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One of Iceland's Biggest Volcanoes Might Be Close to Erupting

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Katla from a distance. (Photo: Gary J. Wood/CC BY-SA 2.0)

Iceland is home to some 130 volcanoes, with over a dozen considered to be active, and with a few them liable to erupt at any minute. Now, after a tremor and some earthquakes, authorities are saying that one of the country's biggest, called Katla and located in southern Iceland, could also be close to erupting.

In recent days, according to the Iceland Review, seismic activity has been detected in the mountain, an augur of a potential eruption. The volcano last erupted in 1918, though similar seismic activity was detected in 1977, when it failed to blow its top. 

Yet, Katla is overdue for an eruption, having generally blown once every 50 years since Iceland was first settled in the 10th century. Volcanic activity at the mountain is getting worryingly behind time. 

"There will be an eruption, it’s just a question of when," Kristín Jónsdóttir, a coordinator at the country's meteorological service told Icelandic radio Monday, according to the Iceland Review

The seismic activity tracked by authorities includes, on Monday, a 3.3-magnitude tremor and, previously, two small earthquakes, both under 5.0 magnitude.

If an eruption begins, Icelanders will have about a few hours' warning, Jónsdóttir said, as magma works its way from underneath a glacier to the volcano's top: some time, then, to hunker down and get ready for the show. 


Food Testing in 1902 Featured a Tuxedo-Clad 'Poison Squad' Eating Plates of Acid

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Members of the "Poison Squad", individuals who tested whether food was safe for human consumption. (Photo: FDA/Public Domain)

Twelve young men sat around a fine dinner table with a crisp white tablecloth and silver settings. The collars of their pressed suits were neatly starched and their bow ties rested politely at their chins as they delicately brought forkfuls of delicious foods to their mouths, each morsel laced with formaldehyde and benzoate. Borax tablets polished off the meal.

These men were the Poison Squad: for five years, beginning in 1902, their nightly meals came from a government-run kitchen, where they ingested common—and previously untested—food preservatives. This danger-facing squad was not only responsible for proving a need for ingredient lists on food labels, but they propelled the creation of our modern Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

The act of healthy men boldly eating poisoned food on purpose lent the Poison Squad near-hero status. Their motto was “Only the Brave Dare Eat The Fare,” and the squad even had its own catchy rhyme, courtesy of poet S.W. Gillian:

On prussic acid we break out fast
We lunch on morphine stew
We dine with a matchhead consummé
Drink carbolic acid brew

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An advertisement for cocaine toothache drops, late 1800s. (Photo: National Library of Medicine/Public Domain)

Today, the idea of having a group of people willingly poison themselves seems unimaginable. But Harvey Wiley, chief chemist of the Bureau of Chemistry, felt he had good reason to go to this extreme when he started the experiment. Since the 1800s, the public had eaten dangerous, unregulated foods; “bitter beer” was laced with strychnine, and it was common to unknowingly eat chalk-filled bread. Wiley even caught honey companies passing glucose off as pure honey.

At the time, food safety was under the purview of state and local governments, but as the United States transitioned from an agricultural society to an urban one, local food laws started to miss the mark. More food products were being made in factories using new, untested chemicals as preservatives, without stating so on the label. Wiley wondered if all those new preservatives, which included borax, salicylic acid and formaldehyde, were actually safe for humans after all.

Members of the Poison Squad leapt at the chance to be part of this new research experiment; Dr. Wiley remarked at the time that his laboratory “became the most highly advertised boarding-house in the world.” Squad members were either employees of the Bureau of Chemistry or Georgetown Medical College students lured by the promise of extra money and free room and board.

Wiley did not try to obscure the fact that participants would be risking their health in service to his experiment. He even wrote a poem boasting about it:

Oh, maybe this bread contains alum and chalk,
Or sawdust chopped up very fine,
Or gypsum in powder about which they talk,
Terra alba just out of the mine.
And our faith in the butter is apt to be weak,
For we haven't a good place to pin it
Annato's so yellow and beef fat so sleek,
Oh, I wish I could know what is in it?”

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Harvey W Wiley, with lab assistants. (Photo: FDA/Public Domain)

Using a $5,000 government grant, Wiley bought food, hired a cook, and brought on the first 12 members of the squad. Each participant was carefully observed: their weight, temperature, and pulse were recorded before the meal; stool and urine samples were tested; and cases of sickness and nausea were recorded. Women were not allowed to join.

As the Poison Squad ate meats and consumed drinks laced with increasing amounts of suspected poisons at their fine dining table, the public fell in love with their cause. Journalists breathlessly reported on their trials of these “young men of perfect physique and health.” Offensive yet popular minstrel shows added poison squad songs to their repertoire. Consumers across the country suddenly grew concerned about the safety of what they’d been eating.

While the Poison Squad wore formal clothing to their dangerous dinner parties, “No rosy-cheeked waitresses with snowy-white aprons serve the boarders,” wrote the Los Angeles Times in 1903. “Instead, a bespectacled scientist” served the “martyrs of science.” The article adds, ominously, that the Poison Squad “always leave the table a little hungry.” While the men benefited from free rent and a bit of prestige in the press, none of them were given individual credit for their work. To this day, most of their names are unknown.

In a statement, Wiley told the press that his experiments were “never carried to the extreme.” As the Poison Squad continued their work, however, the poisons they ate began to wear on them. By 1903 they’d been eating increasing amounts of borax, one of the most common preservatives at the time, with their meals for almost a year.

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The slogan of the Poison Squad: None but the brave can eat the fare. (Photo: FDA/Public Domain)

Fed up, the Poison Squad went on strike that May. The Evening Newswrote that “the twelve men at the borax table refused to take any more borax” in the summer months; apparently it was too much to go through the discomfort in the heat. Wiley compromised a bit; seven men agreed to eat the borax until late June, and the scientist consented to end the experiment early.

After the tumultuous borax experiment drew to a close, Wiley determined that, yes, borax caused severe stomach aches, loss of appetite and headaches, rendering his subjects “unfit for work of any kind.” Despite this, Wiley had no trouble getting new men to sign up for his next food additive experiment: salicylic acid. During those trials, however, Wiley was forced to abandon his tests to let the group recover.

By the end of the Poison Squad’s existence in 1907, those who didn’t withdraw from the experiments completely were observed to be “on a slow approach toward death” after eating long-term doses of the various additives. Formaldehyde, which was often used in dairy products, strained the kidneys and made the test subjects sick. Benzoate caused unhealthy weight loss and blood vessel damage.

When one squad member died of tuberculosis (allegedly after being weakened from poison), his family threatened to sue. Finally, after five years of testing dangerous ingredients, Wiley decided he had gathered enough evidence that these common food additives were hurting people.

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A letter from a Poison Squad volunteer: "My stomach can hold anything." (Photo: FDA/Public Domain)

Meanwhile, The General Federation of Women's Clubs and the National Association of Colored Women had long advocated for issues that affected women and their homes, including preserved food. Women’s groups hit the streets with food safety pamphlets and classes in multiple languages, intended to warn women of the dangers that lurked in common products.

As the public’s outrage against unregulated additives began a slow boil, Alice Lakey from the General Federation of Women’s Clubs began a letter-writing campaign in support of the Pure Food and Drug Act, which would stop companies from adding untested chemicals and fillers like sawdust to the meals of families. As Wiley gained prominence for his Poison Squad’s success, he joined forces with the women’s food safety cause, which was proving highly influential (despite believing that women were “not intended by nature...to follow in the pursuits of men”).

In 1905 Lakey became the head of the Pure Food Committee. She and Wiley brought the letters of support to President Roosevelt, and later, at a Congressional hearing regarding the Pure Food and Drug Act, these letters played a key role. Wiley later credited Lakey and other women with the act’s success, saying “the passage of the bill was due to the women’s clubs of the country.”

The Pure Food and Drug act was passed in 1906, setting a precedent to the later Food, Drugs and Cosmetics Act and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The law prevented“the manufacture, sale, or transportation of adulterated or misbranded or poisonous or deleterious foods, drugs or medicines, and liquors.” Any food or drug product sold in the United States now had to include all its ingredients, including a percentage of narcotics if relevant, on the label for the consumer.

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A cartoon paying tribute to Harvey Wiley's reforms. (Photo: FDA/Public Domain)

Wiley’s work even inspired a fad for local and industry-specific “poison squads.” A year after his experiments ended, a new week-long Poison Squad to test preservatives formed in New York City. Dried fruit packers made their own Poison Squad to re-test sulfites in their products, which Wiley had criticized. A Coffee Poison Squad later recorded the effects of caffeine. In 1913 The Pittsburg Press wrote that the Poison Squad of the city department of health was visiting local ice cream shops, assuring everyone that ice creams and sodas appeared to be safe.

While Wiley’s earlier career had hinged on poisoning his own vigorous employees, in later years he became even more focused on the crusade against the consumption of untested preservatives and drugs. Between 1912 and 1930, Wiley headed the laboratories at the Good Housekeeping Institute, which tested household and food products, which is still done to this day.

Every time we peek at the mile-long list of ingredients in a packaged muffin, and note that chalk is not one of them, we owe our thanks to the young men who bravely put on their tuxedos and swallowed poisonous additives on behalf of American consumers.  

Meet the Button Obsessives Who Salivate Over Hillary and Trump Souvenirs

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article-imageA button signed by Hillary Clinton. (Photo: Bob Levine)

Laid up in a hospital bed, recovering from a spider bite, Bob Levine pays close attention to the television screen. It’s the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. Levine, who is an active member of the Democratic Party in his home state of Missouri, should have been there. He rues missing a historic three days for Hillary Clinton and her supporters.

Ill-health also kept him from the GOP convention in Cleveland. Levine was again bed-bound at the Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis. The RNC didn’t have the same emotional draw, politically at least, but was still an opportunity to do what he does best: Buy and sell buttons.

This isn’t just a source of employment for the man known to his friends as “Button Bob.” For the button obsessed, each item tells a story. Each exchange is exciting, says Levine.

“Having the proof of the election in my hand. Oh my god, it’s magnificent,” he says.

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Homemade by "Button Bob" Levine. (Photo: Bob Levine)

Candidates have spent millions on dollars in the last year producing election swag, and a lot of it ends up in the hands of the collectors. Levine has dealt in buttons, lapel pins and other political campaign memorabilia for most of his life. He’s sold at 30 different political events in 2016 alone, and traded on the street, outside cinemas, at speciality shows, and on the internet over his long career.

The hectic election cycle this year, where dozens of candidates rose and fell, affects traders and collectors like Levine in a special way. It's an opportunity, and a race, to accumulate a comprehensive set of memorabilia. At one point, there were nearly 20 different candidates—and many more buttons—competing to be the Republican nominee. To a collector like Levine, a rare item from a candidate who withdrew before the primaries might be worth more than one from a prominent campaign.

Large companies print tailor-made designs quickly and cheaply, which means there may be thousands of pieces per candidate. And this means the search for every button is almost infinite. Yet in their own unique way, the collectors have cataloged the political history of America. Buttons have marked every presidential election since George Washington.

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Buttons marking George Washington's inauguration in 1789. (Photo: Mark Powers)

Mark Powers, a passionate button collector from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is lucky enough to have three of the buttons produced to celebrate Washington’s inauguration. Button gold, they are locked in a safety deposit box.

A self-confessed “political junkie,” Powers has a collection of buttons that numbers more than 35,000. He says he has insured his entire button collection, which also includes pieces related to President Lincoln, for around $80,000. This year, he attended both conventions by volunteering for the American Politics Items Collectors (APIC) booth.

A love of politics often motivates people to collect memorabilia. Powers grew up in New York City, and at school one day in 1960, he was given a “Nixon for President” pin. When he got home, someone in his apartment building told the youngster he shouldn’t be wearing a Nixon pin, and gave him a John F. Kennedy one to wear instead, a “flasher” style button. From that moment on, says Powers, he became a Kennedy supporter—and a button fanatic. 

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Mark Powers owns rare items including a George Washington button, and this Abraham Lincoln item. (Photo: Mark Powers)

Finding the space to keep memorabilia is a challenge in itself. At the end of an auction, newly purchased goods need a storage place. For collectors with thousands upon thousands of items, not everything can be shown off in a glass cabinet. Powers' collection is spread between his home and a safety deposit box at the bank.

Although he is often intrigued by other items of political paraphernalia, Powers has to restrict himself to buttons, sometimes in the interest of his own marriage.  

“I have to be really careful because every time I bring something home that isn’t a button I get a look from my wife,” he says.  

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Never looked likely. (Photo: Bob Levine)

Collectors like Powers used to rely on marquee events like the conventions and APIC exhibitions to gain access to the best items. But in this election, the buying and selling of buttons has benefitted from a growing number of online marketplaces, especially on Facebook. It has never been easier to search for the promotional items of obscure candidates. 

Facebook exchanges cater to different tastes, and are growing bigger every week. The largest is a group run by APIC, which has more than 1,500 members. There's a JFK exchange and an Obama exchange. Then there’s a site for local political memorabilia, one where you can have your item valued by an expert, and another dedicated to paper items like posters and flyers. 

Todd Klimson runs a Facebook group that specializes in the 2016 election. As the group's administrator, he accepts new members who are then able to advertise their wares, or put out requests. Klimson, an ardent Republican and yacht dealer from Florida, also has a large collection of buttons himself. 

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Donald Trump button. (Photo: Bob Levine)

"We’re all serious about what we’re doing. Everybody knows each other," says Klimson. The collectors know "who sells authentic stuff," he says. "If you sell something that's fake, everyone on the exchanges will know about it. You’ll get blackballed."

There is money to be made in all of this, too. Klimson has old Barack Obama senate election campaign badges that he believes will bring in several hundred dollars one day. His friends always laugh when they see the dozens of Obama items stored at the avowed Republican's house.

From this election, Klimson has collected at least 400 Trump and Clinton items that he’ll retain while he waits for their values to increase.

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The office of Mark Warda, where he keeps thousands of buttons. (Photo: Mark Warda)

Nestled inside garages and cupboards across the U.S., these buttons preserve in tiny physical form the most, and sometimes least, important moments in American political history. Some button fans collect almost any button they can get their hands on. Others have a niche; a political candidate they like, or a social movement or a period of time. For collecting purposes, the more obscure and older the better.

This mantra certainly applies to another collector from Florida, Mark Warda. For years, Warda had a gap in his collection: John W. Davis, a Democratic presidential candidate who lost by a landslide to Calvin Coolidge in 1924. When Warda finally got his hands on a John W. Davis button, he made the candidate his speciality. Since then, he has built a virtual museum dedicated to the little-known politician that displays all his Davis buttons and other memorabilia. 

At his office and home, Warda has three rooms devoted to the storage of buttons and other relics from campaigns of the past. There's over 100,000 pieces of memorabilia in total. In some cases Warda, who works in land trusts, has thousands of the same button design. He's also written two books on the history of political collectables.

Warda imagined he would devote his house to buttons, and keep his thousands of items on permanent display. But, he says, life got in the way. “I had thought I would start a museum and this would be for the gift shop, but I got married and had kids instead."

Found: A Giant Slug the Size of a Cat

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 Sometimes, if you go looking for a giant slug, you find one.

Coyote Peterson, who hosts an exploration show called Brave Wilderness, took his crew to the tidal pools of the California coast in search of the most fantastic sea life they could find. For much of the day, all they had seen were crabs. But then they found what they were looking for, a California black sea hare—the largest of any species of sea slug.

It was, in fact, giant.

These guys are herbivorous sea slugs that grow giant on a diet of seaweed. They’re called “hares” because of the two ear-like protrusions that grow out of their heads.

This sea hare is around the length of a Peterson's forearm—he says about 2 feet, when fully stretched out. It's on the larger side, for a giant sea slug, but still much shorter than the longest one ever measured. That one grew to be more than three feet long. Which is a lot of slug.

Every day, we highlight one newly found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

Angry Elves Force Iceland Road Workers To Dig Up A Sacred Rock

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Wait, are those guys covering my rock?! (Photo: leospek/Shutterstock.com)

In Iceland, elves are serious business, so when local road construction covered up a rock that was important to the wee folk, the locals weren’t happy. According to Agence France-Presse, highway workers had to resurface the rock after series of mishaps indicated that the elves were not pleased.

The “elfin lady stone” was actually covered up back in 2015 after road work was conducted to clear a landslide near the town of Siglufjordur. The rock, which according to local folklore, was sacred to the elves, was buried without the workers even taking much notice. Until the calamities started.

After the landslide was cleared, and the elven stone covered up, the road flooded, once again doing damage, and when the construction company returned to the site, one of their men was injured during the clean-up. After that, pieces of the industrial repair equipment began to malfunction, and a writer who came to report on the scene fell into a mud pool. All of these mishaps were soon blamed on angry elves that wanted their lady stone returned to its natural splendor.

While some Icelanders believe in the actual physical existence of elves, even those who don’t seem to recognize the importance of the mythology to the country’s culture still take elf problems somewhat seriously. Thus, the Iceland Road Administration agreed to uncover the rock, which they did, even giving it a good power washing to make it sing. Hopefully, the elves are happy with the cleaning.

Nelson Mandela's Grandson Wants People To Stop Naming Things After Nelson Mandela

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"Nelson Mandela Square," a shopping mall in Johannesburg. (Photo: Marc Smith/CC BY 2.0)

South Africa's Mthatha Airport is up for a name change. According to City Press, the airport's Aviation Board is considering renaming it for former president Nelson Mandela. If the plan goes through, the building will join schools, parks, bridges, shopping malls, and another airport already named for the late statesman.

There's at least one person who isn't into this trend: Mandela's oldest grandson, Mandla Mandela. Mandela spoke out against the renaming of Mthatha Airport, explaining that his grandfather would not have wanted others' contributions to be overlooked in favor of his own.

“People are so fixated... that they want to Mandelise everything," Mandela told City Press. Meanwhile, he added, others who contributed to the movement are being ignored, or even erased. Mthatha Airport used to be called KD Matanzima Airport, after Mandela's nephew.

Mandla Mandela, who currently serves as the chief of the Mvezo Traditional Council, has previously also spoken out against the name "Mandla," which he says is "just like a nickname," but which the media generally uses to refer to him.

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

A Massive Amount of Cocaine Was Found at a French Coca-Cola Plant

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(Photo: Ken/CC BY 2.0)

Coca-Cola, in its original 19th-century formula, contained cocaine. The plant-based stimulant was legal back then: in Georgia, where Coca-Cola originates, alcohol was what everyone feared in 1886, the year the sugary, coked-up version of Coca-Cola first debuted. 

But after a racist campaign of drug hysteria aimed at African-Americans, Coca-Cola removed cocaine from its soda in 1903, or 11 years before the drug was illegal in the U.S. 

And this week in France, authorities uncovered around 815 pounds of cocaine at a Coca-Cola factory in Marseille, according to the Associated Press. Has Coca-Cola been lying to us all these years? A can of soda is a pretty good high. 

Apparently not, at least according to the company. 

"The first elements of the investigation have shown that employees are in no way involved," Coca-Cola's regional president told a local news website, according to the BBC.

A company official would say that, wouldn't they? When French Coke becomes the next big thing, you heard it here first. 

Yellowstone Owes Its Early Success To Public Bear Feeding

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The bear "Lunch Counter" behind Old Faithful. (Photo: Yellowstone National Park/Public Domain)

When F. Dumont Smith visited Yellowstone National Park's Lake Hotel in 1909, he came away with a few grievances. The boat meant to take him across the lake was late. He didn't manage to catch any trout on his fishing excursion. Other tourists were slow and loud.

And then there was the final straw, much worse than any of these: When it came time for the nightly bear-feeding bonanza, he and his girlfriend didn't get to ride in the hotel's garbage cart. Instead, they and most of the other guests were forced to stand back with their cameras as an employee dumped buckets of the day’s trash in a field, drawing a crowd of hungry black bears and grizzlies.

"The cart drives right out among the bears," Smith later wrote, glumly. "How they got that garbage cart privilege, I never found out—made love to the scullion, I suppose." His girlfriend, too, was mad: "She would rather have sat on [that] swill-can than with kings, emperors and potentates."

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A couple of lucky people who did get to ride on the garbage cart. (Photo: National Park Service/Public Domain)

Today, a garbage-strewn bear encounter behind a hotel would mark a bad day for a National Park visitor. But back in Yellowstone's early days, tourists took such encounters for granted, and the park did very little to discourage this. In fact, as historian Alice Wondrak Biel explains in Do (Not) Feed The Bears: The Fitful History of Wildlife and Tourists in Yellowstone, they banked on it—building elaborate "bear show" pits, failing to enforce the park's no-feeding rules, and tacitly encouraging the many black bears who roamed the roads, "holding up" cars for food.

Today, it's strange to think of having to sell the idea of Yellowstone to anyone. But back when the park first opened, it needed to justify itself. Here was an enormous swath of prime Western land, set aside only for pleasure and recreation, paid for with American tax dollars. It sank or swam based on public opinion. For it to survive, people had to come, and they had to have the kind of good time they couldn't get anywhere else.

The park's superintendents were busy building infrastructure in the institution's first few decades, fighting poachers, and encouraging trains to come near enough that visitors could actually visit. But things improved, and when conservationist Horace Albright took the helm in 1919, he began turning human-animal interaction into a deliberate priority. The National Park Service, he said, had “a duty to present wildlife as a spectacle” for parkgoers.

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Horace Albright dines with some bear friends in 1922. (Photo: National Park Service/Public Domain)

He built a seasonal buffalo corral, and stocked it every summer with 15 of the park’s handsomest bulls. He had rangers culled animals, like coyotes, that ate the more beloved species. At least two actual zoos sprung up within the park, so that visitors could get a good look at deer and badgers without all that pesky land in the way.

Perhaps most importantly, he added flair to the bear shows. What had started as a convenient garbage disposal method became, under Albright’s leadership, a full-on attraction. The dump outside Old Faithful got a feeding platform, a safety ditch, wooden benches for spectators, and a sign that said “Lunch Counter for Bears.” (A 1920 hotel brochure promised you could “photograph a wild bear and eat a course dinner in the same hour.”) Every night at dinnertime, a ranger named Philip Martindale would mount his horse, slowly back it up until it was a mere 30 feet from the feeding frenzy, and lecture on the bears' biology, habits, and family life.

An even larger feeding ground, outside the Canyon Hotel, boasted a huge concrete platform and log bleachers set up on the surrounding hill. “This arrangement created a sort of theater space,” writes Biel, “in which the bears emerged as if from the wings… in order to perform their own Shakesbeare in the Park for the assembled audience.” It drew 50 to 70 fuzzy thespians every night, and the bleachers were so stuffed as to be standing room only.

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Hotel guests watch bears eat trash in the early 1900s. (Photo: National Park Service/Public Domain)

The shows were so beloved that they achieved a kind of meta-popularity: the crowds became an attraction in and of themselves. In 1929, the park’s chief ranger estimated that 90 percent of visitors had visited the Lunch Counter. “The excitement of the audience caused by the appearance of a big old grizzly among a group of hungry black bears is worth going a long way to see,” Albright told theNew York Times in 1931.

As Biel explains, this situation was a triple-win for the park: the people were happy, the garbage went away, and the bears steered clear of dicier food supplies, like human provisions, cute elk, and artificially stocked trout. As Albright himself put it in his book, Oh, Ranger!, “Mr. Bear knows he can eat a lot more in an eight-hour day if he eats ‘combination salad’ at the bear pits than he can if he nibbles at tidbits stolen from campers.”

But the bears soon took matters into their own paws. In 1915, Yellowstone began letting cars into the park. The bears quickly realized that these metal receptacles were, like garbage cans, chock full of treats, and that the best way to get them out was to block the road, preventing the drivers from going further until food was proffered. Martindale once caught a mother bear repeatedly nudging her cub into the middle of the road until he got the knack of begging.

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Calvin Coolidge and family, feeding famous Hold-Up Bear Jesse James in 1927. (Photo: Online Archive of California/Public Domain)

These "Hold-Up Bears" snarled traffic, ambling from car to car and demanding tribute from guests. "The public, ensemble performances of the feeding grounds were replaced by private table dances," writes Biel. Visitors happily paid for the privilege, usually in candy.

Once again, Albright saw very little wrong with this. Although hand-feeding bears was technically against the rules, it was also another way to bring guests that authentic, all-American experience they could only get at Yellowstone. When statesmen came through the park, he made sure to take them on bear-feeding excursions. In 1923, he had rangers tree a couple of hungry bears, so that Warren G. Harding could coax them back down with molasses. Four years later, the Coolidge family arranged a photo op with the most famous Hold-Up Bear, Jesse James.

With all this interspecies snacking, someone was bound to get hurt. In those early decades, people got scratched, bitten, and bowled over, and at least one, a park employee named Frank Welch, was killed by a grizzly.  Bears also suffered: so-called "bad actors" would be shot or shipped to zoos. Albright, for the most part, brushed this off, blaming bad results on people's "foolish behavior." A scar, he would say, makes a great souvenir.

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A Yellowstone bear sniffs at a trailer in 1967. (Photo: Jonathan Schilling/CC BY-SA 3.0)

In 1929, Albright left Yellowstone to become director of the whole National Park Service. His successors, slightly less sold on the wisdom of enabling wildlife encounters, began to slowly phase out bear-feeding. Park biologists submitted new guidelines for the park, predicated on the idea that "every species… be left to carry on its struggle for existence unaided." World War II and its attendant shortages gave those in charge the opportunity they needed to shut down the Lunch Counter, and the other bear shows. Albright never quite agreed with the strategy change. "An argument can be made for such policies," he later wrote, "but the [guests]—and the bears, too—will be hard to convince."

He was correct—it took several more decades for people to stop dangling Twinkies out of their windows. But eventually, decades of science and education, and a new bear management plan, paid off. By the time Biel herself was spending time in Yellowstone, in the 1970s and '80s, she says, she never saw a roadside bear. "My parents always taught me to respect wildlife as being wild," she says. "I never wanted to get close."

Today, "bear jams" are a rarity, and bears eat fish and plants, not garbage. All the lunch counters are specifically for people. And the most famous recent gangster bear was named, not Jesse James, but Scarface—much more fitting for one of the world's wilder places.

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.


Watch These Human Slinkies Dance in a Neon Disco

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If you have ever sent a coiled Slinky somersaulting down a flight of stairs, the moves in this dance performance will look familiar. Veniamin Shows Inc.’s“Human Slinky” mimics the movement of the undulating coils of a Slinky to create this odd, yet alluring bright neon performance.

The troupe consists of Romanian gymnastic duo Veronica Chicioroaga and Veniamin Oprea. Their performances date as far back as 1995, the Human Slinky appearing at sports games half-time shows, variety shows, and festivals around the world.

The Human Slinky is an internet sensation, and it’s easy to see why. In this video, two performers inside giant tubes manipulate the colorful material, making it retract, bob, sway, and form various patterns much like toy Slinkies. 

While the Slinky toy itself was first sold in the 1940s, it’s difficult to pin down the origins of the Human Slinky dance. Other dancing troupes have incorporated the style into performances, such as the masked Swiss theatrical dance crew Mummenschanz, which does a number of various bizarre dance styles. The troupe is said to be the “original masters” of the human Slinky, reports the Huffington Post.

The two-person Human Slinky team produces other “unusual specialty acts.” They have done a number where the two play two octopuses.

They have shimmied as blowfish.

And if the Slinky costumes didn’t already look alien enough, the dancing troupe also does a performance called “Veniamin’s Eyes" in which they move like weird bug-eyed monsters. 

Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.

The World’s First Travel Writer Was a Guy From Ancient Greece

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An 1819 painting of ancient Livadeia, a city "no less adorned than the most prosperous of Greek cities," wrote Pausanias. (Photo: Public Domain)

In ancient times, tourists and travelers in Greece have gotten into some pretty intense situations. An adventure-seeking traveler would bathe in the river Herkyna, then consume sacrificial meat, wander through a dark cave of Livadeia to seek out the oracle, and emerge “paralyzed with terror and unconscious both of himself and of his surroundings.” And that's just a one-day itinerary.

So wrote Greek geographer Pausanias, one of the very first travel writers, in his second-century book Hellados Periegesis, or Description of Greece. As the oldest and most detailed travel guidebook uncovered from ancient times, it is often considered the guidebook that started the genre of travel literature we know today. 

“There were similar guides, but they were much smaller," says Maria Pretzler, professor of ancient history at Swansea University in Wales and author of Pausanias: Travel Writing in Ancient Greece. "[Pausanias’ writing] was definitely the biggest and most comprehensive from antiquity.” His 10-volume book, she says, is “the oldest travel guide that still works.”

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Trophonius' temple was at the oracle. "The most famous things in the grove are a temple and image of Trophonius," wrote Pausania. (Photo: Public Domain

You can find Pausanias’ descriptions from the series sprinkled in just about every travel guide to Greece. Pretzler, for example, hasn’t found a travel guide that doesn’t refer to Pausanias’ account of the oracle in a grove at the ancient capital of Livadeia—a now barren site no one would ever know about had it not been for his writing.

Each of the 10 books details a particular region of Greece. Pausanias describes dozens of cities, from Athens, Olympia, Delphi, to Mycenae. He even trekked up steep mountain roads to visit the more isolated, small villages. The entire Description of Greece took Pausanias at least 20 years to research and complete. Like the authors of modern culture guidebooks who write about the essential artworks and landmarks to visit in a foreign city, Pausanias points out to travelers, scholars, and excavators throughout time what is worth seeing in Greece.

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A map of Greece outlining which parts of the country is described in each volume of Description of Greece. (Photo: Tomisti/CC BY-SA 4.0)

Very little is known about Pausanias’ personal life, but it is believed he hailed from a wealthy family in Lydia in Asia Minor, which is modern-day Turkey. Pausanias was a well-educated man, whose family must have been able to afford to send him to larger cities for his education. 

“Traveling was done on a grand scale, so it was quite expensive,” says Pretzler. “They have quite the entourage, with a carriage drawn by oxen, and pack animals. You have to imagine when Pausanias rides into one of these tiny towns in the Peloponnese mountains it would have really been the kind of event where the whole village comes together.”

While his book focuses on his tour of mainland Greece and the Peloponnese peninsula, Pausanias also traveled to Egypt, Italy, and the Middle East.    

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A painting of the pillars of the temple at Karnac in Thebes, Egypt, a poor city according to Pausanias. (Photo: Wellcome Library, London/CC BY 4.0)

Since the traveling was done by foot or by carriage, Pausanias most likely stayed overnight at the towns and cities he visited. He spoke with locals to document the history of the town, noting myths, monuments, art, statues inscribed with laws, and events—such as the ancient Olympic games. The roads were rocky and he would sometimes indicate that a traveler would need to be a fit walker to scale up mountain paths to reach some of the secluded temples. 

By the second century AD, Greece was firmly under the control of the Roman Empire, and there were only a few more years of ancient culture left, explains Pretzler. Both Greeks and Romans revered ancient Greek culture, and still wanted to know about the cities mentioned in Homer’s epics and Herodotus’ histories. Pausanias' writing may have been a means to document and share those cities. But in the ancient world, there was no such thing as a travel guide yet. Without a definitive genre for his books, it's uncertain how Pausanias intended Description of Greece to be used and who his exact audience was.

“It’s probably either he wants people to read it and basically travel in their heads, because Greece is the country that people read about in all the earlier texts that were the most popular books at the time,” reasons Pretzler. “Or, he wants people to read it in advance of their trip or perhaps they take it on their trips.”

article-imageSounion, home to the temple of Poseidon, begins Pausanias' guide. (Photo: Miltos Gikas/CC BY 2.0)

The books are difficult to read. His language is highly detailed and “almost pious,” Pretzler says, explaining that he deliberately wanted to sound like a serious academic who spent 20 years gathering accurate information.

“He doesn’t give you any practicalities,” says Heinrich Hall, an archeologist who often refers to Pausanias while he gives tours of Greece with Peter Sommer Travels. “He doesn't tell you where to stay, where to eat, how long to stay somewhere. His focus is what you should pay attention to when you’re there—what is worth seeing.”

Unlike Yelp, TripAdvisor, or Lonely Planet, Pausanias doesn’t give detailed advice or reviews, like whether you should eat the olives in Olympia or try the wine in Mycenae, says Hall. Rather, Pausanias provides insights on culture, and local beliefs and traditions that have been crucial in art history. Here, he shows his knowledge of artists’ styles:

“There is also a sanctuary of Apollo which is very old, as are the sculptures on the pediments. The wooden image (xoanon) of the god is also ancient; it is nude and of a very large size. None of the locals could name the artist, but anyone who has already seen the Herakles of Sikyon would assume that the Apollo of Aigeira is a work by the same artist, namely Laphaes of Phleious.” (7.26.6.)

article-imageIt is surprising the buildings he excludes or doesn't describe in detail, such as the Parthenon in Athens. It's perhaps one of the most famous buildings in Greece, yet his description is lackluster and rather casual, says Hall. (Photo: Neokortex/CC BY 3.0)

Archeologists even flipped through his books while completing the first major excavations of Athens, Delphi, and Olympia. In the early and mid 19th century when English lords traveled on their grand tours, they would bring the appropriate volumes of Pausanias’ for their stop in Greece, Hall says. Like those 19th-century travelers, Hall carries the relevant books of Pausanias with him when he leads tours of Athens and in the Peloponnese, reading out sections to his group.

“We actually take him and quote him directly because he describes the appearance of buildings that aren’t standing anymore,” Hall says. “Rather than paraphrasing, we have the opportunity to directly quote him, which brings the second century character as a speaking voice into our tours.”

Many tour guides of mainland Greece will turn to Pausanias automatically or unknowingly, says Hall. In addition to the monasteries and temples that remain in ruins, Pausanias also preserves the people in his texts.

“If you look at modern travel writing we tend to be much more interested in what people say about people than what people say about things,” he says. “He produced something that in its context and in its time as far as we know is unique.”

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An 1829 copy of Pausanias Description of Greece. The books were carried by many travelers during the 19th century. (Photo: Public Domain)

It wasn’t until the 19th century that people began writing travel guides again and started to shape and establish the genre. Some of the very first guidebooks were written about Greece, and they were essentially an update on what Pausanias had written, says Pretzler. “If you have the Blue Guide to Greece, which is very focused on the cultural stuff like Pausanias, you get pretty large chunks of [his work] paraphrased and sometimes quoted.”

Some scholars and adventurers have made itineraries based on his descriptions independently, establishing a 21st-century version of the “Pausanias tour.” It may be almost 2,000 years later, but the pioneering writer's travel tips live on.

The Haphazard History of the U.S. Open's Best and Worst Venues, Soon to Be Rubble

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Louis Armstrong Stadium, with CitiField to the left and, in the distance, the Whitestone Bridge. (Photo: Kai Brinker/CC BY-SA 2.0)

Fans attending the U.S. Open for the first time always find it curious that the championship's second biggest venue is named after virtuoso American trumpeter Louis B. Armstrong. Did Armstrong have a secret tennis past? Or was it just a relic of a different age, when we named things after actual humans and didn't sell rights to the highest corporate bidder?

The answer is even stranger: Louis B. Armstrong Stadium, in fact, began life as one of the earliest examples of a venue that was named for a sponsoring company. 

The stadium, set to be demolished in the coming months to make way for a bigger, more modern venue carrying the same name, is today, an oddity, even on the campus of the U.S.T.A.'s Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, a haphazardly built maze of dozens of courts in Flushing Meadows, Queens. 

Armstrong's seats are cramped affairs, its court a large, hot rectangle, while the stands, with no protection from the sun, might get even hotter. It is not, in short, a fan or player favorite.

"If it's not completely full it looks half empty," the Serbian Janko Tipsarevic said Tuesday after beating the 32nd-seeded American Sam Querrey on Armstrong. "It's not fair."

Shoved up against it, however, to the east, is the Grandstand, a smaller affair (6,000 capacity, versus Armstrong's 10,000-plus), with an appropriately smaller court, that is widely beloved. ("Grandstand. The Grandstand," Tipsarevic repeated Tuesday after being asked his favorite court on the grounds, an opinion shared by many players.)

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The Grandstand, cut into the side of Louis Armstrong, during a match in 2015, with onlookers at Armstrong perched above. (Photo: Steven Pisano/CC BY 2.0)

Yet, sometime after the U.S. Open concludes on September, both will be rubble. That will end a legacy at the tennis center that dates back over five decades, while also, officially, turning a page on the sport's rich Queens past. 

Both Armstrong and the Grandstand began life in the early 1960s as the Singer Bowl, built by the Singer Sewing Company. The company fashioned the rectangular, 18,000-capacity venue in anticipation of the 1964 World's Fair, donating the venue to the fair, after which it was supposed to be demolished. But it lived on, giving Singer some surprising returns on its initial one-off investment.

According to the New York Times, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Ella Fitzgerald, and The Doors played there in the late '60s. The Mets also celebrated their 1968 world title there, in addition to several other large events, like a Ukrainian cardinal celebrating Mass (strangely, the morning after the Doors concert) on Aug. 3, 1968. 

In 1973, a few years before it began hosting the U.S. Open, the venue was christened the Louis B. Armstrong Memorial Stadium, after the renowned bandleader, a Corona, Queens native, who had died in 1971. When the USTA left the Forest Hills Stadium for Armstrong in 1978, the name—grandfathered in at this point—stuck. The stadium was rebuilt for tennis, and, with some room to spare, the Grandstand tacked on too.  

Up until 1997, Armstrong was the tennis center's premier court, hosting each year's finals. But Arthur Ashe Stadium—the largest purpose-built tennis stadium in the world—was completed that year just a hard forehand away, taking Armstrong's mojo, while also, perhaps, dooming Armstrong and the Grandstand to their fates. 

''The new stadium is beautiful; it seems very well put together versus the old place,'' Pete Sampras said shortly after Ashe's opening, before almost immediately getting nostalgic. ''But I kind of miss the old stadium because it's kind of where I made my mark in '90.''

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The facade of the Singer Bowl. (Photo: Doug Coldwell/CC BY-SA 3.0)

The demolition of Armstrong is part of an ambitious, $550 million campaign the USTA has set upon to modernize its grounds in Queens. That includes a now-functioning roof over Ashe, as well as a new Grandstand, which opened this year to (mostly) positive reviews. And then there is the new Armstrong, set to be built on the site of the old one and scheduled to open in 2018. 

"I love that court," the 29th-ranked Sam Querrey said Tuesday of the old Armstrong, when asked if he'd miss it. "It's one of my favorites. Hopefully I'll get a chance to play on the new one, whenever it's done." 

But all of that work, however much better for the USTA's bottom line, will also mean that the last vestige of the grounds where John McEnroe, Chris Evert, Steffi Graf, and Pete Sampras were all crowned champs will be gone. 

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The old Grandstand on Tuesday night. (Photo: Erik Shilling)

Or, maybe, just maybe, there's some life yet. Last year's Open was said to be the last for the old Grandstand, to become a practice court this year in anticipation of its removal. But a strange thing happened this week: Court 10 was deemed unplayable, and officials opted to open the old Grandstand for competitive matches for one last swan song. 

On Tuesday night, Nick Kyrgios, the controversial, if effortlessly watchable and charismatic young Australian player, faced off there against Aljaž Bedene, a Slovenian-turned-British player ranked 77th in the world, in one of the last matches of the day.

The lights were on, but the billboards were blank, and the stadium was less-than-half empty. The crowd, though, was in good spirits, including a hearty contingent cheering on Kyrgios, who was battling a hip injury. It felt more than full. 

When the FBI Grilled Julia Child Over Her Alleged Communist Ties

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A version of this story originally appeared on Muckrock.com.

Anyone with Google, a passing interest in espionage, or a love of Amy Adams knows by now that the life of television personality and French cook Julia Child was entwined in the U.S. intelligence apparatus.

During World War II, the future-famed cook joined the Office of Strategic Services, the United States’ massive intelligence organization and the pre-curser to the CIA. Her career with the organization spanned continents and a number of positions and culminated in a life in post-war Paris and a marriage to fellow OSS agent Paul Child.

More ambiguous, however, is Child’s relationship to the FBI as the U.S. moved out of the joyous tidings of V-J Day and into the cold uncertainty of McCarthyism. Although a number of documents have apparently been deleted, documents released by the FBI on Julia Child contain evidence of a seemingly exhaustive interview conducted in 1957.

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Although McCarthyism’s close associations between communism, disloyalty, and homosexuality led many to believe the FBI had questioned Paul Child’s sexuality, Julia’s file reflects only her association with friends and suspected communists Jane Foster and her husband George Michael Zlatovski.

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Although run-ins between Paul Child and the FBI had made him an avowed anti-McCarthyist as early as 1955, the interview, conducted with Julia on February 14, 1957, traced her friendship to Jane Foster all the way back to their mutual tenure with the OSS.

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You can read the full document below. 

The Delicate Glass Sea Creatures of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka

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Specimen of Blaschka Marine Life: Synapta maculata– sea cucumber. Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, Dresden Germany, 1885. Lent by Cornell University, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. at the Corning Museum of Glass. (Photo by Dylan Thuras)

In the late 1800s a mysterious menagerie of sea creatures was let loose on the world.

They came in a remarkable variety of forms: covered in spikes, writhing masses of legs, purple gelatinous lumps, transparent bubbling orbs. They swam through boarding schools in Minnesota, floating through the Vienna Natural History Museum, and squirming through a hundred high schools across Japan. At the height of their expansion, there were over 10,000, found everywhere from New Zealand to Calcutta.

Astonishing in form and beauty, these creatures comprised 700 varieties of invertebrate marine models sculpted in glass by Bohemian father-and-son team Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka. They were remarkable for their fragile exteriors, scientific accuracy, and beauty. But gradually, these glass animals began to disappear, their habitats shifting into dusty closets and museum storage. People began to forget that these incredible glass creations had existed in the first place.

But now, the creatures have returned.  

article-imageSpecimen of Blaschka Marine Life:Astroides calycularis (1885), Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, Dresden Germany, 1885. Lent by Cornell University, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. at the Corning Museum of Glass. (Photo by Dylan Thuras)

One such collection of forgotten Blaschka marine models was rediscovered in a cabinet at Cornell in the 1960s. Today, the 570 Cornell models are overseen and conserved by the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York. The museum is currently showing the models in its exhibition Fragile Legacy: The Marine Invertebrate Glass Models of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, curated by Alexandra Ruggiero and Marvin Bolt and on view May 14, 2016 through January 8, 2017.

The marine models are shown alongside preparatory drawings—nearly as beautiful as the models themselves—and the father-and-son team's original workbench and tools. It is a deep look into the Blaschkas' methods, which at first glance seem not just impressive to modern glass workers, but impossible.

article-imageAssociate conservator Astrid van Giffen working on conserving a Blaschka model. (Photo courtesy the Corning Museum of Glass.)

As the Corning Museum of Glass has continued to study and conserve these models, some of the mysterious techniques of the Blaschkas have begun to emerge. The world had never seen anything quite like the beautiful, scientifically accurate Blaschka models. Some were available for as little as 20 cents (adjusted for inflation, that's still an affordable $5) in mail-order catalogs like Ward's Natural Science Establishment. Universities and museums bought the aquatic models in bulk, and high schools around the world ordered unique glass creations as teaching tools for their classes. Even private natural history enthusiasts added them to their collections.

The Blaschkas' sea anemone, radiolarians, and other underwater creatures emerged into a world primed for them both practically and philosophically. During the 18th century, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution had left previous social and religious institutions collapsing. In their place science and education had emerged as new shining lights. While the notion of God's fixed unchanging kingdom was challenged by evolution, the natural world was being re-created in taxidermy and dioramas in museums around the world. Zoos, botanical gardens, aquariums, and museums were busy building their own miniature man-made universes.

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Specimen of Blaschka Marine Life: Octopus Salutii (Nr. 573), Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, Dresden Germany, 1885. Lent by Cornell University, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. (Photo courtesy the Corning Museum of Glass.)

The advent of cheap plate glass allowed for the first major public aquarium to open in 1853 in London, but museums had a problem. While they aimed to populate their collections with the world's animals, the stranger creatures of the oceans were particularly problematic. Impossible to render in taxidermy, the ocean's invertebrates had to be shown as wet specimens, floating in jars of alcohol. However, without bones to structure them, they collapsed into small puddles at the bottom of the jar, their colors fading away.

It was this void that the Blaschka models filled, but the story begins with a void of Leopold Blaschka's own.

In 1850, at the age of 28, Leopold Blaschka lost his wife to cholera. His father died two years later. Heart aching, Leopold set out an a year-long journey from his native Bohemia to the United States. His aim was to lose himself in natural history, which he had always had an interest in, and let the world's natural wonders soothe his soul. When his ship was becalmed for two weeks in the Azores islands west of Portugal, Leopold filled his days watching bioluminescent jellyfish emerge from the depths. He wrote:

"the darkness of the sea, which is as smooth as a mirror; there emerges all around in various places a flashlike bundle of light beams, as if it is surrounded by thousands of sparks, that form true bundles of fire and of other bright lighting spots"

Born into a family of craftsmen and a maker of glass eyes and jewelry, Leopold imagined these translucent creatures captured in glass. Unbeknown to him at the time, much of the rest of his life, and his yet-to-be-born son's life, would be dedicated to capturing that momentary vision with ever increasing amounts of scientific accuracy and beauty. 

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Specimen of Blaschka Marine Life. Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, Dresden Germany, 1885. Lent by Cornell University, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. at the Corning Museum of Glass. (Photo by Dylan Thuras)

On returning from his trip, Leopold remarried. His son Rudolf was born a few years later. Rudolf grew up in the family glass-making business, learning the craft at his father's side. At the age of 23, Rudolf began professionally assisting his father. Working together, they began creating many of the glass marine-life models celebrated today.

Since these were scientific models, the Blaschkas were focused intently on the accuracy of their creations. They used the most up-to-date scientific illustrations they could get their hands on, as well as making their own illustrations. "The Blaschkas were much more than masters of glass-working," says Eric Goldschmidt, Corning's Flameworking & Properties of Glass Supervisor. "Without their skills in illustration, they would have had a very difficult time developing the necessary process to construct many of their models."

As their construction techniques got better, so did their study methods. They acquired wet specimens from around the world, went on their own collection trips, and even built a small aquarium so they could work from life. For their glass models, the father-and-son team used flame working, done over a wooden table using a foot-pumped bellows. The small bodies of jellyfish and squid were created from blown glass. 

One of the reasons that the glass models appeared nearly impossible to glass workers when first observed is that they aren't exclusively glass. "They were clearly very skilled in processes that go well beyond most glassworkers," says Goldschmidt, "as they were masters of painting and enameling as well as their ability to work with paper and other materials in their models."

To increase efficiency, the Blaschkas pre-produced many of the smaller pieces and kept them in cardboard cases. Boxes of tiny tentacles and little jellyfish heads filled their work space. For over 30 years, they likely averaged a marine model per day. They are believed to have produced over 10,000 such models in total.

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Box of Kleine Augen or "Small Eyes" in the Fragile Legacy exhibit at the Corning Museum of Glass. (Photo by Dylan Thuras)

As the delicate models aged, they were often moved into storage, or lost altogether. For years many of the Blaschka models remained hidden in closets, their fragile bodies in disrepair. It is only recently that their delicate beauty has begun to resurface. In 2002, the new director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University found a collection of Blaschka marine models languishing in a storage room in their mollusk department.

Leading the charge in returning the Blaschkas to prominence is the Corning Museum of Glass which, as part of their conservation efforts for the Fragile Legacy show, has begun solving some of the mysteries of the Blaschka's unique construction methods. One technique associate conservator Astrid van Giffen has used is looking at the models under UV light to better understand the different materials the models were constructed from. As they investigate each piece, new methods and materials reveal themselves.

Even as the makeup of models becomes clearer, the mystique of the Blaschkas and their marine creations continues to grow. One search the Corning Museum has undertaken is to create a map cataloging where all the models have ended up. While a number of the major collections are well known, and being conserved, the fate of many of the Blaschkas' creations remains mysterious. Somewhere out there, specimens of a beautiful and rare species are lurking in the deep.  

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The models under UV light. The tiny life-sized version of Podocoryne carnea under long wave UV light shows the orange fluorescence of shellac, which was used to glue it onto its paper card base. (Photo courtesy Corning Museum of Glass)

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Specimen of Blaschka Marine Life: Ommastrephes sagittatus (Nr. 578), Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, Dresden Germany, 1885. Lent by Cornell University, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the Corning Museum of Glass. (Photo by Dylan Thuras)

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Specimen of Blaschka Marine Life: Perigonimus vestitus (Nr. 172), Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, Dresden Germany, 1885. Lent by Cornell University, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. (Photo courtesy the Corning Museum of Glass)

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Chief Conservator Stephen Koob photographs a Blaschka model. (Photo courtesy the Corning Museum of Glass.)

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Thalassianthus aster (Blashka Nr. 115), before and after Corning Museum conservation efforts. (Photo courtesy the Corning Museum of Glass.)

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A good example of the mixed media. The interior of the arm is made of painted paper rather than glass. Specimen of Blaschka Marine Life, Argonauta argo (Nr. 549), Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, Dresden Germany, 1885. Lent by Cornell University, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and at the Corning Museum of Glass. (Photo by Dylan Thuras)

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Specimen of Blaschka Marine Life: Tubularia indivisa (Nr. 191a), Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, Dresden Germany, 1885. Lent by Cornell University, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and at the Corning Museum of Glass. (Photo by Dylan Thuras)  

Places You Can No Longer Go: Hoffman Auto Showroom

Found: The First Identical Twin Puppies Ever Discovered

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Kurt de Cramer, a vet working in a suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa, was performing a C-section on an Irish wolfhound when he found something he never had before—two live puppies, attached to one placenta. Identical twins.

Only once before had de Cramer seen two puppies sharing a placenta, he told BBC Earth, and they had died before they were born. These two, though, were alive. He delivered them, along with their five littermates.

Although de Cramer suspected that the puppies were identical, he couldn’t be sure. They had slightly different markings. But DNA samples of their blood and tissue, as well as comparisons to their littermates confirmed what he had suspected: the adorable puppies were identical twins.

It’s rare to find identical twins in species besides our own. Often, the BBC explains, the placenta of other animals cannot support two fetuses on one placenta, so even if identical twins begin to form in the womb, they don’t make it through the full gestation period.

It’s possible that identical twins are more common in dogs than we know, but this is the first confirmed pair ever to be discovered. Their names are Cullen and Romulus, and they’re doing just fine.

Every day, we highlight one newly found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 


Is Carbonated Milk Coming To A Store Near You?

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The milk... it's missing something... (Photo: Carsten Schertzer/CC BY 2.0)

Sure, milk is pretty cool. It's got calcium. Celebs love it, and your mom probably gave you some with cookies at least once in your life.

But don't you sometimes wish it was a little more like seltzer?

Swedish-Danish dairy company Arla is hoping so. Their new product plan, announced Tuesday, includes a line of "carbonated milk and fruit beverages," designed to compete with sports drinks and sodas. "Our milk should not only be enjoyed from litre-sized packages bought in supermarkets, it should also be available as a tasty beverage on the go," the company said.

According to the Local, Arla will test out this plan in the United Kingdom, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates. If that goes well, they will "extend the range to other countries."

As the Local points out, past efforts to get people to like fizzed-up milk have largely failed. Coca Cola's aspiring milk, juice and bubbles drink, Vio, was named one of history's "Top 10 Bad Beverage Ideas" by Time.

A similar combo called "Tango Strange Soda" debuted in Britain in 2003, but was pulled the next year. "The concept of the drink has proved too challenging to consumers," executives explained at the time.

Now it's 2016, though, and anything can happen. Bring on the fizzy, creamy beverage chimeras.

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.

What's So Endearing About Snakes and Toads? Ask a Herper

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A San Francisco garter snake. One of the most beautiful snakes in the world. (Photo: Brian Gratwicke/CC BY 2.0)

Birding might be the most well-known animal watching pastime, but to herpers, the really exciting creatures are the ones found much closer to the ground.

In case you’ve been sleeping on the joys of herping, it is the practice of seeking out reptiles and amphibians, either for the sheer enjoyment of witnessing them in their natural state, or for a little bit of citizen science.

The name derives from the field of herpetology, which is the study of reptiles and amphibians. Herpers are those civilian explorers who have found a fascination (and often a beauty) in creatures that many people might consider creepy.

“I started when I was 11 years old. I saw a snake in my yard, and went from there,” says Mike Pingleton, one of the Project Administrators of HerpMapper, an online project that is working to use herper-collected data to map reptile and amphibian populations across the globe. “That was in the early Seventies and I’ve been doing it ever since. So clearly it’s something I enjoy doing. ... It’s more of an obsession than anything else.”

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A turtle chilling in Texas. (Photo: Mike Pingleton/Used with Permission)

According to Pingleton, recreational herping didn’t take off until the early 1990s, with the advent of the internet. Herping, like birding, has long been around in some form or another, but began taking shape as a more formalized activity in the late 20th century.

As Pingleton explains, it was initially a rather lonely hobby. “Back then when I was a kid it was just sort of a solitary pursuit," he says. "The internet hadn’t been invented yet, and your networks for herping were local herpetological societies or nature centers." However, with the community connectivity provided by the internet, the formerly disparate herpers were able to form a larger, more bonded community, sharing information among each other, and finding like-minded herp fans.

Most recreational herpers refer to themselves as “field herpers,” and their goal is to experience the creatures rather than capturing them and keeping them in captivity. “The goal is to enjoy the animal, not change its life,” says Pingleton. “It’s not really about going out and finding things and putting them in a bag and taking them home. It’s the act of enjoying the animals where they live with as little impact as possible.”

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A little pig frog in the Everglades. (Photo: Mike Pingleton/Used with Permission)

The other aspect of field herping incorporates acts of citizen science. Since people are already out in the wild looking under rocks, and trying to find semi-hidden creatures, some herpers take it upon themselves to catalogue and report their findings to the scientific community. In this way, herping offers the option to crowdsource a complicated and often hidden arm of biology.

Pingelton’s HerpMapper is a good example of this. Using a phone app, amateur herpers can geolocate their finds to an overall map, which could then be accessed by scientific authorities. Many herpers begin as just curious explorers, but then move into more scientific reporting as their interest in the animals, and the conservation of the habitats that support them, grows.

While the herping community has grown over the years, it is still a far cry from such massively popular activities as birding. “I would characterize us as how birding was maybe 50-60 years ago,” says Pingleton. “We might fill one baseball stadium, but we certainly couldn’t fill two.”

Thanks to a larger degree of knowledge of the natural world in the general public (cheers, internet!), people seem less afraid of or creeped out by herps like toads and snakes than they once were. And this in turn has led to a wider general acceptance of herping.  

But even though it’s not as popular as birding, it does have certain advantages that birders will never know—most immediately, the fact that reptiles and amphibians hang out on the ground. “You’re never going to have a wren perch on your hand so you can have a close look at it that way,” says Pingleton. “Herpers have the opportunity to pick up a snake, or look a turtle in the eye.”

That ability to get up close and personal is some of the appeal of searching for herps. While each herper’s specific interest in the pastime is different, many of them become interested in it due to the unique nature of the animals. As Pingleton points out, checking out strange creatures is a fascinating way to experience the natural world.

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A tree lizard spotted in Thailand.  (Photo: Mike Pingleton/Used with Permission)

If you find yourself drawn to salamaders, snakes, frogs, and the like, Pingelton recommends picking up a field guide, or finding another herper in your area that might be willing to familiarize you with the local herps. And from there it’s all about going out and getting used to looking for your quarry. Getting good at herping is a cumulative process that gets more rewarding the more you do it.

“In a sense, it’s a very personal discovery process,” says Pingleton. “The first time you look for a toad, you might have a hard time finding a toad, until you find you first one, then all of a sudden your brain says, ‘Oh, okay!’ Then the next toad is a little easier to spot.”

For his part, Pingleton has an ever-evolving life list of herps that he’d still like to see. He recently got to see another of his longtime loves, the San Francisco garter snake. “Many people think it’s the most beautiful snake in the world," says Pingleton. "It’s only left in a few protected places."

Hopefully, the growing herper community, and its efforts as citizen scientists will be able to keep such incredible creepy crawlies going for years to come.  

This 84-Year-Old Retiree Wants 'the Internet' to See a Massive Mushroom He Found

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You may not be able to tell from the photo, but, as his granddaughter wrote on Facebook, Don Smith is a very happy man. That's a mushroom he's got on his lap, a 15-pound mushroom, which he found on his 100-acre property in North Dorchester, Ontario, about 90 miles southwest of Toronto. 

"I look for them once in awhile because I know a few people who like them," Smith explained to the CBC. "I don't like them myself, but I give them to my friends."

The mushroom is a puffball, which grow in the wild and can be eaten, though Smith said he isn't much of a fan. 

"I've tried them a time or two myself, but I don't care for the taste of them. It's kind of a woody taste," he told the CBC. "They say fry them in butter."

The puffball Smith found is 20 inches, which, while large, is still rather short of the record. That belongs to a 66.5-inch puffball found in England in 2010, according to the CBC.

Still, Smith said his was probably too big for the person he gifted it to.

"I imagine he'll have to have a few friends in to help him eat it," Smith said. "It's a fair size."

Indeed, it is. 

Watch A '60s Magician Play The Mellotron

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Inside the reception room of a large house somewhere in London is Eric Robinson; a musical composer and BBC television personality. A slow instrumental plays in the background. But, as Robinson tells us from his armchair, the song is not a record, it's the Mellotron. 

It's 1965, and the Mellotron is not a mild-mannered robot, but a musical computer for your home. In this British Pathé video, the two men behind the development of this new instrument show how it works. "It makes the actual sounds of the orchestra," says Robinson.

Robinson and David Nixon, his son-in-law, stand proudly next to the contraption. Nixon is frustrated, musically. The Mellotron, if nothing else, frees the musically inept among us. The right-hand side of the keyboard plays lead instruments, and the left-hand supplies the rhythms. To show this in action, Nixon plays his party piece.

Nixon was one of Britain's most beloved magicians. So you're right to be suspicious when he plays a multi-instrumental version of the blues with two fingers. It could be magic. That aside, we're all thinking the same thing: what does this tune sound like with a trombone background? Nixon hears our thoughts, and the ditty is instantly improved. The machine works because each key is connected to a tape, which plays the sound.

Nixon demonstrates the full range of the musical computer and bangs out a Viennese waltz. The magic man is then replaced by an actual pianist who will "really show what the Mellotron can do," says Robinson. A cool mod-styled man appears out of thin air, and plays out the video, furiously tinkling the ivories. 

Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.

Why Northerners Think All Southerners Have One Accent

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The Southern states contain many micro-accents and dialects. (Photo: hans.slegers/shutterstock.com)

The tiny island of Ocracoke, off the coast of North Carolina, is unimpeachably Southern. The most remote of the Outer Banks islands, founded by Sir Walter Raleigh and the point of capture for Blackbeard the pirate, it’s a favorite vacation destination throughout the South—sort of the Nantucket for those below the Mason Dixon line. And yet if you were to speak to an Ocracokian, you wouldn’t necessarily know it by their accent.

In fact, there’s a pretty fair chance you’d have no idea where they’re from.

Being a small island, having been settled by Europeans very early, and being isolated from other parts of the South, Ocracoke has a singularly strange accent, some parts of which do not sound Southern at all. The most classic accent example in Ocracoke is appropriately nautical: “high tide.” Ocracokians do not say “hah tahd,” as the rest of the South would. Instead they say “hoi toid.” It’s a weird remnant from colonial days, trapped in amber.

The fact that Ocracoke has a weird accent is not, in itself, weird; there are plenty of pockets of strange accents scattered around the country and the world. What makes Ocracoke so unusual is that it’s located in the South, which linguistically does not really operate in the same way as other regions.

The South is, just like the North, composed of dozens of micro-accents and dialects, but Southern accents do not really divide up evenly as they do in the North. With much greater population density, Northeastern accents can be split fairly evenly by geography: your proximity to the cities of Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia has a large effect on your speech patterns. The South is divided in much more peculiar ways, and even the devoutly Southern linguists I spoke to, all of whom were very proud and defiant about their own Southern speech, said they’d essentially be unable to distinguish a Houstonian from an Atlantan from a Memphian.

But that doesn’t mean those differences aren’t there—they’re just split in a different way. If you want to really distinguish between Southern speakers, you’ll have to readjust what kind of information you’re hoping to find.


The first problem with defining a Southern accent is agreeing on what is the South. “If you ask 50 people to draw a circle around what they think is the South, you’ll get 50 different responses,” says Dennis Preston, a linguist (and proud Southerner) who specializes in the ways non-linguists perceive accents. Simply going by any areas which include elements typically associated with the South will include parts of many states not normally assumed to be Southern at all: as far north as the southern sections of Pennsylvania, Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois.

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Downtown Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo: Sean Pavone/shutterstock.com)

There are really only a few major linguistic quirks that associate a speaker as “Southern” to the vast majority of Americans. One is the monophthization of the vowel sound “eye,” as in the word “guide.” In most of the country, that’s pronounced as a diphthong, or compound vowel: it moves from “ah” to “ee.” In the South, that’s flattened into a monophthong, which is made up of only one vowel, so “guide” would sound somewhere in between “gad” and “god.”

Preston conducted a study in which he took pronunciations of the word “guide” by speakers in several cities on a North/South spectrum, ranging from Saginaw, Michigan straight south to Dauphin, Alabama. Amazingly, the subjects were able to not only pick out the Southern versus the Northern speakers, but could actually order them, on average, correctly, based on just how flattened that vowel was.

Another monophthongization is in the “oy” vowel, which outside the South is a compound vowel made up of “oh” and “ee.” In the same way “guide” is flattened, so is “boil,” becoming closer to “ball.”

Perhaps the most well-studied quirk is one used by Bill Labov to form a map of the South. (Labov, of the University of Pennsylvania, is easily the most important American linguist of the 20th century, maybe ever. I have literally never conducted an interview with a linguist in which Labov wasn’t mentioned.) That quirk is known as the pin-pen merger. Throughout the South, those two words are homophones, sounding the same; this is not the case anywhere else in the country.

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A map based on The Atlas of North American English by W. Labov, S. Ash & C. Boberg, showing where in the US the words "pin" and "pen" are pronounced the same - known as the "pin-pen merger". (Photo: Angr/CC BY SA 2.5)

There are many, many more speech patterns that are associated with the South, but some of those are waning in use, or are not used in certain sections of the region, or are only used by people of a certain age, class, race, or some other signifier. The fact that those few widely recognized features are part of such a gigantic area is, frankly, crazy; there’s no other region that includes so many obvious features in nearly 100% of speakers. Imagine even talking about a “Northeastern” accent. Impossible!


With a few exceptions, which I’ll get to in a second, the major dividing lines in the South are not geographic. “Currently, you're starting to see a big rural/urban split in the 20th and 21st centuries,” says Paul Reed, a specialist in Appalachian English at the University of South Carolina. This is not really true in the rest of the country; someone from Long Island or New Jersey has, with some variations due to class, age, or ethnic identification, the exact same accent as someone from Manhattan or Brooklyn. A farmer from rural Wisconsin has the same accent as a broker in Madison or Milwaukee. Not so in the South.

“The cities in the South are tending to not sound quite as ‘Southern’ as they have in the past,” says Reed. What Reed means is that native speakers from the largest Southern urban/suburban areas—Atlanta, Memphis, Louisville—still sound identifiably Southern, but, well, kind of less so than they did, and less so than rural speakers still do.

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Kevin Spacey as Frank Underwood in House of Cards, with a rural South Carolina accent. (Photo: Courtesy Netflix)

That’s most obvious in what’s referred to outside the South (and outside the linguistic community) as the “drawl.” Within linguistics, it’s sometimes called “vowel breaking,” which makes it sound kind of bad. Really what Southerners are doing is adding complexity and layers to certain vowels. Think of the word “friend.” Outside the South, that’s a very simple vowel sound: “eh.” Frehnd. But in the rural South, that vowel sound has a great deal of complication: it turns that one vowel sound into not only two, but maybe even three or four different vowels. A rural Southern speaker might turn “friend” into “free-ay-ind.” The word “drawl” implies that people are speaking more slowly, which isn’t really the case: what they’re doing is cramming more sounds into a single word, which Northern ears interpret as taking more time.

In urban and suburban centers, that word “friend” is still more complex than in the North and West, but not quite as complex; maybe it only has two distinct vowel sounds, rather than three or four.

Another example: remember our old friend, “guide”? So that monophthization actually has a few more layers that can tell you where a Southerner might be from—or, in a very fun example, reveal that Kevin Spacey’s rural South Carolina accent in House of Cards is not quite right.

So that monophthization happens throughout the South when that vowel sound comes before what’s called a “voiced” consonant. The difference between a voiced and a voiceless consonant is that if you try to make the shortest possible sound with that consonant you can, a voiced consonant will vibrate your vocal cords, where a voiceless will not. The sound “k” is voiceless; you can make it without actually vibrating your vocal cords. But “d” is voiced; if you try to just make the sound of that letter, it’ll either come out “duh,” vibrating your vocal cords, or more like “t” if you try not to vibrate them.

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Downtown Memphis, Tennessee. (Photo: photosounds/shutterstock.com)

Throughout the South, that “eye” sound is turned into “ah” when it comes before a voiced consonant, which is why “guide” sounds the way it does. But only in rural areas do people do that same sound change before a voiceless consonant. So if somebody pronounces “right” like “raht,” you’ll know they’re from the rural South; city-dwellers pronounce that word pretty much the same way Northerners do. Reed mentioned that Spacey’s character, though he’s supposed to be from rural South Carolina, voices his vowels in a way more similar to somebody from an urban area like Charleston.


Besides the urban/rural split, you’d be surprised at how consistent the Southern accent is across state lines. Even many speakers in Texas, that most independent of Southern states, differ very little from from demographically similar speakers in other Southern states. Just like in the rest of the South, some speakers from Texas will distinguish between “which” and “witch” by giving the former a little staticky, cough-like oomph. Some won’t! Some Texans will distinguish between “horse” and “hoarse,” with the latter sounding a bit like “harse.” And, of course, some won’t. Some have one of my all-time favorite linguistic features, the excellently-named “intrusive ‘r,’” in words like “wash,” so that would sound like “warsh.” And some won’t.

Even some of the grammatical features most associated with Texas are plenty common throughout the South. “Y’all,” say. Or the double modal: in much of the country, you only use one of a selection of words which indicate, say, how likely something is to happen. In Texas—and in many speakers throughout the South—you can double those up, which is how you end up with a sentence like “I might could go to the beach.”

Same thing with the phrase “fixing to,” or as it’s been compressed by black Southerners, “finna.” Those are pretty common in Texas, sure—but also in Arkansas, southern Missouri, Oklahoma, and northern Louisiana, among other places.

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Ocracoke Island lighthouse, off the coast of North Carolina. (Photo: David Byron Keener/shutterstock.com)

These often tend to vary by town or other hyper-local construction throughout the South. So Reed, who is from East Tennessee, can distinguish between East, Central, and West Tennessee, being so familiar with the tiny differences and degrees of differences that separate those regions. But someone from North Carolina would not be able to do anything of the sort, and Reed himself notes that he can’t perform anywhere near that level of identification with anyplace other than Tennessee.

A few Southern coastal cities, most famously Charleston and Savannah, were until very recently non-rhotic, but studies indicate that that feature is disappearing amongst the younger generation. That said, non-rhoticity is so associated with those prestigious cities that many residents will still drop their “r” sounds...in just a few famous examples. Some Charlestonians, for example, will pronounce the name of their city as “Chahleston,” but will not drop the “r” in other places where a truly non-rhotic speaker would, as in “yard” or “swear.”

South Florida does not show any Southern features whatsoever. As in almost all other ways, Florida makes no sense. Like that island on the Outer Banks.


The pockets of non-Southern Southern accents are scattered across the region. Appalachia is an area of active research, as academics parse its unique sing-song quality of speech. Southern Louisiana, better known as New Orleans and Cajun country, has their own particular variety of English that, well...it certainly has some Southern influence, but not in some of the usual places, and the hefty dose of Acadian French and Spanish and African influence has left it in a fairly unique situation. In fact, New Orleans English has at least as much in common with, of all places, New York City English as it does with, say, Dallas English.

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The Blue Ridge Mountains. (Photo: Gafoto/CC BY 3.0)

Many New Orleanians also do not monophthize the classic “eye” sound, making them sound almost Northern. New Orleanians of a certain age might say “turlet” for “toilet.” That coil-curl merger is unheard of in the South, and in fact is most identified with a disappearing accent of the most Yankee place there is: New York City. Until the mid-20th century, New Yorkers had a similar mutation in that “er” sound, turning “Thirty-Third Street” into “Thoity-Thoid” street. You can still hear it in recordings of FDR or old Marx Brothers movies.

The entire South, save that one pocket of Charleston and Savannah, sort of, is rhotic, meaning they fully pronounce “r” after certain vowels. Non-rhoticity is rare in North America; the one big exception is the Boston area and its Hahvahd Yahd. Even Ocracoke, which some atlases don’t even recognize as linguistically Southern, pronounces their “r” sounds.

But the Outer Banks island is still a linguistic oddity. Its colonial throwback linguistics is such an anachronism that it’s possible nowhere else in the South has ever sounded like this. In fact, the only places where you might hear someone pronounce “high tide” as “hoi toid” are in, well, another South: Southwest England, like Cornwall and Devon. Even there, you might have to hop in some kind of time machine to hear anything like that accent. Much easier would be just heading out to Ocracoke. The beaches are supposed to be really nice, too.

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