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The First Ever Stethoscope Was a Simple Wooden Tube

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article-imageDr. Paul-Ferdinand Gachet's 19th-century stethoscope. (Photo: Wellcome Images/CC SA: BY 4.0)

At the Necker Hospital in Paris, Dr. René Laennec stood at the bedside of a female patient who complained of heart trouble. To better understand this woman's ailment, the doctor had limited options. This was 1816, and the standard procedure for auscultation—listening to the respiratory system—involved putting one's ear against a patient's chest to hear the heart and lungs.

This specific case was awkward for Dr. Laennec. He believed the normal method would be improper and ineffective for the woman, due to her being overweight. Instead of placing his ear on her chest, he rolled a piece of paper into a tube, and put it between his ear and the woman's heart. 

Laennec found that the telescope-shaped instrument amplified the sound of the beating heart and respiring lungs. He had avoided the embarrassment of putting his head near the lady's breasts, and at the same time, invented the stethoscope. 

article-imageDr. Laennec and his new invention in action. (Photo: Public domain)

This cylinder is not what we now imagine a stethoscope to look like. But Laennec's seemingly accidental discovery lay the origins for the device that is now slung around doctors' necks.

The new method of mediate ausculation (indirect listening), a phrase coined by Dr. Laennec, soon took off and eventually became standard practice among doctors in France and elsewhere. 

The photograph above of the smooth, wooden and cylindrical stethoscope is a typical example of an early version of Laennec's invention. And this exact item was owned by a quite extraordinary physician. 

article-imageA passionate art collector and friend to many of the leading Impressionist painters, Dr. Gachet. (Photo: Public domain)

The stethoscope was the property of Dr. Paul-Ferdinand Gachet, who must be one of the most hipster medical practitioners of all time. Gachet hung around Parisian cafes in the mid-1850s with Manet, Pissarro and Baudelaire, the poet. He would swap his own homeopathic remedies and medical consultations for his friends' artwork, according to Artnet. He was a pal of many of the leading painters from around the era of the Impressionism movement including Cézanne, Monet, Manet and Renoir.  

Gachet was best known in artistic circles for his unique healing powers. Not necessarily with the aid of his trusted stethoscope, but with his mind. He was a homeopathic doctor and interested in chiromancy—a form of palm reading.

A reputation for improving people's psychological well-being led him to the Dutch master painter Vincent van Gogh. The doctor became "inseparably entwined with the last period of Vincent van Gogh's life," says the Musée d'Orsay's website.

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Dr. Laennec's stethoscope. (Photo: John Cummings/CC SA:BY 2.0)

The pair met and then lived together in the village of Auvers-sur-Oise in 1890 after Van Gogh had departed a mental asylum. Gachet cared for the artist, and acted as his muse during van Gogh's final few months. The Dutchman painted the doctor, in a portrait that Van Gogh described as a reflection of "the desolate expression of our time."

Sadly, Gachet's curative influence was not enough to save the tortured artist, who died by suicide soon after he finished the portrait. 

After Laennec's groundbreaking discovery, inventors in the medical profession were quick to improve the first design. Dr. Golding Bird applied the new technology to a flexible, single-eared piece of equipment. By the 1850s, the single-tubed stethoscope was replaced by a binaural device.

article-imageThe evolution of the stethoscope after Laennec's first invention. (Photo: Samuel Wilks/Public domain)

George Camman, a New York City physician, developed the first of these that became widely available. Made in 1852, the Camman's Stethoscope was built from two ivory ear pieces, connected to tubes made from silver that were fixed at a hinge. Two smaller tubes, covered in silk, were attached to a conical-shaped piece that would be placed on the heart. This design is much closer to the instrument we recognize today.

If you'd like to see one of the kaleidoscope-esque originals, one of Laennec's early monaural instruments is displayed at the Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology in Schaumburg, Illinois. 

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. 


India's Richest Man Offers Free Cellular Data Service to Millions

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Mukesh Ambani, right, with Hillary Clinton and, left, Ratan Tata, the former chairman of the Tata Group, the massive Indian conglomerate. (Photo: Public domain)

For a country of over a billion people, India has pretty spotty internet service, with only around a fifth of the country able to go online. That's because outside of massive population centers like Mumbai and Kolkata, the country's internet infrastructure is far, far behind the times. 

But the country's richest man, Mukesh Ambani, who has earned a fortune in oil and gas, unveiled on Monday a new service that gives hundreds of millions free internet access, according to CNN.

How? Through cellular data. Ambani has invested $20 billion in building almost 100,000 towers across the country, and his service, dubbed Reliance Jio, will give users the equivalent of 4G internet speeds on their phones and other devices. 

Ambani's interest isn't purely altruistic, though, as tech companies for years have been trying to find a way to tap into a massive potential new market of Indian internet users. But, that said, until the end of 2016, the service is free, after which users will pay around $2.25 a month for data. 

So, stream all you want, for now. Free 4G data was never meant to be forever. 

New York City Is Building a Home for 50,000 Oysters From 5,000 Toilets

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Oysters being moved to Jamaica Bay. (Photo: NYC DEP)

Once, the waters around New York City were home to a thriving population of oysters and other sea life. Long story short, pollution killed the oysters off, and now the city is trying to convince shellfish to repopulate Jamaica Bay, the 31-square-mile expanse of water and wetlands not far from JFK airport.

The city’s latest enticement for oysters and their offspring? A field of broken toilets.

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Home sweet toilet. (Photo: NYC DEP)

Over the past few years, a pilot project has showed that oysters can both survive and reproduce in Jamaica Bay, despite less than optimal conditions. The next step is to introduce more oysters to the bay, with the idea that more oysters could help limit erosion and improve water quality by naturally filtering pollutants out. If enough oysters thrive and reproduce, the bay could one day have a self-sustaining oyster population again.

To that end, the city and the non-profit Billion Oyster Project are introducing 50,000 additional oysters in Jamaica Bay. They’re creating one large “donor bed” and four “receiving beds.” It’s these smaller receiving beds that are made of old, inefficient toilets—5,000 of them, which were taken out of commission as part of a water conservation program.

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This will look very enticing to oyster spawn. (Photo: NYC DEP)

The idea is that the grown-up oysters will spawn, and their baby oysters will need a place to grab onto. The receiving beds, a mixture of broken toilet and clam and oyster shells, will look, to them, like the perfect place to make a home.

A River In Arctic Russia Has Turned Blood Red

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A color-altered photo of the area around the Daldykan River. (Photo: NASA/Public Domain)

Either the End Times are here, or there has been a chemical leak, but, whatever the case, Russia’s Daldykan River, surrounded by delicate tundra, has turned blood red. And now, according to ABC News, pictures of the bright red waters are being shared all over Russian social media.

The river is located in Norilsk, a heavily polluted industrial city that sits above the Arctic Circle. Built around a number of factories, mostly owned and operated by Russian mining giant Norilsk Nickel, it is the northernmost city in the world with a population of over 100,000, and it seems as though all that industry might have finally seeped out into the surrounding wilderness. Or at least this is one of the first times it has garnered widespread attention.

A report in the Siberian Times links the river’s sudden coloration to the Nadezhda Metallurgical Plant, which processes nickel concentrate, and is said to leak waste and pollutants into the river. The locals also don’t seem too surprised by the river’s terrifying coloration, reporting that it is not the first time the river has turned red. In fact, there is supposedly a factory reservoir that is so polluted it is known as the “Red Sea.” They also say that in the winter, even the snow turns red.

For the time being, Norilsk Nickel is denying that any leakage is taking place, but they say they are doing environmental checks, just to be sure. They even provided a local news agency with a picture of the river, taken from a helicopter, that shows it healthy and blue (well, blue-green). They say they will also reduce production at the plant.

The apocalypse, in other words, might not be here quite just yet. 

Chronicling America’s Love of the Log Flume

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Still crazy after all these years. (Photo: ShaunWilkinson/Shutterstock.com)

It doesn't matter whether your amusement park of choice is Disney World the local local fun park. When you visit, you're going to see a log flume. 

No matter how advanced amusement technology gets, or how death-defying roller coasters become, the simple pleasures of the log ride continue to impress. Not bad for a ride based on a timber transport system.

“In the parks that have them, they are always one of the more popular rides,” says Jim Futrell, a historian with the National Amusement Park Historical Association. They might seem quaint, but according to Futrell, it is this simplicity that makes log flumes such fixtures in the amusement park industry.

“The ride has a broad appeal because it has an amount of thrill to it, but it is not overwhelming for little kids and older people," he says. "And it also doesn’t drown you.” The log flume is also able to be lightly or heavily themed depending on the park, which gives it a broad business appeal.  

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A log flume, the not-fun kind. (Photo: BridalVeilOregon.com/Public Domain)

Long before the log flume was an amusement park staple, log flumes were used in an industrial setting. The first commercial log flumes were built in the mid-1800s by sawmills that used them to transport logs across long distances. Long, usually V-shaped troughs filled with water would carry freshly cut logs over chasms and over tough terrain. This eliminated the need to create roads and bridges for the lumber to be transported overground.

Many of the original log flumes could stretch for miles, just like the tracks of a locomotive. What is thought to have been the longest log flume of all time ran 62 miles between the Sierra Nevada Mountains and a processing site in Sanger, California. Owned by the Kings River Lumber Company, the massive flume was built in a little over a year, and processed thousands of felled trees. (Downside: this devastated the local population of redwood trees, many of which were over 2,000 years old.)

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Much funner. (Photo: Albin Olsson/CC BY-SA 3.0)

In order to maintain the long system of chutes and make sure they didn’t become clogged or broken, the owners would employ people known as “flume herders” to inspect the length of the transport channel, looking for potential log jams or broken portions of the flume. Sometimes these herders would travel down the flumes in custom built vehicles, but more often than not, they would ride one of the logs down the path. While it was exceedingly dangerous, it was also a lot of fun.

Meanwhile, as amusement park rides developed and evolved in the early 20th century, boat and chute rides began to spring up, taking their inspiration from the fun-looking logging technology. One was a ride known as “Shoot-The-Chutes," which usually featured a larger passenger boat that would slide down a chute and skip along the water at the bottom before being manually hoisted back up the slope. Another popular boat ride was the mill ride, which was usually just a boat that floated along a trough through darkened mill -uilding tunnels.

The log flume was born out of a sort of hybrid of these early amusements. “Later on, in the years following World War I, you started to see what was called a “mill chute” ride, which kind of combined the old mill rides with a Shoot-The-Chutes ride,” says Futrell. “[It] actually has a strong resemblance to today’s log flumes, with a boat ride through a trough, ending with a lift up a hill, and a splashdown.”  

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El Aserradero today. (Photo: Loadmaster/CC BY-SA 3.0)

The first log flume ride as we know it today debuted in 1963 at Six Flags Over Texas. Called El Aserradero (translated as, "The Sawmill"), the ride was the creation of Arrow Development, an amusement designer that had been in the business since the 1940s. It featured two rises that the logs would travel up before crashing back down on the other side, splashing the riders.

Before coming to Six Flags Over Texas, Arrow Development had worked at designing rides for the Disney parks such as the Mad Tea Party and Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. When they came to Six Flags to install a water chute ride, they went back to the roots of the ride and turned it into a themed simulation of riding a commercial log flume. Passengers would board fiberglass logs from inside a replica mill building and ride through the flume along a shallow water trough that led to small hills.

El Aserradero proved so popular that Six Flags Over Texas built a second log flume ride to meet the new demand for the ride. Then log flume rides began popping up at parks all over the world. “It became an industry staple through the '60s and '70s, and into the '80s," says Futrell. "Arrow pioneered it, and most of the major European manufacturers came out with a version."

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A modern log flume. (Photo: Sarah_Ackerman/CC BY 2.0)

Some kept the simple logging theme, while others built more elaborate versions, like the Timber Mountain Log Ride at Knott’s Berry Farm. Disney’s Splash Mountain turned the flume ride into a perilous journey complete with animatronics, tunnels, and other flourishes.

According to Futrell, the other big innovation that helped spread the log flume came in the '80s when the Hopkins Rides company, formerly a manufacturer of ski lifts, began selling cheaper, sturdier log flumes that used cement troughs, which were a more affordable option than the usual fiberglass for smaller and mid-size parks.

Now log flumes can be found just about everywhere, including new parks in China and the Middle East, but the older rides are beginning to disappear, both because of the aging fiberglass construction, and because of the ride’s ubiquity. “One of the challenges in the United States is market saturation,” says Futrell. “Most of the parks big enough to buy one have bought one, and those that might not have one, had one at one time and removed it.”

Nonetheless, El Aserradero is still in operation at Six Flags Over Texas. Over the years it incorporated animated figures and a covered mill building in an attempt to keep up with the more elaborate rides being developed, but those additions have since been removed and the ride is once again a simple log flume.

“Six Flags has shown no sign of getting rid of that ride,” says Futrell. “I’m sure in those hot Texas summers, it still maintains the same appeal it had 50 years ago.”

We're Hitting the Road for a 12-City Book Tour Across America

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Atlas Obscura is celebrating the launch of its very first book: Atlas Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders!

This fall, we're kicking off the book's publication with a 12-city book launch. Each event, in keeping in strict observance of all things unusual and wondrous, will be its own evening of discovery, drawing guests not only to bookstores, but also to venues brimming with unique history and unusual spaces—from a waterworks museum to a funhouse of found art to an abandoned underground neighborhood. Guests will have the chance to ask our authors any burning questions, have their books signed, and delve into its addictive pages, all in the company of plentiful food, drink, and inquisitive souls.

Make sure you get a ticket to the launch event nearest you! Here's the line-up: 

New York: The Brooklyn Navy Yard

September 24

Join us for an explorer's night of wonders and curiosities at a warehouse-turned-wonderfair.

Philadelphia: The Mütter Museum

September 27

Sneak in after-hours for cocktails and live music at America’s finest museum of medical history.

Boston: The Waterworks Museum

September 28

Experience the book from the inside when you wander around this former 19th-century pumping station.

DC: The Sixth & I Synagogue

September 29

Join all three authors and CEO David Plotz for lively discussion at this historic synagogue.

Los Angeles: The Last Bookstore

October 4

Come listen to a conversation between Dylan Thuras and Casey Schreiner at this beautiful and iconic bookstore.

Menlo Park: Kepler's Books

October 5

We welcome you for a conversation and Q&A with Atlas Obscura founder Dylan Thuras and bestselling author Mary Roach.

Portland: Powell's City of Books

October 7

Come for an evening of conversation, discovery, and exploration at one of the most beloved bookstores in the world.

Seattle: The Seattle Underground

October 8

Descend into underground city ruins for a subterranean soirée filled with music and dancing.

San Francisco: The Book Club of CA

October 10

Join us at the renowned Book Club of CA to delve into the most astonishing and curious locations featured in the book.

Minneapolis: House of Balls

October 22

Celebrate with local bands, beers, and hands-on workshops at this funhouse of sculpture and found art.

Madison: Room of One's Own

October 22

Calling all explorers! Come kick off the Wisconsin Book Festival with a conversation about crazy bucket list destinations.

Highland Park: Highland Park Public Library

October 24

Get comfy within this 19th century library for an evening of wonders and armchair adventures.

 

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Advance Praise for Atlas Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders:

“My favorite travel guide! Never start a trip without knowing where a haunted hotel or mouth of hell are!”
—GUILLERMO DEL TORO, filmmaker, Pan’s Labyrinth

“Atlas Obscura may be the only thing that can still inspire me to leave my apartment.”
—LENA DUNHAM, creator of Girls and author of Not That Kind of Girl

"Life is short. Our planet is filled with curiosities and marvels . . . and this wondrous book is your guide!”
—PHILIPPE PETIT, high-wire artist and explorer

“What a strange and wonderful book! It is as curious and surprising as Saddam Hussein’s very own Blood Qur’an—written in his own blood—that I would never have known about had I not read the amazing Atlas Obscura.”
—JON RONSON, author of So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed

What are you waiting for? It's time to come adventuring with us.

Election Fraud in the 1800s Involved Kidnapping and Forced Drinking

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A depiction of politicians trying to buy votes from an 1857 Harper's Weekly. (Photo: Library of Congress/LC-USZ62-118006)

This summer Donald Trump stoked fears that rampant voter fraud could hurt his chances in the 2016 presidential election even as federal courts were striking down voter-identification laws in several states, with a judge in Wisconsin rejecting what he called “a preoccupation with mostly phantom election fraud.”

Those concerns stem from the very real voting fraud schemes of the 19th century, when political parties employed tactics more often associated with pirates and human-trafficking gangs. Before sophisticated computer models were used to get out the vote, violent gangs would kidnap voters, feed them alcohol or drugs and force them to vote multiple times dressed in various disguises. Known as “cooping,” this was a common strategy to ensure a win on election day.

In the 1800s, United States elections were rife with fraud, and political parties were more like private clubs than the bureaucratic representatives we have today, so cooping fit right into politics of the time. A book on the history of Catholicism in the United States says that “the practice of “cooping” voters on election day was quite common,” and campaign gangs who corralled voters were, according to one definition, “wining and dining [victims] till they "vote" according to wishes of the "Coop-manager,” disrupting the American voting process.

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George Caleb Bingham's 1846 painting The County Election, depicting a polling judge and voters, some of whom are drunk. (Photo: Public Domain)

While the public was aware of and disgusted by cooping, it was so ingrained in American politics that it continued through the end of the 19th century. In 1842, Washington’s Weekly Globewrote that the “Federalist Party in the United States, during the last presidential election, introduced all these contrivances” supposedly in lieu of the United Kingdom's cooping schemes, which included “bribing, thumbing, bullying, and the abduction of voters, steeped in drunkenness.” One report in the same article even claims that 300 voters were, according to some witnesses, transported away to different countries to keep them from voting in local elections.

Many cooping victims were immigrants. As naturalization was formalized for the influx of European immigrants in the mid-1800s, new citizens were eligible to vote in the United States, along with most free white men (at that time all women, and men of color, were not). Americans born in the U.S. viewed the immigrant votes as a threat, and would coop immigrant voters in undisclosed locations to keep them from voting—or force them to vote for candidates supported by the gang.

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Fights at the election polls, 1857. (Photo: Library of Congress/LC-USZ62-118012)

Cooping victim J. Justus Ritzmin was looking for a laboring gig when he was lured by cooping campaigners during the 1859 presidential election in Baltimore, Maryland, which was later examined in a lengthy congressional hearing on the fraud. A member of the Pug Ugly street gang offered Ritzman and other men a job, and then brought them to a bar. When fully drunk, they were led into a warehouse, where they “came in front of a crowd of men, about five or six, armed with clubs, and guns, and other weapons,” according to Ritzman’s testimony in court in 1860. The men were robbed and left in a dark basement, where they were given voting tickets for the Democratic candidate.

He and the others voted 16 times that day. Peter Fitzpatrick, another cooping victim, said the gang “dealt me two blows with a billy on the head and two on the knees, to make me drink liquor; and after they compelled me to drink.” On voting day, they and almost 80 other men were forced to one polling booth after another, changing jackets and hats between stops as a disguise. “The treatment of some of those in the coop was disgusting and horrible in the extreme; men were beaten, kicked and stamped in the face with heavy boots,” said Ritzman.

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Edgar Allan Poe, rumored to have died in a cooping incident. (Photo: Library of Congress/LC-DIG-pga-04119)

Votes were easily manipulated by gangs at the time: voter’s lists and pre-registration in the 1800s were hard to track by hand, and voting wasn’t particularly private. Before the election began, voters would collect highly-visible, labeled voting tickets for a candidate, stand in line, and give their tickets to a ballot officer at their local polling place. Often, it was impossible to figure out who had voted when or where, and some candidates hired gang members as voting marshals to oversee elections. The phenomena was so rampant that some biographers of Edgar Allan Poe ascribe his death to a cooping incident during a Baltimore election, though this is not confirmed.

Cooping was rampant in Baltimore, but it seems to have happened nearly everywhere in the United States. T. H. Spencer, accused of cooping for the Democratic Party of the time, said that “Before I was a resident of Baltimore I was familiar with cooping; I was educated in the democratic school, and taught to coop before I was a voter.” He added that other major political groups cooped: “in the year following the Whigs commenced cooping, as they followed in electioneering what the democrats did.” The Indianapolis Sentinelwrote that “gangs of repeaters, thugs and perjurers” made Philadelphia’s “Republican stronghold to be the rottenest, most corrupt place in the country.”

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A scene showing Baltimore in 1837, where cooping was rampant. (Photo: Library of Congress/LC-DIG-pga-04182)

Witnesses of a fraudulent election in Boston, later said that the election “was carried out by violence and murder” and that politicians would bring gangs from New York, Delaware, Washington and Alexandria to help win elections. Senators from both the Democratic and Republican parties were outed during an investigation of a plan to use “repeaters.” Later, new African-Americans voters of the 1880s were often cooped until after election day, the threat of which was to keep them from voting on the Republican ticket, sometimes after Democrats already voted under African-American voters’ names.

New York City gangs, as dramatized in the film Gangs of New York, bullied people into voting multiple times for mayor; in real life, gang leader Mon Eastman said“I make half the big politicians,” publicly acknowledging the corruption of Tammany Hall. Even small elections, like that of Sacramento’s fire department, were controlled by election gangs.

The American Party (also known as the Know Nothing party) whose own heritage came from European colonizers, famously believed in passing anti-immigrant legislature using election cooping in the 1850s. They also used other tactics, including the “blood tub”, which included dragging a bucket of blood from a local butcher to the polls, grabbing Irish and German immigrant voters, and squeezing a sponge full of blood over their faces to discourage them from voting. 

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Two different scenes on election day in New York in 1864, in a wealthy and a poorer neighborhood. (Photo: Library of Congress/LC-USZ62-99844)

It’s uncertain whether all repeat voters were victims of cooping, or if some were merely bribed, though it was unlikely every victim would come forward, given that voting multiple times was illegal. Some cooping victims hardly remembered who they voted for, who captured them, or where they went. Sometimes they even crossed county or state lines. In Oregon, a news report from the small town of Dalles announced, “It leaked out today that worthless characters are to be shipped from here to Portland to be used as “repeaters” in the primaries Thursday.”

Over time, corruption in politics was scrutinized more. New voting laws were put into place, and the secret ballot let voting be a private event that happened alone in a booth, away from prying eyes or potential threats. Sometimes police were sent to watch caucuses to ensure that no one would repeat their votes, though cooping-like instances survived into the 1920s in Chicago with Al Capone’s voting line raids.

Today there’s little evidence of the corruption of elections past, and paranoid laws that keep voters from the polls are finally beginning to wane. These days, at the very least, if American voters feel the need to drink through this election, it’ll be by their own choice.

Watch These Daredevils Take a Spin on 55-Foot Windmill Sails

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In 1908, San Francisco built two large windmills, the southern Murphy Windmill and the northern Dutch Windmill—structural oddities in a bustling port metropolis. The windmills’ massive four vanes, or arms, used the powerful coastal winds to pump up water for the Golden Gate Park. But, in this clip, the wind also propels two daring men clinging firmly to the vanes of the approximately 75-foot-tall Dutch Windmill for a rickety, revolving ride.  

“The cleaner injects a thrill into his job by riding on the 55-ft. wings,” an International News title card states.

The Dutch Windmill worker climbs up the vanes with confidence to make annual repairing and painting of the mill. He smiles merrily and clasps the lower edge of a vane before becoming a mere speck on the screen, his cap all the while remaining secure on his head.

“And International’s cameraman tries it too—turning the crank as he rides—with picturesque results.”

It’s true. The views of San Francisco (while dizzying) are spectacular. At the 55-second mark you can spot San Francisco’s long defunct Big Dipper wooden rollercoaster at the once popular amusement park, Playland at the Beach.

The cameraman and cleaner aren’t the only ones that realized windmills can serve as cheap thrills. In 1921, daredevil Velma Tilden spun around the sails of the Murphy Windmill for 25 full rotations. Young local boys also used to climb windmills in Massachusetts when they were still grinding corn. They would grasp onto the arms of the Godfrey Windmill and others that dotted Cape Cod before they had to jump off and run at sight of the miller.

In the video below, a camera is strapped to one of the arms of the Chatham Windmill in Massachusetts to visualize just how dangerous these stunts were on particularly gusty days.

Both the Murphy Windmill and the Dutch Windmill stopped their operations in 1913 when they were replaced by electric pumps. Today, the Dutch Windmill stands as landmark among the thousands of tulips in Golden Gate Park’s Queen Wilhelmina Tulip Garden.

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.


Bob Dylan, a Musician, Is Set To Drop A New Welded Gateway Later This Year

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The artist at work. (Photo: MGM National Harbor/Used With Permission)

Against all odds, Bob Dylan is still making music, but even stranger, he is also still creating huge, welded gateways. As noted on Stereogum, Dylan is set to install his latest metalwork portal at Maryland’s forthcoming MGM National Harbor Casino.

The famous troubadour first unveiled his welded creations at a 2013 gallery show. Made from all sorts of found metal objects such as gears, chains, axes, and wrenches, the most common form his works take is that of a gateway. Lest you think this is some hands-off vanity hobby, in a BBC article about his first show the at London’s Halcyon Gallery, the gallery president said "Dylan designs the works and decides which objects will be used. He does some welding himself and has one or two people to help him but he is intimately involved in the whole process."

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The new "Portal." (Photo: MGM National Harbor/Used With Permission)

Dylan’s metal works end up as artful dustbowl collages, that just happen to have been welded together by one of the most influential American musicians of all time.

This newest gateway is set to be unveiled later this year when the National Harbor Casino opens its doors. Entitled “Portal,” the 26-by-15-foot… portal will be a permanent feature of the new casino. In a statement shared on Rolling Stone, Dylan explained his love of gateways, saying in part, “Gates appeal to me because of the negative space they allow.”

While Dylan’s metalworking career seems to have just begun, it is already being better received than his Christian phase.    

In 1981, Clowns Allegedly Appeared Across Boston, Similar to Current Clown Panic

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Clowns! (Photo: Frank Behrens/CC BY-SA 2.0)

As everyone who cares about America is probably aware, clown hysteria has taken over the Carolinas. The big-shoed menaces are allegedly lurking in the woods near residences, offering candy and money to children. People are chasing the clowns into the woods with machetes and leaning hard on their 911 autodials. At least one apartment complex has issued an official anti-clown warning. It's gotten so bad that police are discouraging people in those areas from dressing as clowns at all.

Why clowns? Why now? What's going to happen next? Atlas Obscura spoke with cryptozoologist Loren Coleman—perhaps the world's foremost authority on mysterious clowns—about this latest outbreak. Spoiler: he blames old wounds, sad journalists, and "the real clown," Donald Trump.

Recent years have brought us various sudden clowns, most of which have eventually revealed themselves to be pranks, marketing stunts, or strange journeys of self-discovery. Many news reports have cited these incidents as predecessors to the latest wave. But to truly understand this new group, Coleman says, we have to look a little further back—specifically to 1981, when a similar clown epidemic overtook Boston.

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Clown dolls, potentially open-mouthed at their new reputation. (Photo: Commander Keane/CC BY-SA 3.0)

On May 6th of that year, police received a report that "one or two men wearing clown outfits" were driving a candy-laden van around near Brookline's Longwood School. (The van even had a broken headlight, for maximum punchbuggy-style kid attraction.) The next day, a similar report came from the Franklin Park horseshoe-playing grounds—though this man reportedly had only half a clown suit on, as he was naked from the waist down. According to a Boston Globe article entitled "Pupils Warned of Clowns," the school district's investigative councilor quickly issued a memo, instructing students to "stay away from strangers, especially ones dressed as clowns."

At the time, Coleman was heading up a social services office in Charlestown, Massachusetts. He was also corresponding with a number of fellow cryptozoology fans—nearly 400 of them, spread out across the country. He coined the term "phantom clown," and asked his network to send him any local newspaper clippings that referred to similar incidents. "I started getting copies from Cleveland, from both Kansas Cities," he says. "I really started tracking that this was a nationwide phenomenon." 

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Photographer Shawn Tron says this clown is frowning because "the bus driver wouldn't stop for him." (Photo: Shawn Tron/CC BY-SA 2.0)

This information enabled him to draw up a sort of Theory of the Phantom Clown. "Phantom clowns are usually very specific," says Coleman. "There's a clown, often seen in a van, kids being approached and telling adults, and then the clowns never being caught. When [the Carolina incidents] started up, it linked back to all those old stories for me."

So where do phantom clowns come from? In 1981, Boston eventually settled on "the minds of children." A follow-up Globe article, released two days after the first, recasts the alleged perpetrators as victims and vice-versa. After introducing us to a persecuted Stoughton clown, wrongly questioned by police on his way to deliver a perfectly innocent clown-a-gram, the authors quote numerous officers flummoxed by the clowndemonium. "We've had over 20 calls on 911, [but] no adult civilian or police officer has ever seen a clown," says one. "If it's someone's idea of a joke, it's a sick joke," says another.

A similar story in Chicago, from 1991, reached the same conclusion. "The reports, mainly from children, have varied," the Chicago Tribune wrote, after several alleged sightings of a van clown named Homey. "They seem to be reaching near-mythic proportions, tumbling out from different parts of the city like clowns falling out of a Volkswagen."

It's the same kind of situation in the Carolinas—so far, the police haven't seen even one clown. But people are afraid just the same, and Coleman points out that some of this fear may be grounded in community memory. Fifty years ago this summer, the same area of North Carolina that's now being stalked by clowns dealt with an actual nightmare criminal—a man nicknamed The Paddler, who would dress up as a policeman, kidnap young boys, paddle them in the back of his car, and then let them go. He was eventually caught—but after serving ten years of jail time, he went straight back to his old habits, and ended up killing two teenagers.

"That turned out to be real—a real man was doing that," says Coleman. "So I think to some extent, even though the phantom clowns are shrugged off… people are very scared that there might actually be real clowns out there that could harm children."

This real concern leads to real warnings, which lead to real media reports—which, Coleman says, leads to more clowns. Coleman is also the author of The Copycat Effect, an exploration of how media coverage affects trends. "Suicide clusters, school shootings, terrorist attacks and phantom clowns are all driven from one incident to another by the media reporting on them," he says.

This phenomenon gets worse when news is bad, he says—say, in election years, which tend to correspond with phantom clown surges (there was another in Chicago in 2008). "The media concentrates on campaigning so much, if any incidental story comes along, it becomes wall to wall news, almost as if they need a distraction from the ugliness," he says. In this case, he thinks one specific candidate has had newsmakers looking for anything else to write about: "Trump is the real clown," he says. (Trump's campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)

Much of this is definitely conjecture. But the predictions that come out of it are probably worth heeding. "I do expect that if it keeps being talked about in the media, you're going to see [clowns] jumping up in California, Wisconsin, other places," Coleman says. Sorry about this, Northwest.

The Persistent Racism of America's Cemeteries

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 A view of Greenwood Cemetery in Waco, Texas. (Photo: © Google 2016)

Earlier this summer, the city of Waco, Texas issued an order to remove a fence in the city’s public burial ground, Greenwood Cemetery. But it wasn’t just a cosmetic change: Using a forklift and power tools, City of Waco Parks & Recreation staff cut apart the chain-link fence that had been used to divide the white section of the cemetery from the black section.

The cemetery had been racially segregated since it opened in the late 1800s. It was operated by two sets of caretakers, white and black, until the city took over the cemetery about 10 years ago.

Waco is not the only Texas community to struggle with the surprisingly robust ghost of Jim Crow: This spring, the cemetery association of Normanna, Texas, about an hour outside Corpus Christi, was sued by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund for barring a white woman from burying the ashes of her Hispanic husband there. Although the cemetery association later relented, the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating. No Hispanic people are buried within the Normanna cemetery—there is one sole tombstone with a Spanish surname, located just outside the cemetery’s chain link fence.

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San Domingo Cemetery in Normanna, Texas. (Photo: © Google 2016)

Until the 1950s, about 90 percent of all public cemeteries in the U.S. employed a variety of racial restrictions. Until recently, to enter a cemetery was to experience, as a University of Pennsylvania geography professor put it, the “spatial segregation of the American dead.” Even when a religious cemetery was not entirely race restricted, different races were buried in separate parts of the cemetery, with whites usually getting the more attractive plots.

Some white Americans did fight against this policy. Abolitionists, such as Thaddeus Stevens, a radical Republican and chair of the House Ways and Means Committee during the Civil War, insisted on being buried in a non-segregated burial ground. Stevens chose to be buried in an interracial cemetery in Lancaster, Pennsylvania after his death in 1868. The issue of interracial eternal repose was so important to him that he wrote it into his own epitaph. His tombstone read: “I repose in this quiet and secluded spot, not from any natural preference for solitude; but, finding other cemeteries limited as to race, by charter rules, I have chosen this that I may illustrate in my death, the principles which I advocated through a long life, equality of man before the Creator.”

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Abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens. (Photo: Library of Congress/LC-USZ62-63460)

From the 1920s through the 1950s, courts did not consider cemeteries to be “public accommodations,” so cemeteries did not qualify for special civil rights protections. But in May 1948, the Supreme Court ruled in Shelley v. Kraemer that state enforcement of racially restrictive covenants in land deeds violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. This had a major impact on the ability of blacks to buy houses in white neighborhoods, but it also affected the de-segregation of cemeteries. Whites-only restrictions on cemetery plots could no longer hold up in court. As a sign of the slowly-changing times, several interracial cemeteries appeared in the 1950s. Charles Diggs, Sr., a black undertaker and florist in Detroit, bought land to create an interracial cemetery just outside the city in 1953. Mount Holiness Cemetery in Butler, New Jersey, also promoted itself as an interracial cemetery in black newspapers like The New York Age in the 1950s.

But since blacks and whites continued to live and worship separately, such initiatives were few and far between.

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Arlington National Cemetery was desegregated in 1948. (Photo: Sergio TB/shutterstock.com)

Just a few weeks after SCOTUS ruled in Shelley v. Kraemer, President Harry Truman issued Executive Order 9981, which officially desegregated the military. Although it took years to desegregate battlefield units, the order went into immediate effect at Arlington National Cemetery. One of the first black veterans to be buried in a formerly white section of Arlington was Spottswood Poles, a star of Negro League baseball who enlisted with the infamous Harlem Hellfighters, an all-black unit that fought in the trenches of France during World War I. Poles earned five battle field star decorations, as well as the Purple Heart, for his military service. He was interred at Arlington with full military honors in 1962.

As the racial composition of communities changed over time, many black cemeteries became neglected and forgotten, and the resting places of countless unsung heroes of America’s black past quietly disappeared. In 2014, U.S. Senator Bob Casey called on the Veterans’ Administration to establish a public database listing where all black Civil War veterans were buried, because few such cemetery records exist. Since many black graves are unmarked, recording and cataloguing their locations requires ground-penetrating radar and high-precision GPS. Several months ago, over 800 unmarked graves were uncovered using this technology at a black cemetery in Atlanta, demonstrating the potential for similar discoveries in cemeteries and forgotten burial grounds across the country.

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Spottswood Poles in 1913. After serving in World War One, Poles was buried in Arlington National Cemetery in 1962 with full military honors. (Photo: Library of Congress)

Like the city councilors of Waco, many community groups and civic associations are currently engaged in the difficult, lengthy, and expensive tasks involved in unearthing black history. In the process, they are discovering that addressing the wrongs of the past is often more complicated than simply removing the physical reminders of Jim Crow that haunt our landscape. The traces of the past are sunk deep into the earth, but with the right tools, it’s possible to make them visible.

The Brilliant MI6 Spy Who Perfected the Art of the 'Honey Trap'

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Betty Pack on her wedding day. (Photo: Churchill Archives Center, Papers of Harford Montgomery Hyde, HYDE 02 011/Courtesy Harper Collins)

These days the “honeypot” is a popular trope in espionage thrillers, with seemingly every high-level informant recruited via seduction by a ravishing female spy. But long before James Bond ever jumped across the roof of a moving train in books or film, the globe-trotting spy Betty Pack was wooing suitors for classified information on both sides of the Atlantic. Few people have elevated the habit of pillow talk to an art form quite like the crafty American-born intelligence officer, who “used the bedroom like Bond used a beretta,” Time magazine noted in 1963.

Pack’s code name at the British spy agency MI6 was “Cynthia,” and her clandestine escapades during World War II led her boss, Sir William Stephenson, to call her unequivocally “the greatest unsung heroine of the war.” Her discovery of the French and Italian naval codes, as well as her work aiding in the decades-long effort to crack the Enigma code, helped the Allies stay a few steps ahead of the Axis powers, and eventually, win the war.

Amy Elizabeth “Betty” Thorpe was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1910. She was an uncommonly restless child. “Always in me, even when I was a child, were two great passions—one to be alone, the other for excitement,” Betty told her fellow spy and lover Harford Montgomery Hyde, according to a new biography, The Last Goodnight.“Any kind of excitement—even fear.” 

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Betty Pack, spy. (Photo: Reprinted with the permission of The Baltimore Sun Media Group/Courtesy Harper Collins)

The rebellious girl worshipped her father, Colonel George Thorpe, and detested her mother, Cora. Though Cora was a highly educated and cultivated woman, from her earliest years Betty, who was equally brilliant, viewed her as little more than a striving socialite. “You might say that she was a Persian Cat and I was a Siamese,” Betty said later. As her father rose through the ranks in the military, the family moved to Cuba and then to Washington, D.C., where they hobnobbed with the political elite. Betty, sent to the best boarding schools, well-versed in high-society decorum, disliked the phoniness of it all. “Life is a game where one plays one’s role—where one always hides their true emotions,” she wrote in her diary at 13.

From an early age, Betty captivated many of the men she met. When she was only 11, an Italian diplomat named Alberto Lais became so infatuated with the child that he would disturbingly visit her at school, just to chat with his “golden girl.” Tall and willowy with blondish-auburn hair, huge green eyes and a soft, teasing voice, teenage Betty already possessed the sexual allure, heightened intelligence, and eye for detail that would make her such a successful spy.

“She had a force, or magnetism, to a terrifying degree,” Hyde recalled. This was only amplified when, during her high school years, Betty discovered her unabashed love of sex. “The greatest joy,” she wrote, “is a man and a woman together.”

At 19, she found herself pregnant and unsure of who the father was. In the circles in which she moved, being an unwed teenage mother was akin to social suicide. A desperate Betty quickly came up with a ingenious way to find herself a husband, and her child a respectable father. During a weekend party, she snuck into the bed of Arthur Pack, a dapper British diplomatic attaché twice her age, and waited for him to enter the room. “There she was in my bed,” Arthur would explain to his sister, “what could I do?” 

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The cover of Howard Blum's book The Last Goodnight. (Photo: Courtesy Harper Collins)

The couple were married in 1930. This would be the start of what Betty called her “vagabond years,” as she followed Arthur from diplomatic post to diplomatic post. However, Betty soon discovered that her husband was a cold man obsessed with his status. Fearing her child was not his, he forced her to give the baby boy to a foster family in England. From this point on, Betty knew she could never love the man who had taken her child from her, and began to pursue extramarital affairs.

During her husband’s postings in Chile and Spain, the trilingual Betty, often bored and restless, played the part of an perfect diplomatic hostess, and began to hone the information gathering tactics that would later serve her so well. But it was Betty’s selfless—and self-directed—actions in Spain that first caught the eye of MI6 in London. In 1936, the election of a pro-communist government in Spain led to the imprisonment of the clergy, including a priest that Betty was intimately acquainted with. After figuring out which prison he had been taken to, she arranged a meeting with the papal nuncio, the diplomatic envoy of the Holy See, and persuaded him to push for the priest’s release. Although this was a risky gambit, it worked. Betty then arranged the priest’s escape across the border.

Spain exploded into civil war soon after, and many diplomatic families were moved to Biarritz, France. But Betty did not stay there long. When she heard that Carlos Sartorius, a Spanish aristocrat and government official that she was in love with, had been thrown in jail too, she returned to Spain to find him. Again, she was able to convince a skeptical bureaucrat to not only take a meeting with her, but take up her cause. She also petitioned him for the release of 17 imprisoned airmen.

On the same trip, Betty herself was initiated into unofficial spy work by the Valencia-based British diplomat Sir John Leche. After her intercession on their behalf, Sartorius and the airmen were eventually released. Work done, Betty departed Spain. “I come and go,” she explained. “No bones broken, and no hearts either, I hope.”

In 1938, the Packs headed for Arthur’s new post in Poland. But her husband was as cold and distant as ever, a man obsessed with appearances. Lonely and searching for passion and conversation, Betty began an affair with a bookish, cultured man working in the Polish Foreign Office. Soon, he began to share his worries about his homeland, especially the fact that Poland was secretly working with Germany. 

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Pack in later years. (Photo: Churchill Archives Center, Papers of Harford Montgomery Hyde, HYDE 02 007/Courtesy Harper Collins)

Betty, who had seen the dangers of fascism and Nazism during her years abroad, was concerned by what she heard, and went to the head of intelligence at the British Embassy, John Shelley. A short time later, Shelley officially brought Betty into the MI6 fold. From there on out, the young American expat would find everything she was looking for—excitement, intellectual stimulation, and a life purpose—in partnership with Her Majesty’s Secret Service.  

Now Secret Agent Betty Pack was instructed to set a “honey trap” for handsome Count Michal Lubienski, chief aide to Poland’s foreign minister, Josef Beck. After meeting at a society party, the two soon became lovers. During this time, Betty would empathetically listen to his worries, and then go home and type up meticulous reports. These colorful, detailed briefs of conversations with various marks became a staple of Betty’s career, and were eagerly awaited by the folks at British Intelligence.

During her trysts with Lubienski, she copied the reports that filled his suitcase, and eventually learned that the Poles had cracked Germany’s fabled Enigma Machine, whose codes had stumped Europe for decades. Armed with Betty’s information, the British convinced Poland to share the findings. Alan Turing could not have built his famous computer to crack a later, more complicated version of the Enigma cipher without the assistance of Polish mathematicians.

Betty’s time in Europe soon came to an end, but not before a side mission to Prague, where she helped rob the office of Konrad Henlein, leader of the pro-Nazi Sudeten German Party. Betty smuggled out the stolen goods, including an invaluable map detailing Germany’s three-year plan to invade central Europe, in the same suitcase as her negligees.

The Packs’ next stop was back in Chile, where an increasingly restless Betty posed as journalist “Elizabeth Thomas,” writing anti-Nazi propaganda for the paper La Nacion. But soon she left her husband and small daughter behind for good, and returned to her childhood home of Washington, D.C., posing as a freelance journalist. Her superiors at British Intelligence encouraged this move, knowing that as a single working woman, Betty could infiltrate social circles with greater ease.  

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Sir William Stephenson, Pack's boss, and who called her "the greatest unsung heroine of the war". (Photo: Public Domain)

Thus began what Betty called“the happiest days of my life.” Betty’s new boss was Sir William Stephenson, who led the “British Security Coordination” (wartime Britain’s American intelligence arm). Betty chose a lovely house on O Street in Georgetown, which had a handy secret exit around the back for “discreet entertaining.” She was soon given a big assignment— to discover the Italian naval codes.

Betty’s family connections and blue-blooded background were instantly useful. The man the BSC wanted her to trap was none other than Alberto Lais, now Italy’s Naval Intelligence agent, and the man running Mussolini’s secret spy network in the U.S. Soon, Lais was telling his “golden girl” secrets as he stroked and petted her, but never consummated the relationship. Betty, with her expert communication skills, was able to lead their conversations into areas the British were interested in. Eventually, she was able to bribe a clerk for the books containing the Italian naval codes, virtually neutralizing the Italian Navy for the duration of the war.

Her next assignment would be her greatest triumph. Having had so much success with the Italians, Betty was instructed to infiltrate the Vichy French Embassy. Betty’s mark, press attaché Charles Brousse, a married, charming man with serious concerns about the Nazis, immediately became Betty’s one “complete love.” Still, she made her boundaries regarding fidelity clear: “I do not belong to you or anyone else, not even to myself. I belong only to the Service,” she told him.

Soon, Betty had recruited Brousse to the Allied cause. But he balked at one assignment— to steal the French naval codes. “There’s a war going on, and if you, who swear you love me, will not help me, then I will either work alone or with someone else who will help me,” she threatened. He soon acquiesced. 

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Chateau de Castlenou, a castle in the Pyrenees, where Pack lived later in her life. (Photo: Jeantosti/CC BY-SA 3.0)

To get the codes, Betty orchestrated a brazen plan. Over time, the couple cultivated the French Embassy’s night watchman, convincing him to let them use the building for late-night rendezvous. The couple had loud, passionate sex for weeks, with the watchman believing he was simply aiding two lovers. One night, after serving the watchman champagne laced with sleeping pills, they let in a man known as the “Georgia Cracker”—a safecracker. Their first and second attempts to rob the safe failed.

The night of the third attempt, sensing the watchman was on to them, Betty and Brousse stripped naked. Sure enough, the watchman burst into the room, only to be thoroughly embarrassed. That night the safe was opened with the aid of the “Georgia Cracker”, and the code books photographed and replaced.

The codes were a boon for the British and American military, especially in North Africa. It meant the Allies were always aware of the Vichy’s location and plans, giving them an enormously important tactical advantage in every area of warfare. “They have changed the whole course of the war,” a colleague told Betty.

Unfortunately, Betty’s intelligence career ended soon after she helped secure this huge coup. Her cover was blown by none other than Brousse’s wife. After discovering the two in bed together, she screamed that Betty was a spy for all to hear. No longer anonymous, Betty retired from “the service.” She and Brousse married after the war and moved to Chateau de Castelnou, a foreboding medieval castle in the Pyrenees Mountains. Though they loved each other, Betty remained restless. Without the excitement of spy work, or a known enemy to defeat, she felt rudderless and trivial, like the society hostesses she had despised growing up.

Shortly before she died of cancer in 1963, she was asked if she was ashamed of some of the things she had done. “Ashamed?” she scoffed. “Not in the least, my superiors told me that the results of my work saved thousands of British and American lives... It involved me in situations from which 'respectable' women draw back—but mine was total commitment. Wars are not won by respectable methods.”

The First Robot 'Motherships' Are Coming ... And They're Minivans

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Bow down to the future of package delivery. (Photo: Starship Technologies)

The future of robot transportation is here, and it has arrived in the form of a soccer mom’s dream vehicle. As reported in the Los Angeles Times, automated delivery innovators Starship Technologies have unveiled their delivery-bot motherships, and they are minivans.

While Amazon’s drone delivery dreams have stolen most of the headlines over the past few years, Starship Technologies has taken a more down-to-earth approach to robotic delivery, developing squat little automated rovers that can drive packages right up to your doorstep. Their “sidewalk robots” are good for their short trips around the neighborhood, but the question of what their central mothership would look like was unknown until recently.

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Even the insides look futuristic. (Photo: Starship Technologies)

In a press release put out yesterday, Starship revealed the Robovan, a modified Mercedes-Benz Sprinter, developed in conjunction with the German automotive giant. Once their service begin, the robovans, which are still driven by a human (for now…), will post up in one spot in a neighborhood and deploy its fleet of automated delivery bots which will then trundle out to drop off their packages, before automatically returning to the van. Each van will be able to hold some 400 packages in a storage system that hangs above the little robots in their floor lanes.

According to Starship’s press release, the van+sidewalk robot method of delivery will be “the most efficient, cost effective and convenient local delivery method in the world.” In addition to lowering the emissions produced by standard transport vehicles, the robovans are expected to increase the productivity of a given vehicle by over 120%, over previous delivery methods. Here’s to the humble mini-van, and also our future robot overlords.

Places You Can No Longer Go: The Floating Church of the Redeemer

There's New Evidence in the Mystery of Neil Armstrong's Missing 'A'

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Armstrong on the moon. (Photo: NASA)

When Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in 1969, he uttered a series of words. “One small step”…but for whom? Most famously, the quote is “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” But Armstrong has said that version is missing one tiny detail. The real quote, according to Armstrong, should be: “One small step for a man.”

For years, linguists have tried to suss out the definitive answer to this mystery. In a new paper, published in PLOS ONE, a team from University of Oregon, Michigan State and Ohio State lay out more evidence that it’s at least possible that Armstrong said “for a man,” just like he maintained.

The difference here is so small—“for a” vs. “for”—that it’s extremely hard to distinguish one possibility from the other. Examinations of the audio of the quote did not resolve the question. In the new study, the linguists don’t look directly at the quote, but instead consider its context—the production of these words and our perception of them. In other words, how do people in the area of Ohio where Armstrong grew up say “for”? How do they say “for a”? And could the way in which he spoke the whole sentence affect how we perceive it?

The bit of speech at issue here is very short, just 127 ms long. In one experiment, the linguists considered what that length might mean. They looked at 191 examples of people from the same area of Ohio saying “for” and 191 examples those same people saying “for a” and measured the length of those words. They found that the people took about the same amount of time to say “for” and “for a.” The average length of “for” was 168 ms; the average length of “for a” was 225 ms.

What that means is that Armstrong could have been saying either “for” or “for a”—either still makes sense. But while Armstrong’s bit of speech is “highly compatible” with either possibility, the linguists write, and while there’s no statistical significance between the two groups, the 127 ms duration is “slightly more compatible” with the possibility that he said “for man.”

In the second experiment, though, the linguists looked at how Armstrong’s rate of speech might have affected how others heard what he said. He was speaking quite slowly, and, in context, said “for” or “for a” relatively quickly.

Although it’s counterintuitive, his slow rate of speech might have made it more likely that people misunderstood him. Human brains do some very impressive analysis to clip words out from the babble of sound we use to communicate, and they depend on contextual clues. Slower speech indicates to the brain that there are probably fewer words involved, and since Armstrong was speaking slowly, that could bias our brains towards hearing "for" instead of "for a."

In this experiment, the linguists played clips of people using “for a” in sentences where “for” would have worked just as well. (“Y’know I was there just for a half a day,” for example.) Sometimes they played the clips at a normal rate and sometimes they slowed down the rate of speech around the “for a.” When the clips were slower, the listeners were more likely to miss the “a” and hear only “for.”

These studies show two things. First, Armstrong could have said “for a.” He took more than enough time to squeeze in both words. Second, because he was speaking slowly, we could have heard him incorrectly—the slow pace of his speech actually made it more likely others would mishear him.

This doesn’t solve the mystery of the missing “a” one way or another. But it keeps open the possibility that Armstrong really did add in that little article. “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”


Florida Man Fends Ten Sharks Off With Fishing Pole

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Sharks! (Photo: US Fish and Wildlife Service/CC BY 2.0)

There are good fishing trips, where you pull in something big and photo-worthy. There are sad fishing trips, where you don't get much of anything. And then there are very, very scary fishing trips, where you become trapped on a sandbar by ten sharks and have to spend an hour and a half fending them off with your pole.

Steve Moon of Southwest Florida found himself in this last situation yesterday, WFTX reports. The 24-year-old was going after red fish near Burnt Store Marina in Punta Gorda when he got stranded near a sandbar. His phone lost service. Then the sharks started showing up.

"It wasn't a big deal until I counted ten," Moon told the outlet. "They kept getting closer and more aggressive... I saw them out of the corner of my eye come toward my leg, and I said, yeah, it's a seven-foot shark." Moon says he used his fishing rod to keep them out of range, until he remembered his phone's emergency button. Fire rescue crews were there within ten minutes. No word on whether Moon actually caught any red fish.

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.

The Mysterious Origins of This Unnervingly Life-like Japanese Doll from the 1800s

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The Masakichi doll in situ at Ripley's. (Photo: © 2016 Ripley Entertainment Inc)

In the Ripley's Odditorium in Amsterdam, there is a loin cloth-clad doll that is so incredibly detailed and realistic, they say you might mistake it for a real person. Adored by company founder Robert Ripley since he acquired it in the 1930s, Edward Meyer, Ripley's VP of Exhibits & Archives, says it’s one of the collection’s most popular objects. "And everybody wants to lift the loin cloth," he adds, with a laugh. (We're told what's beneath the cloth is equally realistic.) However, depending on who you ask, this doll has one of two origin stories: the swan song of an artist who, believing he was at death’s door, desired to give one last gift to the woman he loved; or one of only many magnificently detailed dolls constructed by a working class craftsman.

Either way, the confusion about the extremely rare doll’s origin is only part of the mystery; its journey to the United States is its own mystery.

Both stories begin in 19th century Yokohama, Japan. Hananuma Masakichi was an artist who specialized in iki-ningyo, or “living dolls.” According to Alan Scott Pate, an expert in Japanese dolls, these came about in the 1700s and achieved great popularity in the mid-1800s. They were put on display and people paid money to see them, akin to the wax museums of today.  

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Masakichi made the doll in his own image. (Photo: © 2016 Ripley Entertainment Inc)

The legend is that Masakichi completed this particular doll in 1885, when he was desperately in love, but was dying of tuberculosis. He decided to make a lifelike statue in his own image to gift to his beloved so that she might always remember him. As he wasted away, he labored in his studio, surrounded by mirrors so that he could see every part of his body. He forged the statue out of 2,000 pieces of wood, recreating every curve and crevice. He drilled small holes into the doll's skin to act as follicles, then plucked the corresponding hair out of his own body and inserted the strands into the doll. He did this with the hair on his head, but also his eyebrows, body hair and pubic hair. Some rumors say he gave the doll his fingernails. Others claim it was his teeth, though Meyer says that the doll's mouth is not open wide enough for anyone to confirm. Despite his efforts, the woman he loved left Masakichi, possibly because he spent all his free time making this doll. And as it would turn out, he either didn't have tuberculosis or made a miraculous recovery. He lived for another decade before dying, penniless, at age 63.

Tragic story, for sure, but is it true?

Pate believes that this was just another work for Masakichi, and that it might not even be a recreation of the artist. "There is no tradition of self-portraiture in Japan, particularly at this time. It was very likely that [the statue] was just a hyperrealistic doll, and it's not necessarily Masakichi himself," Pate says. He says that the lean build of the figure, perceived by some as gaunt, would have been typical of a physically active Japanese workman of the time, such as a basket peddler or rickshaw driver. Pate does not doubt that the sculpture contains real human hair, but perhaps not Masakichi's own. Pate says the hair would have been readily available at a shop, not unlike paint and crafting supplies at art stores today.

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Making the doll required a huge amount of craftsmanship.  (Photo: © 2016 Ripley Entertainment Inc)

Regardless, to make the doll would have required excellent craftsmanship. Pate explains how these dolls were made: 

"Depending on how the figure was going to be displayed, sections of it would be carved wood, other sections would be a molded…composite [of] pulverized wood and sawdust mixed with glue. There would be wire armature inside to help position and strengthen. The exterior skin, if you will, is a material called gofun.

Gofun is a crushed oyster or clam shell mixed with an animal glue, and all traditional Japanese dolls use that as a surface material. It could be, in certain iterations, molded and sculpted like lacquer, but then in its more finely attenuated elements, it serves as a highly polished skin. People think it's porcelain, but it's actually this very highly water soluble material."

What we do know is that the doll made its way from Yokohama to the United States in the 1890s, where it was first displayed at the International Temple of Art in Sacramento 1894. According to Pate's research, it was likely a person named “Colonel Smith” (it's not clear if he was a real colonel) who bought and transported the doll. Articles of the time referred to the doll as a self-portrait of the artist, but skipped the love story. Even without the tale, viewers were awed by how realistic the doll was.

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Ichimatsu dolls, also traditionally made with gofun. (Photo: Ellie/CC BY 2.0)

Pate has tracked the doll from Sacramento through a number of owners and to a series of places where it was similarly displayed. Throughout that trajectory, Pate says the story grew and grew. In an 1898 issue of Strand Magazine, a photo of the doll standing beside a man who was supposedly Masakichi appears, inviting viewers to guess which was the man and which was the doll. According to Pate, this was the first documented time out of many that someone would promote the doll this way, but he asserts that both images were of the doll. The photo appeared in the magazine's “curiosities” section above a picture of a two-headed turtle. 

In 1899, the doll would come to reside at the Art Saloon in San Francisco. The bar gave away tokens with an image of the doll on them, which could be redeemed for a free beer. Ripley, too, would come to live in San Francisco during a portion of the doll's residence there. 

"Potentially this was a place where Ripley was going drinking, [where he] regularly saw this thing, and when he opened his first museum thought this was something that he had to have to display," Meyer says. In addition to the doll, Ripley's also owns some of those tokens.

According to Pate's research, the Art Saloon's proprietor, Thomas Dunne, sold both the Art Saloon and the doll because he was in a large amount of debt. He did take the doll on a final tour of the country, but must have returned it to the bar by 1905 because an article from the period indicated the doll was arrested for indecent exposure. (As we said, the whole thing is quite realistic.) Those charges were later dropped. After the Art Saloon was damaged by the great earthquake of 1906, the unharmed doll moved to a novelty and curio shop called the E. Bloch Mercantile Company. This is when Pate says advertisements talking about Masakichi's illness and use of his own hair began to surface. When the eponymous Bloch died, Ripley purchased the doll for $10 in 1934 (that'd be about $180 today). Meyer says Ripley’s still has that original bill of sale, a curiosity in itself as fewer than 10 objects in the whole collection can make that claim. 

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Robert Ripley. (Photo: Public Domain

Ripley took the doll to the Chicago World Fair, the first of many stops around the country. The doll returned to San Francisco in the late ‘60s, where it remained in the Fisherman's Wharf Oddtorium through 1988. The doll then moved to the now closed Ripley’s Believe It Or Not museum in Buena Park, California but was damaged by the Northridge Quake in 1994. Some sources would have you believe that this is where Masakichi's story ended, forever languishing in disrepair somewhere in Los Angeles. But the doll is resilient: Masakichi was restored, then moved to Ripley's in Wisconsin Dell. Masakichi remained there for several years, but was ultimately again damaged, this time by bugs. He was repaired in Orlando, but "his hair has never been the same," Meyer says.

Ripley's, believing that the hair belonged to Masakichi, has decided not to replace the lost locks. Masakichi had a stint in San Diego at the Air & Space Museum in 2013, before making his way to his current home in Amsterdam in 2015.

Masakichi is not the only doll of its kind that Ripley’s owns, although very few currently exist. (According to Pate, there are thousands of small-scale figures and a large number of bits and pieces of full-scale figures—a hand here, a head there—but in tact, fully assembled, full-scale figures like Masakichi are rare.) Ripley's also possesses a figure known as Mr. Ito, which they acquired in 1994. That particular doll now resides in Gatlinburg, Tennesee, while yet another iki-ningyo resides in London. Masakichi, however, is the only doll to come with such a colorful origin story. In a way, that narrative is intrinsic to the doll. They’ve been traveling around the country together for nearly 100 years, after all.

One of Brooklyn's Oldest Trees Could Live in Your Living Room

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That's one very large log. (Photo: RE-CO BKLYN)

The European Elm tree that grew in a corner of Brooklyn's Prospect Park was one of the city's most impressive trees. Planted in the park's early years, not long after the Civil War, by the time it died in 2015 the elm had grown limbs as wide as some tree trunks. A tree like that, the Parks Department thought, deserved a better fate than most of New York's dead trees, which go straight into a chipper.

Months after it was cut down, this elm is now on its way to a more dignified afterlife. Cut into giant logs, hauled to a lumber yard about two hours north of the city, it's being slowly milled into one-of-a-kind lumber, destined to become hand-crafted furniture. Much of the tree's wood will probably end up right back in Brooklyn. At least one slab certainly will—the company that took the tree away, RE-CO BKLYN, is planning to make a table that will live in a 19th century mansion on the edge of the same park where the tree lived its life.

It takes time to transform a tree into furniture, though. Months after the tree came down, two of the logs RE-CO BKLYN hauled to its upstate yard are still intact, waiting to be milled. The other two, divided into slabs weighing as much as 600 pounds, are drying in the back corner of the yard. Most of those slabs will wait for two years before graduating to the next stage, kiln drying. Even the first slabs to go into the kiln won't be ready until February or March of 2017. It's a slow process, more careful than the treatment most trees get after they're cut down.

This tree is by far the largest that RE-CO BKLYN, founded in 2009 by a group of furniture makers, has handled. The company salvages New York City trees that are being cut down, in order to turn them into lumber or craft them into furniture, and usually the trees they work on are less than four feet in diameter. In other parts of the country, at other times in history, it might have been routine to deal with larger logs. But in New York City, no one's really equipped to keep large trees intact and turn them into something beautiful after they're dead.

Often, says Richfield, there's no choice but to chop them into smaller pieces—they might be trapped in the backyard of a brownstone and need to be carried out through the front door. Or there's just not the heavy machinery at hand to deal with this much weight. The Prospect Park elm, though, got special treatment.

After tree came down, RE-CO BKLYN hauled it away in four logs. These logs were giant, and sawing them into boards was a major undertaking. Each one weighed at least six tons, and the thickest was 7.4 feet wide and 8 feet long. This was as large as they could make this log and still carry it on the truck they would use to haul it to the yard. It had to be lifted by a 50,000 pound excavator. The remaining three logs had a less graceful journey from the truck back to the earth; they were nudged, by machine, off the flatbed truck so that they rolled onto the ground.

These logs were so big that RE-CO BKLYN's mill, which can handle trees up to five feet wide, was not able to just slice through them. The crew started by cutting off narrower slabs from one of the log's long sides, like you might peel a carrot into strips. After they had sliced off enough from that one side, the log measured just five feet from its now-flat top to the ground, and they rolled the log on its side. 

Now, it would fit into the mill. But before they could start cutting again, they had to rebuild the entire machine around the log in its new location. This was a complicated enough process that, after the first two logs were milled, they put the other two logs aside. "These are not easy," says Richfield. They wanted to think before they decided how to handle the remaining two—including the largest log. 

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One of the logs in transit. (Photo: RE-CO BKLYN)

If you went to RE-CO BKLYN's yard to visit the two logs that have already been milled, they would still look a lot like logs. After the company cuts logs into slabs, they reassemble them into a cylindrical shape, layer by layer, leaving only three-quarter inch gaps in between each slab. The moisture of the wood wicks out through the cut surfaces, like perspiration, and is sucked away by air currents passing through.

RE-CO BKLYN has been rethinking what it might do with the two remaining intact logs. The largest log is very straight, which means it could have a different destiny than the other three. The other log can be given the usual treatment, and turned into slabs. "Generally the kind of logs we get are not very straight," says Richfield. "We mill them into slabs, and they have crazy grain and amazing character. They wouldn’t be good as any other kind of lumber, besides slabs."

This last log, though, is so straight it could become dimensional lumber, the more common 2x4s, 4x4s and other regular-sized boards. Only recently has the company figured out a way to make dimensional lumber worth the effort for them, and that's what could happen to the thickest part of one of Prospect Park's largest trees—it'll be broken down into smaller chunks and milled into boards.

One slab of the tree is already spoken for: RE-CO BKLYN is planning to make a conference table for the Parks Department. That table will live inside Litchfield Villa, at the edge of Prospect Park, which serves as the department's headquarters in the borough. The rest will be available to anyone who wants to buy a piece of the tree that spent more than a century growing in a quiet corner of Brooklyn.

Watch a Man Test an Early Football Helmet by Getting Kicked in the Head

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Slather those chicken wings in orange coating and pour that light beer, because football's back. The NFL juggernaut spurs into action tonight, as the Panthers play the Broncos to kick off the new season. 

Running backs, linebackers, the kicker and indeed every member of the squad will be equipped to the nines with the latest gear. Boots to run faster, jerseys that are more slippy and helmets that are more secure. All this modern equipment and sporting technology is tested and developed over months by engineers in laboratories.

But it wasn't always that way.

Back in 1932, football helmets were still considered new. Not long before then, they were not even mandatory. Early designs were leather, and they proved to be largely ineffective. In the early '30s there was a growing demand for better headgear. The gentleman in this British Pathé video thinks he has the answer. The bespectacled chap wishes, rather darkly, to "rid the game of fatalities" with his new invention. 

How should one test this out? Perhaps not in line with the scientific methods of today, but the answer is simple: kick him in the head. Football players in pads and boots, huddle round him and one thwacks him right on the noggin. Others laugh and mercilessly tell him, presumably the team's kicker, to do it again. Three boots to the bean, in all.

Next, it's time to get smacked with a stick. The creator of the hardened hat, wincing, at least sees the funny side of it. After a good knock, he says: "it's like my mother in law isn't it?" 

It gets worse. 

Sprinting into a wall, obviously head first, our man shows the true strength of the helmet, and is knocked back onto his behind. Everything intact, he charges again. Bosh. And as the narrator points out, "he actually seems to enjoy it."

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.

How Fish Forensics Uncovered the Long-Lost Alabama Sturgeon

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2007's Alabama sturgeon, the last one ever caught. (Photo: Courtesy Steve Rider)

Biologist Steve Rider has spent 15 years searching for the long-lost Alabama sturgeon. He's draped gill nets up and down the Alabama River.  He's scoured historical records for promising sites, and waited for hours dangling worms. The only time he caught one—the second-largest ever seen, in 2007—he tagged the big guy with an acoustic transmitter, hoping to be led to his fellows. But no friends ever surfaced.

This past spring, the fish finally showed up again but not as a splash in the river, or a tug on a line. The sturgeon appeared in the form of a small, black bar on a blob of gel, in a lab at the University of West Florida. Rider was elated, as was Dr. Alexis Jasonik, a molecular ecologist and the head of the lab.

They had proven a fish's existence without even laying eyes on it.

Their trick was environmental DNA, or eDNA, left by the fish as it swims through the river. Like all animals, fish shed constantly, leaving a trail of mucous membranes, urine, feces, and bits of scale. Because the DNA in this matter degrades quickly, if you find any of it in water samples, you know whatever left was recently lurking nearby. "It's sort of forensics," says Janosik. "It gives you the utility to look for things that are hard to find, invasive, or endangered."

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Alexis Janosik samples the Alabama for sturgeon. (Photo: Michael Spooneybarger/University of West Florida CREO)

A hundred years ago, you could barely ride a boat through the Yellowhammer State without running into an Alabama sturgeon or two. According to taxonomist Christopher Sharpf, the long, skinny, snub-nosed fish once had the run of the Alabama, Cahaba, and Tombigbee rivers, which criss-cross a combined 700 miles across the state. There were so many, scientists at the time thought they were just baby gulf sturgeons. In 1898, a Congressional report says, commercial fishermen sold about 19,000 of them—enough for everyone in Mobile to take home a nice fillet.

But as humans found new uses for the river, trouble found the sturgeon. In an ideal world, breeding fish swim up to the river's headwaters to spawn, which allows their larvae to drift slowly downstream again as they mature. As more and more dams popped up along the river, both adults and young found themselves trapped in pockets of water, unable to get to one other or to grow up. Dredges and mining exacerbated the problem, and hungry anglers picked the survivors off for caviar. Their population plummeted.

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Rider (left) shows off his specimen in 2007. (Photo: Courtesy Steve Rider)

By the time scientists began looking for the sturgeon in earnest, it was almost gone. "In the late 1990s, the Fish and Wildlife service had a large contingency of people together to search for sturgeon," recalls Rider, who signed on in 2001. "In that time frame they caught five." Later years proved even tougher, a fact perhaps best expressed by one of Rider's papers, written in early 2007: "The DWFF expended 1806 man-days from March 1997 through May 2005, in efforts to collect the Alabama sturgeon," the paper reads. More numbers spool out below, like a sad Mastercard commercial: Trotlines—2661. Hooks—166,350. Total fish captured—13,739. Alabama sturgeons—zero.

Then, in 2007, they finally hooked one. "We were hoping it'd be a female," says Rider, as they had some sturgeon sperm stowed away from one of the earlier catches, and were thinking of starting a captive breeding program, "but unfortunately, he was a reproductively inactive male." They stuck a transmitter in the fish, hoping it would at least lead them to more sturgeons, but no dice. By 2010, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was calling the Alabama sturgeon "one of the rarest freshwater fishes on the planet." In 2013, the last captive Alabama sturgeon, Bubba, perished in a hatchery tank in Marion.

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Jasonik and Rider, sweeping the Alabama for sturgeon evidence. (Photo: Michael Spooneybarger/University of West Florida CREO)

Meanwhile, people were starting to breathe down the fish's neck, so to speak. The government declared the Alabama sturgeon an endangered species in 2000, devoting a certain amount of federal resources to its protection, but the process took years. Conservationists, who felt helping the fish would benefit the whole river, were pitted against corporate bosses and mill workers, who feared the shuttering of the dams. It took what Sharpf describes as a team of "pro-sturgeon lawyers," wielding lawsuits and Freedom of Information Act requests, to finally get it listed.

"It's been a political hot potato," says Rider. "Either you were for it or against it."

Dogging the whole issue has been the persistent question of whether or not the fish actually still exists. So in the early 2010s, when scientists in other parts of the country began using eDNA to search for green sturgeon and Chinook salmon, a buzzer went off. "We just said, 'Hey, we could use this for sturgeon!'" says Janosik.

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Janosik Lab postdoc Justine Whitaker extracts sturgeon DNA from river water. (Photo: Michael Spooneybarger/University of West Florida CREO)

Janosik, Rider, and their teammates gathered samples from different parts of the river system in winter 2014 and summer 2015. "It's like if someone committed a crime and you're sweeping the room," says Janosik. "You take it in several places and you get a good idea of what's going on." Then it was back to the lab to see what came up. Biologists separate DNA through a process called gel electrophoresis; if a specie's traces are there, they show up as a thin band in a particular spot on the gel. "For a long time, we were getting no bands, no bands, and we thought, 'Well, they're just not here anymore,'" says Janosik. "And then a positive pops up and it's incredible."

To be certain, though, that the animal is still around, after Janosik and Rider found bands in 17 percent of their samples, they then sequenced to make absolutely sure they were looking at Alabama sturgeon.

"I'm excited that it's still there," says Rider. "I've always had a glimmer of hope that we can still save the species, and this sort of affirms it." But the real search, the one that counts, has just begun. In order to help this long-lost species, scientists need to learn more about it and how it lives, and potentially set up a breeding program, both of which involve actually getting their hands on one. This means Rider has to truck his nets and lines back out to the river. He's still looking for a needle in a haystack—but the haystack is smaller, and at least he knows the needle is there.

"It's all about how we look for things," says Janosik. "And if we're not looking in the right way, we might miss it."

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