Most everyone has dreamt of having that Jerry Maguire moment, when you get to just walk out of your job, but that fantasy gets a bit more complicated when you are conducting a passenger train across hundreds of miles of countryside. But according to the Telegraph, a train conductor in Spain didn’t let that stop him from walking away from his post mid-trip, stranding over a hundred riders.
The stoppage occurred Tuesday night during a trip from Santander to Madrid. Around 9:15, just two hours into their trip, the conductor stopped the train without warning, and simply walked away. At first the 109 confused passengers were told that the train had stopped for technical problems, but after not too long they got the truth: the conductor’s shift had ended, so he decided to go home. This left the riders stuck just outside the village of Osorno.
Some of the passengers were able to catch local buses to their destinations, but most of them had to wait a couple of hours before some shuttle buses could be scrambled to carry them the rest of the trip.
For the conductor’s part, according to the union, he had requested that the company schedule someone to relieve him, which apparently didn’t happen. The company, Renfe, is pursuing their own investigation into what happened. No matter who is to blame, stranding a hundred customers is a pretty solid way to stick it to your boss.
The expanse of ice in the Arctic appears to have reached its minimum extent for the year, and it's the second lowest record in the record of satellite monitoring sea ice, begun in 1979.
NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center found that the sea ice capping the Arctic had shrunk to 1.60 million square miles, making it "effectively tied with 2007 for the second lowest in the satellite record," say NASA's Earth Observatory.
Earlier in the year, scientists thought sea ice this year could easily reach a record low. In March, when the extent of Arctic sea ice peaked, it was the lowest maximum on record. It had been a very warm winter; the Barents Sea was "pretty much close to ice -free for almost the whole winter, which is very unusual," one scientist told the AP, and even before March, the growth of ice was stalling out early.
As the sea ice began to shrink again, it was already at a disadvantage, and through May, the ice covered less area than it had at that time of year in 2012, when sea ice reached its lowest minimum extent on record. But in June and July, when ice usually melts most dramatically, the weather was cool enough that the melting slowed more than scientists had expected. Ultimately, the extent of sea ice this year was very, very low, but not a record low.
To put that in context, NASA scientists looked at 37 years of monthly records for sea ice extent. NASA reports: "They found that there has not been a record high in Arctic sea ice extent in any month since 1986. During that same period, there have been 75 new record lows."
American history is littered with stories of failed utopian communities that tried to bring new ways of living to The Great Experiment. But even though so many of the nation's utopia’s fizzled out, the remnants of many of these communities are still active today. Whether it’s your refrigerator, your silverware, or even your house, there’s a good chance that you have used the spoils of a utopia in your everyday life.
The specific beliefs of a given utopia vary widely amongst the various communes and disparate collectives that set up shop in late 19th-century America, but prosperity and self-reliance were common themes. Whether it was the utopian socialism of the Fourier Colonies, or the vegetarian orphans of New Mexico’s Shalam Colony, these aspirational settlements taught their participants skills like farming and furniture making so that the community might trade, thrive, and eventually spread their gospels. From this, some utopian communities came to be known for their skill at a specific craft, and many of these reputations have far outlived their original craftsmen.
One unmistakable descendant of a former American utopia is the octagon house, which is what it sounds like: a house with eight equal-sized exterior walls. They can now be found across the country, but the architectural concept originated in Octagon City, a short-lived utopian society. Established in Kansas in 1856 by a group of vegetarian businessmen, Octagon City was designed by a radical architect named Orson Squire Fowler, who envisioned the entire town laid out in an octagon of octagonal houses. The shape of the homes supposedly gave the maximum amount of usable space, short of a true cylinder.
While the prospective city died a quick death when the citizens bailed after a few short months, the design style lived on. Now there are dozens of the octagonal abodes across the United States and Canada, such as the Longfellow-Hastings House in Los Angeles, and the Octagon House in Danbury, Connecticut.
Another holdover from the days of utopian thinking is Oberlin College, the country’s first co-educational college. The institution is the product of the Oberlin Colony (which would become modern day Oberlin, Ohio), a settlement founded by Presbyterian ministers John Jay Shipherd and Philo Stewart. The pair of church men felt that American ideals had lost their way, and the Christian gospel needed to be reintroduced into daily life. Part of their utopian vision included a college that would educate both men and women, regardless of race, thus the Oberlin Collegiate Institute was started in 1835. A remarkable institution for its time, it was the first college in America to make admitting African-Americans a matter of policy, and just a few years later, became the first college in the country to grant bachelor's degrees to women.
Both the colony and the college were radical in their open-mindedness. While Shipherd and Stewart’s community of devotees has evolved out of its utopian roots, Oberlin College is still known for its progressive attitudes, carrying the torch of the Oberlin Colony’s forward thinking into the 21st century and beyond.
One of the most well-known products of utopian individualism is Shaker furniture. The United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, or “Shakers” for short, were a religious sect that, for a time in the mid-1800s, became one of the more widespread utopian communities in the country’s history with more than 20 significant colonies established in America. Their ideals revolved around simplicity, hard work, and creating self-sufficient communities. These utilitarian impulses resulted in the creation of Shaker-style furniture which was and is, renowned for its simple, unadorned style and sturdy construction.
The number of Shaker communities in the United States dwindled in the 20th century, and today only a single active Shaker community still exists, although there are a number of village museums that also continue their legacy, such as the Hancock Shaker Village in Massachusetts. But nothing is more symbolic of their simple ideals than the furniture style they started.
Whole corporations have even sprung up from former utopias, such as the Amana appliance company. Iowa's Amana Colonies were established by a group of German immigrants whose religious break from the Lutheran authorities in their homeland saw them try to create their own society in America. Eventually establishing seven villages, they believed in communal living, including such unique practices as having everyone eat in large dinner halls instead of as individual families, and doling out living expenses to each individual from a central trust.
The colonies did not become synonymous with refrigeration until the mid-20th century. The Amana Society, which governed the affairs of the Amana village citizens, purchased the Electric Equipment Company in 1936. By 1947, the newly named Electrical Department of the Amana Society had rolled out the very first upright home freezer, and cemented its place in appliance history.
The Amana Society eventually sold the company, but it retained the Amana name. Today, the Amana Corporation is owned by Maytag, and is still a leading brand in refrigerators, kitchen appliances, and even air conditioners. The ideals of the Amana Society, however, did not seem to survive with the brand.
There is also Oneida, another household name (this time in flatware) that can be traced right back to a strange utopian society. The Oneida Colony got its start in 1848 when radical socialist preacher John Humphrey Noyes started the settlement in New York. Noyes’ society held a number of controversial beliefs including that Jesus Christ had returned 70 years after his death, and that worldly perfection and freedom from sin were attainable in life. They practiced a form of “Free Love” which frowned on possessive monogamy, and even experimented with early eugenics through selective breeding. Also: they made awesome silverware.
Strangely, it is this last bit for which most people remember the Oneida name to this day. In 1899, the community began producing simple flatware, both for themselves and for trade, and the business took off. Now Oneida Limited is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of flatware and tableware. It is very likely that some of their products are in use in your home today.
It’s hard to truly quantify the effect America’s history of utopian experiments has had on our modern culture, but it’s more likely than not that you have used or experienced some aspect of utopia in your daily life, and didn’t even know it. Maybe a perfect world isn’t so impossible.
When we imagine Neanderthals, we typically picture them like much dirtier, hairier versions of ourselves. Imaginative depictions of Homo neanderthalensis usually mean fur pelts, cave paintings, heavy clubs, and grunting. Lots of grunting.
But maybe that's wrong. In the BBC documentary Neanderthal: The Rebirth a team of scientists investigated Neanderthals' skeletal remains to recreate how they moved and behaved. For this segment, the BBC employed renowned voice coach Patsy Rodenburg to examine a model of a Neanderthal's vocal tract and theorize what their voice might have sounded like. It's not at all what you thought it was. A short voice box, huge ribs, a wide nasal cavity, and a thick, heavy skull made for a sound that was... well, just watch.
A very serious reenactor named Elliot gets the job of reproducing the Neanderthal's voice with Patsy's instruction. Elliot deserves an Emmy in the category of Not Laughing.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Emailella@atlasobscura.com.
Van Gogh's famous Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear (1889). (Photo: Public domain)
Even though Vincent Van Gogh began acting increasingly strangely during the final year and a half of his life, he produced some of his most famous works in that period, including 1889's The Starry Night, before fatally shooting himself in 1890.
The artist has long been presumed to have suffered a psychotic break during this time. It was then, for example, that he cut off his ear and left it with a woman at a brothel, a gesture apparently not intended for the woman but for fellow artist Paul Gauguin, with whom Van Gogh had a fraught relationship.
Researchers and biographers have speculated for years what exactly caused his mental deterioration, but no one has been able to definitively say, though a recent analysis by a team of experts concluded that Van Gogh suffered from repeated "psychosis" in his final 18 months.
The analysis, however, couldn't go any further in describing his mental state, according to the BBC, saying it was also possible that Van Gogh's alcoholism had something to do with it.
"One single thing cannot explain the entire picture of what happened to Van Gogh," Arko Oderwald, one of the experts, told the Telegraph.
The experts, a team of medical professionals and art historians, looked primarily at Van Gogh's letters and other evidence, and presented their findings at a conference in Holland on Thursday.
The psychosis "could come from alcohol intoxication, lack of sleep, work stress and troubles with Gauguin, who was going to leave—attachment being one of his problems in life," Oderwald said. "He has repeated episodes of psychosis but recovered completely in between.”
In 1896, Richard F. Outcault, or, as he was known professionally, R.F. Outcault, found himself—from humble origins in Lancaster, Ohio—to be at the top of the New York journalism world. Commanding a huge sum of money, Outcault jumped ship that year from Joseph Pultizer's New York World to William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, taking his work with him. But Outcault wasn't a writer or editor or photographer—he drew comics, the first such artist to become a bona fide superstar.
It was Outcault, in fact, who invented the dialogue balloons seen in most every comic book since, and it was Outcault's most famous creation, the Yellow Kid, a sardonic Irish ragamuffin who lived on the streets of New York City, that gave us one of journalism's most enduring insults—so-called yellow journalism, or what we might call clickbait today.
According to a poll released this week, Americans distrust the media more than we have since 1972, when Gallup started asking. But distrust of the media—and not just presumed bias—isn't really anything new. That's because since their 19th-century beginnings, tabloids have been, mostly, a vessel for diversion and entertainment—you could leave the serious business to the broadsheets.
The World and the Journal (like modern equivalents such as the New York Post and the Daily Mail) were for too-good-to-check tales of everyday heroism, strident crusades, and, of course, pictures. Lots and lots of pictures. Were the stories true? Who knows. It was fun to read, though.
For decades, the tabloids were also, thanks to Outcault, for comics. And it was his comic that would begin the craze. Titled Hogan's Alley—a fictional New York City slum—the comic, depending on the day, could be funny, brutal, melancholic, racist, and acerbic, sometimes all in one.
It first appeared in Truth, a magazine, in 1894, and then Pulitzer's World early the next year, and proceeded to take New York by storm. Outcault's comics were richly drawn tableaus of life in the slums, popular in part because you didn't need to read the words—New York's population then was 40 percent foreign-born— to understand what was going on. They were vulgar, violent, and sometimes explicitly xenophobic, their appeal something like that of reality television, in which readers could be an audience to the rabble, yet still a layer removed.
"If dem things is as hard on der stummick as dey is ter pernounce, dey'll kill sure'n Coney Island whiskey," explains one character pointing at the opening of a new French restaurant.
In another, which depicted "The Great Football Match Down in Casey's Alley," throngs of children are seen beating each other senseless with rocks, sticks, and fists.
Still, others were more docile, even sentimental, featuring about the same amount of edge as Norman Rockwell. Take one published on December 15, 1895, that depicted children frolicking in the street ahead of Christmas; one girl is seen carrying a book called "Alice in Blunderland." (Many of Outcault's panels can be a massive scavenger hunt of small jokes.)
Whatever their content, the comics were so popular that by 1896, Hearst came calling, and in the fall of that year Outcault took his act to the Journal. There was only one problem, though—Outcault didn't have the copyright, meaning that Pulitzer and his World could keep producing their own rival versions of the Yellow Kid. They did just that, hiring George Luks—who would later establish himself as a painter—to keep the World's version of Hogan's Alley going.
"Do not be deceived," Outcault took to signing some of his comics, "none genuine without this signature."
The battle over the Yellow Kid occurred in the context of a brief, but vicious newspaper war between Pulitzer—who later, of course, burnished his legacy by creating the Pulitzer Prizes—and Hearst, who was the inspiration for Citizen Kane. Pulitzer was the dominant player in New York until 1895, when Hearst bought the Journal and invested significant amounts of his family fortune to try and beat Pulitzer, which, in a couple short years, he did. In addition to a series of raids on Pulitzer's staff, Hearst's acquisition of the Yellow Kid drove newspaper sales, meaning that, by 1897, the newspaper war was effectively over.
Happily caught in the crosshairs, of course, was Outcault, whose creation had made him wealthy, as the Yellow Kid, for a time, was everywhere, from toys to billboards to matchbooks. There was also America's first known comic book, a collection of the Hogan's Alley comics from the pages of the New York Journal. It was 196 pages, and cost 50 cents (about $15 today). In the ensuing decades anthologies would become a logical next step for any successful newspaper comic artist, but then it was novel. On the back of the book was a then-unfamiliar phrase. It was, it said, a "comic book."
Within those pages contained innovations that would stick with American comics for years to come, like the speech balloons appearing next to characters, which included dialogue. Speech balloons themselves had been used for centuries, but not for dialogue, paving the way for modern American comics.
Outcault's comics was also among the first to use panels to show action. In one comic from 1896, for example, the Yellow Kid smokes a giant cigar, which promptly makes him bedridden with sickness. ("The Yellow Kid Wrestles With The Tobacco Habit," the strip is called.) Over the course of six panels, the Yellow Kid goes from enthusiastically curious to nearly dead.
Another six-paneled strip from that same year is more disturbing. Titled "The Yellow Kid's Great Fight," the strip features the Yellow Kid beating up a black boy (referred to in egregious racial terms), the reason for which is unclear. With the aid of a goat, the kid also rips the hair from the boy's head, leaving him for dead.
The comics are relics of an era which, with its popularity and pervasiveness, it also came to define, or at least name. Outcault discontinued the strip in 1898, apparently losing interest in the character after giving up on ever getting its copyright. But the year before, Ervin Wardman, editor of the New York Press,coined a term that would stick with us today.
What to call Hearst and Pulitzer's papers, the pirates of the genre, Wardman wondered. He considered "new journalism" and "nude journalism," though those terms didn't quite fit. Wardman eventually settled on "yellow-kid journalism," which later became just yellow journalism. It stuck.
A couple years ago, Robert Delaware requested from the NSA any entries from its Intellipedia - the agency’s internal answer to Wikipedia - regarding the micronation “The Conch Republic.” The agency later released four pages, which is a fairly impressive feat considering that, strictly speaking, the Conch Republic doesn’t exist.
The Conch Republic, better known to us non-Conchers as Key West, Florida, was founded in 1982 as a tongue-in-cheek protest against a U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint at the one artery between the Keys and mainland, which had created traffic jams that stretched for miles and threatened the area’s dependence on tourism. As far as civil disobedience goes, this was harmless, fun, and surprisingly effective - which may be why the NSA took note. Or at least, shameless cribbed their notes from the Wikipedia page.
Yes, despite the admonition at the top of the Intellipedia article to “be bold” …
the Intellipedia page is a nearly complete (albeit somewhat outdated) copy-paste job, “borrowing” word-for-word content regarding the nation’s brief war with the United States Army Reserve …
its aborted attempt at bridge-theft (with bonus Jeb!) …
and on a more serious note, its footnote in the history of 9/11 (which is what had prompted Delaware to request the page in the first place).
In fact, the only major difference between the Intellipedia and Wikipedia entries is this one sentence from the “In Literature” subsection:
As is so often the case, almost everything actually related to the NSA has been redacted, though we are privy to the fact that the page has been accessed 763 times.
Which, granted, doesn’t sound like a lot, until you compare it to an earlier entry on the state of Montana, which last time we checked, actually exists:
People have found ways to live in the most inhospitable places on Earth. Nearly immediately after finding a way to survive, they have found a way to get drunk.
Likely because of, rather than in spite of, the challenges of living in the far reaches of the world, establishing a communal space is a survival necessity. Be it at the base of an active volcano, inside a 6,000-year-old tree, or even on your way to Mount Everest, no matter how far off the grid you end up, you are likely to find a place for strong spirits and lively conversation.
Now raise a glass to 10 of the oldest, most remote, and simply unlikely places in the Atlas at which to have a drink. Cheers!
Just off the small Zodiac boat required to access freezing Galindez Island in Antarctica lies the world’s southernmost bar. This tiny, one-room social area is located among the same research facilities where scientists first discovered the hole in the ozone layer. The bar was built by carpenters during the station's British stewardship, although they were supposed to use the wood to build a new pier for the complex. Instead they decided the base needed a place to drink.
The carpenters built the bar to recall the rustic pubs of their homeland with exposed wooden beams and aging photographs of Antarctica explorers. After the station’s purchase by the Ukraine in 1996, the bar became a firmly Ukrainian establishment where you can drink and cavort with researchers during the off hours. In addition to the standard libations, the bar also makes its own vodka using the surrounding glacial ice. The drink can be purchased for three dollars a glass or it is free with the donation of some womens’ undergarments to display behind the bar. Judging by the decor, there have been a number of free drinks. Essential drink: A glass of home-brewed vodka. (Your payment method is up to you.)
With no access by plane and a severely limited boat schedule, Pitcairn Island is one of the most remote inhabited locations on Earth, its closest neighbor being Tahiti, which is over 1,300 miles away. The outcropping of volcanic rock is home to only 50 people, receives all of its power from three generators, and, despite its limited services, contains a single bar called Christian’s Cafe.
The island is best known as the final resting place of the H.M.S. Bounty which was burned and sunk in 1790 when the mutinous crew settled on the island, leaving the 50 remaining descendants to carry on their legacy. Christian’s Cafe added spirits to its menu after 2009 when the local government lifted a law requiring a permit to purchase or consume alcohol. The bar itself is a white-walled, single room affair with a view of the island’s tropical foliage, and is only open on Friday from 6:30 until “late.”
Pitcairn Island is only accessible via a three, or ten-day pass which will deliver you to the island as a passenger on its single passenger/trading boat, or as a stop on a cruise vessel. No matter how you get there, make sure it's on a Friday so you can have a tipple at Christian’s Cafe. Essential drink: A tall glass of rum, ye mutinous dog.
Through dust storms, floods, and dwindling population, Australia’s Birdsville Hotel has stood the test of time in one of the most unforgiving climates on the planet.
Located on the edge of the arid Simpson Desert, in the population 273 town of Birdsville, the 27-room lodging and its attendant pubs act as a last bastion of civilization and camaraderie for anyone entering the nearby outback where the temperature averages over 100 degrees and rain is seen as a miracle.
Built in 1884, the one-story, sandstone establishment has three drinking areas, including two traditional outback pubs and a beer garden to accommodate the mix of tourists, outdoorsmen, and locals. Despite its remote location and demanding surroundings, the hotel’s rooms and facilities are modern and well kept thanks to the annual influx of spectators of the Birdsville Horse Races which bring in thousands of people to the otherwise small town every September. However, the bar areas retain the cacophonous charm of a traditional outback pub with exposed rafters strung with the accumulated remains of countless drunken evenings at the edge of civilization. Essential drink: A cold can of Australian bee.
Edinburgh of the Seven Seas is a small British settlement of under 300 people who live 1,800 miles of ocean from their nearest neighbor, but dangerously close to an active volcano. This mix of isolation and natural danger would make anyone need a drink, and to that end the Albatross Bar was created.
The small village of Edinburgh of the Seven Seas, known locally as “The Settlement,” was established in 1818 at the base of the volcano on the island of Tristan da Cunha as an act of English military strategy. The Settlement’s single taproom takes up the eastern portion of Prince Philip Hall, the local common house. It consists of a newly refurbished linoleum bar in the single room, having been rebuilt after a hurricane severely damaged the building in 2001. The bar itself is small, but in a farming community where the constant threat of famine, disease, storms, and volcanic eruption loom large, the simple watering hole is more than sufficient.
Reaching the island will take seven to eight days aboard one of the irregularly scheduled fishing trawlers which picks up locally caught lobster and drops off supplies, but if you can make it, the Albatross Bar should give you company in the shadow of the volcano. Essential drink: A lager and a locally-caught-lobster pie.
While many of the bars on this list lay claim to “most remote bar” only one holds a Guinness World Record for the honor, and that is Scotland’s Old Forge Pub. Originally built as an actual blacksmith’s forge on the shore of Loch Nevis, the building evolved into a social club for the local workers after World War II, before finally becoming a pub in 1981.
The long, exposed-wood interior of the establishment offers a warm, cozy environment and the walls are adorned with various musical instruments which the patrons are welcome to play if they know what they’re doing. In addition to a number of locally brewed beers, the large taproom offers a full menu of food and coffee for any weary traveller who succeeds in reaching the place.
As the pub has gained popularity for its hearty food, impromptu musical performances, and welcoming atmosphere, the ways to reach the Old Forge have increased, now including multiple ferries. However over land there is still no road to the blissfully isolated alehouse, but the scenic 12-mile walk from the nearest car-stop will make leaving the world behind all the easier. Essential drink: A brew from the local Glenfinnan micro-brewery, run by a retired math teacher.
A baobab (alternately called a dead-rat tree, a monkey-bread tree, or an upside-down tree) is a tree indigenous to Africa, recognizable by its wide, thick trunk and sparse, broad canopy. These trees can grow exceedingly large, and in the case of the ancient baobab on the Sunland Ranch in South Africa, large enough to build a whole bar in.
The "Big Baobab” as it is known is 155 feet around and 75 feet high, leading some to believe that it is the largest tree on the African continent. Whether or not this is true, the really remarkable feature is that the tree is naturally hollow, creating the space in which the van Heerden family, who own the land, built a bar the size of a railway car. The English pub-inspired interior of the tree can comfortably fit up to 20 people and features a dart board among other knickknacks placed along the tree's natural contours. The space even features a natural cellar to keep the drinks cool.
The Sunland Baobab has been carbon-dated to be over 6,000-years-old, and may even be one of the oldest living organisms on the planet, but don’t be intimidated by the pub’s size and age, just enjoy a beer in the bar nature gave us. Essential drink: A beer from the literal root cellar and a can of ant repellant.
Hiking to the apex of Mount Everest, the highest peak in the world, is thirsty work. Luckily, as the Nepalese trading community of Namche Bazaar evolved into a village, one smart entrepreneur established the simply named, Irish Pub, the highest bar in the world.
Namche Bazaar is a small village on a steep mountain slope which was built in response to the increased number of hikers looking to follow in Sir Edmund Hillary’s footsteps, and many of those adventurous souls come together at the Irish Pub to share rousing tales of their travels. The pub consists of one long bar and a number of entertainments, including a pool table, foosball, and a wide-screen television where travelers can keep up with their local game. While the traditional taproom amenities are a welcome sight for many travellers, the opportunity to meet fellow wanderers and interact with the local people is just as attractive. In this vein, the bar offers a number of Irish whiskeys and standard draughts, but customers can also choose from a number of traditional Sherpa alcohols to spice up their Everest experience.
To reach the Irish Pub at Namche Bazaar you will need to fly into the only airport in the Everest region (oft thought of as one of the most treacherous airports in the world due to its short, sloped, and frozen runway) and trek in to the village on foot. The hike can be done in one day, but it is suggested that travelers take up to two days to avoid altitude sickness. Essential drink: A Raksi, which is a wood-distilled rice wine common among sherpa drinkers.
England's oldest inn as it looks today. (Photo: Necrothesp/CC BY-SA 3.0)
Nestled in the stone crags beneath England’s Nottingham Castle lies the oldest inn in England which legend has it provided Crusaders with ale to gird their courage at the last stop before they went on to Holy War. Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem Inn began as a brewhouse in the 12th Century and takes its name from the apocryphal tales of Christian Crusaders who would supposedly drink one for the road before heading off to Jerusalem.
“The Trip,” as its called for short, consists of a large alehouse that abuts the cliff face is in the approximate location of the castle’s original brewhouse from the 12th Century. Inside this building is a classical English pub built directly into the sandstone beneath the castle. From here one can also access other, older chambers which were built into the cliff and are believed to have been used in the fermentation of ale during the Crusades. Even the ancient cellar tunnels beneath the cliff, which were once the castle jails, are used for keg storage.
Tourists to Nottingham Castle are encouraged to stop and have a drink at the Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem Inn today just as the 12th Century Crusaders were, proving that be it a during a relaxing vacation, or a dire holy war for our very souls, there will always be a place to have a pint. Essential drink: One of the locally imported Greene King ales, or a sip of sacramental wine.
Unlike most of the entries on this list, Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop in New Orleans is not hard to reach, but having been in business continuously since its construction in 1722, the popular tourist attraction, and America's oldest operating bar, may be most likely to exist until the end of the world.
The aged brick building is one of the only remaining examples of the once ubiquitous French Colonial architectural style on Bourbon Street. While the space has been renovated over the years, the interior still maintains the original stone and wood decor. The bar takes its name from a local legend which says that the public house was once used as a base for the Lafitte Brothers, notorious smugglers.
Despite crime, wars, fires, and even potential hauntings, Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop continues to draw large crowds of tourists and locals, and if business continues as it has for the past 200-plus years the bar may still be serving when the sun goes out. Essential drink: A souvenir t-shirt to show that you visited the bar before it was the only one left.
Built on the tiny, man-made flotilla called Forbes Island, the restaurant and bar of the same name is simply floating in a San Francisco dock waiting to sail into the ocean where the wealthy customers can continue sipping their cocktails should the world fall into ruin. While this may be a dramatic reading of the establishment’s intentions, the upscale eatery and lounge is in a unique position to act out this apocalyptic scenario.
The “island” itself was created in 1975 by millionaire houseboat designer, Forbes Thor Kiddoo, and is actually a marvelously designed concrete barge. The bar rests in a hut above the waterline next to an actual lighthouse. Drinkers can peer out at the bay as they sip a glass of fine wine from the barge’s underwater cellar, or order a nice summer cocktail and watch the birds that have made their home in the towering palms which were successfully transplanted to the boat. Below the waterline the island houses an upscale restaurant with portholes that look out under the sea.
Forbes Island is an easily accessible location permanently docked in the San Francisco bay and they are currently taking reservations. But should the need arise this floating marvel has the potential to set out to sea and become the most remote tavern on this list. Essential drink: A sea breeze.
Bridge over Mill Race, the canal that stretches through the Amana Colonies in Iowa. (Photo: Carl Wycoff/CC BY 2.0)
From my hometown of Toronto the drive to Amana, the dismantled utopian colony in Iowa, is 13 hours. I made it often in childhood, stuck in the backseat of my parent’s car, running batteries dead in my portable tape player, wondering if the long trip to a weird religious community was worth it.
But always, there was relief after we crossed the Mississippi river into the green rolling hills of my mother’s home state. “I feel better once I’m in Iowa,” she has said so often that I’ve come to believe it too. Most familiar of all to her is Amana, where she grew up, and where postcards of our family are still sold in the General Store: my great grandpa in front of a truck circa 1918, cousins hiking by the Iowa river, an aunt sorting cabbages.
If Amana sounds familiar it may be because it’s the name of your fridge or microwave. Although the Germanic religious group embraced separatism and outdated fashions in a similar way to the Amish, the Amana Society has always had a comfortable relationship with technology.
In 1855, the Amana Colonies were founded by a Pietistic German religious sect called the Community of True Inspiration. The founders were communal pacifists attracted to America for its religious freedom and to Iowa for its fertile soil. This soil was made available by earlier treaties designed to drive out the Meskwaki Nation to make room for white settlers.
The seven villages that make up the Amana Colonies are grids of several dozen to a couple hundred houses surrounded by farmland—except my mother’s village of Homestead, which is one long street, “just like Las Vegas,” as a village Elder once joked. With a population of just 148, my mother knew everyone.
She grew up in a large brick house in front of the railroad track. Amana homes were built to hold multiple generations, and when my mother was born there were eight people living in her house. Her father, my Opa, served in World War II. He made it home after the war but died a few years later due to complications from the malaria he contracted while overseas, leaving my Oma with two daughters, ages 6 and 3.
“My father died and things were tight financially as a result,” my mother recalls, “but we were comfortable because we had the support of the community and this big house.”
The homestead. (Photo: Courtesy Ellie Gordon-Moershel)
The house is a legacy of Amana’s communal roots. During communal times members were provided with housing, food, daycare and schooling for children, and a line of credit at the village stores for shoes, clothing and sundries. In exchange, all members from age 14 were assigned jobs in their villages. Farming, wool and calico sustained the community as did their craftwork; handmade rocking chairs and grandfather clocks are still an attraction for tourists.
Not surprisingly the strict uniformity had its downsides. In the communal years the village Elders forbade culture practices that seemed at odds with a simple life in devotion of God. Anything deemed “worldly” was a no go. This included baseball, haircuts for women, and photography.
As isolation from the outside world became harder to maintain, some of the Amana leadership turned a blind eye to certain activities if engaged in discreetly. Covert baseball diamonds were carved out in pastures behind town and these secret baseball leagues even produced a pro-league pitcher, Bill Zuber, who went on to the New York Yankees.
My great-grandmother was one of the first women to cut her hair. “Oh, I was frightened,” my Oma recalls, of how her grandfather, a town Elder at the time, would react.
The desire for these worldly pursuits are cited as part of what sparked “The Great Change.” It was 1932 and the leadership decided, almost 80 years after Amana’s founding, to abandon its communal system. Members of the community gained ownership of their homes. The bulk of land and economically viable businesses were consolidated into a new corporation and shares of stock were issued to all community members.
It was decided that the corporation would cover lifetime healthcare costs to people born before 1932 and their children until they came of age. “I realized later that what Amana provided us was socialized medicine,” my mother says. “What a blessing that was.”
Just after the Great Change, the son of the High Amana General Store proprietor, George Foerstner, began to manufacture beer coolers and frozen-food lockers for farmers. He sold the little business to the Amana Corporation, and soon the company expanded into personal freezer units for the home, introducing the first upright freezer in 1947. Two years later it debuted a combination refrigerator-freezer. By 1954 the company was making air conditioners, too.
For many years, the name “Amana” was also synonymous with microwave ovens; after being acquired by the Raytheon company, the company became known for a then-novel idea: the home microwave. The invention revolutionized the late-1960s kitchen, and ushered in a new approach to cooking. Amana dishwashers, countertop ranges, and washer-dryers soon followed.
For a long time I thought the Amana appliances had nothing to do with my mother’s hometown. It seemed impossible to me that the modest community where my relatives lived could have influence elsewhere. Even now I find it kind of baffling that on eBay you can buy a vintage 1948 poster of Groucho Marx posing with an Amana freezer. (The company is now owned by Whirlpool.)
Even as the community cemented its reputation for technological savvy around the globe, life in town stayed rooted in religion. Services were led by a town Elder, a layperson chosen from the community. “There was no ‘I am the voice of God,’” my mother says. “It was personal reflections; they were ordinary people.”
Gordon-Moershel's grandfather and great-aunt. (Photo: Courtesy Ellie Gordon-Moershel)
The Amana church believed that any follower of God could become “inspired” and used as God’s instrument, or “Werkzeug.” The last Werkzeug was an illiterate innkeeper’s helper named Barbara Heinemann, who delivered divine testimonies that are still read in the Amana church today. Though there hasn’t been a Werkzeug since Heinemann’s death in 1883, my mother couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if she suddenly became inspired and delivered testimony in front of everyone. “I’ll be so embarrassed,” she thought as a teenager.
Having had enough of small town life my mother left for the East Coast after high school. I ask her if she’s ever felt self-conscious about her roots. “No, no. Not at all,” she says without pause. Despite some community shortcomings, like women not being allowed to be Elders until the 1980s, the core Amana belief in striving for equality across the board is something my mother still carries.
Admittedly, part of the reason I asked her is because I used to feel some embarrassment about my family roots in a former utopian community that most people either associate with microwaves, or mistake for the Amish. Now I’m grateful for the simplicity of Amana. My favorite Amana meal is called matte (pronounced “mahda”) which uses four ingredients: boiled potatoes, butter, cottage cheese, and sour cream. And, if you’re not going on a date later, says my Oma, you can put onions on top.
The resistance to excess and materialism also informs the community’s approach to death. Every town has its own cemetery, tucked away and lined by pine trees. Each gravestone is the same: a small, plain, cement marker. There are no family plots. People are buried in the order they die. “Walking through the cemeteries you have a chronological rhythm of the life of that community,” my mother says. In the Homestead cemetery her father and Opa happen to be buried next to each other because they died six weeks apart.
These peaceful graveyards are some of my favorite spots in the Amana Colonies. They are testament to a modest, hard-working group who did their best to provide for all, and ended up giving the world some of its most beloved appliances.
Our relationship with the stars stretches back to the first person ever to look up and wonder, what's up there?
The answers have varied over the years—God, aliens, TV satellites—but sometimes our understanding outstrips our equipment. Painstaking preparations and research become obsolete overnight, leading us to drop projects and abandon facilities in pursuit of the newest understanding. From Depression-era observatories quietly deteriorating in the woods to discarded space shuttles in rusting warehouses, this guide explores a few of the mysterious and fascinating ruins in the Atlas leftover from decades of out-of-this-world ambitions.
The haunting ruins of a military fortress turned astronomical observatory sit on a Sarajevo mountaintop. The fortress was built during World War II as the mountaintop provided views of the entire city. After the war this lookout point proved useful again, when the fortress was converted into an astronomical observatory.
The Orion Astronomical Society established the Čolina Kapa Observatory and worked hard to bring it up to state-of-the-art technological standards. By 1972, it was the only facility of its kind in Bosnia and Herzegovina, its three domes crowning the building waiting for astronomers to observe the night sky. Unfortunately, two decades later in the 1990s much of Sarajevo was devastated by shelling during the Bosnian War. The Čolina Kapa Observatory and all its instruments were completely destroyed between 1992 and 1995 and the building abandoned. Today, though the walls are crumbling and decrepit, the tower remains an important symbol of Sarajevo.
High in the Sierra Nevada mountains near Granada, Spain, a crumbling observatory serves as a testament to changing times. Built in the early 1900s, the Mohon del Trigo Observatory in Spain’s Sierra Nevada mountains was a center of astronomical study, housing a small Cassegrain-type KYOTO reflector telescope donated by Georgetown University.
However by the 1970s the clear mountain air had been tainted by light pollution from the surrounding cities, and increasingly obsolete equipment led to the abandonment of the building. The telescopes were moved by the Insituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía to the more modern Observatory of Sierra Nevada in Loma de Dilar, and Mohon del Trigo came under the auspices of the University of Granada, a lonely magnet for graffiti artists and explorers.
Ascension Island is a tiny, British-controlled volcanic rock, known for its sea turtle nesting sites, British military presence, and a successful mid-1800s experiment in terraforming. It also played a small but important role in the Apollo manned missions through its NASA-run Deep Space station.
In 1962, NASA, working with the British government, established a tracking station to support the Surveyor Deep Space missions. Ascension Island was on a flight path between NASA’s Johannesburg and Spanish tracking stations and an important communications point.
The station was a collection of concrete buildings and satellite dishes nestled between the island’s volcanic peaks, charmingly named Devil’s Ashpit, which shielded the instruments from radar interference.
In 1965, the race to the moon intensified, and NASA expanded the Devil’s Ashpit tracking station into an integrated Deep Space Station with two independent 30 foot antennas, capable of simultaneously supporting Apollo and deep space missions. It was one of the fourteen land-based Apollo tracking stations of the Manned Space Flight Tracking Network.
The island’s landing strip was extended in 1964 to allow for the emergency landing of a space shuttle, but was never used. The station remained in operation for 20 years, until it was deemed no longer unnecessary and abandoned in 1990. Today the buildings remain; one is now the headquarters of the local Boy Scouts. Visitors are free to drive out to the site, walk around and explore while enjoying the seabirds, sport fishing, and lava caves of the remote island.
The remains of the abandoned Gun from Project HARP in Barbados. (Photo: Brohav/Public Domain)
In lay terms, the HARP project was established to create a cartoonishly large gun to shoot things into science into outer space. Designed by mad ballistics engineer Gerald Bull, the gun itself was originally built from a 65-foot long, 16" naval cannon, the kind that might be seen on a battleship. It was part of an initiative to research the use of ballistics to deliver objects into the upper atmosphere and beyond.
Similar guns were built in locations across the United States, however the sole surviving fruit of the project is the massive, toppled gun barrel at the Barbados test site. The Barbados gun was abandoned in the late 1960s and left to rust on its original launch site and after years of neglect looks more like a painted sewer pipe than a Godzilla-size gun barrel.
(Photo: Worapong Art Soodsamai/Public Domain) Built in 1937, this former space-gazing site was once owned by Indiana University. Professor Wilbur A. Cogshall oversaw the construction of the round stone keep on the then-outskirts of Bloomington. The observatory’s plain walls, practical rotating dome (the rollers are still visible though now rusted into place), and unpolished wooden floors show the influence of a pragmatic, no-frills mind.
After the observatory was finished, a 26-inch Gaertner Scientific telescope and 24-inch Schwarzschild reflector were installed and functioned for several years. Unfortunately, light pollution from expanding nearby cities, new technologies, and Professor Cogshall’s retirement led to the observatory’s abandonment in the mid-1940s. In 1965, the telescope frames and mounts were bought by the founders of the New Jersey Astronomical Association (NJAA). They refurbished the equipment in their backyards and installed the frame and mounts in New Jersey’s Paul Robinson Observatory, where they remain today.
Stripped of its equipment, but still showing its sturdy roots, the Knightridge Space Observatory currently stands alone in the woods, its dome open to the elements due to damage from fallen logs.
During the glory days of the Space Race, when the U.S. government was throwing money at anything that would give them an edge in the race to the stars, rocket and missile propulsion manufacturer Aerojet General decided on a bold move. Gambling that NASA would choose solid over liquid fuel for the Apollo missions’ Saturn 5 rockets and hoping to score a lucrative government contract, Aerojet secured funding from the U.S. Air Force, acquired cheap land out near the Everglades, and built a rocket manufacturing plant. They dug a 150-foot silo to test the rockets (the deepest hole ever made in Florida). Also, since the rockets were so huge they could only be transported by barge, the company dug a canal (including constructing a drawbridge) from the plant to the Atlantic ocean.
A few tests were done, but all this effort became useless overnight when NASA decided to forgo solid fuel and use liquid fueled rockets instead. The silo shut down in 1969. Now the facility has been barricaded and welded shut—with the rockets still inside.
Easier to visit than many abandoned space relics, Cooper's Island in sunny Bermuda used to house ammo bunkers and underground storage tanks during World War II. In 1960, NASA built a tracking station there to keep tabs on all the manned missions. This station was another member of the Manned Space Flight Network.
Outside of Cape Canaveral, the Cooper’s Island station was the most important of the 15 Mercury Space Flight Network ground stations. The Mercury Atlas rockets’ flight paths were almost directly over the island, which allowed an essential 25-second observation window as the rockets ascended into orbit. The station provided the vital “Go/No Go” to Cape Canaveral. Within 25 seconds after a rocket’s launch, the station would observe its trajectory, and based on their observations allow the rocket continue into orbit—or tell it to abort the mission, fire retrorockets, and splash down safely in the Atlantic. The station remained in operation through the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions, but NASA closed up shop in 1997 after space shuttle modifications made the base unnecessary.
The eastern end of Cooper’s Island has become a wildlife refuge, opening to the public and under active restoration since 2009. As of May 2013, one of the NASA radar towers has been converted into an ideal birdwatching station.
Baikonur is the largest and most famous of the former USSR’s space race bases—the launching site of Sputnik, Yuri Gagarin, and modern-day cosmonauts. Parts of the base are still active, and since the retirement of NASA's shuttle program in 2011, serves as the only launch point for all manned missions to the International Space Station.
The site also houses a museum full of famous Space Race memorabilia, including preserved cottages that once housed Yuri Gagarin and Sergey Korolev, lead engineer for the Soviet space program. Yet oddly enough, while the base continues to welcome tourists and send astronauts from across the world into space, much of Baikonur and the town surrounding it is deteriorating.
Launch of the Soyuz TMA-16 in 2009 at Baikonur Cosmodrome. (Photo: NASA/Public Domain)
Large swaths of Baikonur are deserted, leaving acres of unused launch pads and miles of pipes exposed to the desert air. Among the abandoned warehouses is much of the equipment for the cancelled Buran Space Shuttle Program, including shuttle prototypes and a massive multi-ton shuttle transporter. The only Buran shuttle to actually make it to space was destroyed in a hanger collapse in 2002, an accident that also killed seven technicians.
The Russian government doesn't appear too keen on updating Baikonur either, and the $155 million yearly rent they pay Kazakhstan for the site has long caused friction between the two countries. In January 2011, ground was broken on the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Amur Oblast, in the Russian Far East. The new cosmodrome will reduce the Russian space program's dependency on Baikonur, and allow it to launch missions from Russian soil by 2018. Vostochny, while bringing employment and infrastructure to a relatively undeveloped region, seems to spell the end of the Baikonur era.
In 1934, in the Polish town of Zlocieniec, then part of Germany, Hitler's Nazi party was putting up a new building, to house a school for future Nazi leaders. In the foundation, likely in April of 1934, they placed a time capsule.
Archaeologists have known for years that the time capsule was there, but they had little idea of what was inside and no way of accessing it. Recently, though, they were able to work past the concrete to retrieve a copper cylinder, soldered shut, that had been buried there for more than 80 years.
Often, the contents of time capsules end up as soggy messes, but this one was well constructed. The researchers used a small saw to open the capsule, and starting pulling out photos, letters, an invitation to the building's opening, and newspapers. There were coins and a book about the town's history—standard time capsule fare.
But, this being a Nazi time capsule, it also contained two copies of Mein Kampf and photos of Hitler.
It would be another five years before World War II started; after the war, the town was part of the territory given to Poland. The building is now used as a military building by Polish armed forces.
A photo posted by Johann Fürnsinn (@johannfurnsinn) on
In Ian Fleming's Goldfinger, the titular villain has a penchant for covering things in gold—cars, photographs, human women.
An Austrian criminal, recently nicknamed Goldfinger by local police, is slightly less sinister, but equally mysterious. This man (or woman) with the Midas touch has been swooping around the small town of Klosterneuburg at night with a spray can, a glittery vision, and a very specific target: "In the past three weeks at least ten fire hydrants have been sprayed a brilliant gold during the night," reports the Local.
Locals have praised the makeover, saying it makes the town more beautiful. In photographs, the new hue looks classy against the streetside greenery. The mayor, however, is less than impressed: as the Local explains, "the sprayer has effectively damaged council property." He put local police on the case.
They have their work cut out for them, as two more golden hydrants have been spotted in Korneuburg, just across the Danube from the original spray sites. Be careful out there, and remember: this heart is cold/he loves only gold.
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.
Almost every kitchen counter in the United States is 36 inches tall. And 25 inches deep. Eighteen inches above the counters are the cabinets, which are 16 inches deep.
Where do these sizes and dimensions come from? Have they always been so exact?
Building standards, as these numbers and rules are often known, are everywhere, helping shape everything from your kitchen cabinets and the sidewalk in front of your house to the layout of your favorite restaurant. Despite their prevalence, building standards really only came into being in the last century. A major turning point in their wild proliferation arrived in the 1920s, when the German government made the then-radical decision to standardize the size of office paper.
This seemingly bureaucratic move inspired a modernist architect named Ernst Neufert to create standards in his own field, ones that would simplify and streamline the work of design and construction. His efforts would change the size and shape of much of postwar Germany, as well as how architects around the world approach design to this day.
Despite his influence, he’s not exactly a household name. “He wasn’t like Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe, where you can point to a signature building,” says Nader Vossoughian, Associate Professor of Architecture at the New York Institute of Technology. “His influence was mostly behind the scenes.”
Neufert’s most important contribution to the field was his book of standards, called Architects Data. A massive tome, it provides ideal dimensions for everything from breakfast nooks to chicken coops, and can still be found on the desk of most architects in Europe. Few people, though, seem to know how it got there.
Born in Freyburg in 1900 and trained as a stonemason, at 19 Neufert enrolled at the Bauhaus, the famous Weimar-based design school. In fact, he was one of the first students of Walter Gropius, one of the founders of modernist architecture.
Like many of his modernist peers, Neufert was fascinated with industrialization. The Ford Model ‘T’ first rolled off the assembly line in America in 1908, leading experts in all sorts of fields to explore how to adapt industrial technologies for their own benefit. Neufert was eager to bring the predictability, efficiency, and cool logic of the assembly line to architecture and construction. But he wasn’t quite sure how.
But in 1922, the German government did something that would point the way for him.
They standardized the size of office paper.
Standardizing paper had surprisingly far-reaching effects, says Vossoughian. Books could now be standard sizes, making their storage and transportation easier. Mail would be easier to ship, weigh, and sort, and offices would be able to more efficiently store documents, files, binders, and portfolios.
The newly standardized paper dimensions were called the ‘A Series’ of paper formats. The largest size (A0) measures 84.1 centimeters wide by 118.9 centimeters tall—a total area of one square meter. Folding it in half creates the next size down, called A1. Folded in half again, A2. Anyone who has spent time outside of the U.S. has probably encountered the narrow, bizarro version of printer paper known as A4; it’s the closest thing to our 8.5 by 11-inch size.
A page from Architect's Data, showing standard-dimension furnishings. (Photo: Courtesy of Neufert-Stiftung, Germany)
Neufert was dazzled by the idea of regulating paper sizes. “He was really taken by the idea that you’d use one standard to regulate an entire system,” Vossoughian notes. He also recognized that this system had potential to affect far more than books and office supplies.
Uniform-sized books led to standard bookshelves, standard files to standard filing cabinets. Desks could be built to perfectly hold all the paper they needed, without wasting a centimeter. Offices could be built to perfectly fit the desks. Soon different businesses like banks, libraries, and administrative offices could begin to fit together, like a machine.
But Neufert wasn’t alone in this appreciation; the Nazi government was interested in standardization, too.
By the early 1930s Neufert was an accomplished architect, and a leader in the field of construction technology. In 1936 Hitler implemented a four-year plan to prepare for war, which, among other things, involved rebuilding Berlin into a massive world capital, complete with grand, Parisian-style boulevards, new train stations, and massive apartment buildings.
In 1938 Hitler’s chief architect Albert Speer hired Neufert to, as Speer put it, “oversee the standardization of building parts, and the rationalization to building methods.” He got to lead his own team of designers and technicians. They were called The Neufert Department.
For the project to succeed, construction had to happen quickly and cheaply, and Neufert had to figure out how to streamline and simplify every step of the process. Trying to meet these demands, Neufert thought back to the A Series of paper formats, and what had made them so successful.
The beauty was in this standard’s ability to affect not just paper, but everything that interacts with paper—desks, drawers, offices, mailmen. To have a similar ripple effect throughout all of construction and design, what, then, should you change?
The bricks, of course.
A diagram of the "Octametric System" designed by Neufert. (Photo: Courtesy of Neufert-Stiftung, Germany)
And so he did. He created the Octametric Brick, a standard-sized masonry unit that would come to replace any other sized brick in Germany (the bricks were 12.5 centimeters wide, or one-eighth of a meter, hence its name). Adoption of the brick, as Neufert saw, would create a standardized, modular world that all construction would occur in—no more custom shapes or sizes within buildings, no more worrying that cabinets would be the same height as the stove.
With the Octametric Brick, buildings could still look different and be different sizes, but everything, when reduced to its smallest part, would have this as a base unit. This overarching uniformity, based around the dimensions of a single brick, would be called the Octametric System. Even if products were made of other materials, under this system their dimensions would always have to be evenly divisible by one-eighth of a meter. Everything would finally fit together.
The Nazi government loved it. The Octametric System helped solve several construction issues the regime faced, the most pressing of which was how make the act of building—something that had traditionally been done by skilled craftspeople—simple enough for unskilled laborers to perform. The modular nature of the Octametric System made construction relatively easy and error-proof, more like assembly of building blocks than fine woodworking or masonry.
In this case, unskilled laborers often meant concentration camp prisoners. The Octametric System was believed to help solve problems of worker sabotage, being so simple and transparent that it was difficult to undermine. Individual agency was removed from the job site, much as it was removed from the assembly line of the Model ‘T’.
All of a sudden, in Neufert’s eyes at least, a grid measuring one-eighth of a meter by one-eighth of a meter was overlaid onto all of Germany and its occupied territories. The world was becoming pixelated, a real-life Sim City, a Legoland.
Just as Neufert’s systems were beginning to be fully implemented, the fate of Nazi Germany began to teeter. After losing over 800,000 soldiers by invading the Soviet Union in 1941, the Nazis government put the rebuilding of Berlin—and with it, the adoption of the Octametric System—on hold. They never picked it back up.
The page on "man is the measure of all things". (Photo: Courtesy of Neufert-Stiftung, Germany)
Something strange happened when it came time for Allied forces to rebuild Germany after WWII, though. The need to build fast and cheap was just as urgent—if not more so—than it had been under the Nazi regime. Committees were formed, summits were held, and eventually those in power decided to stick with Neufert’s Octametric System. The Nazis may have been the enemy, but Neufert’s system was very convenient.
In the following decades thousands of units of housing were built following the Octametric System. Until the 1990s, the Octametric Brick was the only kind one could buy in Germany.
While much has changed since World War II, standardization has only become more central to our lives. The practice of writing and enforcing standards has proliferated far beyond the world of architecture, and now hundreds of organizations and governing bodies write standards for different industries, making sure that all the parts of our global economy can fit together.
While Neufert’s Octametric System never officially spread beyond Germany, it came to have a tremendous effect on building standards around the world. Throughout his life, Neufert continued to update his encyclopedia of architectural standards, Architects Data. Starting in the 1940s, his Octametric System began to reshape the contents of his book. Ideal dimensions within buildings were altered ever-so-slightly, so as to now be divisible by one-eighth of a meter.
Today Architects Data is one of the most popular reference books in architecture. It’s currently in its 40th edition, and has been translated into 20 languages; from France to Argentina to Iran, architects around the world open it up when trying to decide how tall to make a door, or how wide to make a parking spot. In this way the Octametric System still lives on in much of the world, even if most designers have never heard of it, or know anything about the man responsible for its creation.
Today Neufert has no iconic buildings to his name, or contributions to architecture that you can point to and admire. That’s because like most behind-the-scenes work, when done right, standards all but disappear.
Lightning happens in a flash, but that doesn’t mean they are always forgotten. In a recently released paper from the American Meteorological Society (h/t Science Alert) two lightning strikes in particular have been singled for their record setting length and duration respectively.
The longest (in length) lightning strike on record was determined to have occurred in Oklahoma, back in 2007. The incredible bolt stretched a mind-blowing, 200 miles across the sky. It was so long that researchers are now looking into whether they are going to have to redefine exactly what a lightning strike is, due to the fact that it was previously thought that lightning could only touch down around 20 miles from a storm.
In addition to the Oklahoma strike, a lightning bolt that was recorded around Cote d'Azur, France in 2012 has also been singled out as the longest (in duration) on record. This electrical spark lasted for almost eight seconds, smashing the previous notion that lightning’s duration could rarely exceed one second. This rare lightning also clocked in at an impressive 125 miles in length, stretching between two clouds
The findings took years of comparison of information gathered by Lightning Mapping Array stations across the globe, that try to predict and record lightning strikes by sensing the subtle radiation that precedes them. Of course, the survey can only compare the strikes it records, and the researchers believe that even more incredible lightning flashes probably exist in nature. We just have to catch them.
A sign for Radio La Colifata. (All Photos: Alejandro Cynowicz)
The weather is chilly, but the sun is shining. It’s Saturday, August 13, the tail end of winter in the southern hemisphere. A crowd is gathered in the patio of the Hospital Borda in Buenos Aires, Argentina. They sit in a circle of chairs near a couple of small, brightly painted buildings, barely larger than sheds. Murals and mosaics dot the walls. One mosaic reads: Siempre Fui Loco—“I’ve always been crazy.”
Every Saturday a non-governmental organization named La Colifata comes to this “neuropsiquiátrico,” or psychiatric hospital, to host Radio La Colifata: the first radio to be run from inside a mental health institution.
The hospital hallways are empty; beige paint is peeling on the walls, and a few stray dogs roam the hallways freely. There seems to be no staff around, and only a few patients walk through halls, unsupervised. Two men sell knickknacks on blankets on the floor. But in contrast to the desolate vibe inside the hospital’s walls, outside a festive atmosphere prevails. People chat, laugh, and pass around drinks. In front of the shed, a console with a computer and soundboard is set up to record.
A patient singing.
The patients control the show, which lasts for four hours on Saturday afternoons and is broadcast on local radio as well as online. Regular presenters have their own programs; on a recent Saturday, Silvina read her poetry and Hugo Lopez sang a song about loving his cellphone, followed by a debate about modern technology.
But this Saturday is special; it is Radio La Colifata’s 25th anniversary. A crowd of well-wishers has come out to show support. Colorful balloons hang from strings, which crisscross over the crowd seated in chairs and on the grass.
The scene of the 25th anniversary celebrations.
According to Alfredo Olivera, La Colifata's founder, the radio has two main goals: to destigmatize mental illness by creating a bridge between society and the patients, and to offer a healing tool for patients who have few other opportunities to express themselves and be heard. “The radio came to be as an idea that was going to create a bridge of communication with the outside world,” he says. And the method works; Olivera says that of the patients released from the hospital, the ones that participated in the radio show are much less likely to be interned again than those who didn’t.
Alfredo Olivera, La Colifata's creator.
Lopez, an ex-patient and one of the radio’s regular contributors, explains it less clinically. La Colifata helped him “feel like a person,” he says. Other patients and ex-patients share similar feelings throughout the afternoon. “These days, everyone can talk. But it’s more difficult to be heard,” says Olivera.
On this anniversary, there are scores of people present: patients, ex-patients, the radio’s founders and long-time collaborators, psychologists who want to learn from the radio’s unique approach to healing. Yet it can be difficult to tell who has been diagnosed mentally ill and who has not. Everyone is sitting and talking together, laughing, eating, smoking cigarettes. One of the regular speakers holds the microphone in one hand, his infant nephew in the other. His sister, the baby’s mother, stands behind him. He credits La Colifata’s work with changing the attitudes people have about mental illness. People are no longer afraid to bridge the gap between “sane” and “crazy” and walk through the hospital’s front gate, he says. The radio is breaking down walls.
Although kids are not allowed to enter the hospital, an exception was made for this patient's nephew to join the party.
Radio La Colifata—La Colifata means “crazy” in local slang—has attracted an audience of millions of people over the years. But that doesn’t mean everything always runs smoothly; this is still South America, and operational hiccups are the norm. During the anniversary transmission the power cuts out unexpectedly halfway through the show. The sound system dies, the microphones shut off. The computer can still run on battery power but the internet is disconnected, rendering it useless. Nobody seems bothered.
Even during an electric power blackout, music goes on in La Colifata.
These things happen sometimes, we are told. One host even hints that the Borda hospital has cut the power before as a punitive measure—the hospital may allow La Colifata to broadcast from inside its walls, but the radio and the institute have had conflicts in the past, according to several of the hosts. When it becomes clear that the power is out on the entire city block and probably won’t return soon, La Colifata adapts. Someone pulls out a guitar, a few others gather around to sing. The circle of chairs tightens. A few people leave, but most stay. Some patients get up to dance; it’s clearly the moment they’ve been waiting for. Paired up on their own, they move with equal enthusiasm to salsa or strumming rock.
Patients show their dance moves in a breakdance battle. Later, when the sound system has returned and hip-hop comes on, a few of the more intrepid young men begin a short breakdance battle. It’s not that anything goes here, or that everyone does what they wish; rather, it’s that everyone is encouraged to express themselves and show respect to each other. “Here in La Colifata we try to create a context so that each person, ‘sane’ or ‘crazy,’ becomes part of the group process ... that’s what creates the positive results.” Olivera says.
La Colifata has come a long way since its humble beginnings 25 years ago. Back in the day, “a group of people would get together in the patio of the psychiatric hospital with a small recorder that we passed around from one person to the next, and each person would give their opinion, talk, and reflect about their feelings and their way of viewing the world ... I would edit the footage and transform it into short fragments that were two or three minutes long and bring those to a local FM radio station,” Olivera says.
Nowadays La Colifata has its own antennae and FM radio station—its full name is 100.3 LT 22 Radio La Colifata—as well as a website with live streaming. Listeners Tweet encouragement or questions to their favorite broadcasters, and other radio programs have retransmitted La Colifata’s shows, expanded the audience to thousands and even millions at times.
Lalo Mir (left), a famous mainstream radio host, has backed this project since its inception.
Many of the radio’s hosts have been collaborating with La Colifata since the '90s. They have been through highs and lows together. The singer Manu Chao performed a show in collaboration with the Colifatos—as they call themselves—and director Francis Ford Coppola shot scenes for the movie Tetro in the hospital’s yard. Together the Colifatos have also traveled to places like Costa Rica and Bariloche to raise awareness about mental illness.
In recent years, similar radio shows have popped up all over South America and the world. During the anniversary broadcast, Olivera goes through the list: Chile, Costa Rica, Italy, France—it goes on and on, dozens and hundreds of stations that have been inspired by La Colifata’s ideology and work with students, psychologists, volunteers and patients all over the world to help break down the walls around the Borda Hospital and others like it.
A mosaic on the wall: "Siempre fuí loco", meaning "I've always been crazy".
Night falls on the party, and the broadcast ends. One patient is selling his poetry, printed on glossy paper; another offers a painting. Most people drift away, back to the outside world and their day-to-day lives, or inside the walls of the hospital for their evening meal. But the radio has one last surprise to offer today: a birthday cake, complete with candles and sparklers. The group huddles together to sing happy birthday to La Colifata, and wish her many more years to come.
When you hear John Williams' enchanting score for the the Harry Potter films, you are immediately transported to J.K. Rowling’s fantastic world of wizards, witches, and magical creatures. The first notes of the iconic Harry Potter theme music, known as “Hedwig’s Theme,” are unmistakable—even when ringing from glistening glass goblets.
Just when you thought the tinkling tune couldn’t be more reminiscent of Harry’s mystical world, these two musicians add the eerie and elegant sounds of glass to the score. At a concert in Tennessee, the Polish glass music group GlassDuo recreate “Hedwig’s Theme” on a massive glass harp comprised of specially tuned goblets.
The instruments dates back to 1741, when an Irish musician created the first glass harp, played with wooden sticks. Today, notes are played by running moistened fingers around the rim of a wine glass either filled with water or ground down to obtain the correct pitch. The style of music has evolved into its own kind of artistry. Street performing glass harpists attract large crowds, and composers have incorporated the unique sound into movie scores such as Dr. Zhivago.
Formerly musicians in the symphony orchestra in Gdansk, GlassDuo’s Anna and Arkadiusz Szafraniec hand-built the largest known glass harp in the world, requiring 2,000 glasses. The three rows of goblets are tuned so they don’t have to be filled with water. Having the advantage of four hands playing the instrument at once, GlassDuo utilizes the entire five-octave scale to create a spell-binding performance of “Hedwig’s Theme.” GlassDuo is one of a few professional glass music ensembles in the world, and they have been playing their music for about two decades.
As Dumbledore said in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone: "Ah, music. A magic beyond all we do here!"
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.
A test screen from the Emergency Broadcast System, which was replaced in 1997. (Photo: YouTube)
On Monday morning, a little over a day after Saturday's bombing in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, which injured 29 people, officials sent out an alert to millions of people on their cell phones.
The alert, the New York Times reported, was "unprecedented," the modern equivalent of the centuries-old wanted poster.
"WANTED," the alert read, pushed out to cell phones a few minutes before 8 a.m., "Ahmad Khan Rahami, 28-yr-old male. See media for pic. Call 9-1-1 if seen."
It's too early to say how big of a role the alert played, but the alerts themselves have been an increasingly common part of our digital landscape, pushed out for blizzards, hurricanes, and missing children, among other reasons, though this is the first time an alert has been issued naming a terrorism suspect. (An alert sent in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing was a shelter-in-place order for local residents.)
The alerts have also been criticized—sometimes for being untimely—or, in the case of Monday's alert, just not being very helpful, even if on most phones, it's possible to turn them off entirely.
You can silence your notification settings for all kind of alerts. Except, that is, for those coming from the president.
Such a presidential alert has never been sent, but since 2006, they've been unblockable by law. That's when President George W. Bush signed into law the Warning, Alert, Response and Network Act, which provided for the Wireless Emergency Alert's creation. The law made it mandatory for wireless companies participating in the system (nearly every major wireless company has voluntarily opted in) to make presidential alerts unblockable on cell phones and other devices that use cell data, like iPads.
This might seem a little creepy, except when one considers that such a system has basically always been in place in other formats. The long-standing Emergency Alert System, formerly the Emergency Broadcast System, is capable of taking over television and radio stations across the U.S. within minutes to issue emergency messages.
The president has unfettered access to the system, to be used in the case of national emergencies.
And like the cell phone system, a presidential alert in the television and radio system has never been used. Such a system was originally established in 1951 by President Harry Truman, mostly in anticipation of a nuclear attack as the Cold War got underway.
Mexico is a land of dazzling landscapes. From the jungles of Chiapas to the deserts of Sonora, from the freezing 18,500-foot peak of Orizaba to the tortilla-flat Yucatán, from forests filled with butterflies to the underwater abundance surrounding Baja California, Mexico’s ecosystems are easily as diverse and wondrous as those of its northern neighbor.
But there is one landscape I had long wanted to see more than any other—the cloud forest. I’d seen photographs: bizarre and hypnotic places, worlds of mist and mystery, haunted landscapes forever cloaked in fog and secrets. Places where, if you allowed your mind to drift, you could easily imagine trolls and forest sprites wandering under primordial boughs. And yet, beyond these forests’ appearance, I couldn’t really say much about them.
Year after year, I tell myself I will visit the fireflies of Tlaxcala, climb Orizaba and see the cloud forest during the rainy season—and each year, I run out of time. This year, determined to experience these fantastic foggy forests once and for all, I bought a ticket to the city of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, in Chiapas, for the beginning of the rainy season in May. What I learned shocked me. When it comes to this enchanting ecosystem, it seems I am not the only one running out of time.
This waterfall in Veracruz, Mexico illustrates the role that cloud forests play in producing fresh water for communities downslope.
San Cristóbal, located at an elevation of 2,200 meters (7,200 feet), is perfectly situated for cloud forests, and was once famously surrounded by them. My plan is to explore the forest around Huitepec, an extinct volcano outside town, so I meet up with Paula Enriquez, a biologist at the nearby College of the Southern Border, and the two of us head up the mountain. A sharply intelligent woman with unruly black hair, Enriquez studies the population dynamics of cloud forest birds, especially owls.
We begin our trek on a cloudy morning outside Huitepec Ecological Reserve and trace its border for half a mile or so. It’s not hard to spot the park boundary. To the left of the trail are stately trees and on the right is a clear-cut slope—forest that has been replaced by small-scale farming plots. Soon we notice the temperature drop a few degrees, and with a thrill I realize we have entered the cloud forest. Other than slightly chillier air, what strikes me is just how familiar this forest feels. Only a few miles away, the forests are jungles, thick with tropical trees squeezed together, competing for sunlight. But here, the canopy is a lush tapestry of beech, sycamore, oak and sweetgum—more reminiscent of Massachusetts than Mexico. Reach into the thick leaf litter on the ground and you might pull out an acorn the size of your fist. It’s simultaneously intimately familiar and bizarrely alien.
As we walk, we hear a pink-headed warbler (Ergaticus versicolor) and a black thrush (Turdus infuscatus), and spot a garnet-throated hummingbird (Lamprolaima rhami) probing a dazzling pink bromeliad. Enriquez kneels by a solitaire’s nest carved into a mud bank and explains that these birds can live in several habitats but prefer to nest under the broad leaves and insect-rich branches of cloud forests during the rainy season. We stop to listen to a series of short, mournful whistles coming from 60 meters (200 feet) uphill: a mountain trogon (Trogon mexicanus)—cousin of the cloud forest’s most iconic creature, the resplendent quetzal (Pharomachrus mocinno)—staking out its breeding territory. Quetzals haven’t been seen here for decades, pushed out by encroaching development.
“Here,” Enriquez says, “the question is: How will species be able to adapt to the changes? Some maybe will, but some maybe won’t.” She is talking about birds, but she might as well be speaking of the cloud forest itself. In fact, the forest surrounding this extinct volcano is all that’s left of the once-sprawling cloud forests of central Chiapas.
One of the many threats faced by Mexico's cloud forests is deforestation caused by locals clearing land for farm plots and pasture for cattle.
At the top of a ridge, we look out over the landscape through a break in the trees, and I suddenly understand. The morning overcast has burned off and the day is hot—without a cloud in the sky. No fog-cloaked landscape, no forest trolls, no mysterious mists. The trees are there, as are some of the orchids and mosses. But no clouds. The combination of deforestation and urban heat emanating from the nearby city has pushed up temperatures in the area roughly two degrees Celsius—coincidentally, the same amount that scientists often say would be a catastrophic tipping point with global warming. Looking out over what used to be thousands of hectares of cloud forest, all we see is pine trees and farms.
Cloud forests are unique ecosystems—throwbacks to the last ice age—that exist within a narrow band of physical and climatic conditions. They provide clean water for the cities below, as well as crucial habitat for dozens of critically threatened plants and animals. But studies suggest that climate change in this century alone will have devastating impacts on cloud forests—especially those at the northern extent of their range here in Mexico. Because of this, Mexican cloud forests have a great deal to teach us. Dependent on fog, which, in turn, is dependent on specific temperatures, these sensitive ecosystems are a window into what may happen to many habitats as the globe warms.
So scientists are scrambling to understand not only the threats facing cloud forests but, more basically, how they function. What they’re finding could help preserve these forests—and offer a glimpse of what conservation may look like in an ever-warming world.
Seventeen thousand years ago, during the height of the last great ice age, glaciers and tundra covered the northern United States. To the south, boreal conifer forests stretched all the way down the eastern half of the country. And deciduous forest—those hardwoods that give Midwesterners and East Coasters the stupendous fall colors they enjoy today—was squeezed south, into Alabama, Texas, and down into Mexico. If you were to walk through the forests of Eastern Mexico during that time, it would have felt a lot like the Berkshires or the Ozarks today—with oaks, beech, and walnuts everywhere you looked.
From left: The curled “fiddlehead” of a cloud forest fern about to open; ferns, which are plentiful in Veracruz's cloud forests, are regularly harvested for flower arrangements; one of the many native cloud-forest plants that locals collect and use as food and medicine.
But it was not destined to stay that way. Over the next 10,000 years, a massive change in climate shattered these ecosystems, shifting everything northward and transforming the continent into what we recognize today. Ice and tundra retreated to Alaska and Canada, chased closely behind by dense conifer forests, while lush forests of oak, hickory, ash, and dozens of familiar American plants spread throughout the Eastern United States.
Meanwhile, down in Mexico and Central America, anemic tropical forest came roaring back, flooding into the region like batter poured over a hot skillet, replacing the deciduous forest with jungle. The lowlands, now hot and moist, became home to vast rainforests of mahogany, ramón, and sapodilla, as well as orchids, bromeliads, and avocado.
But a strange thing happened. Those ice-age deciduous forests didn’t disappear entirely. Instead, they retreated to the only places cool enough for them to resist the onslaught of invading tropical trees: high in the mountains.
Research student Juan Manuel Diaz Garcia searches a cloud forest stream for amphibians.
Thus were born the cloud forests, some of the world’s most haunting and fascinating ecosystems. These remnant deciduous hardwood forests have persisted for thousands of years in the borderlands between too hot and too cold, too high and too low. In Mexico, their canopies are home to an eclectic mix of temperate and tropical flora and fauna—like the highland guan (Penelopina nigra), the Veracruz tree frog (Charadrahyla taeniopus), and dozens of tiny orchids—and have become crucial habitat and breeding grounds for hundreds of rare, endemic animals. Alarmingly, in a 2011 survey, scientists found that almost half of cloud forest tree species are in trouble, 15 percent critically so.
Cloud forests are also important for humans. In addition to the forests’ branches, leaves, mosses, and epiphytes capturing moisture from clouds, they also play an active role in creating those clouds. Between the water in their roots and the water in the air, cloud forests are like giant reservoirs sprinkled across the mountains of Latin America and watering the lands far below. And the water coming out of these chilly forests is substantially cleaner than other reservoirs, because colder temperatures and less suspended material mean fewer parasites.
But cloud forests have been vanishing across Latin America due to a number of human stressors, including encroaching coffee plantations, logging, and of course shifting climates. And because of their specific niche, biologists often describe them as one of the terrestrial ecosystems most vulnerable to an ever-warming world. To better understand what is happening to Mexican cloud forests, I needed some additional expert perspective. About 550 kilometers (340 miles) northwest of San Cristóbal is the city of Xalapa, Veracruz, once similarly enshrouded in perennial fog. Here, just outside town, tucked in a dense jungle valley, is the National Institute for Ecology, one of Mexico’s leading research centers and one of the best places to study cloud forests.
“I think that what we are seeing is not anymore what we used to call cloud forest,” says Tarin Toledo, a forestry expert at the Institute. “What remains of cloud forest is degraded forest.”
From left: although listed as near-threatened, this tree frog is relatively common in the cloud forests around Veracruz; a blue-crowned motmot seeks shelter from the rain in the lower branches of a cloud forest tree near Xalapa; brightly colored velvet mites like this one emerge from the forest litter after a rain to hunt for other small invertebrates.
With her tribal necklace, nose ring and fleece vest, Toledo has an undeniable granola charm coupled with a deep-seated sense of optimism. She and her colleagues are trying to ask two simple questions: What constitutes a cloud forest? And how will they adapt if climate change moves their clouds? Her office is smack in the middle of the 900-meter (3,000-foot) elevation band preferred by cloud forests, yet she says that only about 10 percent of the cloud forests from this region remain. Meanwhile, the city that was once steeped in mist and fog for 240 days per year now sees only about 70.
Not all of this dry, hot weather is due to global climate change. The clouds that envelope the slopes of these mountains are fed by the Gulf of Mexico, 55 kilometers (34 miles) away. Moist air travels across the flatlands and condenses into clouds as it travels up the foothills of Pico de Orizaba, the fourth largest mountain in North America. But over the years, the land between the Gulf and the mountains has been cleared for farms and housing. This landscape is drier than the lowland forest once was, so now, by the time the air reaches the mountains, much of its moisture is gone, and what remains condenses only at higher, colder climes. Many of the cloud forests here simply don’t see the clouds that once helped sustain them.
Just as in San Cristóbal, these drier, warmer conditions are a preview of what the world will look like in a future with higher CO2 levels—and this is an excellent place to study that future. To learn what exactly these changing conditions will mean for cloud forests, we follow a group of Toledo’s students into the mountains outside of Xalapa. Again, the day is hot and the forest is dry. It’s more than a month into rainy season and we should be drenched by cool mist by now—but the cloud layer sits stubbornly thousands of feet above us.
Moss hangs from the branch of a typical cloud forest tree, Veracruz.
The forest around us is covered in beech, walnut, and especially oak. If I didn’t know better, I might think I had been transported from Mexico to the Ozarks of Southern Illinois. Of the 150 species of oak in Mexico, almost half of them live in cloud forests. Yet Toledo and her students can see this forest is deeply troubled. For one thing, there aren’t many saplings in the understory. Plenty of brush but no young trees.
Toledo says this is one sign that a forest is disappearing. And while technically, these are cloud forest trees, the forest is not as diverse as it should be. Many of the trees, like walnuts, that you would expect to see just aren’t here. And it’s not just the trees. Toledo’s colleague, a bat expert named Vinicio Sosa, says that bats seem to be declining as well, or are confined to narrow corridors and waterways. Insects, likewise, seem to be disappearing from these forests, presumably forced into higher, wetter elevations
“The animals that we saw before aren’t there,” says Federico Escobar, an expert in cloud forest invertebrates at the Institute who has been revisiting sites that were last surveyed in 1995, and is documenting the changes.
From left: Indian pipe is a rare parasitic plant that is relatively abundant in the cloud forests of Veracruz; Leaves of a club moss in the cloud forest around El Zapotal; :close-up of fruits of a pokeweed.
But by far the most impacted group of animals is the amphibians. The moist, fertile undergrowth of a cloud forest is perfect for their delicate skin, which must be wet for them to breathe. About half of the amphibians found in the cloud forest are endangered. The Monteverde golden toad (Incilius periglenes), a cloud forest animal from Costa Rica, is considered by some to be the first creature to have gone extinct because of climate change. Another, the Townsend’s salamander (Parvimolge townsendi) of Veracruz, was considered extinct as of 2008.
This raises a fundamental question for scientists. Without its insects, amphibians, and saplings—in other words, its residents and future housing—is a cloud forest still a cloud forest? Toledo says no. Many of the forests here have become so stripped of biodiversity that they can’t really be called cloud forests anymore. But despite the massive challenges, she is immune to doom and gloom. There is hope, she says. “These species are much more plastic than we think.” She fervently believes that, given the opportunity, many cloud forest species will adapt and survive. But they need the opportunity. “If you don’t have anywhere to move, it doesn’t matter.”
And this is where research at the Institute gets interesting. Cloud forests might eventually follow the clouds up the mountainsides. But how will the forests form? Which trees will go first? And how can we help them? In many ways, Toledo and her colleagues are trying to create a recipe for recreating and maintaining cloud forests. Which is tougher than it sounds. Depending on elevation, moisture, and temperature, it’s not clear why a walnut might do well in one spot while an oak will thrive in another. She and Sosa have several research plots that snake up the sides of the mountain, where they have planted hundreds of native trees that are in decline elsewhere to understand which trees will thrive at which elevations.
Research students from Mexico's Institute for Ecology in Xalapa, Veracruz study trees replanted in an area of cloud forest once heavily deforested.
Scientists have found that with this sort of facilitated restoration—where humans nudge certain species ahead in the right environment—cloud forests can come quickly back. Guadalupe Williams, who has been a pioneer in cloud forest restoration for decades, planted an experimental forest on the Institute’s grounds 15 years ago, on land whose original forest had been cut down and left fallow decades before. With a little maintenance, today it’s a young but lush, vibrant cloud forest, despite the lack of clouds. Williams, who is thin and lively, with exuberant, often erratic mannerisms, is a passionate advocate for the return of the cloud forests. Walking into the experimental forest with her, with stately ash growing alongside a bubbly little stream, it was almost impossible to recognize how it could have been a farm field just a few decades before.
Williams and Toledo say that cloud forests have adapted to climate change in the past and they will again in the future. The trouble, they say, is likely not the warming planet.
“How fast is climate change going to destroy the forest? Probably not as fast as humans,” Williams says. “At least in this region, this is what we see eating the forest.”
Tillandsia imperialis is a common cloud forest epiphyte that is often used by locals in the construction of arches that decorate churches during religious festivities.
This is the real crux with climate change, not only in cloud forests, but in ecosystems around the world. It’s not the changing climate alone that will drive species to extinction—it’s the combination of that with centuries of mismanagement by humans. Here in Mexico, the primary culprits are coffee plantations, which covet the same chilly high altitude soils as cloud forests. And the lands above the cloud forests aren’t exactly vacant, either. If the cloud forests migrate uphill, they will quickly come into conflict with potato farmers, who plant their crops in the higher, chillier terrain.
So the race is on. Can we preserve enough of the cloud forest and give it enough space to move so that it can adjust to an uncertain future? Can an ephemeral ecosystem squeezed between coffee and potatoes find a slice of space inside the cloud layer? Maybe. Many of the local coffee plantations have switched over to more sustainable “shade coffee” that is grown under the canopy of local trees. Research suggests that as much as 84 percent of cloud forest species can live in such coffee plantations.
Likewise, biologists have found pockets of cloud forest creatures like pink-headed warblers and even quetzals living in unusual habitats downslope from cloud forests, perhaps waiting for a time when they can return to the chilly boughs of their traditional habitats. Sosa has tracked similar remnant groups of bats, and a few years ago an amphibian expert at the Institute named Eduardo Pineda made a remarkable discovery. He was working in a forest not far from Xalapa when he flipped over a patch of leaves to expose a small, unremarkable salamander crawling in the cool damp below. With a shock, he realized it was a Townsend’s salamander, a creature that—until that very moment—was considered extinct. Since then, he has found dozens of them, and several even wander the leaf litter outside his office at the Institute.
“They are still there,” he says. Sometimes you just have to know where to look.
The cloud forest's abundant forest litter provides habitat for insects and amphibians.
Walking out of the Institute of Ecology in Xalapa, I’m not sure what to think about the future of this ancient and fascinating habitat. These forests have survived some of the most profound climatic pivots in the history of our planet. Yet it may be tough for our grandchildren to find a true cloud forest in 50 years. It’s hard enough for me to find one now, in the heart of what should be the rainy season.
Before I leave Xalapa, I take one more trip into the cloud forest, searching for that classic moment where the thick layer of fog lifts off the rich green hillside and the world is muffled in a cloudy blanket. This time, it’s with Sendas A.C., a cooperative created through local indigenous communities that promotes ecotourism as a way to preserve the forest. Our guide is Angel Morales Gabriel, an enthusiastic lover of all things cloud forest, and his more subdued uncle, Pedro. They maintain an excellent series of pathways through the forest, complete with benches and shelters for taking a load off. But the region has been plagued by drug violence, and we are only the second clients they’ve had in six months.
We meet before sunrise, hoping to catch an early morning glimpse of this unique ecosystem in all its foggy glory before the moisture burns off. We start up, heading past farm fields and scattered houses until we reach a series of switchbacks up a steep slope to a prominent ridgeline. Around us I hear dueling mountain trogons staking out breeding grounds, and a slate-throated redstart (Myioborus miniatus) scolding us from the trees. A fine mist falls just at the treetops.
We reach the ridge and find a glorious break in the trees. Down the valley we can see ancient oaks and beech trees transition to pines and eventually to coffee plantations. Beyond is the horizon—and a glorious sun rising to light the whole valley in a vibrant green. It’s going to be another beautiful, clear day.
Sally Rios Kuri contributed to the reporting of this story.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
The screw is the ultimate example of an object that hides under our noses but we never think about.
It's the most basic of building blocks, something that connects every one of our devices, manufacturing processes, and likely even the chair you're sitting in right now. (One device that doesn't tend to have screws? The air mattress.)
And generally, we never give screws a second thought. But I was thinking about them a lot the other night when I tried to screw a nut around a screw and misaligned it so annoyingly that it took a lot of physical might to unscrew that screw.
Where do screws come from? And what did we do in a world before them? As it turns out, screws have a surprisingly diverse and unexpected history, stretching from ancient Greece to what we think of them as today, essential parts of our literal foundations. In ancient Greece, for example, it's claimed Archytas of Tarentum invented an early version. Leonardo da Vinci also had one, and, later, of course, it was a key part of the Industrial Revolution.
Today, though, we mostly use a combination of Phillips head screws and flathead screws, though for decades, these haven't been the only variety out there.
British Engineer John Frearson, for example, came up with an alternative to the flathead in the 19th century. (It's still popular today in some specific uses, such as boating.)
It is well known to persons who use screws that if the nicks are narrow and shallow it is difficult to drive the screw without the screw-driver slipping out of the nicks, and if the nicks are wide and deep to afford a good gripe, the head of the screw is weakened, and the screw-driver is liable to slip out sidewise and deface the finished surface of the work, and if the screw-driver is the same width as or wider than the head of the screw, the countersink work is liable to be defaced, and the angles of the screw-driver are often broken."
The Frearson screw, as it came to be known, also used a cross design like the Phillips screw, but differ in a significant way: The Phillips screw, unlike the Frearson, has a slight curvature in the center, which makes it so that when the screw is in all the way, the screwdriver would inevitably fall out (or if you're me, you would continue twisting anyway until you've fully stripped the metal and made the screw useless).
A few other screw types you may or may not have run into at the hardware store:
The square-headed Robertson Screw predated the Philips screwdriver by about 30 years, and for decades it was more common than the Philips in the U.S., which eventually won out not due to a more efficient design, but because of licensing drama. See, Henry Ford wanted inventor P.L. Robertson to license out his screw design. Robertson refused, and that led the design to lose out to the Phillips screwhead in the U.S. market. The Robertson screw is still popular in Canada, however.
The hex socket set screw, named for its six-sided hexagon design, isn't named after a person, but its corresponding tool is. The Allen wrench, named for William G. Allen, has existed for more than 100 years. The reason the wrench is named for Allen rather than the socket? Because the hex screw predates the Allen wrench by a few decades.
The Bristol screw, which is now called the Bristol Spline Drive, has an unusual spline-driven circular design that is claimed to be excellent at producing torque. The invention, which initially had an Allen wrench-style design, dates to 1911, with the invention credited to a guy named Dwight S. Goodwin.
The Torx screwdriver, which first appeared in 1967, introduced a star shape that has become fairly common in certain technical uses, such as cars, bikes, and consumer electronics. Unlike a Phillips screw, it's designed not to fall out, and at first, to prevent people from unscrewing it, as the screwdrivers were proprietary. They also came in handy for guns. "Before Torx, which appeared in 1967, all firearms relied on slothead screws, which were designed to make ordinary shooters miserable and enable gunsmiths to drive around in Bentleys," Field & Stream's David E. Petzal wrote.
Perhaps the most interesting and unusual screw design in the past few decades is the Outlaw Fastener, a multi-tier screw that is akin to combining an Allen wrench with a three-layer cake. It was the subject of a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2013. The design, if fairly advanced, isn't totally new; it appears to be the direct descendant of the Uni-Screw, a design that dates back to the 1960s.
It was in the early 20th century, an era of screw-head innovation that led to the creation of both Robertson and Phillips screws, that the U.S. government … well, they spent a lot of time researching screw threads.
(For people who don't regularly screw stuff in, the thread is the pointed metal line that twists around the metal rod. It's part of what makes a screw a screw and not a peg.)
In 1918, Congress passed a law establishing an organization called the National Screw Thread Commission, with the goal of ascertaining consistent standards for screws. The goal of this effort, which you might guess given the timing of the law's passage, is military-related: the military uses a lot of screws, and inconsistencies were apparently bad enough after World War I that Congress had to do something about it.
John Q. Tilson, a Connecticut congressman, argued that the measure was necessary due to the problems a lack of consistent screw thread were creating. He also made the case for businesses—who he argues also will benefit from screw compatibility.
"Private manufacturers, however, desire this done just as much as everybody else," he said, according to The Journal of the Society of Automotive Engineers. "They would like to have the standard of tolerance for screw threads all over the United States."
The law, of course, passed, and we had the National Screw Thread Commission, perhaps the most obscure bureaucratic organization to ever exist.
But it had a perfectly good reason to exist. A 1926 New York Times article about the commission highlighted the 1904 Baltimore fire, in which fire departments from other major cities came in to help. Unfortunately, the other cities had hoses that were incompatible with the screws used by Baltimore, making their help useless.
The article noted that the government was working closely with the U.K. on the issue, and differences between those two countries did a lot to underline the problem:
There is, however, a fundamental difference in the angle of the thread of the two systems. This is 60 degrees for the American and 55 degrees for the British thread. Still another difference is that the American thread has flattened crests and roots, whereas those of the British thread are rounded.
This difference surfaced essentially because the U.K. had created its own standard, the Whitworth Thread, but an American thought he could do things better. In 1864, William Sellers introduced the screw design for the American market that borrowed inspiration from Sir Joseph Whitworth's design, but pitched a new path forward.
Now, the U.S. was trying to convince the rest of the world that Sellers' design was the way to go. And it took a long time to sell them on the idea. The National Screw Thread Commission was active for three decades, partly because of all the details to go over, and partly because another war threw a wrench in the mix. (We haven't even talked about wrenches!)
What eventually ended the commission's long reign of terror was a deal with Canada and the U.K. to embrace the 60-degree screw thread, something that's called the Unified Thread Standard. (The Second World War, of course, highlighted just how big a problem the different screw standards were.) The good news, then, was that the screw design chosen was the same angle as an American screw. The bad news? They set the design on the metric system, when the U.S system was based on inches.
So much for a unified system, then, though Americans don't seem to mind it. The U.K. moved over to the metric system in 1960, losing an ally, but Canada is hanging tough, and we roll on.
In a lot of ways, the various types of screws highlight some important modern debates we're having with technology.
Apple, it should be said, is a company that knows its screws.
There are 69 screws in a full screw kit for the iPhone 6S sold on Amazon. (Yes, I counted. It was tedious.) While it's still early to report on how many screws the iPhone 7 has, I can reveal that iPhone 6 had just 52 screws, according to one online seller.
Screws have periodically been a source of controversy for Apple, particularly when the company introduced pentalobe screws with the iPhone 4 at a time when pentalobe screwdrivers were very rare. (They're similar to Torx screws, except rounded instead of pointed.)
The screws were seen by repair experts, such as iFixIt's Kyle Wiens, as a way to prevent users from repairing their own devices.
Headphone jacks and screws are two examples of very analog things that have traditionally shown up in Apple's devices.
So, let's put the company's headphone argument in screw terms: The headphone jack, as it currently stands, is the musical equivalent of a Phillips screwdriver, better than what we originally had (flathead screws) but also greatly lacking in terms of what could be.
Which means that the company is still giving you an option for screwing stuff in for now, but maybe not so much in the long run, as Apple, as we know, has never been one to follow standard.
Just look at the pentalobe screw.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
