these badges isn’t like taking an overnight course. While qualifications are somewhat different in the Air Force, in the modern Army, an officer needs to spend a full year in the fairly niche preparatory courses designed for those who are going into space operations, Functional Area 40 (FA40), as an Army career. That said, space operations can encompass a fairly wide variety of specialties.
A pamphlet from ASPDO describes the space operations force as “a diverse group with various areas of concentration, military occupational specialties and occupational series with a common mission—to develop, plan, acquire and operate space capabilities to fulfill mission requirements in the five space mission areas: Space Situational Awareness; Space Force Enhancement; Space Support; Space Control; and Space Force Application.” Connolly says that people in the space operations community do everything from fixing satellites to coordinating communications from space direct to soldiers on the ground. It takes another four years of training and experience in the field to earn the Senior Space Badge, and a further seven years to earn the Master Space Badge.
People other than FA40 officers (including soldiers and civilians) can also earn Space Badges by working the requisite amount of time in one of the Army’s 4,400-some postings that are considered space-related. But in the Army at least, space operations is still a tiny division. Since 2011, the Army has awarded exactly 2,454 Basic, 500 Senior, and 125 Master Space Badges, and some of those recipients are counted three times, as they earned each badge. Connolly says there are just 330 officers in FA40 at the moment, making the Army Space Badge a rare sight. “It’s unique in appearance and there’s a lot of questions about it,” he says. “So young soldiers don’t know what it is.”
For those in space operations, the Space Badge is taken quite seriously, even after its sci-fi redesign. “I’ve heard no negative reaction to the new badge. It is pretty bold to say the least,” says Connelly. And it seems to be beloved outside of the specialty, too. “I gotta be honest, as many soldiers as want to wear the badge, I think they like it,” he says.
The Space Badge is an evocative name and image, but when asked whether the men and women involved in space operations would one day be in charge of sci-fi military space battles, Connolly demurs. “I’m not qualified to answer that question,” he says.
Meetings between foreign leaders and diplomats traditionally involves an exchange of gifts as a sign of good will. The State Department Protocol Gift Office is the team responsible for handling these exchanges on behalf of the U.S. government, and they process the treasure trove of gifts that pour in from abroad.
A 71-page document from 2015 (the most recent filing) itemizes and appraises this hoard of art, jewelry and historic goodies. Analyzing the list, Middle Eastern governments stand out as some of the most lavish gift givers. Saudi Arabia alone generally spends a million dollars a year on shiny objects like a $88,000 ruby encrusted sword, a $160,000 Thomas Mercer chronograph, and a $522,000 diamond encrusted horse sculpture. Or take the intriguing description of Qatar’s $110,000 “gold-plated mechanical bird of a Common Chiffchaff that tweets, turns, and flaps its wings once per hour.”
The president doesn’t get to keep any of this loot however; once the Protocol Gift unit processes everything most of it gets shipped off to a National Archives warehouse. In an interview with The New Yorker last year, the chief gift officer put it plainly; “We look at them for a few minutes and then hand them over for recording.”
Occasionally, as was the case for a Pakistani muzzle-loaded gun in 2015, gifts will be retained for official display in government offices. The only gifts that are not retained are food and liquids. “Perishable items [are] handled pursuant to United States Secret Service policy,” which probably means they are given to the staff or thrown away.
Contrary to the status of the economic trade deficit, the U.S. imports far more gifts than it exports. By law, the president is allowed to spend no more than $2,000 on a gift, and the Secretary of State gets a miserly $1,000. This leads to amusing headlines every few years when the U.S. shows up to a meeting notably lighthanded.
Clad in an electric red Hazmat suit, black rubber boots, and a respirator, the life-size “Cold War Horse” sculpture stands sentinel over the former site of the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant, one of the largest in the U.S., producing over 70,000 plutonium triggers for nuclear bombs between 1951 and 1989.
The sculpture was installed along Highway 72 northwest of Denver as a memorial to the people who worked at Rocky Flats and those who lived in the surrounding community. It was created by artist Jeff Gipe, who worked at the plant for 20 years.
While in operation, a series of environmental disasters—including fires, leaks, and unregulated burying of radioactive waste—led to the widespread contamination of the 6,500-acre site. In 1989, the FBI and the EPA raided the plant, shutting it down, and putting an end to nearly 40 years of unmitigated pollution.
However an air of secrecy during and after the cleanup has caused many groups and individuals throughout the Front Range to doubt the efficacy of the remediation efforts and the health impact on the surrounding area. Community watchdog groups consistently publish reports updating the pollution levels around the site and urge developers, homeowners, and prospective homeowners to educate themselves about the potential dangers of living and building in the area.
The Cold War Horse sculpture stands, not just as a memorial of the dark and secretive history of Rocky Flats, but as a stark warning of the possible contamination still present in the soil, air, and waters surrounding the former Superfund site. First erected in 2005, sculpture was torn down and badly vandalized by unknown assailants just two weeks later. The artist was not deterred however; Cold War Horse was repaired and now resides in the same spot, surrounded by a fence, lights, and cameras armed with motion sensors.
The Fairy Glen isn’t one of The Isle of Skye’s most popular attractions—in fact it remains quite well hidden—but it’s completely enchanting. The bumpy, off-the-beaten-path spot stands out from the surrounding farmland. The natural rock formations, cone-shaped hills dotted with ponds and scattered waterfalls are all within one small area, making it seem as though it’s the shrunken version of a larger-scale geological wonder.
Though there’s no definitive folklore linking the land to the magical realm, some say faeries created the dramatic landscape and still dwell within its many crevices. It's no wonder; the whimsical otherwordly landscape looks just like the kind of place you'd expect to find faeries. The Isle of Skye is, after all, rich with faerie lore. However, the unique geological formations are actually the result of a landslip, similar to the one that created the nearby Quiraing.
It’s easy to spend a morning or afternoon wandering among the cluster of hills. The grassy glen’s natural colors are especially vivid on a sunny day. Visitors can take their time climbing the mounds or snapping photos of the stone designs tourists tend to create (though they’re not nearly as impressive as the more permanent rock spiral). The best vantage point is from the top of Castle Ewan, the natural rock formation that resembles an ancient ruin. A steep, narrow trail leads directly to the top, but it does involve a bit of scrambling.
Since 1998, Candace Frazee and her husband Steve Lubanski have opened their Pasadena, California home to the public to showcase a collection of bunny-related items that has been steadily expanding for decades.
Those items—over 33,000, which together comprise a (very specific) Guinness World Record—include real bunnies, but also dolls, and figurines, and lawn decor, and light fixtures, and taxidermied dead bunnies, among other items.
It's known as The Bunny Museum, and has become famous in southern California, mostly thanks to Frazee and Lubanski's undying bunny passion.
But, recently, it all became a bit much. Or, rather, as Frazee explained to the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, it had always been a bit much, their home never big enough to contain their bunny ambitions.
So, they moved, in this case to a space in nearby Altadena, where there will be a "Grand Hoppenin'" on March 20 to mark the occasion. (The space is now also where the couple live.)
Frazee has been moving and arranging bunny things for weeks at the space, which sits next to a bike shop Lubanski owns and operates.
And her bunny ambitions remain high, she said, in part encouraged by the continuing draw of the museum, which surprised even its owner and curator.
“When we first opened we thought it would just be families,” she told the Tribune. “But it turned out that hipsters like it."
Toward the end of his life, Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky wanted a quiet place to work outside the hubbub of Moscow. He lived in this country home in the Russian town of Klin from 1892 until his death in 1895, and here he wrote and edited some of his finest work, including The Nutcracker, 18 piano pieces, and his last major work, the 6th Symphony.
When he was not working, Tchaikovsky would read, entertain guests, stroll through the garden and surrounding forest, gather mushrooms, and tend to the garden. In the latter half of his life, the composer was drawn to spending time more time surrounded by nature than urban, city life.
Tchaikovsky's cozy country home and lush garden has since been converted to a museum. The house is filled with pictures of the most beloved people in Tchaikovsky's life. Above his writing desk is a picture of Anton Rubenstein, the founder of the St. Petersburg Conservatory of Music and Tchaikovsky's first teacher of instrumentation and composing. Just below is a picture of Beethoven.
In 1843, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his new wife, Fanny, made an unusual honeymoon stop: in between jaunts to the Berkshires and the Catskills, they swung by the Springfield Armory, a small, federally owned weapons manufactory in Western Massachusetts. As they walked through the factory, gaping at gun stands that held tens of thousands of identical rifles, the Longfellows felt a sense of dread. "I urged H to write a peace poem," Fanny later remembered.
He did just that—"The Arsenal at Springfield" was published in 1845. In it, Longfellow describes both the "huge organ" of guns that greeted him at the factory, and his hope that, soon, "there were no need of arsenals or forts."
It was not to be. Twenty years after the Longfellows' visit, civil war erupted, and the Springfield Armory kicked into high gear, churning out hundreds of thousands of rifles and arming a full third of Union troops. By perfecting interchangeability and pumping up their production line, the Springfield Armory went from practically empty to a well-oiled rifle-making machine in just a few short years.
"The Springfield Armory rarely appears in Civil War histories except perhaps as an unexplained statistical wonder," writes Michael Raber in a new paper in Arms & Armour. But, he argues, it was also more than that—"Springfield's response to wartime demands… may have been among the first examples of American mass production," he writes.
The Springfield Armory grew up with the country, playing a shifting but vital role in a large number of U.S. military conflicts. Throughout the 17th century, local militia would drill on the bluff where it was eventually built, which overlooks the Connecticut River. At the outset of the Revolutionary War, when George Washington was seeking a spot for an arsenal, he chose that same bluff, building barracks and storehouses there, as well as stockpiles of weapons.
During Shays' Rebellion, rebels targeted the Springfield Armory, hoping to use it to arm themselves further and overthrow the Government of Massachusetts, but the state militia kept them at bay with grapeshot; a few years afterwards, in 1794, large-scale manufacturing began. The Armory was also involved in later conflicts: just before World War II, a Springfield-based armsmaker designed the M1 semiautomatic rifle, which General George S. Patton Jr. called "the greatest battle implement ever devised."
But it was during the Civil War that the Armory really shone, Raber argues. As he explains, the Union Army started the war at something of a disadvantage—in the years before war broke out, they had sent large quantities of arms and equipment down South, under orders from soon-to-be Confederate generals Jefferson Davis and John Buchanan Floyd.
To make matters worse, just a few days into the Civil War, the other Union armory, at Harpers Ferry, was destroyed in battle. The Union Army's Ordnance Department quickly emptied the Springfield storehouses to arm the first waves of troops. It was up to the Springfield Armory to refill itself.
Within a few months, they proved themselves up to the task. "So many rifles and bayonets are now being turned out of the Springfield Armory, that if our armies lost theirs in every battle they could be replaced in a very short time," wrote a Harpers Weekly reporter in a September 1861 profile of the institution. Under the joint direction of Ordnance Captain A.B. Dyer and Assistant Superintendent George Dwight, the Armory continued to grow over the next two years, soon outstripping private contractors and foreign importers to become the largest supplier of shoulder arms in the United States. "The works are daily turning out enough to arm an entire regiment," marveled the technical writer George B. Prescott in 1863.
As Raber explains, Springfield's dominance was partly the result of their devotion to a principle called "interchangeability." Building weapons with completely identical, swappable parts had been a goal of the American military since soon after the Revoultionary War—in 1785, Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Jay about a French inventor who had proposed "making every part of [a musket] so exactly alike that what belongs to any one may be used for every other musket in the magazine." By 1849, the Springfield Armory was producing standard-issue army rifles made of completely interchangeable parts.
When the war hit, they put this knowledge to good use. Dwight quickly expanded the facilities, added steam power, and—since the rifles were being shipped out as fast as they were made—dragged more machinery into what had been stockpiling rooms. Captain Dyer also outlawed smoking in the shops, to reduce the risk of fire.
In the month before the war began, the average Armory worker produced 43 rifles, writes Raber. By the beginning of 1862, that number had risen to 84 rifles per month. By May of 1863, the factory average topped out at 120 rifles per worker, nearly a 300 percent increase in productivity. Dyer kept wages high to attract new workers, both to ramp up production further and to replace those who had been drafted. Eventually, the Armory employed nearly 3,000 people working ten-hour shifts, seven days a week.
Raber argues that another part of the Armory's success came from a certain resistance to progress. Although the Armory also made ammunition, replacement parts for other weapons, and bits for military horses, they produced just one particular type of rifle throughout the war—the Model 1861—making only the occasional change for safety reasons.
Even when soldiers, pundits, and President Lincoln himself made the case for other weaponry types, the Ordnance Captain kept the Armory churning out Model 1861s. "Making essentially the same [rifle] throughout the war avoided... extensive re-tooling and production delays," writes Raber.
By the time General Kirby Smith surrendered the Confederate Department of the Trans-Mississippi in June of 1865, the Springfield Armory had built nearly 800,000 rifles. In Raber's mind, this was not just an achievement in itself, but a potential important first, and a harbinger of things to come. "The initial achievement of mass production has often been credited to self-publicized 20th-century makers of automobiles," such as Henry Ford, he writes. "[But] it is hard to see the wartime Armory as engaged in anything other than mass production." Perhaps it was not the Model T that first exemplified what we now see as all-American principles of ingenuity and replicability, but the Springfield Armory and the Model 1861.
On Tuesday, December 6, 2016, a mummified human heart was packed into a small, custom-made, €700 suitcase, and hand-carried onto a plane bound from Belgium to Detroit.
The heart’s carrier and custodian, who also toted a stack of customs forms and insurance paperwork, passed the organ through customs at Detroit, then carried it onto a flight to Dallas.
Though by no means a frequent flyer, that heart had traveled great distances before. It belonged to John Berchmans, a 17th-century Flemish Jesuit seminarian who died in Rome at the age of just 22. At the time, there was no question of repatriating his body. Transporting a whole, rapidly decomposing body over the Alps in 1621 would have been almost impossible.
Instead, a Jesuit priest on his way back to Belgium took the most important piece: his heart.
Berchmans was canonized in 1888, at which point his heart became a relic—a venerated remnant of a saint. In December 2016, after it left its home in Our Lady of Leliëndaal, a 17th-century Jesuit church on bustling shopping street in Mechelen, Belgium, for Dallas, it traveled 200 miles east by car to Shreveport, Louisiana, and its destination at the Cathedral of St. John Berchmans. There, the heart, in its silver and gold reliquary, spent 11 days being the focal point of a celebration nearly two years in the planning.
Getting permission from the Jesuits who keep the heart in their church, Our Lady of Leliëndaal in Mechelen, Belgium, was the first and perhaps most difficult step, says Father Peter Mangum, rector of the St. John Berchmans Cathedral and the architect of the heart’s journey.
“The relic has not left Belgium in 395 years—my first request was met with a little kind of chuckle,” he says.
The Jesuits’ reaction is perhaps unsurprising: relics are incredibly important artifacts of Catholic faith. (We should note here that other religions also venerate relics—the Prophet Mohammed’s beard is housed in Istanbul’s Topkapı Palace, and the Buddha’s canine tooth, which survived his cremation, lives in Kandy, Sri Lanka—and that secular relics also exist, such as Galileo’s thumb and middle finger and Napoleon’s penis. But it’s the Catholic faith, and Orthodox faith, that really, really go in for relics.)
In Catholic tradition, relics are intended as a kind of physical link to God’s power, evidence that God works miracles through the bodies of saintly, holy individuals, and that this power does not wane with death. It is a practice that runs deep in the Church; one of the earliest mentions of the power of a relic comes in the Old Testament, in Kings, when a touch from the remains of the prophet Elisha resurrects a dead man.
For every story from the Bible, there probably has been or is still a relic: Crusts from the bread of the Last Supper, feathers from the wings of the Angel Gabriel, the bones of the Three Magi, living in a gold reliquary in Cologne since 1164. Some are more improbable than others, such as the Virgin Mary’s actual home, allegedly flown from Palestine to a small town in Italy by four angels in the 13th century.
Stories about the powers of relics are myriad, from the mummified head of St. Catherine that transformed into hundreds of rose petals and back again, to the perfumed fog that engulfed Calcata, near Rome, after the Holy Prepuce—Jesus’s circumcised foreskin and allegedly the only piece of his body that remained on earth—was brought there in 1557.
As Christianity came to dominate the Western world and beyond, the demand for relics as a link to God grew. Many are built into the bones of Catholic churches: Early on, it was the practice to place the relic of a saint under the altar table during church construction, as a way of further sanctifying the space. Even now, whenever a church is constructed, the diocese must appeal to Rome to be supplied with a relic. In addition to being sealed away in churches and cathedrals, relics were often hawked on street corners at pilgrimage sites; the fact that they were typically small and portable made relics even more useful as objects of faith.
It also meant that from the very beginning, the potential for fakery was huge. The amoral and industrious could do a brisk trade in any old dead thing, saints’ “finger bones,” tatty bits of cloth supposedly worn by the Virgin Mary, and suspicious vials of liquid meant to be blood or tears or even holy breast milk. Even if there was no outright trickery involved, a combination of passing centuries, tradition, and wishful thinking has meant that there are, for example, several sites claiming to have the skull of John the Baptist.
There are now hundreds of thousands of relics scattered throughout the Catholic world, divided into three classes. First class relics are body parts of the saints, such as the heart of St. John Berchmans, St. Thomas of Hereford's leg, the disintegrating eyeball of Catholic martyr, Blessed Edward Oldcorne, or the objects intimately involved in Christ’s Passion, such as wood from the True Cross. Second-class relics are objects that once belonged to a saint, such as piece of cloth from St. Joseph’s (probably not technicolor) cloak. Third-class relics are objects that were touched to a verified first- or second-class relic, so there’s an almost limitless number of potential third-class relics. Stricter emphasis on authenticity in the last century meant that some dubious relics were taken out of circulation, and now, museums sometimes display notable reliquaries without their disproven contents.
Search “reliquary” on eBay, though, and hundreds of “authentic” relics of long-dead saints pop up, some more dubious than others—a piece of the Shroud of Turin and a sliver of an actual thorn from Jesus’s Crown of Thorns among them—and fetching upwards of $15,000.
This, notably, is in direct violation of Church Canon Law number 1190: “It is absolutely forbidden to sell sacred relics” (for the record, it’s related to “simony,” one of the lesser known sins), and strains eBay’s own regulations regarding “authenticity.”
But for the devoted, opportunities for veneration might be few—travel to the places where these relics live can be prohibitively expensive. Which is why some of these verified relics, like St. John Berchmans’ heart, go on tour.
Despite initially getting the brush off when he asked to have St. John’s heart visit the Shreveport cathedral that celebrates him, Father Peter persisted. And timing was in his favor: 2016 marked the 150th anniversary of the miracle that got St. John Berchmans canonized, an event that happened in the same state. (In 1866, a would-be nun fell desperately, vomiting-blood-ill in tiny Grand Coteau, Louisiana. Through the intercession of Blessed Berchmans, she says, she was cured. St. John Berchmans is now the patron saint of youth, students, and altar servers.)
The cost of bringing the heart to the Cathedral so far is around $20,000, paid for by the Diocese, but, Father Peter says, “the expense, ultimately, is minor compared to the spiritual rewards that we are already seeing.”
Though this was only the second time in its independent life that the heart made such a big journey, relics of other saints spend much more time on the road. The floating rib and skin from the cheek of St. Anthony of Padua have been touring the world for the last 20 years. In 2016 alone, the relics, in their gold reliquaries, visited New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, Vancouver and British Columbia, Denver, Colorado, and Houston, Texas, as well as the Philippines, Ireland, and the UK, in the carry-on baggage of their Franciscan guardian, Father Mario Conti.
In February 2017, these relics will travel to Austin, Texas, accompanied by Father Mario and Tom Muscatello, the US representative of the Anthonian Association of America, who organizes the U.S. and Canadian tours of the relics. Tours are paid for in part by donations from the faithful; there is no cost to the churches visited. Muscatello wouldn’t divulge how much a typical tour costs, but said, “It’s not an extreme cost, but when you’re on a Franciscan budget, it’s a cost.”
In the years that they have been touring together, Father Mario has had few problems getting the relics in or out of countries. But the fact that he is traveling with human remains can get a little weird. Muscatello laughed when asked about getting relics through TSA check-points, although he said that most of the time, the relics make it through the scanner with little comment.
It’s typically customs where things might get held up, as in the case of the heart relic of St. Philip Neri, which spent a day in customs after arriving in Washington, DC in January 2016.
“If someone’s Catholic at the customs, they probably know what a reliquary is,” Muscatello pointed out. “But we had one problem in Los Angeles,” he said, laughing. “What happened in Los Angeles, the guy said, ‘What the heck are these?’... The guy thought Father Mario was absolutely crazy.” It took some explaining, he said, but they managed.
Father Peter and Muscatello agreed that relic tours have increased in America over the last 20 years, so perhaps customs officials are getting used to seeing the body parts of saints packed snugly into custom carry-on suitcases. That uptick might be in part due to the fact that America is historically short on relics compared to Europe, and travel between continents is easier (mostly) than it was, but Muscatello also attributes the rise to demand and curiosity.
“[The relic visit] gathers Catholics who are very curious to come in contact with the reliquary, it gathers people because they want to know what veneration is and they want to know what this whole exercise of venerating a relic of a saint is,” he explained.
So, what is it that attracts the faithful in droves? Is it the same thing that drives fans to collect shoes worn by Alyssa Milano, a bra worn by Katy Perry, snippets of clothing worn by Kevin Spacey or Arnold Schwarzenegger (thank you, eBay’s Celebrity Worn page)? Not exactly, although Father Peter acknowledged that there is some of that need for a transitive physical connection in there. For Father Peter, though, veneration of a relic is tied to the Catholic faith’s unique grounding in the physical body.
“The Catholic Church recognizes the body as being good, not just good, but very good, and after death, we believe in the resurrection of the body ... We are spirit-body creatures,” he says, meaning that the body is a temple for the Holy Spirit, and a conduit for it.
This is in line with the Church’s message on the veneration of saints’ relics (which is largely the same message since the 16th-century Council of Trent): In 2005, Pope Benedict XVI explained, “The relics direct us towards God himself: it is he who, by the power of his grace, grants to weak human beings the courage to bear witness to him before the world... [T]he Church does not forget that, in the end, these are indeed just human bones, but they are bones that belonged to individuals touched by the living power of God.”
But the function of relics also seems to be to remind the faithful not of a saint’s holiness, but of their humanity. These were real people, who wore cloaks and carried cups, had teeth and cheeks and kneecaps; they may have struggled, had doubts, made strange decisions, met grisly ends, but they were people – and, says Father Peter, role models, proof. “It can be done, everything that we talk about in church. People can lead a holy life."
All throughout Aokigahara, Japan's so-called Suicide Forest, are underground caves that were formed by volcanic activity from the nearby Mount Fuji. If you ever go exploring, you may just fall into one.
One of the largest and most impressive of these lava caves is the Narusawa Hyoketsu, or Ice Cave. There are stairs leading down into the 70-foot-deep cavern and areas where you must crouch to get through. Once you reach the bottom, the ice is crystal clear and stunning, catching the color-changing light beautifully.
The ice is there year-round, with large icicles growing throughout the cave sometimes up to 3 feet long. Located on the edge of the Suicide Forest, also called the Sea of Trees, Narusawa Hyoketsu is designated a Natural Monument of Japan.
Some kids never get to make it to Disney Land, but then again, some kids have grandparents who aren’t afraid to just build them their own amusement park right in the backyard.
According to WFAA, Decatur, Texas resident Jimmy White built the mini-amusement park for his 2-year-old granddaughter. Made of metal, wood, and PVC pipe, White started work on his fun fair as soon as he discovered that he was going to be a grandparent.
Without any formal training as an engineer, White learned about gravity-propelled coasters, and decided that he could build one himself. Once finished, the DIY mini-coaster now starts on the second-floor of his house, and the child-sized car can thunder along the tracks without much help from an adult. He also built a playground carousel for his little park, as well as a miniature Ferris wheel that needs to be turned by hand.
White told WFAA that he wanted to give his granddaughter the attractions that he didn’t have access to as a child. Unsurprisingly, his granddaughter seems to love it.
Underneath the Palais de Tokyo art center is one of the best-kept secrets of street art in Paris. The center started the Lasco project in 2012 to showcase urban art in the building’s subterranean passages, corridors, and stairways—a part of the center until then undisclosed to the public.
The Lasco project is an underground wonderland of murals and art pieces by some of the most renowned street artists from around the world. The dark corridors are filled with a diverse mix of graffiti and art pieces, giving off a mysterious and secretive vibe that feels like you're entering a concealed universe in the shape of a street art maze.
New artists are invited every year to fill the falls of the constantly evolving gallery, which is now accessible through a guided tour of the museum. Note that part of the Lasco project remains hidden from the public, featuring pieces by renowned photographer and street artist JR and duo Os Gemeos. The only way to see their art installation is via a video inside the Palais de Tokyo.
Klaus Kristiansen’s father had mentioned, once, that during World War II a plane had crash-landed in one of the field of their farm, outside the town of Birkelse, near the northern tip of Denmark.
Decades later, Kristiansen remembered that comment when his son, Daniel, came home with an assignment to write about World War II, and he suggested that Daniel go look for it, as The Local reports.
It was meant to be a joke, but after father and son went to the field with a metal detector, they started finding pieces of plane. When they started finding human bones, they called the authorities.
Soon, local police, bomb disposal teams, and German diplomats were all standing in their field.
The plane they discovered was a Messerschmidt Bf 109, a commonly used model during the war. The unfortunate pilot still had documents and papers in his pockets.
— Sarah Sophie Flicker (@sarahsophief) March 8, 2017
Today is “A Day Without a Woman,” a nationwide action that aims to highlight women’s economic power and draw attention to discrimination. All over the country, women are going on strike in order to hammer home just what the world would look like without us.
One who jumped the gun a little? Lady Liberty. The statue went dark for about an hour on Tuesday night, surprising just about everyone.
Although the statue’s interior, including the torch and crown, remained lit, the exterior spotlights were extinguished, shrouding the figure in darkness. About an hour after she switched off, she switched back on again. The Associated Presscaptured a dramatic video of this moment, which transforms a gloomy, almost dystopian New York Harbor back into the aesthetically welcoming place we’re all used to.
According to NPR, the National Park Service says the outage was “unplanned,” and that it was probably related to work they’re doing to replace a backup generator.
Unplanned by the Park Service, maybe. Lady Liberty does what she wants.
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.
Today—March 8, 2017—people across the United States are taking the day off work, eschewing most purchases, and dressing in red. They're participating in "A Day Without a Woman," a nationwide action that aims, in the words of its organizers, to "recognize the enormous value that women of all backgrounds add to our socio-economic system, while receiving lower wages and experiencing greater inequities."
While the problems these strikers aim to address are, famously, far from new, the tactics they've chosen are more storied than many people may realize. Driven by the foresight of the so-called "Lowell Mill Girls," American women have been going on strike at least since the 1830s, and thanks to the powerful rhetoric of one woman, Sarah Bagley, they began officially organizing not long after.
The Industrial Revolution changed the makeup of the global workforce, and in the early 1820s, young women from across the United States flocked to Lowell, Massachusetts, seeking employment in one of the city's many textile mills. While most "Mill Girls" took these jobs in order to send money home, they found their new employment came with a certain measure of financial and intellectual independence. In their few hours of free time, many attended lectures, swapped books, or learned from fellow workers in the dormitories.
Twenty-eight-year-old Sarah Bagley made her way to Lowell in 1935, leaving her home in New Hampshire in the hope that she'd be able to send some extra money back to her struggling family. Like many of the mill girls, she embraced the cultural environment in Lowell, and in 1940, Bagley published a short essay in the Lowell Offering, a monthly literary magazine written and edited largely by mill girls. In the piece, called "Pleasures of Factory Life," Bagley ruminated on the various good parts of her job—the new friends, the learning opportunities, the potted plants the women placed around the factory floor—but she gave special weight to the space the job left for thinking.
As the body goes through the motions of twisting, pulling, and plucking, Bagley wrote, "all the powers of the mind are made active." The looms themselves inspired further thought: "Who can closely examine all the movements of the complicated, curious machinery, and not be led to the reflection, that the mind is boundless," she wrote, "and that it can accomplish almost any thing on which it fixes its attention!"
A few years later, exactly where Bagley had fixed her attention became clear. In the early 1840s, as factory owners tried to maximize profits in the face of a recession, the already-high demands of mill work ramped up. Many of these changes were sexist: In one mill, management cut wages for everyone; when the need for austerity ended, pay was raised again, but only for men. Another mill tried to double the number of looms that each weaver was responsible for. When a group of 70 women went on strike in response, they were not only fired, but blacklisted from ever getting another mill job. Earlier strikes by women workers—in 1834 and 1836—had ended similarly.
Bagley watched all of this go down, and in December of 1844, she and five other women formed the Lowell Labor Female Reform Association—"one of the earliest successful organizations of working women in the United States," writes the National Park Service. Voted the Association's president—and, soon after, fired from her mill job—Bagley quickly threw herself into her new role, at once broadening her audience and sharpening her rhetoric. She oversaw a membership that eventually numbered over 600, and pledged solidarity with the largest existing union, the New England Workingmen's Association. In one of her most famous speeches, she turned herself against her old publisher, the Lowell Offering, accusing them of censoring worker dissent. The speech was greeted, the local labor paper reported, by "loud and unanimous huzzahs."
Over Bagley's three-year term, the Association took on multiple projects. The most pressing of these was the "Ten Hour Movement," an attempt to get the grueling mill workday, which often lasted 12 to 14 hours, down to a slightly more manageable ten. This was a near-universal wish—"If I must wend my way / Uncheered by hope's sweet song / God grant that in the mills a day / May be but Ten Hours Long," went one popular worker tune at the time—and the Association gathered about 2,000 signatures in support. Bagley drummed up publicity for the cause by visiting nearby prisons to clock how much the inmates worked. (The answer: much less than the mill girls.)
Eventually, the Massachusetts legislature agreed to review the petitioner's complaints only if the mill girls would speak in court, essentially challenging them to break a long-standing taboo against women speaking in public. Led once again by Bagley, the women called their bluff. "When our rights are trampled upon and we appeal in vain to our legislators, what are we to do? Shall not our voice be heard?" she said on the stand, before introducing six Association members who came forward to testify. Despite their accounts of sickness, injury, curtailed leisure, and lack of sleep, though, the state refused to reduce working hours.
Early on, the Association had chosen the motto "Try Again." Now, they put it to good use. Mounting another appeal, they quintupled the number of petition signatories and defeated the re-election campaign of one prominent, unsympathetic member of the House. At the same time, the Ten Hour Movement spread to nearby states in New England and the Mid-Atlantic. In subsequent years, mill workers in many of these states, including Pennsylvania and Delaware, successfully bargained, legislated, and struck the workday down to ten hours. (Massachusetts eventually got there too, in 1874.)
Bagley stepped down as Association president after three years, but throughout her life, she remained devoted to women's equality and empowerment. In 1846, she was hired as the country's first female telegraph operator—but after she realized she wasn't being paid as much as her male counterparts, she quit. ("The world is quite satisfied with the present arrangement, and we can only protest against such a state of things," she lamented to a friend at the time.) She moved back to Lowell and continued agitating and organizing for several years, before moving to New York and working as a homeopathic doctor.
A century and a half after Bagley and her compatriots began to organize for women's labor—and despite enormous, hard-won strides—American women are still fighting many of the same fights: for good working conditions, for adequate time off, and for equal pay. Were Bagley here to see this, she would likely sigh, and get back to work. "To labor year after year and have only an ungrateful return… is truly discouraging," she once wrote. "Let us trust on and try to leave a little seed on earth that shall bear fruit when we shall pass away."
In the middle of the 18th century, a group of nearly 300 men and women in rural Pennsylvania retreated from their material lives and became part of the Ephrata Cloister, a religious community founded by a German immigrant named Conrad Beissel.
A baker who was also a religious philosopher, Beissel left his homeland in 1720 when his ideas clashed with those of the German church, and sought refuge in Pennsylvania. Here too, his radical thoughts about forms of worship became a cause of dissent at the new congregation.
In 1732, when he moved to the Cocalico region of Pennsylvania to live like a hermit, his followers or religious ‘solitaries’ joined him there and the Ephrata community came into existence.
It began as a small hermitage but soon grew in size and in 1735, Kedar, the first large building on the premises was constructed. Members lived in spartan dormitories and followed a strict daily timetable. While many of the members were celibate, a number of families also lived on the property, which soon extended across 250 acres.
Meditation and prayer were an integral part of days at the Cloister, as were chores, farming, and upkeep of the property. The group became well-known for its acapella music and German calligraphy. A fully functioning publishing center, complete with a paper mill, printing office, and book-binding operation, was established on the premises.
Beissel’s death in 1768 triggered the slow decline of the Ephrata way of life, and his successor Peter Miller struggled to attract new followers and keep the movement alive. The remaining members formed the German Seventh Day Baptist Church and the buildings on the premises were repurposed and modified to serve new resident families.
In 1941, the structures of the Cloister were taken over by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the original buildings were restored.
Today, visitors to the Cloister can walk through the once self-reliant property and see the restored interiors of the dormitories and work spaces, as well as Beissel’s house, to get a sense of its unique residents and their secluded lifestyle.
