Scientists discovered this toad during an expedition to Colombia. The species, which has yet to be officially described and named, was dubbed the “Monty Burns” toad by lead scientist and photographer Robin Moore, who compared its profile to that of the nefarious villain from the popular TV series The Simpsons. (All Photos: Robin Moore/bioGraphic)
Maybe it’s because they often look like they’ve been let loose in a paint store filled to the brim with lidless buckets of brightly hued paint. Whatever the reason, amphibians are among the planet’s most charismatic ambassadors for imperiled biodiversity. Faced with a variety of threats, from disease to habitat loss, about half of the world’s roughly 7,000 species of amphibian are threatened with extinction—and more than 250 of those species haven’t been seen since the turn of this century.
That’s why Conservation International scientist Dr. Robin Moore launched a six-month, 21-country effort to search for frogs, toads and salamanders that hadn’t been documented in decades. From Borneo to Brazil, Colombia to Congo, and Israel to India, more than a hundred scientists joined this ambitious effort to find some of the most elusive animals on Earth. Here are some of their most spectacular discoveries—animals that have reappeared (or in some cases appeared for the first time) against the odds, proving their resilience and offering hope for future amphibian conservation efforts.
Glass Frog
Glass frogs are so-named because their translucent skin provides a surprisingly revealing window into their internal organs. These frogs are often good indicators of environmental health, being particularly sensitive to toxins and changes in climate. This species (Hyalinobatrachium ruedai) is one of several that are commonly found in the Chocó forests of Colombia. Their abundance is a testament to the relatively large and undisturbed swaths of forest that remain in this region.
Glass Frog Spawn
During a search for the Limon harlequin frog, the team found the eggs of a glass frog (Cochranella resplendens) on a leaf overhanging a stream in southern Ecuador. Suspended in mid-air, the eggs are less vulnerable to predators than those laid in water, but they are still targeted by parasitic flies and predatory snakes. Some glass frog eggs hatch early in response to vibrations produced by approaching snakes, dropping into the stream below to complete their development. The tadpoles are elongated with powerful tails to cope with fast-flowing water. Eventually, as adults, they will crawl out of the stream to live in the tree canopy.
Reticulated Glass Frog
Scientists encountered this reticulated glass frog (Hyalinobatrachium valerioi) in the Osa Peninsula of Costa Rica, one of the most biologically rich forests in the world. The frog was photographed peering through the leaf on which it was found, backlit to illustrate the translucence of the frog. Armed conflict has kept developers out of these forests, resulting in vast swathes of intact rainforest and a high diversity of frogs.
Ventriloquial Frog
Until recently, only three individuals of the ventriloquial frog (Eleutherodactylus dolomedes) had ever been recorded. A 2010 expedition to Haiti rediscovered the species after 19 years without a sighting. The frog was named by herpetologist Blair Hedges for its seeming ability to throw its voice, making it extremely challenging to locate—especially since it is the species’ call that first alerted the search team to its presence.
Variable Harlequin Frog
The variable harlequin frog was one of the first “lost" frogs to make a remarkable reappearance. The species (Atelopus varius) vanished suddenly from streams across Costa Rica and Panama in the late 1980s and early 1990s, one of the many victims of the deadly chytrid fungus that has decimated amphibian populations around the world. It was thought to have gone extinct until it was rediscovered in a remote stream in Costa Rica in 2003. Two current populations have been identified to date, and scientists are carefully monitoring and studying both.
Solomon Islands Eyelash Frog
The Solomon Islands eyelash frog (Ceratobatrachus guentheri) is a striking species that mimics—in both color and shape—the leaf litter of its home on the forest floor. This frog is an interesting example of a frog that undergoes direct development, meaning that there is no free-living tadpole stage. Eggs are laid in small hollows at the base of trees from which the young emerge as fully formed, albeit tiny, froglets.
Borneo Rainbow Toad
The Borneo rainbow toad (Ansonia latidisca) was one of the top ten "most wanted" lost amphibians in the world during the Search for Lost Frogs project in 2010. After eight months of repeated searches, an intrepid team of scientists led by Dr. Indraneil Das struck gold, rediscovering the toad after 87 years without trace. The team was the first to record the incredible coloration of the animal, and named it the rainbow toad. In May 2016, the scientists retraced their steps with Robin Moore to find and photograph the toad in the wild.
Long-limbed Salamander
The scientific name of the long-limbed salamander, Nyctanolis pernix, translates as “night anole,” because this nocturnal salamander runs and leaps more like an anolis lizard than a salamander. The species was discovered in the remote Cuchumatanes Mountains of northwest Guatemala in 1975—and then disappeared for more than 30 years, before being rediscovered by local biologist Carlos Vasquez in 2009.
Ruby-eyed Toad
An entirely new species that has yet to be officially described and named, the ruby-eyed toad was discovered during an expedition to the Chocó forests of Colombia. Upon learning that the habitat of the newly discovered toad was threatened by logging, the search team worked quickly with local partner Fundacion ProAves to create a new protected are called Las Tangaras Reserve, purchasing land and building a research center to help ensure the species’ survival.
Limon Harlequin Frog
Harlequin frogs are some of the most beautiful and threatened of all frogs. More than 100 species exist, and almost all of them have been decimated by disease, climate change, habitat destruction or some combination of these threats. In southern Ecuador, a new species dubbed the Limon harlequin frog (Atelopus sp.) was found in a small section of stream—but when an international team traveled there to document the frog, they found debris spewing into the stream from the construction of a new road. Their most poignant find was this dead female harlequin frog splayed in the shallow waters with a male trying to mate with her. The male died in captivity shortly afterward.
Sometimes a weapon is whatever you have on hand. (Photo: webandi/CC0)
Sometimes, the daily grind gets you down. You try to judge situations on a case-by-case basis, and link them together for broader understanding, but occasionally, the wurst comes out anyway. All this is to say: in Germany last weekend, one man attacked a second man's car with a sausage.
According to the Local, the attack occurred on Saturday evening. The first man and his son were walking through the city of Neubrandenburg, when the second man drove around the pair and parked directly in front of them. The first man began shouting, so the second man exited the BMW and began shouting, too, and soon the two were grappling with each other.
"Finally, the [first man] reached for the only weapon he had to hand, a 30 cm sausage," writes the Local. He hurled the sausage at the BMW, and the force of the throw, combined with the metal clip at the end of the sausage, left a one-centimeter dent in the right rear door.
Both men are being charged with verbal assault, and the sausage-thrower is also being charged with property damage. In the meantime, one likes to imagine that he's hung the weapon on his wall, like a spicy sabre.
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.
Darkness calls. (Photo: Screenshot by Eric Grundhauser)
Ridley Scott’s 1985 fantasy classic Legend is a beloved '80s movie, unless you don’t like it. For every '80s kid that marks it as one of the seminal films of their childhood, full of whimsy, excitement, and incredible effects, there is a film buff who will criticize the movie for being boring, poorly edited, or incomprehensible.
But possibly even more heated is the debate over the film’s two soundtracks, which themselves are related to the rocky history of the film. “If you’ll excuse the term, it’s legendary,” says Kristen Romanelli, Managing Editor for Film Score Monthly, who, when approached about the subject, was instantly familiar with the dueling soundtracks.
As a child of the '80s Romanelli grew up believing the soundtrack to Legend was by German electronic music group Tangerine Dream. Then came a startling revelation: “When I went to college, I learned that there was a completely different cut of this film with a completely different score.”
For those who have never experienced the magic/trainwreck of Legend, the film revolves around Jack and Lili, a pair of young lovers, played by Tom Cruise and Mia Sara respectively. They struggle against the Lord of Darkness, played by a never-better Tim Curry, covered in head-to-toe devil make-up (only fools debate his performance in the film).
Also, there are unicorns, which play a large or small role depending on which cut of the film you are familiar with. The plot, admittedly scant, revolves around the Lord of Darkness corrupting the pure Lili after his hench-goblins manage to steal a unicorn’s horn. Jack, a near-mute child of the forest, must then travel to Darkness’ fortress and rescue Lili with the help of some friendly fairyfolk. The film maintains an air of fantasy and ethereal mystery throughout, some of which is by design, and some of which is thanks to some confusing editing by notorious tinkerer Scott.
Then there is the music. Scott’s original choice to score the film was industry veteran and film score legend Jerry Goldsmith, who had provided the scores for films like The Omen, Poltergeist, Gremlins, and even Scott’s Alien. Goldsmith was brought on early in the production process, and began writing songs that would be sung by the characters in the film, tying his vision of the movie’s music very closely to the narrative. He spent six months composing the final score for the movie.
In a 1986 article in the Washington Post, Goldsmith described the score as “the best score I've ever done, and people who have heard it have felt it was an outstanding score." For the most part, his score maintained a classically fantasy movie feel, but it was also interspersed with oddly modern flourishes. For example, a jaunty run of flutes, horns, chimes, and choral voices could be interrupted with a bolt of twangy synth sound. “If you listen to the structure of the score, a lot of it is very postmodern and Stravinsky-esque,” says Romanelli.
Unfortunately, for all the positive reactions Goldsmith’s score reportedly received internally, it didn’t seem to play well with audiences. After screening for European test audiences, a preview screening in San Diego concluded with dismaying results: younger viewers were unable to take the fantasy film seriously. This shook both the producers’ and Scott’s faith in the film as it was. In response, Scott made major edits to the film.
A European cut of the film was produced, maintaining an edited version of Goldsmith’s score, as well as an American cut which contained an entirely new soundtrack. “Not only do they have a new soundtrack brought in, they re-edit the film, and it’s almost a completely different story," says Romanelli.“Language is changed. Instead of a 'Princess,' Lili is referred to as 'Lady,' and the focus is more on her and Jack, and rescuing Lili, instead of the unicorn, which is more the focus of the European cut.”
To give the movie a score that might resonate more closely with younger viewers, the production brought in German New Age synth band Tangerine Dream. The band had previously scored movies including Firestarter, and even Risky Business, using their signature ethereal synths. Unlike Goldsmith’s score, which was tightly tied to each beat of the film, Tangerine Dream’s score was more rangy, and loosely atmospheric. The Tangerine Dream soundtrack sounded quite clearly like a Tangerine Dream soundtrack.
Of course, back in 1985, when the film was released, the fact that there were alternate versions of the film playing in different parts of the world—each with a wildly different soundtrack—was not common knowledge. American audiences simply experienced the film through the sound of Tangerine Dream, while European viewers came to know a version of Goldsmith’s score.
While Tangerine Dream seemed happy with their work, Goldsmith was less than impressed with the replacement of his score. In that same Washington Post article, he says, “It came as a total surprise and shock to me,” and later states, rather diplomatically, “That this dreamy, bucolic setting is suddenly to be scored by a techno-pop group seems sort of strange to me.”
The film received mixed reviews upon its release, with most critics praising the make-up, but faulting the movie for its directionless plot. Roger Ebert’s review said, “All of the special effects in the world, and all of the great makeup, and all of the great Muppet creatures can't save a movie that has no clear idea of its own mission and no joy in its own accomplishment.” Even today, the movie only holds a 48 percent "Freshness Rating" on Rotten Tomatoes.
But nonetheless, in the years since its release, the movie gained a strong cult following. With the rise of the internet, American viewers who had grown up with the Tangerine Dream version were eventually able to get their hands on the Goldsmith version, and vice-versa. A director’s cut of the film was released in 2002, using Goldsmith’s score, and bringing a third version of the soundtrack into the mix. Still elusive, however, is the original preview cut of Goldsmith’s full score, which is mainly available as a bootleg.
In the years since Legend’s release, its two soundtracks have also garnered fandoms of their own, with vigorous proponents on either side of the debate arguing over forums and in reviews (for an exhaustive, academic reading of both soundtracks, see here). When asked to chat for the article, Romanelli and some of her peers at Film Score Monthly immediately had thoughts on which score was superior: Goldsmith’s.
“Everyone has a quick opinion on this,” says Romanelli, “I feel like a lot of people bring this down to a synth vs. orchestral thing, but that’s absolutely not true. [...] I think it’s a lot more complex than the traditional vs. 80s pop.” Goldsmith, a virtuoso composer from a more traditional background, is often thought to have made the more complex and detailed score, while Tangerine Dream’s score is praised for its originality and otherworldly vibe.
But ultimately, Romanelli says, the deciding factor in which score is superior boils down to context, stating simply, “The Goldsmith score would not work on top of the United States cut, and the Tangerine Dream score would not work on top of the European cut.”
If you’d like to decide for yourself, both soundtracks are available in multiple releases online. If you still can’t decide, you could always vote for option three: Reggie Watts’ live, improvised soundtrack to the film.
For two weeks in the winter of 1980, a small town in upstate New York had an Olympic Village filled with 1,800 of the world’s most elite athletes. Despite Cold War tensions, the mood in the village was jovial; the athletes shared meals, traded pins, and gathered in the Village’s “psychedelic room full of blinking electronic game machines” for endless rounds of pinball. Emotions ran high, as most Americans fondly remember the 1980 games for the “Miracle on Ice” victory over the Soviet hockey team, one of the iconic moments of any Winter Olympics.
But a short six months later, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons had converted the Olympic Village into Federal Correctional Institution Ray Brook, still standing today. The ice skaters, skiers, and hockey players were replaced by hundreds of incarcerated young men. The dorms turned into cells, the game room turned into a prison chapel.
This was not an accident. From the get-go, America was intent on building living quarters for the planet’s greatest athletes that could double as a medium-security prison for around 1,000 people. State and federal legislators vowed that they would not let the Lake Placid facilities turn into another crumbling piece of infrastructure, and instead argued that building a prison would be a practical investment to accommodate the nation’s skyrocketing number of inmates.
In the lead-up to the Rio games, architects and bureaucrats alike have discussed how when the Olympics leave town, host cities are often left with a “white elephant”—the unwanted buildings and stadiums the games leave behind. “We’re at a stage in the Olympics where social and financial responsibility are much more important than they used to be,” Bill Hanway, a planner of the London and Rio parks, told Wired. But this emphasis on sustainability isn’t completely new. Thirty-six years ago, the United States was keenly engaged in similar discussions about reuse and community impact for Lake Placid, the town that hosted the games. While the Rio planners designed puzzle-like modular structures which will be dismantled and turned into new buildings after this summer, the U.S. had a simple and controversial solution—build a prison they could use for decades to come, and call it an Olympic Village for two weeks.
The so-called “Olympic Prison” triggered what Sports Illustrated declared “a revolt, unprecedented in Olympic history,” as a growing number of visiting Olympic teams “(refused) to be incarcerated” at the Village, citing its tiny cells, barred windows, and barb-wire perimeter. But the revolt went far beyond the conditions of the facility itself. At a critical moment of expansion for mass incarceration, the Olympic Prison raised big questions both domestically and internationally—why did America need to imprison so many people, and why was it imprisoning them in the middle of the Adirondack Mountains?
Lake Placid was not the first location one might think of to host an Olympic games. Nestled in upstate New York, hundreds of miles from an urban center, the town had just 3,000 residents. Yet what it lacked in population, it made up for in winter sports amenities. Its boosters noted that many American athletes already traveled to the town for training and, as the former site of the 1932 Olympics, it already had much of the necessary infrastructure—to the Olympic Planning Committee’s great relief, no one would have to build a new bobsled track.
The existing facilities meant the Olympics could be staged on a reasonable budget and with limited environmental impact. It was not just a matter of convenience, either, according to Lake Placid's congressman, Representative Robert McEwen. "It is no secret to us in America that the measure of support given to athletes in Communist countries is on a level unknown to us here in America,” he told Congress." This would be a step in the right direction, a worthy investment in American winter athletes in the midst of the Cold War.
Also, it would be safe. Terrorism weighed heavily on the minds of the Olympics organizers and the 1980 games would take place just a few years after the 1972 Munich attacks, in which members of a Palestinian terrorist group broke into the Olympic Village and killed 11 Israeli athletes. The security of the Village would be under extraordinary scrutiny, and hosting the games in a quiet, remote village rather than a major metropolitan city certainly seemed safer.
In the mid-1970s, the Lake Placid Olympics looked like a slam-dunk—cheap, secure, and a good symbolic move before Moscow hosted the Summer Games later that year. In fact, the Olympic Committee declared before Congress, one of the only things they would need federal funding for was the construction of the Olympic Village.
It Takes a Village
The Olympic Village under construction. (Photo: Courtesy Lake Placid Olympic Museum)
But nothing is ever easy with the Olympics; Lake Placid might seem like a thrifty choice, but it certainly wasn't free. Host cities needed to house thousands of athletes in facilities that were clean, comfortable, and above all, secure. And in virtually every situation, this housing had to be built from the ground up for tenants who would stay for a grand total of two weeks.
As bottom lines rose, cities grew increasingly concerned about what would become of the Village once the Olympics left town. Following the 1972 Munich games, Village housing sat unoccupied for years, as the developer found it more convenient to take the rents guaranteed by the International Olympic Committee in the case of vacancy than to deal with tenants. The 1976 Montreal games swelled to 13 times the approved budget, leaving the city near financial ruin. The Village became embroiled in scandal when the developers were arrested on charges of fraud and conspiracy for allegedly copying the Village’s design from a French apartment complex, and illegally taking the land from a popular municipal park.
The Lake Placid Olympic Village saga began in early 1976, as McEwen approached one federal agency after another, hoping to find one that could repurpose the athletes' housing complex. Congress appropriated $28 million in federal funds for construction of the Olympic Village near Lake Placid, but policy dictated that any federally financed Olympics facilities must also have a “secondary use.” To ensure Lake Placid’s Olympics bid, McEwen needed to find someone, anyone, to give a second life to the Olympics Village.
Ideas circulated about turning the Village to housing, to hospital space, and to a permanent athletics facility but each plan eventually lost steam. As the search became increasingly dire, McEwen heard that Federal Bureau of Prisons Director Norman Carlson had congressional authorization to build a prison somewhere in the Northeast. Carlson listened to McEwen's description of International Olympic Committee security requirements for an Olympic Village, and told McEwen that the Olympic Village he described sounded exactly like one of the Bureau of Prison facilities.
Director Normal Carlson certainly had his work cut out for him in the 1970s. As arrests and incarceration rates reached all-time highs, they triggered a boom in demand for prison space. From 1969 to 1979, the Bureau added 24 new prisons, with more than 9,500 bed spaces. But alongside this unprecedented expansion came new waves of prison reform activism. Activists noted the tremendous racial disparities in sentencing and incarceration rates. They also drew attention to the horrendous conditions inside many American prisons, bringing a flood of lawsuits that challenged everything from abusive guards to medical experimentation on inmates.
The Nixon administration had a simple solution: build more prisons. Rampant prison overcrowding exacerbated many of the issues stressed by prison reformers—inadequate health care, substandard living conditions, inmate violence. Officials blamed overcrowding, rather than unfair treatment of inmates, for the unprecedented number of prison riots throughout the 1970s. Building more prisons would mean more humane conditions for prisoners, the Bureau of Prisons argued. Meanwhile, conservative politicians continued to insist that prison expansion was critical to maintain law and order and keep the growing number of drug offenders off the streets. In spite of activists’ best efforts, new prison construction received significant bipartisan support.
If prison construction in urban and suburban areas triggered not-in-my-backyard backlash, prison construction in rural areas, and upstate New York in particular, became seen as an economic development solution. According to officials of the local antipoverty program, half of Essex County households survived on an income under $8,000 a year. The Olympic Prison promised over 200 new “recession-free” jobs, at a starting salary of $15,000, a huge boon for an area with the state’s highest unemployment rates for much of the ‘70s. "It's the most sensible idea anyone's come up with yet," Lake Placid Mayor Robert Peacock told the media. As manufacturing and agriculture moved out of rural America, the prison industry moved in.
Three years after the 1976 agreement, Lake Placid had a nearly-complete Olympic Village, boasting 937 "sleeping rooms,” or as they’d later be known, “cells.” Each room was about 8-by-13-feet with cinderblock walls. The cells had bunk beds to accommodate two to four athletes, along with a wardrobe, equipment lockers, and a writing table and chair for each occupant. The majority of the rooms featured a single, narrow window with a steel rod running down the middle of the glass to discourage escape—or, in the case of potential Olympic terrorists, entry. Some rooms had no windows at all. Athletes entered through doors constructed of heavy steel with small peep-windows that guards would later use to check in on inmates. Two 11-foot electrified fences encircled the campus.
“Though the Lake Placid Olympics Committee has taken great pains to add enough All-American creature comforts (i.e., a disco, a movie house, a stage for live theater and concerts) to mute the effects of all those barred windows and cell-like ambience of the rooms,” the Sun reported, “a feeling of incarceration remains.”
As construction wrapped up in 1979, signs of trouble emerged. Protestors began standing alongside Olympic torch runs with signs declaring such messages as “Olympic Torch = Freedom, Olympic Prison = Slavery.” A poster with the Olympic rings behind bars appeared throughout town. The national media, from 60 Minutes to the New York Times, began to take note. The answer to Lake Placid’s Olympic dreams would prove more contentious than they had hoped.
A group called Stop the Olympic Prison (STOP) emerged as the face of the anti-prison movement. A coalition of religious and civil rights groups, STOP’s rhetoric combined social justice and anti-racism with a decidedly moralist bent. “Prisons exploit and isolate the poor. They symbolize grief, suffering and destruction,” the organization wrote in one of its initial publications, “This prison violates the spirit of the Olympic Games, one of international humanity, community, and celebration.”
STOP argued that the Olympics Prison would isolate inmates, coming primarily from New York City and Boston, far away from their families and access to legal resources. This rang contrary to the established best practices in penology. The 1967 report of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice stated that “New institutions should…be relatively small, and located as close as possible to the areas from which [they draw their] inmates, probably in or near a city rather in a remote location.” A lawyer from the ACLU stressed this point in a 1979 hearing on the Olympics Prison, declaring, “There is almost no public transportation to Essex County. How many black families will be able to travel all weekend from Harlem to Lake Placid, or from Boston, to spend an hour or two with their sons or brothers?”
The poster for "Stop the Olympic Prison,"designed by Andy Hall and Michael Kroll, produced for the New York Moratorium on Prison Construction and the National Moratorium on Prison Construction, 1979. (Photo: Lincoln Cushing)
In the wake of the 1971 Attica prison rebellion, opponents also raised concerns about the staffing of correctional facilities—namely, the near-universal whiteness of the guards and employees. There was not a single black guard at Attica, a facility with about 61 percent African-American inmates. “(Lake Placid) could turn out to be an Attica,” said Reverend Graham R. Hodges of the Emmanuel Congregational Church in Watertown, New York, “where you have hundreds of black and other minority prisoners guarded by upstate rural white guards, many of whom have no understanding of the people they’re guarding.”
The Bureau of Prisons conceded that while the location was “not an ideal site,” the agency had encountered little success in attempting to place new facilities in urban areas. By the time construction began in Lake Placid, space in federal prison facilities was so limited that the organization was moving prisoners from the Northeast to a federal facility in Sandstone, Minnesota. “Lake Placid may be inconvenient for families in New York or Boston,” a spokesperson acknowledged, “but it sure as hell beats Sandstone.”
The plans to convert the Olympic Village to a prison brought the emergence of American mass incarceration to an international stage. The Lake Placid Winter Olympics were scheduled to occur just five months before the Moscow Summer Olympics. By the late 1970’s, rumors circulated that the U.S. might boycott the summer games to protest Russia’s contentious human rights record. As controversy swirled around the implications of the American Olympics Prison, the Russians announced their own plans to convert the Moscow Olympic Village into public housing for 14,000 needy Russian citizens.
“One would have thought the two nations would have just the opposite kinds of villages, but not so. It is we Americans who are hosting Olympic athletes in a prison, the first time in nearly 3,000 years of history of the games,” wrote Reverend Hodges, in a letter to the Washington Post. As the United States clamored for humanitarian high ground, this was less-than-flattering comparison.
Playing billiards inside the Olympic Village. (Photo: Courtesy Lake Placid Olympic Museum)
Not all opposition was ideological—much of the international backlash to the Lake Placid facilities centered on how spartan and institutional the housing for their most elite athletes would be. Gianfranco Cameli, a member of the Italian Olympic Committee, toured the Village, then fired off a report to Rome: "After four years of hard training we cannot expect competitors to live in such a lousy place. The rooms clearly show what they are meant for. Two persons cannot be in them. If two stay inside with the door closed for privacy, they'd feel as if they were in prison—suffocating.”
In April 1979, Sports Illustratedpublished an investigation into the outrage around the Village, interviewing representatives of at least a dozen different countries. Outrage about facilities led many international Olympic committees to seek alternative housing, further complicating both the security situation and the impact on the already-weary Lake Placid community. As teams threatened to find non-Village housing, it heightened community concern that landlords would evict tenants—an apartment that might rent for $250 a month in normal times might draw $4,000 for the Olympics, Sports Illustrated predicted.
The Olympic Village disco in use during the games. (Photo: Courtesy Lake Placid Olympic Museum)
Others feared the symbolic implications of the prison-like space. Harry Fregoe, chair of the IOC’s athlete housing committee, insisted that the site’s barbed wire fences not be added until after the games. “We’re a little bit afraid of the concentration camp atmosphere for some people from European countries,” he reported. The protest group STOP encouraged European countries to write letters of disapproval to the U.S. government. They also stressed the stark contrast between international models of criminal justice and the emerging American model—as Holland, Sweden, Japan, England, and others were reducing their use of prisons in favor of community sanctions, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons had doubled its number of prisons in the previous ten years.
As controversy peaked in 1979, Ramsey Clark, the former Attorney General under President Lyndon B. Johnson, testified that the controversy about the Lake Placid project wasn’t just about Lake Placid, or the symbolism of the Olympics—this would be a litmus test for the future of incarceration in America. “We are going to be masters of our destiny or the victim,” he told Congress. “It’s precisely the psychology of the prison, that once it is built you believe you have to fill them up.”
But the protests of Clark and others were not enough to stop the Bureau of Prisons; the Ray Brook Federal Correctional Institution opened for its first round of inmates just months after the Olympics concluded. Officials noted that the only remaining trace of the games were three flagpoles in front of the facility. They had once flown the flags of the 37 competing nations.
The 1980 Olympics represented a watershed moment for New York State’s relationship with incarceration. In the years that followed, small upstate cities, much like Lake Placid, began organizing to attract prison investment and the jobs that accompanied the new facilities. ''The addition of a prison of this size is very significant in our north country,'' said Roger Tubby, a state economic representative to the Adirondacks. ''It adds another element of economic stability to an area that is largely dependent on the weather and tourism.''
New York state became one of the most significant areas of prison development in the nation, adding 39 new state prisons between 1982 and 2000. Almost every one was in a rural county. “Prisons are viewed as the anchor for development in rural areas,” said Thomas Coughlin, the New York Corrections Commissioner from 1979 to 1994, “We give our list to the Legislature, and the next day I get back the list of where our prisons are going to be. They pick ’em.” The Olympic Prison showed that incarceration could be sold as a new economic backbone for rural communities; a legacy that would have reverberations far beyond two weeks in 1980.
Thirty-six years after the Lake Placid games, the Ray Brook Federal Correctional Institution houses around 1,000 inmates per day–as STOP predicted, the vast majority of the men come from Boston and New York City. The prison created the jobs that lawmakers promised—today employing about 250 guards and staffers. After 1980, the prison receded from the media spotlight. Occasionally it received a notable inmate—the rapper Ja Rule was incarcerated there from 2012 to 2013—but few remember its origins. A manager at the Adirondack Museum told North County Public Radio that when tourists ask where they can see the 1980 Olympic Village, she responds, “in order to visit that Olympic Athletes' Village (today), you would have to commit a federal crime.” The interlocking Olympic rings, when seen from a certain angle, can easily become handcuffs.
Finding an invasive species that runs the risk of destabilizing your local ecosystem is never a good sign. But sometimes it has a funny name. According to the Daily Astorian, locals have recently found “crazy snake worms” infesting the state.
Technically known as the Amynthas agresitis, the worm is a species that generally calls Japan and Korea home. They get their colorful nickname from their tendency to thrash around wildly when picked up. The worms are also known as “Jersey Wrigglers,” or “Asian Jumping Worms.” From outward appearances, they look just like normal worms, but a bit more slender.
The snake worm is an aggressively invasive species, running the risk of causing damage to the Oregon ecosystem by eating the nutrient rich layer of soil that would normally foster plant growth. How the worms got to the state is unclear, but they could have come with earthmoving equipment, fishing gear, or even compost.
The impact of the worms is not yet known, but as more of them are found, it’s becoming clear to officials, eventually, they might become a real problem.
During the Olympics, events appear up on our screens that never normally receive much airtime. Amid all the synchronized swimming and steeplechase matches in Rio, you might have missed another obscure battle: Britain's annual Cooper's Hill cheese rolling competition.
It's part of Britain's long tradition of partnering cheese, rolling, and competition. As this video shows, competitors hurtle down a steep hillside after officials release a tumbling eight-pound Double Gloucester wheel of cheese. The participants are told that they compete at their own risk, and you can see why.
With a mixture of sprint-running, gravity and plenty of guts, the runners race to get down to the bottom first. At the start it's hard to see whether anyone has kept their footing. The majority are simply falling head-over-heels down the grassy slope. All require a human buffer to impede their progress at the end.
One man, the eventual winner, masterfully gets back onto two feet and reaches the bottom first. A huge crowd lines the course and cheers for their chosen runner. The final four are jeered over the finish line and greeted with a thumping rugby tackle from one of the stocky buffers.
The winner from May 2016, Chris Anderson, was a soldier in the British army and had already won the event 17 times.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Emailella@atlasobscura.com.
The hourglass curve of this rectangular baffle muffles conversations on a candlestick phone so only the receiver can hear on the other end of the line. [Photo: Spark Museum of Electrical Invention]
It's not unusual today to overhear strangers' intimate phone conversations while commuting to work on public transit, or when relaxing in a park. Wireless telephone devices also give us the luxury of seeking out a quiet space where no one can listen in on a private phone call, or taking calls on the move.
But in the early 1900s, as businesses began adopting telephones and conducting meetings by phone, people began to run into an uncomfortable issue: eavesdropping. The first telephones strapped people to their desks, transforming the office into a space where everyone could snoop on conversations aired out in the open. Unfamiliar with the new conditions, many workers felt as if their privacy was being infringed upon.
“Today, it’s not a big deal if your coworker heard you talking to another customer,” says John Jenkins, co-founder and president of the Spark Museum of Electrical Invention in Bellingham, Washington “But back then, phones were so different and new. [People] were used to this face-to-face interaction, that it felt very much like they were being violated.”
To create more privacy, callers could attach a Hush-A-Phone, a rectangular, metal chamber—or baffle—that concealed conversations from others in the room.
A Hush-A-Phone propped on a candlestick phone on display at the Spark Museum of Electrical Invention. [Photo: Spark Museum of Electrical Invention]
Invented in 1921, the Hush-A-Phone was advertised as a “telephone silencer” and a device that “Makes your phone private as a booth.” It produced the same effect as cupping both your hands around the mouthpiece of the two-pieced candlestick model telephone, with others in the room only hearing a rumbling of indiscernible sounds.
Callers only needed to slide the Hush-A-Phone over the mouthpiece of the phone, place their lips in the circular opening, and speak. The device was simple, easy to use, and it worked. Yet, the Hush-A-Phone isn’t remembered for its simplicity, or success in creating an artificial cone of silence. Rather, the device is known for waging a war against the telecommunication giant, AT&T—a historic legal battle law experts compare to feuds over today’s open internet.
“Hush-A-Phone is probably one of the more well-known cases,” says Jenkins. “I don’t know if it’s the first, but it’s certainly one of the most prominent.”
The open internet, also referred to as network neutrality, is an ideology endorsing the freedom of people to browse and consume any content on the web at any time without interference from internet service providers. It is opposed to companies that would slow down data speeds of certain users, or allow some sites and content to load faster than others.
During the most recent push for open internet, experts began dusting off and revisiting the story of the Hush-A-Phone, which became relevant due to AT&T’s exclusion of the device, and subsequent monopolization of the telecommunication market. "It's famously cited in law school textbooks and was used as an example during the internet freedom movement," says Jenkins.
In June 2015, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) agreed to support an open internet, and vowed to protect “open, uninhibited access to legal online content without broadband internet access providers being allowed to block, impair, or establish fast/slow lanes to lawful content.”
Unfortunately for Hush-A-Phone customers, there was no such protection from the powerful phone companies that would limit and even stop providing service if such accessories were used. The obscure, unsuspecting Hush-A-Phone became a victim in AT&T’s inexorable need to control the telecom world.
Using the Hush-A-Phone was like having your own private phone booth. [Photo: M0tty/CC BY-SA 3.0]
In 1921, Harry C. Tuttle began developing the telephone silencer in a small office near Union Square in New York City. From the 1920s through the late 1940s, Tuttle’s Hush-A-Phone Corporation pushed out the six-to-seven-inch devices to business people and professionals in the U.S. The device was particularly popular in Washington, D.C. and New York City, and even used to make private calls in Congressional Committee rooms, Columbia University law professor and network neutrality expert Tim Wu notes in his book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.
“Tuttle and Beranek didn’t exactly consider themselves a threat to the Bell system,” wrote Wu, referring to MIT acoustics scientist Leo Beranek, who helped upgrade the device, and AT&T’s research division at the time. “Rather, their modest aim as independent, outside inventors was a minor improvement to the telephone handset, and an ungainly one at that.”
But their intent didn’t matter. AT&T wanted to make it known that it was the reigning phone system on the market. AT&T strategically bought out rivals, and blocked new and emerging companies by establishing regulations. In the late 1940s, the company enforced a blanket rule against all third-party phone extensions:
“No equipment, apparatus, circuit or device not furnished by the telephone company shall be attached to or connected with the facilities furnished by the telephone company, whether physically, by induction or otherwise.”
“The regulations in place were not made to help customers,” explains Thomas Hazlett, an economics professor at Clemson University in South Carolina. However, most people simply accepted the conditions of the market. “The monopoly idea was baked into the cake, and there wasn’t much controversy about the fact.”
It’s said that an AT&T lawyer came across a Hush-A-Phone displayed in a store window and brought one back to the company, wrote Stewart Schley in Business Insights: Essentials. T AT&T sent out cease and desist letters, while Bell repairmen began warning customers with Hush-A-Phones that if they didn’t stop using the devices, the company would stop providing service.
While other small companies may have just crumpled under the pressures, Tuttle defiantly took the issue to the FCC. The FCC held a two-week hearing in Washington, D.C., where Tuttle brought his lawyer, and two engineering experts, including Beranek.
AT&T argued that the Hush-A-Phone device posed a substantial harm to its telephone system, and that the company was committing fraud by selling a rather useless device. An engineer from Bell Labs was brought to the stand, and demonstrated a transmission loss of 13 decibels and receiving loss of 20 decibels with the Hush-A-Phone, which was greater than all the improvements made to the handsets over the last 20 years, he said.
AT&T’s president also claimed that third-party attachments could cause “power surges up the phone lines that might electrocute Bell repairmen and send them falling to their deaths,” wrote Wu. Upon cross-examination, it was concluded that nothing like this had ever happened before.
Hush-A-Phone refuted AT&T’s claims, and stated that the device actually could help mental health by reducing noise, and that privacy was necessary for their list of important clients. The two engineering witnesses conducted a series of tests that demonstrated that the words of the conversation could still be deciphered when using the Hush-A-Phone, while also maintaining secrecy.
But the FCC could not come to a final decision at the end of the two-week hearing, and subsequently sat on the case for five years, until it finally ruled in favor of AT&T. A modern analogy to the ruling would be if AT&T was somehow able to ban putting protective cases manufactured by other companies on smartphones leased through AT&T, or if Apple was able to dictate which selfie sticks could be used with its iPhones.
Tuttle was hit hard by the drawn-out battle, as he financed the lawsuit himself. Still, he relentlessly appealed the FCC’s ruling and brought the case before the District Court. Finally in 1956, eight years later, the panel of federal judges overturned the FCC’s ruling: “To say that a telephone subscriber may produce the result in question by cupping his hand and speaking into it, but may not do so by using a device… is neither just nor reasonable,” the statement from the court noted.
Even though Tuttle eventually won, Hush-A-Phone couldn’t recover. The company advertised that Hush-A-Phone was now approved by federal tariff, but it was too late. Manufacturing couldn’t keep up with AT&T and Bell Lab’s 1960s product designs and handsets, and Hush-A-Phone was forced to shut down.
It was hardly a worthy rival for AT&T: after nearly three decades in business, the Hush-A-Phone Corporation had sold only around 125,000 units by the time of its final tally, in 1950, and was used by only a tiny proportion of telephone subscribers.
A candlestick phone on display at the Molalla Historical Museum. The Hush-A-Phone case helped pave the way for new additions to telephones. [Photo: PhotoAtelier/CC BY 2.0]
The triumph of the small Hush-a-Phone company marked the beginning of the collapse of AT&T's monopoly. When the court contradicted the FCC and ordered AT&T to allow people to use the Hush-A-Phone and similar devices, “it was really important because that led the way for other devices like the telephone modem to be connected to the network,” says Jenkins.
The ways in which AT&T fought to gain to control over its customers are the same issues that we are dealing with today in battles over the open internet. Back then, "the regulatory system was so rigid and so costly that you wonder what we gave up," says Hazlett. "What else could have come from the 1920s to the 1950s if we supported innovation?”
Hush-A-Phone's non-legal legacy is scantier: there are no similar telephone privacy devices like the Hush-A-Phone in today’s market, says Jenkins, and taking calls in a crowded room where others might hear doesn’t seem to be much of an issue anymore.
Object of Intrigue is a weekly column in which we investigate the story behind a curious item. Is there an object you want to see covered? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
Every year, Israeli high school students and their teachers and advisors descend on patches of ancient land south of Jerusalem. The site of the Third Jewish Revolt, they are there to excavate it, and if they are lucky, to discover something unusual.
And this year, a school official said, something big turned up: a ballista ball, about the size of a very large fist, according to the Jerusalem Post.
The ball, officials think, is a remnant of the war, which is thought to have been fought between 132 and 135 A.D., in which thousands of Jews battled the Romans after years of political and religious persecution.
The Third Jewish Revolt was the last of several battles fought against the ancient Romans, ending with Roman victory and hundreds of thousands of dead.
Around 2,000 similar ballista balls have been found on the ancient battleground, the Israeli Antiquities Authority said. The students found the ball in Gush Etzion, a modern group of settlements outside Jerusalem.
In 1964, a young Hunter S. Thompson went to the Ketchum, Idaho, home of Ernest Hemingway, who, three years prior, had shot himself.
Thompson was there to investigate the suicide for a now-defunct national weekly, but he ended up leaving Ketchum with more than just a story: He also left with some mounted antlers, a bit of taxidermy that he'd stolen from the Hemingway house after getting "caught up in the moment," his widow, Anita Thompson, told BroBible.
The antlers are, apparently, the result of one of Hemingway's famed hunts, and hung in Thompson's garage until recently, when Anita Thompson decided to return them.
So she drove them back to the Ketchum property, which is now owned by a nature conservancy. There, she met the current owners of the home, who were "warm and tickled" by the gesture, she said, before later hearing from Hemingway's family.
The antlers will now be shipped to New York, where Sean Hemingway, a grandson, will take possession permanently.
Anita Thompson said that her husband never talked about the stolen antlers much, mostly out of shame. He was also, potentially, worried about copycats.
“He wrote that piece of paper that he stuck to the door [at his home] that’s still there that said ‘Please don’t steal from this home, by the management,'" she told BroBible. "You can’t expect people to behave well in your own home if you have a piece of stolen art.”
Cleveland's Public Square in the 1910s. (Photo: Public domain)
If you look at a map of Connecticut, paying particular attention to town names, and then do the same to Northeast Ohio, you might get the impression that, at some point, the map was folded over onto itself before Ohio had been filled in, and before the ink of Connecticut’s place names had dried.
That’s because in a sense, it was. In America’s early years, what is now Northeast Ohio belonged to Connecticut, and in the late 1700s and early 1800s, Connecticut transplants gave Ohio many of its names, institutions, traditions, and people, into what was then called the Connecticut Western Reserve.
That legacy remains apparent to this day, not just in place names—there are, among dozens of examples, Kents, Saybrooks, and New Londons in both states—but in architecture, city planning, and even the quality of the area’s higher education. Cleveland’s famous Public Square, for example, recently refurbished for the Republican National Convention? They can thank a guy from Connecticut for that. Ditto for pretty much every other town square in this part of the state, in addition to Case Western Reserve University, Oberlin College, and a church in Tallmadge, Ohio that Life magazine once used as an avatar of New England.
Residents of the Nutmeg State, in other words, will find a lot that's familiar in Cleveland and its suburbs. And to the men and women two centuries ago who battled mosquitoes, disease, thick woods, and death to settle the Western Reserve, that's no accident.
Connecticut’s history with Ohio began early. Very early. King Charles II’s royal charter of 1662 legitimized the colony’s political existence and established its borders: To the east, “Narraganset-Bay;” to the north, “the Line of the Massachusetts-Plantation;” to the south, “the Sea;” and to the west, “the South Sea” - i.e., the Pacific Ocean. If Connecticut had retained this territory, it would now encompass not just part of Ohio but also Chicago, Omaha, Salt Lake City, and the northernmost sliver of California.
After the Revolutionary War, Connecticut, like other states, ceded most of its Western land to the new United States. But it refused to part with a roughly rectangular piece of what is now Northeast Ohio and which was, then, referred to as New Connecticut, or the Connecticut Western Reserve. Even so, over a decade after the war ended Connecticut did part with much of the land, selling over three million acres of it for $1,200,000 to a group of investors called the Connecticut Land Company. The westernmost 500,000 acres had previously, in 1792, been designated as compensation for Connecticut residents who had lost property in British raids, otherwise referred to as the Sufferers’ Lands or the Firelands.
Surveyors in the ensuing years explored, measured, mapped, and divided the land into neat sections. And pioneers from Connecticut and other Eastern states trickled in westward to settle it, eventually forming the basis for what we have today: an urban mass of over four million, populated by residents who are fiercely loyal to their little sliver of America.
A marker in Conneaut, Ohio. (All photos by Johnna Kaplan except where noted.)
Recently, I took a trip there myself in part to compare its present with the east-coast roots of its past, beginning in Conneaut, just over the Pennsylvania-Ohio line, where a sign proclaiming “Life's just better here!” echoed the promotional materials Connecticut speculators used to entice pioneers in decades past.
On Conneaut’s humble Main Street, a brown-and-gold Ohio historical marker commemorates the arrival, on July 4, 1796, of the first Connecticut Land Company surveying party. The group, led by General Moses Cleaveland, landed at the mouth of Conneaut Creek. They “gave three cheers and christened the place Port Independence,” Cleaveland wrote in his journal, parts of which are kept at the Western Reserve Historical Society. “We drank several toasts, viz., 1st. The President of the United States. 2nd. The State of New Connecticut. 3rd. The Connecticut Land Company. 4th. May the Port of Independence and the fifty sons and daughters who have entered it this day be successful and prosperous. 5th. May these sons and daughters multiply in sixteen years sixteen times fifty. 6th. May every person have his bowsprit trimmed and ready to enter every port that opens.” They “closed with three cheers,” Cleaveland recorded, then “drank several pails of grog, supped and retired in remarkable good order.”
Further along the lakefront, meanwhile, familiar place names began to emerge: Saybrook Township and New London Road, among others. And, while I was in a car, early “emigrants,” as they were called, traveled by wagon or oxcart or on foot, carrying across the Alleghenies their household goods and the names of the places they were leaving: New Haven, Trumbull, Danbury, Fairfield, Ridgefield, Groton. Even so, not all Reserve towns were named for Connecticut places. Euclid was named for the Ancient Greek mathematician, an homage to the Connecticut surveyors who measured the township and then purchased it for themselves. Warren, Kent, Tallmadge, and many others were named for Connecticut investors, settlers, or landowners. Cleveland was, of course, named for Moses Cleaveland; the extraneous “a” was later abandoned. One story behind the change has it that the Cleveland Advertiser found they couldn’t fit the longer spelling in a headline when they began publishing in January 1831.
Charter Oak Park in Painesville, which features a statue of General Edward Paine.
The city of Painesville, meanwhile, was named for its founder General Edward Paine, a Bolton, Connecticut native who fought in the Revolution and went on to serve in Ohio’s Legislature. His statue, looking stern in military uniform, stands in a small park named for Connecticut’s now-dead famous Charter Oak tree. That tree, located in Hartford, was felled in 1856, but was said to be where colonists stashed their royal charter – the very document that had granted them rights to the future Western Reserve in the first place—after King James II revoked it in 1687. And here, hundreds of miles away, was one of the tree’s direct descendants.
Nearby, I found another Connecticut transplant: a quintessential New England town green. Greens, or “squares” in Ohio, were part of the plan from the beginning, even before the townships were being measured out by teams of surveyors, the first in a stream of settlers who tried, and sometimes failed, to tame the land.
The first surveyors, for example, ran into a host of problems: they often lacked food and water, ate wild berries and rattlesnakes, struggled through swamps, and endured “Musketoes & Gnats,” one of them reported. That witness, an astronomer named Seth Pease recorded the grim tally on his travels there in 1796 and 1797. There were injuries—“John Dorn put his wrist out of joint”—but, also, deaths: “David Eldride…was unfortunately drowned…Mr. Hart used every precaution to Recover him but to no purpose they brought the Corpse to the Cuyahoga River.” He chronicled illnesses like “dysintery” and fits of “Ague & Fever,” and their treatments - bark, Tartar Emetic, and “Reubarb.” He also described encounters with Indian “friends,” in which the flow of whiskey both smoothed and helped exacerbate any undercurrent of misunderstanding.
The land was measured using chains, compasses, and the stars. It was numbered in ranges from east to west, and in towns from south to north. And even today, data about northeastern Ohio municipalities sometimes includes their place on this grid. Tallmadge, Ohio, was once known as Town 2, Range 10, for instance, and while elsewhere in the state, townships are six miles square, in the Western Reserve, because of the surveyors’ legacy, they are five.
The First Congregational Church in Tallmadge, Ohio.
The town squares of Northeast Ohio were particularly evocative of Connecticut. Painesville’s featured an impressive copper-domed city hall. Chardon’s topped that with the High Victorian Italianate Geauga County Courthouse, which looked like a fancy cake. Tallmadge’s square was a circle. On it stood the First Congregational Church, the oldest church building in Ohio in continuous use as a place of worship, which looked so New England-y that in 1944, Life put it on their cover to illustrate a Thanksgiving story about “the devout spirit of New England Puritans.”
All of this sprung from conditions that were, initially, bleak. Joseph Badger’s 1802 account, for example, was typical. Sent west by the Connecticut Missionary Society to spread New England Congregationalism among both Indians and white settlers, Badger, his, wife, and their six children “loaded our wagon, drawn by four horses, with as much household furniture as we could stow together.” They “made [their] way, slowly, cutting…many small trees and saplings to make room for the wagon.” On the “miserable road in the Connecticut Western Reserve,” they “passed…more than two hundred miles through a wilderness, with but here and there a log cabin.” When they reached their lot, Badger built his own cabin, “a rough one, round logs, without a chink; and only floored half over…and partly roofed…with no chimney.”
And once a family had a home, they had to procure necessary goods from more settled areas elsewhere, traveling by boat on fickle Lake Erie or by horse or wagon through untamed woods.
The chapel on the campus of Western Reserve Academy in Hudson, Ohio, which was originally the home of what is now Case Western Reserve University.
Badger tried to make the best of it, while some others, like the caustic Margaret Dwight, a niece of Yale University president Timothy Dwight, did not. Margaret Dwight snarked her way through an 1810 trip to the Reserve in a letter to a friend. Dwight looked down on the family she traveled with (“I will never go to New Connecticut with a Deacon again, for we put up at every byeplace in the country to save expense – It is very grating to my pride to go into a tavern & furnish & cook my own provision – to ride in a wagon &c &c”) as well as the people she encountered along the way (“I should not have thought it possible to pass a Sabbath in our country among such a dissolute vicious set of wretches as we are now among – I believe at least 50 dutchmen have been here to day to smoke, drink, swear…laugh & talk dutch & stare at us…It is dreadful to see so many people that you cannot speak to or understand.”) Her tavern reviews were scathing (“the pillow case had been on 5 or 6 years I reckon”) and her put-downs caustic (“I found the people belong’d to a very ancient & noble family – they were first & second cousins to his Satanic Majesty.”)
Other settlers more quietly went about the business of building, essentially, a new civilization. Sixteen years after Dwight’s passage, Connecticut natives established the Western Reserve College and Preparatory School as a sort of frontier Yale, laying the seeds for what is now Case Western University. Its original campus is now the prestigious boarding school Western Reserve Academy. And Owen Brown, the father of abolitionist John Brown, helped found the groundbreaking Oberlin Collegiate Institute, now Oberlin College. (John Brown, who at one point operated a tannery in Kent on a site that is now preserved as a public park, was just five years old when his family moved. He found his new home “a wilderness filled with wild beasts, & Indians.”)
In addition to schools, there are also libraries, like one in the Cleveland suburb North Olmsted, named for the Connecticut sea captain Aaron Olmsted. In return for the naming, Olmsted’s family sent the town 500 volumes, forming the basis of the Oxcart Library, the first public library in the Western Reserve. Today, 159 of the books can be seen in a glass case in the North Olmsted branch of the Cuyahoga County Public Library, where the books live on in an area roped off like a VIP section.
A replica of the cabin of Lorenzo Carter, an early settler, in Cleveland.
All of this development came at a steep price to the area’s native populations, who were pushed out with little recompense. American Indians’ claims to most of the land were extinguished by the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, which came after a bitter defeat in the Northwest Indian War at the hands of American soldiers. Moses Cleaveland bought off a handful other claims with, to quote Seth Pease, “D.500. New York courency, in Goods” plus “2 Beef Cattle and 100 Gall of Whisky.” And later U.S. administrations would force American Indians farther and farther west.
African-Americans, meanwhile, didn’t get a much better deal. That’s because while the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 forbid slavery in the Territory, local “Black Laws”—which required any black residents to prove their freedom—kept most African-Americans out.
For the white settlers, though, development continued full steam ahead. Cleaveland laid out his eponymous city himself, starting with a public square. He boldly predicted that because of its prime location, Cleveland might soon grow to be “as large as Old Windham” in Connecticut, which at the time had 2,700 residents. (Cleveland now has a population of over 390,000.)
Farther to the west I found the towns that had been settled by the so-called Firelanders, whose property had been destroyed by the British during the Revolutionary War. Farther inland, the place names were familiar but the rural landscape did not match up with the rolling hills, winding roads, and stone walls characteristic of New England’s agricultural areas. Here there was just open space, bisected by carefully-planned roads that met at right angles.
And it was on one of these roads, before I left, that I drove to the western edge of the Western Reserve. There, in rural Huron County, on a patch of tall grass between two country roads, a small brown marker stood beneath an advertisement for log home logs. It read: ENTERING THE FIRELANDS ESTABLISHED 1792.
I circled the sign a few times. Then I headed back towards New London, Connecticut, where, occasionally, people still talk about which buildings survived the Revolutionary War, as well as those that were lost.
The altered photographs showing Hitler in different disguises. (Photo: Universal History Archive/Getty Images)
By 1944, the face of Nazi party leader Adolf Hitler had stared out at the public from newspapers and newsreels for years. His unmistakable mustache, plastered hair and manic gaze were burned into the brains of the public (where they remain). There was a flipside, also, to that iconic visage—the fear that the genocidal dictator could wipe his most recognizable features away, and fade into the crowd.
It was this fear that led a New York makeup artist named Eddie Senz to give Hitler a makeunder. In a series of altered photographs, reportedly created for the U.S. government, Hitler sports a beard. He has glasses, is bald, and parts his hair differently. The images are strange, otherworldly, even darkly funny—there’s something satisfying about seeing the man stripped of the things that lend his face import.
The story is that Senz was called upon by his country to carry out cosmetic intelligence, providing the feds with a lookbook of disguises that would enable them to nab Hitler if he shed the mustache and made a run for it. This tale surfaced in print through the years in outlets from Der Spiegel, to the Associated Press to the Times Picayune to Austraila’s Herald Sun. It enjoyed a second life online, where it was reported by the Daily Mail, Business Insider and found its way onto Reddit and other sites. But this version of events is not quite the truth.
Born in 1899, Senz was a legacy makeup man.
“I came by my work honestly,” Senz told The New York Times in 1961. “My father was make-up director for the Metropolitan Opera House and I was practically raised backstage.”
Senz went to Hollywood, where he tended the blossoming stars of “talkies,” doing makeup on the sets of Paramount, Fox and Warner Brothers.
His work with celebrities like Rudolph Valentino helped launch his career as a go-to authority on beauty, dispensing tutorials and tips in magazines and newspapers.
Towards the end of the war, there was a fear that Hitler would flee in a disguise. (Photo: Universal History Archive/Getty Images)
At the same time Senz was anointing starlets with powder and lipstick, World War II was grinding to an end. The Allies invaded France on D-Day, June, 6, 1944, and proceeded to push back German forces in Europe. With defeat on the horizon, people began speculating about how or if Hitler would meet his demise. The idea that he would disguise himself and escape retribution by fleeing abroad was widespread. (This fear was validated by history; plenty of Nazis successfully moved abroad and many were even assisted by the United States government in relocation.)
The scenarios were alarming. “Adolf Hitler has had his face lifted, his whiskers removed, his nose changed by facial surgery, his hair returned to its natural white for a man of his age, and parted the normal way on the left side,” wrote the Berlin bureau chief of the Associated Press in a 1944 article.
The same year, the New York Times published a story by German journalist Victor Schiff that also imagined a world where Hitler altered his appearance to dodge authorities. “Can you imagine how Adolf Hitler would look without his mustache and his dark lock, his hair cut short and dyed fair or ginger or white, and wearing horn-rimmed glasses and perhaps a bowler hat?” Times readers didn’t need to use their imagination, because the paper helpfully published images of Hitler in various costumes.
“These changes are illustrated above from suggestions by Eddie Senz of New York, make-up expert for the screen, stage and opera,” read the caption. “According to Mr. Senz, the hardest feature to hide is Hitler’s eyes—which he says “are the most remarkable I have ever seen.””
This could have been the end of it. Upon his death in 1973 Senz would be remembered for his work on stage and screen, not the unusual series of images that appeared in 1944.
But the U.S. government had taken note. The Office of Strategic Services—or OSS, a government agency that preceded the CIA—kept tabs on the news, and someone clipped the article and filed it away. Decades later, the internet would help resurrect the photos and Senz. The records of the OSS were declassified and made available to researchers; eventually several of them were published online through the National Archives and Records Administration.
The first fresh mention of the Senz photos appeared in a short article in Der Spiegel in 1998.
“The US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) wanted to be prepared for anything and instructed New York artist Eddie Senz” to create the images, the story reported. The story does not specify what document the images were discovered in. This triggered a flood of follow-up stories; several newspapers reprinted the images and similar stories. In 2012, they resurfaced online and the legend grew: The photos were distributed to officers abroad so they could hunt for Hitler, the photos were created on D-Day, they were distributed before the D-Day invasion, the photos had never before been seen until Der Spiegel unearthed them in the 90s.
The last bit is the easiest to debunk; the images obviously appeared in The New York Times in 1944. The National Archives and Record Administration confirmed via email that they credit to the images to the newspaper. According to official records, the OSS made a habit of accruing photographs of prominent people, often from commercial sources. The Senz series is stored in a box along with images of photographs of military and civilian figures from over seventy-five countries, including Josef Stalin and Mao Tse Tung.
It seems most likely that it was the New York Times that commissioned the images from one of the day’s foremost experts on faces. Since then, thanks to the internet and an insatiable hunger for World War II narratives, the story has taken on a Hollywood sheen; Senz is the glamorous makeup man called upon by the most secretive forces of the United States government to play a role in bringing a monster to justice.
After the Hitler affair, Senz continued to work with American stars. He opened a bustling salon in Manhattan, styled Broadway stars, and beautified the political elite, including first lady Claudia Alta "Lady Bird" Johnson and her daughters. (In a truly bizarre phone conversation—which you can listen to here—president Lyndon B. Johnson exhorts Senz to travel to Washington D.C. to tend to his family and staff for very little pay. “All right, now I'm a poor man, and I don't make much money, but I got a wife and a couple of daughters, and four or five people that run around with me, and I like the way you make them look…” says Johnson. At this time, Johnson was estimated to be worth around eight figures.)
It’s hard to imagine, though, that Senz would easily forget the affair. Prior to Hitler’s death in 1945, people lived in fear that he would escape. After his death, they refused to believe it had happened.
For years, the FBI was flooded with news of Hitler sightings, some of which were investigated. He was spotted in a cafeteria in Los Angeles. He was living in Wisconsin, where he acted deranged and played the violin. He was a communist in Philadelphia; he lived in Miami and had plastic surgery. He was in the Soviet Union, Argentina and Denmark. Even today, people refuse to believe that Hitler perished in a bunker by his own hand in April 1945; there are websites and books devoted to telling the truth about the dictator’s escape to Argentina and other lands. On some of these sites you’ll find the images Senz helped create, proffered as proof that the United States government knew Hitler was on the run and in disguise.
Hitler’s death is unsatisfying; he was never held accountable before the world. Maybe this is why people felt compelled to tell stories about his survival. If he had lived, it meant he could be hunted down and punished.
In a 1973 obituary for Senz, The New York Times did not mention his role in redesigning Hitler, although they included a quote from a previous interview that seemed especially pertinent.
“Beauty is all a matter of concept,” he said in an interview. “In this country beauty generally means an oval Nordic sort of face. We’ve been brainwashed to think our standards are the only standards. Who are we to think we have a priority on beauty knowledge?”
You’d expect a governor’s mansion to hold its fair share of state secrets, but discovering a sprawling, century-old bunker underneath it still comes as a shock. According to a story in the Hindustan Times, that is just what happened this week, when a British Colonial-era hideout was found beneath the Maharashtra Raj Bhavan in South Mumbai.
The bunker was unearthed after a wall that had covered the entrance was removed, a project undertaken after old employees shared rumors of tunnels beneath the complex. Sure enough, behind the temporary wall was a 20-foot-tall metal gate (topped with a gnarly spiked bar) that led down into an underground tunnel system. Upon exploring the old bunker, they found that it covered around 5,000 square feet underground, split up among hallways and 13 separate rooms. Many of the rooms were marked with faded wooden signs indicating a shell store, a cartridge store, and a workshop, among others.
With systems to provide the bunker with fresh water and air, it seems like it would have been a self-sufficient munitions store as well as a defensive position. Having been abandoned after India's British rulers left the country, officials were worried that they might encounter snakes, or other hazards in the depths, but the remarkably preserved shelter didn’t even seem to have a single bug living in it.
Maharashtra governor Ch Vidyasagar Rao is now trying to locate experts that can help preserve the abandoned bunker as a cultural heritage spot.
Kevin's adoption page at the Piano Pound. (Image: Piano Pound)
It's a sad fact of modern life—when people move, they often can't take their pianos with them. These stray instruments, once beloved members of the family, end up abandoned: no one to sing with them, stroke their glossy backs, or tickle their keys.
But one concerned citizen has gestured at an answer. If you're in the San Francisco Bay area, and you've got some spare space and a crane, you can now head on over to the Piano Pound to browse for a new musical companion.
The site profiles the free pianos up for adoption around the city, giving them names and displaying their most flattering headshots. Some even have backstories: Sir Hamilton, an upright from Oakland, is "a piano whose tone you could really find yourself in on a lonely night"; Kevin, aka "Crazy Keys," is "the kind of piano who would sell you pot from an M&Ms mini-tube."
They're just lookin' for a home. (Screenshot: Piano Pound)
The Piano Pound was created by Silas Moon, a San Franciscan who has spent a fair amount of inebriated time on Craigslist's "free" section and, as he tells it, decided yesterday to finally take some action.
After Moon posted his project on Reddit, the positive response inspired him even further:
"This has me thinking that if we could get enough people out to move these wood-pets, we could put them all in a big warehouse and people could enjoy them whenever," Moon writes. Here's hoping the Piano Pound soon becomes a Piano Humane Society.
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.
Whales are some of the most mysterious, majestic creatures on the planet. While whaling is a despicable business that has been slowly outlawed across the planet over the last century (there's still a long way to go), whale bones and skeletons make for fascinating artifacts both for their massive size, and their alien shape.
Whale skeletons can be found hanging in countless museums, but all across the world, whale bones are also out on open display, as tributes to life near the sea, fossilized remnants of ages lost to time, or simply as decoration. While the titanic ribs are more common, some towns have entire skeletons mounted like public statues. Here are 10 of the best places to see whale bones outside of a museum.
In 1933, an arch made of the giant jaw bones of two blue whales was erected in front of Christ Church Cathedral in the Falkland Islands to observe a century of British rule. The British had claimed the territory in 1785, regardless of the French already laying claim a year earlier. Spain then bought it from the French, and evicted the Brits, only to decide they preferred what is now Argentina. In 1820, the shiny new nation of Argentina absorbed the islands, but in 1833, the British made a comeback, and the Falklands have been theirs ever since. The jaw bones were brought to Stanley from the South Shetland Islands in 1922, and used to create the arch that stands out against the church's humble backdrop today. (Read more...)
In September of 1920, the corpse of an 80-foot-long blue whale drifted into Bragar Bay, on the western Atlantic side of the Isle of Lewis. It had a harpoon in its head, trailed by 50 feet of rope. The harpoon had not detonated, shooting the barbed "stun" into the creature, and so had merely become lodged into the whale's body thus sentencing it to a slow death. (Read more...)
Consisting of hundreds of whale bones, mainly jawbones, ribs, and vertebrae, Whale Bone Alley is thought to have been created around 600 years ago by a cooperative group of native tribes. Many of the bones were placed in long rows along the shore, which inspired the site's evocative name. In addition to the massive bones that were planted into the ground, a number of pits used for storing meat were found with fossilized whale bits still in them. The overall effect is of a haunting titan's boneyard. (Read more...)
In Ubatuba, Brazil, in October of 2000, the body of a dead humpback whale was deposited onto one of the city's busiest beaches, like a sad gift no one wanted. Shortly after its arrival, the whale's rotting body began contaminating the beach with its overpowering stench and the bi-products of its massive rotting body. (Read more...)
The scattered bones of Egypt's Valley of the Whales belong to a long-extinct suborder of whale known as archaeoceti. What really sets these ancient creatures apart from your ordinary, modern-day cetacean is one odd, yet profoundly important anatomical difference—hind legs. This critical deviation in the fossil record of whales is the basis for the notion that the massive seafaring beasts we know today began their existence as land-based animals. (Read more...)
This Barrow, Alaska arch opens up to the Arctic Ocean, symbolizing Barrow's relationship to the sea and whaling. The "Gateway to the Arctic" sits upon a gray pebbled beach with the shells of traditional whaling boats and other bones scattered about. There is little information about the arch's history, though sources date it to the end of the 19th century. (Read more...)
Krakow's Wawel Cathedral holds the remains of a number of Polish royals as well as some of the country's most famous religious art, but the real attraction at the massive religious compound is the hanging bundle of bones which are rumored to have belonged to a local dragon. It is more likely however, that the bones actually once belonged to a whale. (Read more...)
The original whale that "donated" its bones to the town of Hals, Denmark, was shot back in 1868 in the Barents Sea, by Captain C. Klitgard, a resident of Hals. After returning with his kill, the blue whale's jaw bones were removed, bleached, and given a new life as a local landmark. The original jaws were destroyed in 1953 where a truck hit the fragile old bones. Sadly, the remains were not worth trying to save. (Read more...)
On January 15th, 2009, a fin whale stranded itself on the coast of the Burren, a karst landscape in Ireland, most likely disoriented by unusually high tides. When the marine giant was discovered, the locals sprung into action to save the creature by dragging it back into the water with the help of the Courtmascherry lifeboat, but to no avail. With no further options, the whale unfortunately perished there on the shore. A specialist was flown in from America to take a look at the carcass, and an autopsy was performed. The only problem left was what to do with the body. (Read more...)
Picturesque though it be, the current whale bone arch in Whitby is not the original; it’s actually the third arch to stand in this spot. In 1963 the original whale arch was replaced by 20-foot jaw bones from a 113-ton Fin whale killed by a Norwegian whaling ship. (Read more...)
In the summer of August 20, 1922, a crowd of 20,000 spectators cheered at a rare sight: dozens of international women were running in fierce competition, throwing javelins and breaking world records. Alice Milliat, a French athlete who dominated rowing, soccer, and track and field competitions, was fed up with restrictions keeping women from Olympic competitions. So she organized a new Olympic Games—one for women only, the first of its kind.
Technically, women joined the modern Olympics in 1900, but the sports they could compete in were limited: a few women appeared on sailing, croquet, and horseback riding teams in the early 20th century, but only gentle competitions of tennis and golf were deemed female-appropriate at first. Archery, tennis, figure skating, and swimming were added to the women’s competitions by 1912; by the 1920s, fencing and light gymnastics were allowed, but the chance for women to show their athletic abilities ended there.
The reasons given by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) for not letting women participate fully in the Olympics from the beginning drew from both moral and faux-medical grounds. Doctors frequently discouraged women’s participation in sports, with high-energy sports singled out as particularly harmful: one physician argued that the ski jump was “very strenuous for more or less weak, nervous and untrained women.“
Iconic Olympic sports like track and field were also considered too immodest and dangerous for a woman; many doctors through the 1800s believed that women had less energy, and that the uterus could actually detach and wreak havoc in the body as a ”wandering womb” when stressed, fueling common assumptions that women were frail in the 1900s. What women wore in competition was also policed: female swimmers were required to wear heavy blouses and bloomerswhile racing in the pool.
Milliat and other female athletes knew this was ridiculous. Milliat loved sports. Her uterus, she trusted, remained firmly in place while she ran and exercised, which she could do for long periods of time. By 1919 she had become president of the Fédération des Societés Féminines Sportives, dedicated to organizing women’s sports competitions. She soon got the attention of her fellow women athletes when she formed the Federation Sportive Feminine Internationale (FSFI), and asked those who controlled the Olympics and sports competitions for the inclusion of female track and field sports.
The request didn’t go over well. When the IOC and IAAF ignored her, in 1921 Milliat and other passionate sportswomen of the FSFI instead organized a small, all-female track meet called the Olympiades Féminines (Women’s Olympiad) in Monte Carlo, France, attracting 100 athletes from France, Italy, the U.K. and Switzerland. No uteruses wandered, no women collapsed, and attending crowds loved them. This success drove the group to go big: Milliat declared 1922 the first Jeux Olympiques Féminins (Women’s Olympics).
Held in Paris on April 20th of that year, the Women’s Olympics was a sensation. Seventy-seven women from five countries competed in jumps, javelins and shot put, and six running competitions, including a stereotype-defying 1,000-meter race. In front of approximately 20,000 spectators, female athletes broke 18 existing world records. After the roaring success of the inaugural event, another Women’s Olympics was planned for four years later, in 1926.
Kinue Hitomi, competing in long jump in 1926, for which she broke the world record. (Photo: Public Domain)
As attention to the competition grew, the IOC became upset at the illegal use of “Olympics” in its title, and the event name was changed to the Women’s World Games. By the time the 1926 competition was held in Gothenburg, Sweden, it had grown to over 100 participants from nine countries, including Japanese competitor Kinue Hitomi, who broke the world record at the time for the long jump and won several other competitions. The next one, held in Prague, saw twice as many female athletes competing, in front of tens of thousands of fans. In all, four Women’s Olympic games were held over 12 years.
Meanwhile, the actual Olympics was drawing modest, limited numbers of female athletes. In the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, there were 136 women competitors, compared with 2,956 men. In response to the popularity of women’s sports (and, some attest, due to pressure from the FSFI), in 1928 the official Olympics tentatively added five of the 11 track and field categories included in the Women’s World Games. Unfortunately some news sources misrepresented female involvement in the 1928 Olympics; falsely reporting that 10 women collapsed during and after the 800-meter run, feeding into the sentiment against female involvement in the Olympics. Women were subsequently banned from participating in this run for the next 30 years.
As might be expected, the success of an all-female Olympic-style competition didn’t go down without backlash. Milliat butted heads with critics, including the “father of the modern Olympics,” Pierre de Coubertin, who said in 1900, “An Olympiad with females would be impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic and improper.”
Coubertin reiterated this sentiment in 1928, saying “as for the admission of women to the Games, I remain strongly against it.“ (Until his last year of life, he would protest that the “only real Olympic hero” was the “individual adult male.”) Despite this, Milliat “was so successful that the August newspaper edition of Le Sportif compared Madame Milliat to Coubertin,” Ana Miragaya writes in Olympic Entrepreneurs, which probably would have grated on them both.
Hurdles competitors at the 1930 Women's World Games in 1930. (Photo: Public Domain)
Meanwhile, Milliat’s sports competitions were having an international impact, with more and more women signing up to compete as serious athletes. Their critics didn’t let up, though: in 1929 Frederick Rogers, director of the New York State department of Health and Physical Education, tried to discourage female involvement in the Olympics and bribe female athletic groups into endorsing a ban.
In 1930, fresh from a winter Olympics meeting, committee president Godfrey Dewey remarked thatthere was no need to worry about too many women joining more Olympic games, since “some influential men consider the matter of women taking part should be separated entirely from the Olympic games.” Though he supported women participating, he added that the plan was to keep the amount of female participation the same as in years past, avoiding an increase.
Thus, the Women’s World Games continued to fill a gap for most female athletes. Milliat even requested that the Olympics do away with all “women’s sports” if they would not allow participation in all sports; her event could clearly cover the need. Some national battles went beyond sexism, though: African American women were excluded from official Olympic competitions untilLouise Stokes and Tidye Picket broke that barrier, joining the 400-meter relay in 1936.
In “Women’s Contribution to Sport in the 20th Century”, Núria Puig notes that while “equal rights between men and women were recognized from a legal perspective, such equality remained a distant reality” during the Women’s World Games. The final Women’s World Games was held in 1934 in London, with 200 athletes from 19 countries. Finally, in 1938, an agreement was reached to allow more women’s sports at official Olympics games and recognize records set during the Women’s World Games.
Ethel Catherwood, one of the six Canadian women who competed in the 1928 Olympic Games. (Photo: Public Domain)
However, the IOC wouldn’t include female members in any decision-making position until 1981. “We have the good fortune to be doomed to a cult whose practices veil the relative austerity of purpose to girls and young women who, early on, braved the hydra of prejudices and social conventions,” Milliat wrote in 1922, and her words are still relevant.
While the Olympic charter promises “to encourage and support the promotion of women in sport...with a view to implementing the principle of equality of men and women,” the necessity to fight for the equality of Olympic women continues, be it for equal pay and field conditions to those of men under contract, or dodging sexist remarks and criticisms of their looks.
This makes women’s athletic groups, like those that started the Women’s World Games, an essential advocate for sportswomen. Female boxers won the chance to compete in the Olympics in 2012 and in May of 2016, athletes ran in Alice Milliat's name for female athlete visibility. The promotion of women in sports across the world is also growing, and having a positive impact on the women and girls involved.
Milliat, who believed her fellow athletes “will happily destroy the legend of lightness and elegant sentimentality,” and her female Olympians of the 1920s would have likely approved.
Starting in May 2016, library staff started bringing books into the lower level of the Milstein Research Stacks. (All Photos: Zach Gross)
This summer, several times a week, a 30-foot truck filled with rough wooden shelves of books has arrived early in the morning at the New York Public Library’s flagship research library. Each truckload contains thousands of books, which have been sitting for the past three years at a storage facility upstate.
Now, 1.5 million books are migrating home, although not to the shelves they once occupied, in the library’s old stacks beneath the Rose Main Reading Room. From the loading dock, the shelves are moved through the maze below the library, until they are two levels below the ground, underneath Bryant Park, which stretches like a lawn before the Beaux-Arts building. There, the books loiter in the hallway, waiting to be ingested.
Books were stored in cardboard trays, by size.
Trays of books arrive on wooden carts from offsite storage.
Empty shelves await more than 1 million more books.
In this subterranean section of the library, you can accidentally walk a city block if you don’t plan right. The basement corridors pass by black pillars that carry the weight of the main reading room and by the stonework from the reservoir that once held the city’s drinking water. On the floor, red and yellow arrows guide the way, to a door through which only a few dozen people are allowed to pass.
“We want to keep our collection safe,” says Johannes Neuer, the library’s director of customer experience, who’s in charge of the books’ big move back to the library. “Once we go to the second level, you’ll understand why it’s very important that only people who know what they’re doing are allowed in the space.”
This storage area was originally excavated in the 1980s, and the upper level opened in 1991.
Twenty-five years ago, when the library first moved books under the park, construction crews carved out two underground floors, but only the top one was finished. The second level, deeper down, was an unlit hollow, until, starting in April 2015, renovations transformed it into an archive-qualitystorage facility.
It is a beautifully cool 65 degrees down here, with 40 percent relative humidity, and there’s a new electric trolley system, in which books can be sent off to reading rooms upstairs in bright red carts. Most importantly, there is space for 2.5 million books.
The new electronic delivery system will send books up to the library's reading rooms.
This underground lair of books was part of a resolution to a tumultuous dispute over the library’s future. In March 2013, the library emptied its central stacks, the layers of shelving in the main building. While this main branch of the library has been a research collection, in which books could only be used onsite, the plan, at the time, was to renovate the old stacks and make this a circulating library. But researchers who valued the library’s old set-up objected, aggressively. The plan changed.
When most of the library’s collection moved offsite, the most frequently requested books stayed behind, in the upper level of the underground stacks, where part of the library’s collection of periodicals is also stored. The library collection management division has found that its patrons most often want to look at books published in the past 30 years, in English, but even that tranche of books wouldn’t all fit in this one level. Many of the books the library acquired in the early 1990s and 1980s had to go into storage.
An older technology for keeping track of books.
After English, materials in German and French are requested most often.
Books on the upper level of the Milstein Research Stacks.
The upper level also stores part of the library's microfiche collection.
Those are the books that are coming back first, but they’re bringing freeloaders with them. The collections management team analyzed the books that moved off-site, looking at each box to see how often its contents were requested. If five out of 10 books in a given box needed to come back, the whole thing returned, no matter howold or undesired the other books were.
These are the boxes that are now arriving in a steady stream by truck. On an August morning, the 10-person team that works on the second level of the underground stacks was “ingesting” oversized art material. The books are grouped together by size, in cardboard trays with white plastic handles at the front. This library doesn’t use the Dewey Decimal System, so books that are grouped together don’t necessarily cover the same subjects. Upstairs, in the older level of stacks, each book has a call number, and to find a book in one of the six bays, you need to be trained to understand where it might be located. In this lower level, there’s an inventory control system that might be used in an Amazon warehouse or other industrial setting, that tracks where the books are.
Books on the upper level of the stacks.
While the new electronic delivery system is being put into place, library staff ferry books upstairs on carts.
Before the books are allowed to move into the stacks, they are measured, to make sure they will fit. There are shelves here as low as 12 inches and as high as 58 inches. Each book is laid on a sizing template, where rectangles of blue, green, red, yellow and orange give their true measure. The shelves at the storage facility were larger than the shelves here, and many supposed As, the smallest size of book, turned out to be Bs, just a bit too large to sneak onto the shortest shelves. Likewise, Ds have had to become Es. (Bs and Cs were mostly able to stay with the size they originally were assigned.) Before it goes on the shelf, every book is measured by hand, its size double-checked with a ruler.
After that, they are counted. How many books live in this tray? Are they are all there? Each book has a bar code, used to scan it into the library. It’s officially back now. When that’s done, the books in the tray are counted again. Are they still all there? Are they in the correct tray? Only then does “tray-to-shelf” happen.
Barcodes are everything on the lower level of the Milstein Research Stacks.
Microfiche stored on the upper level.
The person doing that work has a list of all the empty shelves, and the tray goes directly to an appropriately sized spot. In the new and empty stacks, there are more barcodes to address. The shelf has a barcode, which is scanned. The tray’s barcode is scanned. Then two more barcodes, one for the area in which the tray lives—they call it a “module”—and one for the aisle. Once all this happens, the tray will not move. This is where it lives. When staffers come to collect requested books on this level, they will receive a list that optimizes their path through the stacks, so they never have to double back.
This is why it’s important that no one come down here who’s not familiar with the system. In an old-fashioned library, if someone took a book of a shelf, it could be re-filed, according to the number on the spine. Here, if a book moved without being scanned out, it could disappear. “If someone were to remove an item from this tray, we couldn’t find it anymore,” says Neuer. “We don’t want to be in a situation where we lose track of material.”
Johannes Neuer is the project lead on bringing 1.5 million books back from offsite storage.
Within a couple of weeks, the trolley system will be operational.
It takes a book about five days to move through thisimmigration process,from upstate storage to shelf. The homecoming procession has only just begun. So far, 250,000 books have returned to the library; there are another 1.25 million to come. Moving them all should take nine months.
Even then, though, the migrationof the library’s books will not be complete. It never really is. Books that live upstairs may move down here or, possibly, off-site. There needs to be room upstairs for new books, which keep coming in. Altogether, there is space for about four million books down here, but within eight to ten years, the library still may run out of underground space. Then the librarians will look again at each tray on the shelf. If no book in the tray has moved since it landed there, it can be sent away again, back to offsite storage.
Card catalogs are being augmented by newer technology.
Paper records are still important, though.
Old periodicals are preserved on microfiche.
Microfiche storage on the upper level of the Milstein stacks. It can take a few months to learn the system on this level.
For a viral-aspiring Youtube video, this one starts off pretty boring.Three people, two men and one woman, are gathered around a table, which holds a computer broadcasting the 2016 Río Opening Ceremonies. As the delegation from Antigua and Barbuda marches across the screen, one of the men makes a judgement: "Sochi was better," he says, in Russian. Everyone nods.
Then from the corner comes a different voice—tinny yet resonant, barrelling forward as though woken up in the middle of a speech. "Humans, what has our arrogance profited us?," it begins, also in Russian. "And what good has our boasted wealth brought us?"
The unlikely source of this lecture is a shiny white robot, its body out of the frame, head moving back and forth to reveal blue LED eyes. The human heads swivel in turn as the robot continues its diatribe: "All those things have vanished like a shadow, like a rumor that passes by. Devise your strategy, but it will be thwarted."
Things are officially getting weird. "What's wrong with that thing?" the first man asks.
"I have seen many things in my travels, and I understand more than I can express," it opines. "Like the fool, the wise too must die. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of. And the truth will set you free." One of the men stands up and switches the robot off.
This entrancing video came to me as part of a PR email, sent to presumably thousands of journalists. But what are we watching, exactly? The answer to that question turns out to be surprisingly fraught, as advances in robot and machine learning technology intersect with the internet's insatiable appetite for crazy stories.
If you were on the internet anytime this June, you've probably come across Promobot IR77. According to its creators, who have already released two versions of Promobot, IR77 is a prototype for Promobot 3, which will be released in October and is designed to act as an all-purpose attendant in public places. If all goes according to plan, you could someday see the snowman-shaped bot roving around in, say, your local mall, displaying ads, giving shopping advice, and directing people to particular stores.
Currently, though, Promobot IR77 is known not for doing its job, but for avoiding it. On June 14th of this year, IR77 supposedly made a run for it, escaping its testing site in Perm, Russia through a gate left open by an engineer. After rolling into the street, the bot's battery died, leaving it stranded in the middle of traffic. It languished there for forty minutes, attracting cops and curious children, before engineers arrived to roll it back onto the sidewalk.
Everyone, from I4U.comall the way up to the BBC, wrote about this. Some outlets, like Gizmodo, hedged a bit ("the company says..." "the robot appears…"); others (including me) didn't bother. The robot, like a person in a certain type of Upworthy video, yearned for freedom, and, like a cat in certain type of cat photo, failed to get it. This was relatable; tragic; funny. This was good content!
Such good content, in fact, that it set off some alarms. Chris Mills, a longtime technology writer and the current news editor ofBGR.com, felt his blare as soon as he saw the story. "A lot of my job is fact-checking the claims made by tech companies," says Mills. "The whole industry is pretty rampant with viral marketing efforts."
A closer look at this escape revealed a few red flags. First, something about the claims didn't add up: The robot supposedly had a dead battery, but in photos and videos, its screen is clearly on. Previous videos show the bot moving slowly, over level, smooth ground; Google Street View images of the escape site show clear inclines and curbs. In addition, all the articles seemed to lead back to two sources: the Promobot website, or Central European News (an outlet that, in the past, has been caught faking stories).
Mills detailed these concerns in a BGR post, and went on with his life. Promobot IR77 went on with its life, too, getting up to even more crazy exploits. It escaped again, and was threatened with the scrap heap. The next day, I got an email describing how "the Promobot's office, located in the Russian Perm city, has been receiving dozens of letters from all over the world in recent days [asking it] to not to destroy IR77, the robot with a character."
During the Great Pokemon Go Craze of July, a Promobot was "taught" to play the game, after a developer outfitted its operating system with an Android emulator. "The robot explores the neighborhood in search of monsters and catches them," another email breathlessly explained. (Accompanying video shows the bot rolling along a sidewalk at night as the game's trainer avatar "walks" on its stomach-screen, but no actual catching seems to be involved.)
During the original escape, Promobot IR77 was supposedly testing improved obstacle-avoidance technology. For this latest Olympics-themed feat, it was showing off new neural network speech abilities, which would allow it to remix learned words into new sentences. "As we remember that IR77 is a freedom-loving machine, we uploaded the works of philosophers who wrote about freedom," like Spinoza, Holbach, Kant, and Hegel, Promobot founder Aleksei Iuzhakov explained in the accompanying email. They also fed Promobot the Old and New Testaments. "It was interesting how it would cope with such serious works." Iuzhakov goes on to suggest that Promobot had taken the New Testament words and remixed them into a speech inspired by the aforementioned philosophers. "Frankly to say," he writes, "the result is amazing."
This also seems, to Mills, too good to be true. "It's kind of coming out of nowhere," he says. "They haven't claimed to have a really deep machine learning capability before. And then all of a sudden, it's able to do that kind of thing on the fly—claiming a sophisticated capability that Google spends billions working on." If true, that kind of accomplishment would be better served by real fanfare than a wannabe-viral video, he says. (Others agree with him—Russian media has been skeptical from the start, and for every credulous Promobot article, there are dozens of comments crying wolf.)
The Promobot company, for their part, insist it is all real. Iuzhakov took the time to go through a number of allegations against Promobot, and had an explanation for each—separate batteries power the display and the motor, Promobot can jump curbs up to four centimeters, the metadata was lost during the photo upload process. "We did not plan that Promobot IR77 would demonstrate his abilities in such a way," he wrote to me. "We were stunned and shocked with all this publicity."
"We do not stage any incidents in the lab," he continued. "We just started to make records to be sure that all this fun with the bot is carefully collected and described. IR77 is like a kid now. It is developing and getting smarter. And we have a lot of pleasure watching him."
I, too, have a lot of pleasure watching IR77. Unlike more impressive AIs—the monsters of Boston Dynamics, Google's deep-dreaming computers—it looks just like I imagined robots always would, cute and human-sized, with big eyes and anthropomorphic dreams and the ability to deliver philosophical lectures. After I finish writing this, I will probably have to go back through and replace "he's" with "it's". If Promobot is indeed punking us, they're relying on these misplaced expectations. "Most people don't know what a robot is capable of," says Mills. We just wish we did.
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.
These nimble-fingered mavericks turn a deck of ordinary playing cards into a mesmerizing swirl of patterns and tricks. A small, but budding group of cardists (a combination of “cards” and “artists”) have attracted fans for their fluid card spins, twirls, tosses, and flicks.
Cardistry is a kind of performance art that visually captivates audiences with impressive card manipulation skills. Many associate it with magic card tricks, but the two are actually very different. Magic relies on concealment of skills, while cardistry embellishes skills on full display, Dave Buck, a famous cardist, explains to Vanity Fair.
While cardists are adamant about establishing their differences from magicians, the art form does have roots in magic card tricks. In the 19th century, magicians would show their sleight of hand by completing some of the shuffling patterns we are most familiar with, such as the riffle shuffle and the Charlier Cut (splitting the deck with one hand). Cardistry has since branched away and expanded from magic. Cardists have mastered turnovers, tosses, catches, elaborate patterns, card springs, and have even invented new moves.
In the video, a cardistry fan compiled some of the best clips of cardists doing these advanced tricks. Some moves are so complex and ornate that Gambit—the X-Men superhero who flings kinetically charged playing cards—would be awestruck. At the 1:10-mark, a cardist performs a card spring by squeezing the edges of the deck and releasing it to form a steady ribbon of cards. Some experienced cardists have been able to create springs as long as three to four feet.
The growing cardistry subculture supports enthusiasts, hobbyists, full-time professionals, and cardistry schools. This past July, cardists from around the world united to celebrate the craft at the annual three-day Cardistry-Con in Berlin, Germany.
Cardistry is like card “pornography,” magic historian Jamy Ian Swiss tells Vanity Fair. “It serves no function except as eye candy.”
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Emailella@atlasobscura.com.
Pentathletes competing in 2007. (Photo: U.S. Army)
The ancient pentathlon, contested in the first Olympic games over two millennia ago, could be dangerous. Consisting of five events, the ancient sport was designed to mimic the tasks a soldier might be required to do in battle: run, jump, throw a javelin and discus, and, of course, wrestle.
Wrestling, though, in this context, wasn't just two guys in leotards on a mat. It was—though some accounts differ—the type of Greek wrestling known as pankration, a brutal open-ended battle with few rules that often ended in serious injury or death.
But with that risk came, potentially, fame; compared to its modern counterpart, winning the ancient competition was hugely prestigious, since it was seen as the peak of human athletic achievement.
And yet, these days, champion pentathletes couldn't be more anonymous, while the sport itself is just trying to hang on, a bizarre and quiet denouement for the modern equivalent of that ancient epic. The modern pentathlon was always a direct, if slightly romantic gesture to the past. The only question for now is how much longer that gesture will remain.
Part of the reason the modern pentathlon struggles to draw a crowd is that it is built around five disciplines that are hardly spectator sports: fencing, show jumping, shooting, swimming, and running. The ancient version, too, included events—discus and javelin—that aren't exactly riveting, but it also benefited from scarcity, as the ancient Olympics had just a handful of events, mainly just running and chariot racing, while this year in Rio de Janeiro there are 41 other sports asking for your attention.
The modern pentathlon also suffers from what you might call an origin problem. It has no reason to exist, other than that Pierre de Coubertin, the father of the modern Olympics, thought it should. Like its predecessor, Coubertin made the modern version based on military tasks, in this case, a calvary officer who might be expected to, at some point in the course of his work, run, swim, shoot, sword fight, and command an unknown horse. (Competitors are only assigned a random horse 20 minutes before competition is to begin.)
The idea, Coubertin said, was to produce the "ideal, complete athlete," or at least someone capable of being a highly-functioning soldier.
And, initially, it was a sport dominated by military officers themselves. It was first contested at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden, where future World War II General George S. Patton, representing the U.S. Army, was among those competing.
Patton's biggest challengers were Swedes, who not only enjoyed home-field advantage but also dominated the sport in the early decades.
And in its first year, Patton, a 26-year-old lieutenant, gave them a show. Competing against 41 other military officers, Patton began with the first event, shooting. But unlike the rest of the competitors, who used .22-caliber guns, Patton chose to use a larger .38-caliber weapon, shooting and, he thought, hitting a stationary target 20 times. But when judges checked, they found only 17 holes. Patton's explanation? Three bullets clearly went through the target's holes without making a mark of their own.
But the judges didn't buy it, and Patton finished 21st in that portion of the competition. He did better with the four other disciplines, in the end passing out from exertion after running 2.5 miles. When he came to, he was told the final results: Patton had recovered to finish fifth (three Swedes took each of the medal places).
That Patton came close to sniffing a medal at all was its own kind of achievement. Sweden won 11 of the first 12 medals handed out for the modern pentathlon, and it wasn't until a German in 1928 won bronze that any non-Swedish athlete stepped on to the podium. And while in the ensuing years the event's appeal for other countries widened considerably—Hungarians dominated most of the '60s and early '70s—modern pentathlon remained an oddity on the Olympic schedule, neither a reliable draw or an interesting competition to watch.
That hasn't been for lack of trying, though, as the sport has evolved continually since its debut. Though it still uses the same five skills, real guns are no longer used, for example, and the distances for the running and swimming portions of the event have been modified. It's also been compressed into three days, instead of what started as five.
The competition will open this year on Thursday, August 18, in Rio de Janeiro, to conclude Aug. 20, meaning, of course, that for now, it's still an Olympic event, though officials have continually threatened to drop it, along with things like dressage and synchronized swimming.
Modern pentathlon's advocates, though, at least have Aristotle on their sides. Around 2,500 years ago, in Rhetoric, he wrote that "pentathletes have the most beautiful bodies, because they are constructed for strength and speed together."
This Sunda pangolin (Manis javanica) was rescued from poachers and is awaiting release into Cuc Phuong National Park in Vietnam. (All Photos: Suzi Eszterhas)
When acclaimed conservation photographer Suzi Eszterhas settled in for the evening, she didn’t know what to expect. She seldom does when trying to photograph elusive, nocturnal creatures. But circumstances on this particular night were unusual. She was sitting in an enclosure—albeit a naturalistic one—and although she knew her photographic subjects couldn’t flee, she thought it was quite possible she might spend the entire night being riddled by biting ants without capturing a single shot.
A couple hours later, a bizarre creature—a Sunda pangolin nicknamed “Lucky” by the staff of the rehabilitation center where Eszterhas sat—sniffed his way out of his burrow and lumbered into the photographer’s frame. Eszterhas has photographed a lot of spectacular creatures and has made a name for herself capturing rare imagery of newborn animals in the wild, but this, the first pangolin she’d ever seen, made a lasting impression.
“Some animals you can’t help thinking just seem too innocent for this world,” she said. “The pangolin is one of those creatures.”
A rescued and rehabilitated Sunda pangolin (Manis javanica) raids an ant nest while awaiting release into Cuc Phuong National Park in Vietnam.
Innocent, but otherworldly, too. Resembling some sort of stubborn holdout from Earth’s prehistory or a sci-fi writer’s composite creature possessing both reptilian and mammalian traits, the pangolin is one of the strangest animals most people have never seen. It is also the most illegally traded wild mammal on the planet, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and is in danger of being eaten to extinction.
Nguyen Van Thai knows well the innocence, mystique, and vulnerability of the pangolin. Nguyen established this rehabilitation center, called Save Vietnam’s Wildlife, in 2006 to protect some of his native country’s most vulnerable creatures. Lucky and four other pangolins, all confiscated from traffickers, were some of the center’s first residents.
But Nguyen’s obsession with these creatures dates back much further than that. He often tells a story from when he was just eight years old of watching in horror as a hunter pulled a female pangolin and its baby from their burrow. He’s been determined to fight for these exploited and underrepresented creatures ever since.
A two-week-old Chinese pangolin (Manis pentadactyla) clings to its mother, who was rescued from poachers and is now part of a captive breeding program at the Taipei Zoo.
The world currently has eight living species of pangolin, four in Asia and four in sub-Saharan Africa. These eight—the only members of the family Manidae, which is the only family in the order Pholidota—occupy their own little branch of the tree of life. Although the pangolin’s scales are the most prominent symbol of that uniqueness—no other mammal has them—the eight species all share several other physical and behavioral characteristics. For example, none of them has teeth. All feed almost exclusively on ants and termites, which they access by tearing into the insects’ nests with their powerful forelimbs and heavy claws, and then collect with swipes of sticky tongues that stretch nearly the entire length of the animal’s body when fully extended.
When threatened, pangolins tend to retreat into burrows or curl up into a ball, leaving only their scaled surfaces exposed. Unfortunately, what has proven to be an effective defensive strategy for some 80 million years since pangolins first evolved has made these animals particularly vulnerable to human hunters. Snares set at burrow entrances and dogs that can sniff out and dig out hidden pangolins are the most commonly used methods. And if hunters are lucky enough to stumble upon a startled pangolin in the open, they can simply pick up the coiled animal, shove it into a sack, and continue on their way.
A rescued Sunda pangolin gets a helping hand from Thai Van Nguyen, Executive Director of Save Vietnam’s Wildlife.
It’s a lucrative business with devastating consequences. Pangolins are prized both for their meat (and blood), which is considered a delicacy, and for their scales, which are used in traditional medicines—despite the fact that pangolin scales are made of keratin, the same substance as human fingernails. A single live pangolin can fetch several hundred dollars on the not-so-hidden Asian black market. And these prices have only risen in recent years, fueled by official bans on the legal trade of pangolins and their parts, as well as a lack of concerted efforts to enforce those restrictions. Nguyen and IUCN reports suggest that you needn’t look far to find pangolin meat being offered on restaurant menus and their scales being sold as remedies for everything from ulcers to acne, particularly in China and Vietnam.
While no one knows how many wild pangolins have fallen into this illicit market, the IUCN estimates that the number is likely more than a million over the past decade. While all pangolin species are under threat, two Asian species, the Sunda pangolin (Manis javanica) and the Chinese pangolin (Manis pentadactyla) have been hardest hit. Although both species are adapted to a wide variety of habitats and their native ranges cover vast swaths of geography, the IUCN estimates that their populations have declined by 80 percent or more over the past several decades, and the organization predicts a similar rate of decline over the next 20 years, unless swift action is taken. At this moment, both species are listed as critically endangered, just one precarious step from extinction.
Thai Van Nguyen, Executive Director of Save Vietnam’s Wildlife, examines a three-month-old rescued Sunda pangolin.
In recent years, conservation organizations large and small have stepped up in the fight to slow the precipitous loss of pangolins from the wild. These efforts range from developing scientific studies to better understand the basic biology and ecology of the animals to rewriting trade policies and enforcement strategies to squeeze, if not completely eliminate, the pangolin market.
One small but critical piece of this fight are the efforts by organizations and individuals to care for pangolins that have been confiscated from poachers—either to release these animals back into suitable habitats once they’re healthy, or to establish captive breeding populations to help supplement the numbers and genetic diversity that have been lost from the wild.
Research assistant Hsuan-yi Lo monitors a three-month-old Chinese pangolin at the Taipei Zoo. The young pangolin’s parents were rescued from poachers.
Rehabilitation centers like Nguyen’s Save Vietnam’s Wildlife and captive breeding programs like the one at the Taipei Zoo are prime examples of these types of small-scale but critical efforts. Although the number of animals cared for and reared in these facilities is relatively small compared to the tens of thousands of pangolins poached from the wild each year, the influence these programs have on public perception, both within their communities and around the world, has the potential to extend much further.
According to Nguyen, most people in Vietnam don’t even know that pangolins are illegal to eat, and many local people fear them simply because of their strange appearance. And then there are the people who don’t even know they exist. So, while Nguyen and his staff spend a great deal of their time caring for pangolins like Lucky, they are equally dedicated to educating the public about the world’s only scaly mammal, and doing whatever they can to make sure we don’t lose them for good.
Through a pioneering captive breeding program, the Taipei Zoo has now successfully bred six Chinese pangolins (Manis pentadactyla), four of which are second- or third-generation zoo-born animals. Here, research assistant Hsuan-yi Lo tends to a twelve-day-old baby.
At the Taipei Zoo, research assistant Hsuan-yi Lo bottle-feeds a 12-day-old Chinese pangolin whose mother was unable to feed it.
This Chinese pangolin (Manis pentadactyla) was rescued from poachers and given safe haven at the Taipei Zoo. She and her two-month-old baby are evidence of the zoo’s successful captive breeding program.
After being confiscated from poachers and rehabilitated, a Sunda pangolin (Manis javanica) awaits release into Cuc Phuong National Park in Vietnam.
