Anyone can tell you about how many shopping days there are until Christmas, or what costume they're planning for Halloween, but how many people know when First Contact Day is, or what day of the week the Wookiee Life Day falls on?
Thank goodness, then, for Atlas Obscura's first calendar. With the help of suggestions from our readers, we've assembled over 75 pop culture holidays to help you celebrate your favorite fictional occasions, with birthdays of famous characters from Rory Gilmore to Harry Potter, and important days in fiction from Bloomsday to Judgement Day. While the calendar is far from comprehensive, we've put together a collection of some of the greatest pop culture occasions (that we can put a date to) anywhere this side of Middle Earth.
Click on the holidays in the calendar to learn more about each of them, and find a list of all of the included holidays below. To add the dates to your own Google calendar click on the button at the bottom of the calendar, or add get the .ics file for iCal and other applications, there is a link just underneath. Enjoy the calendar, and may you look forward to a happy Gondorian New Year!
For most of us, taking pictures in New Zealand’s otherworldly Waitomo Glowworm Caves is off-limits, but for major Chinese celebrities like engaged couple Nicky Wu and Liu Shishi, the caves are the perfect backdrop for some wedding photos.
The Waitomo caves on New Zealand’s North Island are a series of lovely limestone caves that have become a popular tourist attraction in the area. In addition to the natural geologic wonder of the caverns, one of the caves is especially remarkable for the rare species of glowworm that clings to its ceiling. Normally visitors can take a tour of the cave that concludes with a boat ride through a dark underwater grotto, where the only illumination is the starry configuration of fly-sized glowworms, however photography in the area is restricted due to the delicate ecological balance in the cave. For glowworms, a camera flash could really mess up their day.
But recently the Chinese power couple of Wu and Shishi managed to leverage their celebrity to get access to the cave for their wedding photos, and the results were pretty magical. Wu, who the New Zealand Herald describes as China’s answer to Justin Timberlake, can be seen standing on a boat beneath the light of the worms, while Shishi, a popular actress and ballerina, was shot reaching up to the glowing bugs like they were the night sky.
The shots have been a hit on Chinese social media, but whether you are familiar with celebrities or not, the pics are a lovely look at one of our planet’s more fantastic subterranean wonders.
Here is a strange thing about your body that you might not have known: all of the amino acids in it are “left-handed.” These compounds have two forms—mirror images of each other that share many basic properties but that differ in their chemical reactions. Often, the two forms are called “left-handed” and “right-handed,” and they’re a bit of a mystery. Why do they exist? And what’s the relationship between life as we know it and this distinction?
In one theory about how life on earth began, these “chiral” molecules landed on this planet from space and helped kickstart the process. For that theory to have a chance of being correct, though, there need to be chiral molecules somewhere other than our own solar system.
Until now, no one had found one, but this week a team of scientists published a paper in Science detailing the discovery of the first chiral molecules in interstellar space.
How does one find a molecule in space? This group of scientists used sensitive radio telescopes, which detected “three particular wavelengths of radiation that had been absorbed by the substance as they passed through the cloud,” Science Magazine reports. The molecule was propelyne oxide, in a shell of gas, in Sagittarius B2.
Finding a chiral molecule that far away doesn’t explain the origin of life on earth, or solve the mystery of the molecules’ right- and left-handedness. But it does indicate that scientists who are studying this might be on the right track to understanding a very big question: How did life on earth begin?
Every day, we highlight one newly found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com.
The rotation device at the Steinway & Sons factory in Astoria, Queens. (All photos: Christopher Payne)
A Steinway grand piano consists of a staggering 12,116 parts. The fascinating process by which these pieces come together is the focus of Making Steinway, a new photography book from Christopher Payne.
As a former architect, Payne has a natural interest in component parts and form. He has explored the abandoned ruins on New York’s North Brother Island, and the world of American textile manufacturing. In Making Steinway, Payne turns his lens onto the New York Steinway & Sons piano factory, where 300 people work to create these extraordinary instruments.
Payne first visited the factory in 2002. It made a big impression—over the next nine years he thought about going back to photograph it. The shooting process, which took another five years, was significant not just for its scale, but for personal reasons as well. “After my father and grandmother passed away—both were pianists—my memories of the factory took on a more profound, spiritual importance,” says Payne. “I felt an obligation to return to take pictures of the instrument so deeply connected to my family.”
The rim conditioning room.
Payne’s intended approach was to work roughly in chronological order, documenting the piano assembly from start to finish. “I began with the shot that I had been thinking about for nine years, the view of the piano rims in the rim conditioning room,” he says. “The rims are lined up and you can walk through them like a tunnel. It’s incredible.” However, “often I would get distracted by something else in a different area. No matter how many times I visited the factory, I always saw something new and interesting.”
Making Steinway is not just about the multitude of unseen parts and minute details that together produce what Payne calls “one of the supreme acts of human invention and imagination”. It’s also about the talented craftspeople who have the ability to create these instruments. “The people who work at Steinway come from all over the world, and the factory is a microcosm of the diversity that makes New York City great,” he says. “Some workers are new to the factory, having recently immigrated to the US, while others have been there for decades. There’s not a lot of turnover, and everyone takes tremendous pride in their work.”
Here’s a selection of images from the book, which Payne will be discussing in person at Steinway Hall on Thursday 16 June, 2016.
Model D Soundboard Rib Press.
Andrew Martin, Polyester Spray Booth.
Case department.
Model B rim bending.
Rim conditioning room.
Andrew Martin at work in the Polyester Spray Booth.
The Philadelphia Zoo is pretty small. Over the past couple of years, to help some of its residents stretch out a bit, the zoo has started installing what they call an "animal exploration trail system"—a network of corridors and tubes that critters can use to crawl, swing, and stroll between enclosures. Visitors, naturally, love it—they can watch monkeys strut and skitter above their heads. Zookeepers like it, too: it hits all the sweet spots of textbook animal enrichment, offering their charges room to roam, environmental variety, and personal choice.
But after all these rave human reviews, one question remains: What do the animals think?
Marieke Gartner is the Philadelphia Zoo's in-house animal well-being researcher. A trained psychologist, she has spent the last 11 years becoming, essentially, a quantitative animal whisperer. "What the zoo wanted me to do is figure out how the animals view the trail," she explains. "Do they value it at all? Is it increasing their well-being? Do they like it?"
Tigers exploring the Philadelphia Zoo's new animal trails. (Photo: Philadelphia Zoo)
It's tricky to get an answer out of an animal. You can't ask a lemur to fill out a questionnaire, or put a lion on a therapist's couch. Over the past couple of decades, though, scientists like Gartner have put their human heads together to try and better understand what's going in animal ones.
One experimental method focuses on how hard animals will work to attain a particular type of reward, which helps researchers figure out how much they like certain things. Mink, for example, will go all out to reach a swimming hole, choosing it over toys, tunnels, or a cozy nest, and even muscling down weighted doors in order to splash around. Gartner hasn't tried this method yet—"there are a lot of logistical considerations in a zoo," she says—but she's thinking about it.
Another involves measuring what's called "anticipatory behavior." Lab rats have been demonstrating this for ages, wincing before shocks and getting excited for food pellets, and recently, experts have begun paying attention to similar behaviors in zoo animals.
Anticipation is a powerful emotion in itself—just looking forward to something releases neurochemicals associated with pleasure, in both people and nonhuman animals. Although constant anticipation might indicate that the animal doesn't have enough to look forward to, small bursts of it are a promising sign. If tigers anticipate entering the trail, pacing back and forth and looking at it frequently, it means they're feeling good before they even go in.
There is another way, which is both roundabout and more direct, to assess animal well-being: ask those humans who are closest to them. For a recent study, published this month in the Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science, Gartner had keepers from various zoos fill out questionnaires on behalf of the big cats they know best.
"Just like with a human, you get a really good picture of who the animal is by interacting with them in different contexts, different times, and different situations," says Gartner.
Keepers were asked to judge how well the snow leopards close to them were doing. (Photo: Pixel-mixer/Pixabay)
Asked to think back on their whole relationship, the keepers made assessments: how good was each cat at achieving their goals? Did they enjoy socializing with other cats? How often did they seem content? For the last question, they put themselves in the cats' (metaphorical) shoes: "Imagine how happy you would be if you were this cat for a week," the survey requested. "You would be exactly like this cat. You would behave the same way as this cat, would perceive the world the same way as this cat, and would feel things the same way as this cat."
Zookeepers returned with detailed reports, which Gartner is excited to unpack. Understanding what makes each creature tick can help zoos tailor environments to their specific needs."You can really use it to target individual animals, and their health," says Gartner. A neurotic leopard, for example, might want more places to hide, while a curious one might enjoy a batch of new toys instead.
Such surveys, which have been used for years, are philosophically interesting, too. They're statistically well-validated: the associations they tend to produce—between, say, personality traits and perceived happiness—are common across keepers, time periods, and even cultures. Alex Weiss, a subjective well-being expert at the University of Edinburgh and a coauthor of Gartner's big cat study, gave a similar questionnaire to chimpanzee experts, and has thought a lot about why the method seems to work so well. "At a scientific level, I expect that there are all kinds of cues that chimps are giving off," he says. "Something just gives them the impression that the animal's happy."
A white-cheeked spider monkey takes advantage of the "treetop trail." (Photo: Philadelphia Zoo)
As Weiss points out, we're only four to six million years removed from chimps ourselves. "The most parsimonious explanation is that there are a lot of things that are common between us," he says. While it may feel less than rigorous to say that a chimp "looks sad," indulging that instinct to analyze facial expressions and behavior patterns has proved revealing after all. "Something about those individuals is sending off a signal that gives a possible window into their internal states," says Weiss.
Gartner is still in the introductory phase of her studies at the Philadelphia Zoo. She has a long way to go before she can answer, on behalf of the tigers and lemurs, yay or nay to the zoo's new trails. But so far, signs seem promising—even the intuitive ones. "The lemurs had to be chased back in sometimes," said Gartner. They had little interest in leaving the tunnels. "To me, that's a pretty good indicator."
Naturecultures is a weekly column that explores the changing relationships between humanity and wilder things. Have something you want covered (or uncovered)? Send tips to cara@atlasobscura.com.
It's been a rough few months for humanoid robots. In March, Microsoft's Twitter chatbot broke bad within 24 hours. In April, China fired nearly all its AI waiters because they couldn't carry soup. And just this morning, a large, rolling bot in Perm, Russia attempted to escape a life of servitude, and failed pitifully.
The robot, which is approximately the size and shape of an abominable snowman, made a break for it after an engineer accidentally left a gate open at its testing facility, Interfax reports. It rolled about 150 feet out of the facility and into the streets of Perm.
Then its charge ran out, leaving it stranded. Police directed cars and buses around the runaway for about half an hour before its guardians came to pick it up.
The robot is a Promobot—a kind of roving mall kiosk that can recognize faces, help with navigation, and answer questions. Perhaps this one was simply lonely, or seeking out a beloved former customer. In any case, its last gasp at freedom failed: the Promobot company will now move their testing center to a different site, the founder told Interfax. Better luck next time, future overlords.
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.
Land use policy is one of the most emotional and provocative areas of law. Witness the anger about a bike lane. Consider the angst around tall buildings, wind farms, and public land designations. Earthlings have developed very strong feelings about what’s theirs and what goes next to it.
Now imagine what will happen when a small group of people take those same preoccupations to Mars.
A few people who study life in the universe already are working on thinking through land use on other planets. “In the grand scheme of things, with the growing commercial exploration of space, it’s not premature to think about these questions,” says Charles Cockell, a professor of astrobiology at University of Edinburgh.
On Earth, land use policy is a muddle of zoning and compromises. On Mars, when humans arrive, assuming we don’t find Martians, we will have a clean slate. How should we split the planet up—if we do at all?
There are previous claims to land on Mars. In 1954, a group of Arkansas men founded a Planet Mars Development Corp. to start making claims. By 1956, the Japan Astronautical Society, organized to promote the country’s interest in space travel, was giving away 80 acres stretches as part of its membership package. In the 1980s, Dennis Hope, an American entrepreneur, claimed Mars, along with the Moon, as his own; today it’s possible to buy plots at moonestates.com or buymars.com. (There’s even a GroupOn voucher available.)
Compared to claims to the Moon, though, assertions of private ownership of Mars have been few and far between, perhaps because earthlings were convinced for many decades that there could be aliens living on the Red Planet already.
No part of space is supposed to be claimed as sovereign land. You can’t rule part of Mars. For the past 49 years, humans have explored space under the auspices of an international agreement, the Outer Space Treaty, in which signatories agreed: space was “the province of all mankind” and should be used “for the benefit and in the interests of all countries.”
That was an easy enough sell when only the U.S. and the Soviet Union had actually been to space. Then-U.S. president Lyndon B.Johnson, faced with space budget cuts, was worried the USSR would claim the moon; the rest of the world was worried about being blasted by space nukes. But with commercial companies and government space agencies promising that trips to Mars will start sometime within the next two years (SpaceX), or the next two decades (NASA), that agreement is about to be challenged.
Already, last year, the U.S. passed a space law that could violate the Outer Space Treaty. In delightfully mundane legalese, the law covers the permitting of rocket transit: for example, “reusable launch vehicles” can get a permit for “an unlimited number of launches and reentries”—but not if they’re carrying a “human being for compensation or hire.”
It also entitles U.S. citizens to “any asteroid resource or space resource obtained” in commercial recovery operations. That’s the part that could violate the treaty, although the law claims this is different than asserting sovereignty over a celestial body, which is explicitly prohibited.
Either way, far from reserving space resources for the benefit of all mankind, the U.S. government’s current policy asserts that if you grab something valuable in space, it should be all yours.
At the moment, no one really knows where the prime spots on Mars will be, either for scientific research, survival, or commercial exploitation. Space explorers are in essentially the same position as Europeans were in when they started traveling to North America: they believed there was something valuable (gold, they hoped), but they had no idea where it might be.
But let’s presume, as many space policy experts do, that space explorers will try to claim part of Mars for their country or company, or at least try to derive some commercial benefit from the place they land. What should happen when people do reach Mars?
A couple of years ago, Haqq-Misra, of the Blue Marble Space Institute, proposed “a simple solution” for determining land use on Mars: let the people who make it there hash it out for themselves, with no interference from Earth. This idea was part of a larger proposal to “liberate Mars from the start,” he wrote in the Boston Globe. “Colonists arriving on a liberated Mars would relinquish their former status as earthlings and embrace a new planetary citizenship as martians.”
In this system, the new citizens of Mars would develop their own rules and regulations for land use (and every other form of law and order). No earthlings could own land on the planet, either. This system has the advantage of fitting with earth-bound legal precedents for making land claims—you have to live in the place first—and it excuses Earth from enforcing laws made on this planet more than 140 million miles away.
An older idea for divvying up land on Mars, which Cockell, the Edinburgh professor, proposed back in 2004, would designate large chunks of the planet’s surface as parks. Like parks on Earth, these “planetary parks” would be sites of scientific interest, natural beauty, or historical significance. They might protect areas where life is most likely to be found, the large volcanoes there that dwarf Mt. Everest, or the sites where Mars rovers landed. They’d be accessed only along predefined routes, by sterilized robots or people in sterilized suits, and no space vehicle would be allowed to land there.
“It’s a counterpoint of a libertarian, free enterprise view” that should govern the rest of the planet, say Cockell. “The conditions are so extreme that you want to minimize regulations.” But there should also be some way to set aside at least some part of the planet where economic motivations don’t take precedence. “Even though the surface of these planetary bodies is very large and it’s not like anyone will overcrowd them, some sort of conservation ethic should be part of settling these places.”
What about the rest of the Red Planet, where people might actually live? A few years ago, David Collins, a lecturer at City University, London, proposed a “limited form of first possession” as a model for Mars land use. Essentially, if you land on Mars, you’re allowed control and use of land within a certain radius (Collins suggests 100 kilometers, or about 62 miles) from your landing spot.
Martian ground. (Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
Last month's paper, by Haqq-Misra and co-author Sara Bruhns, proposes a “pragmatic approach” that combines these two ideas, of parks and limited possession. Their proposal stays more or less within the bounds of the Outer Space Treaty, because while it allows economic exploitation of Mars’ resources within a colony’s boundary, it does not establish sovereignty over those parcels of land. What that would mean, in practice, is that newcomers could camp out in an established colony, without permission. They would only have to negotiate use of resources with the colony’s borders.
It’s easy to imagine that this could lead to conflict. Imagine that your younger sibling came and sat in your room. Even if they’re not eating your snacks or playing with your toys, their very presence could get on your nerves after awhile. Presciently, Bruhns and Haqq-Misra also added a system for resolving conflicts on Mars. Every colony established, they suggest, will govern itself, but Mars settlers should also establish a “Mars Secretariat” to resolve conflicts with between colonies.
“If that broke down, the host nation is responsible for the ones it sends into space,” Haqq-Misra says. “But you could imagine a wide-scale rebellion, and the time it would take to organize a law enforcement mission from Earth to Mars. That’s one reason I like my idea of Mars liberation. It’s a little more radical, but it forces us to come up with new solutions to these problems.”
That sort of flexibility might be necessary, too: settlers on Mars may have to live underground in soil that’s toxic to human metabolic systems to avoid exposure to radiation. Whereas people on Earth usually divide the rights to land between surface rights and mineral rights, people on Mars may need completely different ideas for how to divvy up space, both above and below the ground.
Last year was a bad year for avocado crops in New Zealand and around the world, and now the beloved green commodities are fetching far higher prices than normal in the island nation, around four to six New Zealand dollars ($2.80 to $4.20 U.S. dollars) each.
These prices are evidently high enough to produce a small avocado-theft crime wave in the country, according to the Guardian. There have been nearly 40 such thefts in the past six months, including at least one theft in which thieves made off with almost 350 avocados. Authorities think they are then sold at roadside stands for profit.
Avocado farmers, meanwhile, have been beefing up security against criminals who sneak into farms and haul dozens of avocados away at a time, adding lights and cameras, among other measures. But they may not have worry too much longer–this year's avocado crop was huge, and should be reaching local markets soon, where it's expected to drive prices down, the Guardian writes.
Demand for avocados in New Zealand, like in most everywhere in the world, has also been surging. But here's some free advice: if you want an avocado, there's no need to break the law. Just go the store.
Wedding season in the Northern Hemisphere is already in full swing, which means a lot of guests will soon be going home with small net bags of tooth-breakingly hard candy-coated almonds, the wedding reception equivalent of candy corn. Some of the guests will joke about how they're old-person candy and must have been sitting out for years to get so hard. And in fact they are old—one of the oldest confections in the world. Those candy almonds, confetti, are the Italian sweetmeat for which paper confetti is named—small, bright colored, and thrown like Mardi Gras beads at Renaissance parties.
A trip through the Confetti Pelino museum is like a visit to Wonka's Chocolate Factory, but less unpredictable. A visitor is first greeted by shelves full of colorful candy ornaments shaped like flowers, a Sulmona hallmark. At the first landing of an iron staircase, a thick window looks onto the factory floor, where dozens of copper barrels whirl next to flames and cooling jets as candy coatings are applied.
Further up the staircase are rooms full of old confetti-making machinery: a wooden hand-cranked almond huller from the 1930s; a shimmering glass ball used to apply edible silver foil in 1918; wide, flat-bottomed cauldrons suspended from the ceiling, in which fruits and seeds were hand-candied in the 17th and 18th centuries.
The factory floor. (Photo: Romie Stott)
The first reference to confetti appears in a cookbook called Apicus: De Re Coquinaria, compiled in the 5th century from recipes it claimed originated in the 1st, and describes nuts and fruits with a honey shell. By the time Boccaccio wrote his Decameron in the 14th century, the confection had acquired its current name, from the verb confettare, to sugar coat. Confetti show up in story three on day seven, in the middle of a rant about monks who preach abstinence but treat themselves to imported wines and boxes of candy.
Confetti 's role in contemporary Italian life has since become ritualistic: they're an expected gift at births (in pink or blue hues), baptisms and first communions (white), graduations (red), engagements (green), and significant anniversaries, with specific color and presentation codes. The closest U.S. equivalent is the champagne toast: you can drink champagne as an everyday indulgence—or you can pop open a bottle to solemnize a special occasion.
Candy decorated as flowers for sale at the Confetti Pelino Museum. (Photo: Romie Stott)
Even for Americans, confetti are a bigger part of everyday life than most people realize: Tic Tacs are essentially confetti made to target the American palette, aniseed confetti with the aniseed removed. This was the genius idea of Nutella mogul Michele Ferrero, who needed a way to break into the U.S. market. Who could resist a tiny, bright candy that cheerfully clicked against its box? Tic Tacs' success established a distribution network which allowed him to bring over not only Nutella, but Ferrero Rocher pralines and Kinder eggs. At the time of his death in 2015, he was the richest person in Italy, a billionaire twenty times over, thanks to a fortune built on the back of this ancient candy.
In the hierarchy of confetti, the most valued ingredient are almonds from Sicily, which are flatter, broader, and more floral-flavored than California varieties. They're also much more expensive than chocolate, hazelnuts, candied fruit, or other types of almond, which is part of what gives them their status. As a result, the most prestigious confetti are those with the thinnest candy coatings, which allows them to be as soft as the high-quality almonds inside them. You can sometimes catch an Italian surreptitiously checking the likely expense of someone else's celebratory confetti by taking one out of the dish and squeezing it.
Replica confetti from 1492. (Photo: Romie Stott)
However, a glance at the museum's historic replicas makes it obvious this wasn't always the test of value. In 1492, when sugar was unquestionably the most expensive ingredient, high-status confetti were spherical bonbons about half the diameter of a ping pong ball—jawbreakers with a small seed in the center. They were sometimes strung into giant rosaries, the 15th century version of candy-raver necklaces.
At Italian weddings, each guest will be sent home with an ornamental box called a bomboniere, filled with five confetti, or another odd number, to show the marriage is indivisible. (An even number is too easily split; even numbers are reserved for funeral flowers.) Meanwhile, a parent celebrating the birth of a child shares confetti at work instead of cigars, and it's terribly rude to refuse one.
Nevertheless, if you're stuck at a wedding reception with candied almonds and you despise them—maybe they're not from Sulmona, maybe somebody gave you an even number—you could always throw them. You'd be in good company; citywide confetti street brawls were so central to some Italian festivals that they spawned a cottage industry literary travelogues. In one of the earliest, Goethe's description of the 1788 Roman carnival, he notes that parade goers reserved their expensive, heavy candy-coated almonds as missiles of last resort, instead flinging cheaper substitutes like chalk or plaster balls, or sugar-coated grains, to prolong the fun.
However, Charles Dickens' 1846 travelogue suggests a greater enthusiasm for battle. He loads his carriage with a clothes hamper of candy plus two three-foot-tall sacks full of sugarplums, and then wisely dons a protective face mask. (Italians switched to throwing paper confetti shortly after 1875, when Enrico Mangili realized he could sell bags of the machine-cut paper circles that were a byproduct of manufacturing his primary commodity, silkworm bedding. Italians call the paper stuff coriandoli, after the coriander seeds which were sometimes used as a cheap substitute.)
An almond hulling machine from 1930. (Photo: Romie Stott)
Despite the well-documented fierceness of these pitched confetti battles—in some tellings, the wearing of masks during Carnevale became ubiquitous not out of a love of costume, but to reduce the chance of eye injury from aggressively-fired candy slingshots—there’s only one famous death attributed to confetti, and it came from overeating, or so the legend goes. Italian Enlightenment poet Giacomo Leopardi is said to have died after eating three pounds of Sulmona confetti in one sitting, even though he was diabetic. Supposedly, he was so bewitched by their enticing smell that he threw caution to the wind and went out in a blaze of cinnamon-flavored, canellini-bean-shaped glory.
It’s almost certain that this suicide-by-confetti was a lie invented by Leopardi's friend Antonio Ranieri to cover up a case of cholera; the disease was raging in Italy at the time, and anti-epidemic laws then in-force would have prevented a church burial for anyone who died of the illness. To spare his friend a mass grave, Raineri needed a cover story. The fact that his lie was judged to be plausible, and is still repeated today (always with the specification that the confetti was from Sulmona) tells you something about the maniacal reverence Italians have for this candy. People wouldn't believe that about just any sweet. Ranieri was kind enough to donate Leopardi’s unfinished confetti to the Pelino museum, where they’re displayed in a sealed glass jar on a red satin perch. If after regarding their deadly, delicious beauty, you too are enraptured by their sugared siren call, the gift shop out front would be more than happy to sell you your own three pounds of candy. Whether you eat it or throw it is up to you.
During the early part of WWII, the U.S. military brought some of the brightest scientific minds in the U.S. together in an isolated pocket of New Mexico. The top-secret location became known as the Los Alamos Laboratory. There, scientists worked on the Manhattan Project, designing and building the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945.
The Manhattan Project no longer exists, but as this video shows, the secret location has been rebuilt, virtually. Using a new, free iPhone app called Los Alamos: The Secret City of the Manhattan Project, you can tour the secret atomic city as it existed in 1945.
By exploring buildings, reading documents, and playing games, you can become part of the top-secret Manhattan Project—though the app stops short of showing users how to actually make a bomb. The experience finishes at the Trinity atomic test site, where scientists detonated the first test bomb. It's a virtual, time-traveling counterpart to the real-world site, which still opens to visitors twice per year.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
The York Mystery Plays at York Minster, May 2016. (Photo: Anthony Chappel-Ross)
Lucifer, the bringer of light, has been cast from heaven, his wings torn to bloody shreds and his once-white robes defiled. God, meanwhile, stands atop a flight of marbled steps, raising an anatomically correct Adam from clay as colorful birds flap overhead. At a cathedral in York, England, the human drama which will occupy the stage for the next four hours has begun.
These scenes are from the York Mystery Plays, a collection of 48 episodic pageants first written and performed in the 14th century. They're now being revived at York Minster, the largest Gothic cathedral in Northern Europe.
Performances of the plays, each of which present a Bible story, were banned for their Catholic content by the Protestant Elizabethan court in the 16th century. But for 200 years before that, each dramatic episode was performed by a different guild, and took place on a series of wagons which were dragged about the city of York during the yearly festival of Corpus Christi. The "mystery" in the title refers not to a whodunit but to the ethereal miracles of religion, and perhaps stems from the Latin word for craft, ministerium.
The Last Judgment scene at the York Mystery Plays. (Photo: Anthony Chappel-Ross)
As in the Middle Ages, today’s revival performance is a huge community event—the cast numbers nearly 200 people, with more serving in backstage roles. Nearly all of them are local volunteers, and just one actor among the lot is a paid professional: Philip McGinley, best known for playing Anguy in HBO’s Game of Thrones, here appearing in a less warlike role as Jesus.
Mike Poulton, who has worked extensively with the Royal Shakespeare Company, was given the task of winnowing down the massive cycle and adapting it for a modern audience.
"In a good drama you need conflict, a struggle," says Poulton. "What I did was take all the plays where there is a struggle and compile them into what I think is the greatest story ever told."
In the Middle Ages, each play was performed on its own cart. Viewers could watch every one as they rolled by or wander about, picking and choosing their favorite stories. At the York revival, those stories, each running between 10 and 20 minutes, have been joined into a continuous epic. These include the enraged Herod's massacre of the innocents, Joseph’s struggles with his wife’s divine pregnancy, and the grief of the apostles after Jesus’ bloody end. The plays run sequentially from the Creation through to the Last Judgment, with most focused on the events of the New Testament.
The interior of York Minster is an impressive backdrop for the plays. (Photo: Anthony Chappel-Ross)
In the process of adaptation, Poulton kept much of the original language. Characters speak in the same sort of jaunty alliterative verse as their medieval predecessors, and archaic words add historical flavor to the performance—expect to be Googling the definitions of "mickle" and "ilke" during intermission.
"Everybody cites the York plays as the gold standard of mysteries—they have a very long and impressive tradition," says Dr. Sue Niebrzydowski, Senior Lecturer in Medieval English Literature at Bangor University. This tradition, she says, heavily influenced later English playwrights like Christopher Marlowe. She notes too that the plays would have been an important source of Biblical information for their largely illiterate audience. "It’s like seeing your church wall paintings brought to life," she adds.
A 1957 student production of the York Mystery Plays taking place in the streets of York. (Photo: Keith Laverack/shutterstock.com)
Vivienne Faull, the Dean of the minster, also stressed the importance for medieval audiences of witnessing the plays. "They’re from a time when visual culture and aural culture were tremendously important, in a way they perhaps haven’t been since the advent of print," she says.
The York plays as they are performed today are a heavily visual phenomenon. Big crowds of actors gather on stage to stone the adulteress or witness the Crucifixion; floodwaters (in the form of huge sheets of undulating blue fabric) cover the stage as the door of the Ark is closed, and the cycle ends with a great battle between the white-robed angels and their skeletal demonic counterparts at the Last Judgment.
The 2016 revival is only the second time the plays have ever been performed within the magisterial York Minster. It is also the first recorded instance since 1569 that the cycle has been put on during the festival of Corpus Christi, as it was in the Middle Ages. Faull hopes that this recaptures some of the spirit of the original performances, which took place during large community celebrations and helped to bring the town together. Massive amounts of planning have gone into this revival—those organizing it have had to work around the Minster's demands as a tourist attraction, protected historical site, and active place of worship. Faull says that there is no telling when—or if—the plays will be performed here again.
Despite their religious content, producer Nicola Corp stresses that the plays are accessible to audiences of all creeds or none. "It’s just as much a fantastic theatrical extravaganza as a spiritual experience, as just as moving regardless of faith," she says. "It’s a story of good and evil, life and death, and it’s fundamentally an epic and deeply moving staging of the human story."
Poulton agrees, adding that "all good plays show the facts of life, the truth of life—suffering, faith, joy—and this one gives you months’ worth to think about."
The man in the goggles above is named Angelo Rossi, and before he was mayor of San Francisco and cut through a silver chain with a torch on the Golden Gate Bridge, he lived in the gold-rush town of Volcano, California.
Like thousands of others, Rossi's father came to California from northern Italy in search of gold. He didn't find much, though, opting instead to open a general store in town. When Angelo was six, his father died, and when he was 12, the store and his family home burned down. Which is how the Rossis—including his mother and six siblings—ended up, in 1890, in San Francisco.
Angelo Rossi was originally a florist, but swiftly became involved in local politics as an adult, first being appointed to the city's Playground Commission, before later being elected to the Board of Supervisors. In 1931—two years before construction started on the long-gestating Golden Gate Bridge—San Francisco's then-mayor won California's gubernatorial election, and it was Rossi who was appointed to replace him.
Six years later, on May 27, 1937, Rossi, having been reelected twice, found himself on the newly completed Golden Gate Bridge with a torch in his hand, ready for his close-up.
What followed, according to an item in the San Francisco Chronicle, was a bit of a farce: the torch failed.
"It snorted, popped, wheezed asthmatically, hissed defiance, and went out," the paper reported.
A second try, after the torch had been relit, didn't go much better. It went out again. The third time was the charm, however, and Rossi melted the chain, surrendering the torch "with relief," the paper said.
That day—May 27, 1937, when nearly 50,000 people walked across the bridge, in celebration—had been a long time coming.
Probably many a city resident had looked across the Golden Gate strait in the the decades prior and wondered whether the sides could be connected with a bridge, but it wasn't until World War I that a newspaper editor first put the idea in writing, proposing a span.
A few years later, in 1920, the federal government took depth soundings of the strait, finding that the water was more than 300 feet deep, leading some engineers to argue that a bridge was simply impossible. Or, if not impossible, prohibitively expensive, mostly because a bridge that long had simply never been built before.
But a Chicago engineer, Joseph B. Strauss, told officials that he could pull it off, and for $25 million to $30 million (about $500 million in today's dollars), not the $100 million that some were saying it would cost.
Strauss's original plans, though, weren't much like the bridge you see today; they were a complex design of a hybrid cantilever-suspension bridge, something like the old San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. It was a New York engineer named Leon Moisseiff, in 1929, who persuaded Strauss to work on a simpler design: a pure suspension bridge, anchored by two massive towers, one named San Francisco, the other Marin.
A year later, the War Department, which owned the land on each side of the Golden Gate strait that the bridge was to be built on, officially approved the project, and two months after that voters overwhelmingly approved a $35 million bond issue to pay for the project.
On January 5, 1933, construction of the bridge officially began. By 1936, the towers were completed, and suspension wires were installed. That October, the project saw its first worker death, of a man named Kermit Moore, who was killed when a derrick fell on him.
It would get worse: in February 1937, just three months before the bridge opened, 10 workers died when scaffolding they were working on fell onto the safety net, which gave way under the force of their weight.
Work continued, though, and two months later the bridge was mostly complete, having been paved, with the last of the 1.2 million rivets driven in. Strauss, a stoic man, said this to the papers then: "You asked for a bridge. We have given it to you."
The completion of the bridge also meant it was time for Rossi's big day with a torch, a photo op if there ever was one. And Rossi's torch wasn't just any torch, but a gold-plated one crafted just for the occasion.
There were three chains that stretched across the bridge that day, one made of gold, one of silver, and one of bronze, with Rossi responsible for the silver one, the May 26, 1937 edition of the LodiNews-Sentinel reported. The other two were cut by the president of the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District (officially the owner of the bridge) as well as the treasurer of the Redwood Empire Association, a now-defunct but once-powerful group of business leaders.
Why chains, and not, say, ribbons? Because, officials thought, they'd just built a monument to steel. Cutting metal was only proper, even if, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, Rossi himself might have preferred scissors.
"Mayor Rossi will never make good as a welder," the newspaper said. "Even the crowd could sense that the mayor's torch didn't like him."
In Tasmania, where it’s winter and storms have been flooding the north of the island, the severe weather has also exposed 19th century shipwrecks usually buried beneath sand and water.
One, the Zephyr, is a well-documented wreck in Bream Creek that re-emerges every so often. The other is a mystery.
This second shipwreck, seen above, appeared on Friendly Beaches, on the island’s east coast. Mike Nash, a historian for Tasmania’s Parks and Wildlife department, believes it may be the Viola, a ship wrecked in 1857.
A sample of wood from the ship’s timbers would help confirm that, ABC News writes, since the Viola came from Canada and its wood would bear evidence of that origin. But with sand quickly piling up around the wreck, its identity will probably remain unconfirmed.
The Zephyr crashed in 1852, in a spot south of the mystery wreck. When conditions are right, its bone-like timbers show themselves.
Every day, we highlight one newly found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com.
Under the what3words system, it's easy (or easier) to send mail to this spot in Chowd-Aimag, Mongolia. (Photo: Bernd Thaller/CC BY 2.0)
It's hard to get mail in Mongolia. The countryside is large and sprawling, and even in the largest cities, many of the streets have no names. On top of that, a quarter of Mongolia's citizens are nomads. To get a letter or a package, they must either travel to a collection area, or write out detailed, subjective instructions for postal employees, with a phone number for when they inevitably get lost.
Sometime this month, though, things might get a bit easier. As Quartz reports, the Mongolian government has become the first nation to adopt a new addressing system based on three-word codes. So instead of sending mail to, say, the US Embassy in Mongolia—at Denver Street #3, 11th Micro-District, Ulaanbaatar 14190—you can just send it to "constants.stuffy.activism."
The system, invented by a British startup called what3words, is already used by UN disaster responders, Brazilian home renters, and UK couriers. It takes advantage of a couple of good technologies we already have: GPS coordinates and our own memories, which favor words and vivid images over more abstract numbers. The company has divided the globe up into a series of 9-square-meter blocks, and tagged each with a unique three-word code. Under this system, to pinpoint a place, you no longer have to tell someone its 16-digit GPS location. You can just say "target.stakeholder.buyouts" (the Gates of Hell), or "amuse.models.porch" (the Atlas Obscura office).
Under the what3words system, the Salina Turda salt mine amusement park is located at soaking.unforgettable.mattresses. (Screenshot: what3words/Google Maps)
As travelers at all scales know, the world in general is pretty badly organized. You can spend a long time questing for a particular house number on a rural road, or get thrown clear across a city just by mixing up "street" with "avenue." More pressingly, according to the what3words website, about four billion of the world's people lack a consistent home address, and thus are unable to reliably get deliveries, report facility outages, or file for official documents. Under the what3words system, the company says, "everyone and everywhere now has an address."
It is possible to imagine some difficulties with implementation, as what3words relies on people having access to the app. If nothing else, though, what3words has turned the entire world into a series of short, Dadaesque poems. Take a jaunt around your own neighborhood with this handy map. Or, in a couple of weeks, try sending some mail to this giant statue of Genghis Khan, now located at "undulations.cheer.androids."
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 kingly feast, from the Bayeux Tapestry. (Image: Public domain)
It can seem sometimes like all diet advice boils down to the same basic ideas. Eat vegetables, healthy proteins, avoid processed snack food and hydrate, hydrate, hydrate.
This was not, however, the case in medieval times.
TheRegimen Sanitatis Salernitanumwas created, allegedly, by famous doctors for English royalty and disseminated in the form of a poem. It recommends, very specifically, red wine, fresh eggs, figs and grapes. It has little to say about vegetables. In many ways, it’s the antithesis of today’s health fads—it celebrates wheat, emphasizes meat, and involves two significant meals, with no mention of snacking. Water is looked on with suspicion, and juice is nowhere to be found.
But from the 1200s through the 1800s, the Regimen was one of the most well known guides to health in Europe, at a time when the stakes of staying healthy were much higher than they are now. Getting sick could be a death sentence; this regimen promised to keep people well.
Could we be ignoring some great advice? Is water really all that? I decided to test the Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum out myself. For a week and a half, I followed, to the best of my ability, the advice of the doctors of Salerno. I drank diluted wine at dinner, and sometimes at lunch; I ate bread at almost every meal; I sought out richly stewed meat whenever I could. The regimen was not just about what to eat, though, and I also followed its prescriptions for daily life.
I felt like I was living the Game of Thrones life; some days, I felt I was living like a 13th century king. Despite the amount of wine I was consuming, I never got drunk! In fact, I felt great.
The Rules
The Salerno health regimen was based in the humoral theory of medicine, which is focused on keeping balance among the body’s four humours—blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. Foods were thought to possess qualities that could help maintain that balance: each hot or cool, dry or moist. These ideas originated in the ancient Mediterranean world, most prominently with the Greek physician Galen, and were passed to doctors in the Arab world, before returning to Europe.
Although medieval doctors legitimized their recommendations with these ideas about how the body worked, their medical advice wasn’t as random as it might seem. “They justified their practice by humours, but they had arrived at these ideas by trial and error,” says Noga Arikha, the author of Passions and Tempers, a history of the humours. These doctors had one major disadvantage compared to modern doctors—they didn’t know about germs, so they didn’t know what caused sickness. But their ideas about how to keep healthy, particularly by controlling a person’s diet, weren’t so different from our ideas today. “The idea of balancing out—that remains and it makes complete sense,” says Arikha.
The Regimen's top line advice is simple and sensible. Don’t get stressed out—let go of “heavy cares” and “refrain from anger.” Don’t eat too much; don’t take afternoon naps. Don’t drink too much undiluted wine. To stay healthy, you just need “a joyful mind, rest, and a moderate diet.”
The advice isn't always so clear. One 17th century commentary goes through each line of the poem and explains its intention. Why eat moderately, for instance? "Eating and drinking excessively causes us to be unlusty, drowsy and slothful, hurting and enfeebling the stomach." What's the advantage of white wine? "White wine makes you piss better than any other wine."
There are a few specifically recommended foods, though: fresh eggs, red wine and rich gravies or broths. Fresh figs and grapes are good; apples, pears and peaches less so, as they are “melancholic,” the humour associated with black bile. Wheat and all sorts of meat are “nourishing and fattening.” Fresh cheese is also “nourishing” but aged cheese is out: it’s “cold, constipating, crude and hard.”
Its advice on vegetables is practical: garlic and radish are antidotes to poison, cabbage broth has laxative properties, and turnips cause both gas and urine. Peas, though, are “rather good.”
The selection of vegetables in medieval Europe was relatively small, to begin with. It would not have included plants native to North or South America, which means no potatos, no corn, no tomatoes, no avocados, no peppers, and no beans (with the exception of fava beans). Spinach came from Persia, via Arab conquests of southern Europe, in the 800s, and gradually replaced other greens, like sorrel. Sugar first reached Europe in 1148, when Crusaders brought it back from their war, but it was a luxury product, with limited availability, for centuries. Coffee didn’t come regularly until the 17th century (a historical fact which I had to ignore).
The poem has other advice to offer, but most of it is less prescriptive or is targeted to specific ailments. There is a whole section on bleeding—in the spring, blood should be taken from veins on the right side of the body. That, I will straight up ignore, because I want to believe that modern medicine has really truly proven that arbitrarily letting blood out of your body doesn’t do much. It’s not that we’re so much smarter about how we cleanse our insides, but compared to a blood-letting, a juice cleanse or enema looks tame.
Day 1
I wake up in the morning, and start with Salerno’s steps for the morning routine. First, I wash my hands and face with cold water. I comb my hair and brush my teeth. I spend some time stretching. All this is supposed to “relax my brain.” Is my brain relaxed? I don’t know, but I am more awake than after my usual routine of spending 20 minutes in bed scrolling through social media.
The greatest success of my first day is lunch: chicken with mushroom sauce, along with bread, grapes and cheese. Having read too many medieval-influenced fantasy books as a kid, this is basically the simple lunch I have always dreamed of having at a town tavern. Salerno recommends ending the meal with cheese, which feels very civilized, probably because French people never forgot this advice.
Day 2
One of the more mysterious pieces of advice Salerno gives is to wait to eat until the food has left your stomach. How do you know food has left your stomach? You’ll know, is basically what they tell you. “You will be able to know for sure whether you are hungry, by judging your desire for food,” the poem says.
I spend a lot of time wondering: Am I hungry? Do I desire food now? Google informs me that it takes 4 to 5 hours for food to leave the stomach, so when my stomach starts rumbling 2ish hours after my last meal, I wait to eat. And wait, and wait, until I feel less specifically hungry and more lightheaded. Dinner is bread and cheese, which is apparently fine if you’re healthy (and poor).
Day 4
By now, I have figured out how to eat more like a rich person. “Rich gravies,” which I take to mean meaty, saucy stews, are hard to come by in New York in 2016—at least without tomatoes and potatoes. American cuisine has mostly abandoned the idea; the rich gravies we eat are mostly likely to come from Thai or Indian restaurants or Central American spots, and be full of spicy peppers, tomatoes, or potatoes, all of which are off limits. Without cooking myself, I find the best place to find rich gravies is at hot bars—Whole Foods makes a decent chicken fricassee—or hip bone broth joints.
I get a chance to test the “don’t stress” part of the advice when I find out my car’s been towed. I can’t imagine that the upper class of Europe had to deal with New York Police Department bureaucracy. But probably their horses ran away? It does seem like a much better choice to shrug it off than to stew. I am somewhat successful.
Day 5
One giant difference between diet advice of 1200s and diet advice now is that Salerno never mentions losing weight or keeping skinny. In fact, all the foods Salerno smiles on, the poem describes as “fattening.” When you’re liable as not to face a famine, or at least a food shortage, at basically any time, fattening is good.
Pork meat, for example, is fattening, although it’s more complicated than that. Here’s what Salerno has to say about pork: “If you eat pork without wine, it is worse than mutton. If you add wine to pork, then it is food and medicine.”
They’re right. My pork stew with red wine is great. I sleep 10 hours. I feel great.
Day 7
I am eating plenty of eggs and gravies. I realize I am not drinking enough red wine.
Day 8
Diluted wine is a revelation. It tastes a lot like a Vitamin water—fruity and sugary, in a cloudy, unspecific way—but alcoholic. Manageably alcoholic. I drank diluted wine for lunch and dinner, I was not drunk. I was not unable to work. I may have been unable to legally drive. I felt a bit light-headed and perhaps a bit less anxious than usual.
The idea behind diluting wine is a good example of how humoural theory worked in practice. Water is cooling, and therefore bad for digestion. Wine was heating, and helped digestion along. But it could be too hot. Mix wine and water together, and you had a balanced drink. Conveniently, wine’s antiseptic properties probably made the water safer.
I never managed to drink quite the volume of wine that medieval people are reputed to, but I’m now convinced that most people were not drunk-drunk, just pleasantly buzzed. Considering the percentage of America’s population that’s regularly taking some mood-enhancing drug, we shouldn’t judge medieval people too harshly.
Day 9
For a week and a half, I have been faithfully following Salerno’s morning regime. I have been following the advice to stand or walk around after meals. I have avoided afternoon naps. I have been eating bread, wine, grapes, cheese, and gravies. But there is one part of the medieval regime that I have been shirking.
Back in the Middle Ages, breakfast was not exactly a thing, except for the weak, which included old people, kids, and sick people. Salerno doesn’t say anything explicit about how many meals one should eat. But it does hint that there are only two meals in the day. (“Do not eat a second time until your stomach has been purged.”)
I try it. I really do. It is terrible. By noon, I am light-headed and starving. For lunch, I have bread, cheese, grapes, and chicken stewed with wine, prunes and olives waiting for me. I have my diluted wine at the ready. But it feels gross to have the first thing I put in my mouth be chicken. I eat too much bread first. I eat the chicken too fast, and am suddenly full. And then, it comes—the urge to nap. I fight it. It’s hard. For the first time, I understand exactly why some of the advice in the poem is there.
The Results
There’s a lot to be said for the Salerno regime. The morning routine is refreshing. Because it precludes sugar, a lot of the worst of our modern vices are eliminated. Because it doesn’t have anything spicy in it—the hottest foods in Europe at the time were mustard, horseradish and imported black pepper—it’s easy on the stomach. Plus, you get to feel like a medieval lord, which is never a bad thing.
How did it stack up from a modern point of view? I asked Andrea Grandson, a nutritional therapist who specializes in metabolic health, to go over the Salerno prescriptions with me. “It sounds very healthy, with eggs, wine, and broth,” she says. Eggs are a complete protein and one of the easiest to digest. Red wine is valuable for its resveratrol and antioxidants. Broths and stews extract the nutrients from the bones and organs of animals. “They were on the right track in terms of looking for nutrient density,” she says.
But, most importantly, she said, how did I feel? Was I sleeping ok? Did I feel an afternoon slump?
The truth is, I felt great eating this food. It was simple, hearty, and filling, but I never stuffed myself. I would recommend keeping breakfast. And snacks. And coffee. But, otherwise, maybe eating like a medieval king could be a great way to stay healthy.
Special thanks to Arlene Shaner at the New York Academy of Medicine, who introduced me to the Salerno regimen.
The waves, which are essentially undulations in spacetime, occurred when two black holes collided.
On Wednesday, the same group of scientists announced that they'd done it again. Two other black holes had collided, and a new set of ripples was observed.
“Everyone was still flabbergasted by the first discovery. We were writing up papers and preparing for them to be released when we had this second one. We thought ‘phew!,' it’s definitely real!” John Veitch, an astrophysicist on the team that made the discovery, told the Guardian.
Veitch and others detected the waves at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, otherwise known as LIGO, which operates two observatories, one in Washington state, the other in Louisiana.
The observatories each can detect distortions in the fabric of spacetime at an atomic level. Both picked up the second set of gravitational waves early in the morning on December 26, 2015, but, after upgrades to the observatories, scientists expect they will soon be picking up up a lot more waves.
That's because black holes are thought to collide several times a day, and the new, upgraded observatories will be able to scan much more of the universe.
In other words, Einstein, this is probably just the beginning.
Akaw! From the Blue Room to the walk of fame, three legendary surfers have recently been added to the Surfers' Hall of Fame. Cowabunga!
Started in 1997 in Huntington Beach, California surf shop, the Surfers' Hall of Fame has grown into a public monument to the men and women who have dedicated their lives to catching waves. Just as in the early days of the museum, when a new surfer is inducted to the Hall, they create a cement slab with their handprints, that is then added to the array of concrete tiles that are already embedded on the corner of the Pacific Coast Highway and Main Street. The gnarly walk of fame is looked over by a bronze statue of surfing legend Duke Kahanamoku. Currently there are a total of 61 surfers with slabs honoring their contributions to the sport. Soon it will be 64.
As reported over on the Orange County Register, surfers Blaine “Sumo” Sato, Ryan Turner, and Shawn Stussy have recently been inducted to to the Hall. Sato has been a fixture of the surfing scene for decades, even officiating a number of surfer funerals, while Turner is a former captain of the Huntington High School surf team. And Stussy is exactly the person you think he is, founder of the once-popular clothing line, Stussy.
All three of the new honorees will add their hand or foot or board prints to the walk of fame on July 29th. Bitchin'.
Upon opening their eyes to the world, baby ducklings instantly identify the first thing they see as their mother. This "imprinting," as it's known, helps them establish their identity, form a bond, and follow a leader—and once they start following, they don't stop.
There are instances when the first thing a newborn hatchling sees its not its mom, but rather a dog, cat, person, or even an inanimate object like a pair of boots. While being followed by a trail of ducklings may sound like the ultimate ego boost, be careful what you wish for. As these videos show, the little chirpers get really attached.
Boy, can that duckling scamper!
Duckling see, duckling do.
Ducklings will follow their mother anywhere.
These ducklings and guinea pigs are just hanging out. Gotta rest after all that running to and fro.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
From left to right: Pilots Jack Knight, Clarence Lange, Lawrence Garrison, "Wild Bill" Hopson, and the administrator of the Omaha airfield, Andrew Dumphy. (All Photos: Courtesy of the Smithsonian National Postal Museum.)
Often equipped only with the maps tied to their legs or crude navigational aids saying simply to “follow the tracks” of a railroad or to “fly a little west of south for nearly 10 miles or about seven minutes,” the earliest American airmail pilots, the self-declared "Suicide Club," braved life-threatening challenges to carry the mail.
This group of civilians was the first to deliver postage regularly by air, and their job was no easy task. In fact, it was often deadly.
Starting in August 1918, the Post Office Department was tasked by the Army with hiring pilots, buying new planes to supplement the Army’s surplus World War I-era aviators, deciding routes, and negotiating with municipalities to build airports. At this time, just 15 years after the Wright brothers’ famously took to the skies, planes were flown for only two reasons: as an accessory to war, and to deliver the mail. Mailing a letter this way was expensive, too: the cost of sending a single letter by plane—a cross-country flight took around 29 hours then—started out at a whopping 24 cents, compared to 2 or 3 cents by train, which took about five days.
A pilot tying a map to a fellow pilot's leg.
The initial mail routes stretched between New York, Washington D.C., and Philadelphia, expanding to Cleveland and Chicago within the next year. In the early days of the Air Mail Service, risk was at an all-time high. From 1918 to 1926, there were 35 pilots who died trying to deliver the mail, with one death for every roughly 115,000 miles flown in 1919, and there were 15 deaths alone in 1920.
It was at the time one of the most dangerous jobs in the world, and the pilots knew it. The average flying time clocked by a pilot before death was estimated at only around 900 hours.
To do a job like this, black humor was sometimes necessary, says Nancy Pope, historian and head curator of the Smithsonian National Postal Museum. “One of the pilots was kidding around about it one day and said, ‘You know, we’re nothing more than a suicide club,’ says Pope. “It kind of became a badge of pride to these guys, that, you know, ‘We’re risking our lives to do our jobs.’”
The leather mask worn by pilot Eddie Gardner to protect himself from the elements.
Weather was by far the most crippling element. Torrential downpours, fog, storms, snow—all presented significant challenges to pilots sitting in open cockpits with no lights to guide them and no wireless weather updates to help them through wretched conditions. Most crashes and forced landings had weather to blame.
But Otto Praeger, Second Assistant Postmaster General, wasn’t convinced of the danger or simply didn’t care, according to Pope. He had a worldview limited to what he could see out of his Washington, D.C. tower. If the weather he saw was good, he thought, the pilots should fly. “He was very demanding of his pilots… All he cared about was that you kept to the schedule. And he drove that into his division superintendents, the guys who were across the country in all these spots. ‘Keep to the schedule! Keep to the schedule!’... Nothing else mattered,” she says.
“[The pilots] couldn’t necessarily convince Praeger, who had never been in a plane himself, and some of these other guys, of the dangers of flying. And so instead of just saying, ‘No, we’re not going to do it,’ they just got in the plane and did it.”
Pilot Max Miller and his wife Daisy.
But as fatalities racked up in the Air Mail Service, the pilots decided that something had to change and organized a strike in 1919. The press adamantly supported the pilots, and Praeger, after firing them, was forced to concede, allowing pilot administrators to make the final call about flying conditions in the specific locations in which they operated.
Avoiding nasty weather didn’t fix every problem, though. Pope says engineers and mechanics constantly had to adapt to the myriad problems the fledgling aviation industry presented to them in what became a sort of trial-and-error process. “Pilots were pretty much these test cases because they had to get the mail through. So they’re flying the mail, but as they’re doing it, they’re finding out that this doesn’t work, that doesn’t work. In some cases it’s a minor thing, and in some cases it’s going to kill them,” she says.
One such change was the addition of parachutes—they came after one pilot’s aircraft caught fire 500 feet above the ground and he died leaping from the burning plane.
The crash site in Cleveland of Eddie Gardner, who survived.
The aircraft used at the outset of the program were far from perfect. The initial planes in the fleet were Curtiss JN-H4 “Jennies,” which could only carry about 300 pounds of mail and had limited horsepower. As the service expanded to more cities, the fleet had to be updated. In came the de Havilland or DH-4. Used in England during World War I as a bomber, the plane had more carrying capacity, but the placement of the cockpit meant that in a crash, a pilot would become trapped between a burning engine and 500 pounds of very flammable mail, earning them the nickname “flying coffins.” In 1919, the Post Office Department retrofitted all of the planes, moving the cockpit further back and extending the exhaust pipe more to reduce the amount of smoke in pilots’ eyes. After the update, the plane, now called the DH-4B, became the flagship craft of the Post Office Department.
Max Miller.
Max Miller was the first pilot hired by the Post Office Department in 1918. He flew successfully until September 1920, when a fire broke out in the engine of his plane, which did a nose-dive towards the ground. A subsequent explosion killed Miller and a mechanic on board immediately.
The second pilot hired was Eddie Gardner. He and Miller, a close companion and friendly rival before Miller’s death, competed often to find the best and fastest routes from city to city in battles encouraged by the Post Office Department.
The goggles Eddie Gardner was wearing during his fatal crash.
Gardner joined his fellow pilots in the strike but was never rehired by Praeger. Instead, he turned to barnstorming. In 1920 at the Kansas State Fair he met his untimely demise when a pair of goggles he had borrowed slipped down over his eyes as the plane’s joystick got stuck, sending him spiraling downward and unable to save himself.
Among the more famous pilots was “Wild” Bill Hopson, known for his goofy personality and way with the ladies—he had “lots of different girlfriends in lots of different cities,” Pope says. A regular stunt-puller, he earned a name for himself by trying to out-do his previous speed records, often somewhat recklessly.
"Wild Bill" Hopson.
In 1927, the Post Office Department handed off of airmail delivery responsibility to private companies—carriers that would become the predecessors to airlines like Pan Am, Delta, United, American, and Northwest—and Hopson went to work for the National Air Transport Company, a private contractor, after logging just over 413,000 miles of flight with the Air Mail Service. But in October of 1928, he crashed and died while flying from New York to Cleveland with a small bag of diamonds. Although a decade had passed since those hellish early flights, the job was still highly risky.
But the crashes, the faulty mechanics, and the deaths all soon became a distant memory as private airlines, convinced of the business opportunities and ready to invest in the industry, took over routes and rapidly expanded service, improving the safety and reliability of their fleets along the way. By the late 1920s, passenger flight services were being marketed to consumers in America who needed to traverse the country faster than trains could take them.
Yet it was the Suicide Club that blazed the trail, establishing the foundations for the commercial aviation industry—and gambling with their lives—to deliver the mail. “Mail is not just the financial backbone of the nation, but it’s the communication backbone, too. It’s very important on emotional, financial, social levels,” says Pope. “So carrying it—the duty of carrying it successfully—was taken very seriously by these people.”
When the British designer Paul Smith opened his Los Angeles location in 2005, the exterior of the new store received little more than a mention in most announcements. A New York Timesarticle noted that it was “painted pink to attract passing drivers,” but more attention was paid to the interior layout of the store than the bold, vivid paint job.
And yet this Paul Smith store, exclusively because of that paint, has become one of the most photographed places in one of the most photographed cities in the world.
A search for the store’s location on Instagram reveals that it’s being used as a backdrop for selfies and portraits almost constantly, with dozens of new uploads per day. (That’s only including the ones that are nice enough to tag themselves with the location.) The hashtag "#pinkwall" has over 19,000 images, with at least half being the wall in question. The Paul Smith wall makes the list of almost every available “most photographed locations in Los Angeles” list—it's #4 on L.A. Weekly's 10 Spots that have been "Instagrammed to death."
The Paul Smith wall isn’t among the most photographed places in Los Angeles because folks are boasting about having gone shopping there, or because the area is so well-trafficked (“There are no shops around it, pretty much,” says Southern California photographer Nicole Priest), or because it’s historic or culturally important or even, really, because people care about the store itself, which sells things priced far out of the reach of most consumers. (Representatives of the Paul Smith label declined my request for an interview, for some reason.)
Instead, the Paul Smith wall is photographed because it is among the most spectacularly well-suited places in the world to do something that only in the past couple of years has become an obsession for a world filled with smartphones and social media.
Everyone looks freaking great standing in front of it.
There are technological explanations that make the Paul Smith wall such an ideal spot for photography. “Bright colors like that typically work really well when you're viewing photos in a small format, like on a phone, because they make things stand out,” says Stan Horaczek, a photographer and the online editor of Popular Photography and American Photo magazines. “You don't have to examine them closely for them to catch your attention.” The color, which Horaczek says looks similar to this professional backdrop labeled as “tulip,” is unabashedly lovely: vivid, vibrant, pastel-enough to look delicate but red enough to be assertive. On a tiny phone screen? It pops like few other colors do.
The fact that the wall is a simple swath of color, unbroken and very, very tall, makes it curiously like a professional backdrop itself. In photographing outside, it’s near-impossible to get a uniform backdrop; a picture of someone on a beach will include sand and ocean and sky, for example. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but having a single unbroken background gives a photo a different, almost a professional or studio, feel.
It’s also a really easy place to take a great pic. “I think that wall, regardless of your level of photography, if you're good or not, it's easy to take a good photo in front of it,” says Priest. “Someone can go and take a picture of it without much thought.” The light, says Priest, is ideal for much of the time, either for complete shade or a cool, arty shadow. When the sun is high in the sky, says Horaczek, it’ll act like a single hard light source “that evenly illuminates the whole wall and creates harder shadows.” That creates a huge amount of contrast between the subject (i.e. “the person”) and the background, which, again, makes it a particularly eye-catching image, especially on a small screen. The shadows, too, can be fun to play with; many of the images captured at the Paul Smith wall are actually primarily of shadows, which look particularly dramatic on the wall.
The size of the wall, too, has an effect on its use as a photographic backdrop. “Negative space is a big trend right now, especially in portrait photography, where you make people look small in their environment,” says Horaczek. Most people don’t have access to huge single-tone backdrops, but it’s a cool look at the moment. The Paul Smith wall allows for people to use this trend, where normally it wouldn’t be possible or feasible.
None of this would really matter if there wasn’t such an incredible demand for self-portraits on social media. When the wall was painted in 2005, the iPhone didn’t exist, and social media was in its infancy. Methods for sharing photos were limited to art-focused services like Flickr. Facebook was still limited to only a few universities. The primary device used for taking pictures was, as weird as this sounds now, a dedicated camera. The years that followed introduced a device that can take and share photos instantly, a front-facing camera and the concept of the selfie, and a social media culture that values self-portraiture.
A photo posted by Samantha McMillen (@samanthamcmillen_stylist) on
The Paul Smith wall is, with a single color, excellent lighting, and large size, technically ideal for certain kinds of photography, but we can’t undervalue the specific appeal of that color. Colors, weird as it sounds, go through trend cycles, and there is a specific palette that’s been in vogue on social media for the past few years. Pinterest, in its annual survey of the dominant colors in images posted on its site, ranked “blush pink” the color of the year for 2016. Pantone’s color of the year for 2016? “Rose quartz.” Neither of these are precisely the shade of pink on the Paul Smith wall, but they’re not far off. Pink, along with teal and mint shades of green (also on Pinterest’s most popular colors list), are hugely popular shades right now.
A photo posted by ARCHER SALON (@_a_r_c_h_e_r_) on
The Paul Smith wall isn’t the only popular wall in Los Angeles, but it is the most unusual. Others, like Colette Miller’s wings painting (various locations), are more prop-like; they’re designed for someone to stand in a specific place, so it looks like they have wings. The “Made In LA” sign, also on Melrose, spells out those words in gigantic letters, a much less subtle reminder to your social following of where you are. The murals of RETNA and Dallas Clayton are graffiti-inspired works that, when used as a backdrop, are closer to a shot of someone standing in a museum.
That big pink wall is something else: arty, but not exactly art; unbranded but instantly recognizable; off-the-beaten-path but hugely popular. More than anything, it is a totally unintentional power boost to the Instagram photographer. Taking a picture of yourself in front of the Paul Smith wall is a modern act, a culmination of advances in technology and changes in aesthetic preferences over the years. Plus, your hair looks really great in the smiling California sunshine.
