Do yourself a favor and skip straight to minute 3:30 of this life-changing video.
You'll see little Pepto-Bismal-colored pink bloops glide out of this snail's somewhere-or-other. What you've just witnessed is the egg-laying process of a female apple snail. Who knew?
Unlike most other types of snail, apple snails are not hermaphrodites, and cannot self-fertilize. The male and female must mate, a ritual that can last between two and 12 hours.
If you currently own an apple snail and notice that none of your snail's eggs are transforming into baby snails, there is an online resource for that. For more general apple snail FAQs, see 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.
If Lieutenant Commander Spock is known for one thing, it's his signature Vulcan handsign for "Live Long and Prosper." But if he's known for a few more things, one of them is definitely his mastery of three-dimensional chess.
Though the board game may look like a sci-fi creation, 3-D chess is actually something that exists on planet Earth—and it was invented many decades before Star Trek.
Three-dimensional chess can refer to any type of chess in which the pieces can move vertically as well as horizontally, usually across a series of stacked boards. Most famously, this variant has appeared as a part of the Star Trek universe, where it is usually referred to as Tridimensional Chess. “I thought, ‘Hm. Interesting.’ But I didn’t pay much attention to it,” says Dr. Leroy Dubeck, President of the U.S. Chess Federation from 1969-1972, when Bobby Fischer won the world championship.
But while the prop designers who came up with Star Trek’s multi-level chess game probably just envisioned it as a futuristic kind of advanced strategy game, an actual version of three-dimensional chess has existed since at least the early 19th century.
Possibly the first version of three-dimensional chess was a German game, created by a doctor, occultist, and sometime inventor named Dr. Ferdinand Maack. In the 1900s, Maack worked on versions of three-dimensional chess throughout his life, later collaborating with his son on variations of the game, with at least one lost variant featuring game pieces fashioned after an okapi. Today he is best remembered for Raumschach, which ironically translates to “space chess,” although the futuristic association with three-dimensional chess wouldn’t come until later.
First unveiled around 1907, the game was inspired by Maack’s belief that if chess were to represent the strategy of actual warfare, then there must also be a representation of aerial and underwater attack, which could be represented by movement up and down a stack of playing fields. After some experimentation, Maack decided that the most effective configuration for the game was five 5X5 chess grids stacked in a tower.
Players start with their pieces lined up on opposite ends of either the top two tiers, or the bottom two. All of the traditional chess (sometimes called “orthochess”) stations are represented—king, queen, bishop, rook, and pawn—but there is also a special piece called the unicorn, the movement of which is tailored to a three-dimensional space. While the other pieces move in an approximation of their same pattern in two-dimensional chess, the unicorn moves diagonally and vertically through the corners of the squares. The win condition of the game is the same as in orthochess: to put the opponent’s king in check, with no further legal moves. It’s just far more difficult.
Unfortunately, despite Maack's belief in the game, Raumschach never took hold. Dubeck, a lifelong chess master had never even heard of it. But three-dimensional chess, at least in the popular imagination, was far from dead. Other types of tiered chess games have been proposed over the decades, but none saw much popular or commercial success. Save for the fictional version aboard the starship Enterprise.
In the first season of the original Star Trek, Tridimensional Chess was introduced as the popular game of the future. In the episode “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” the very first scene presents Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Commander Spock as they play a familiar but multi-tiered game that Kirk simply calls, “chess.” The board is split into flying tiers of different-sized grids, and it certainly looks like a set of chess from the future.
The game reappears in subsequent episodes of the series, and a similar but even more futuristic version shows up on Star Trek: The Next Generation. No gameplay guidelines were ever set down on screen, but fans and experts began to create their own rules for the game by the late-1970s. The rules of Tridimensional Chess differ from author to author, but many have gone to great lengths to make the strange board work as a serious chess variation. Some ambitious players have even created variations of “standard” Tridimensional Chess, with in-jokey names like “The Borg Queen,” “Warp Factor,” and “Kobayashi Maru.”
Dubeck himself even worked on a version of official rules to accompany a licensed replica of the game, although the only thing he really remembers about them is that they weren’t exactly tournament ready. “Anyone who’s actually interested in chess, they’re going to want to stick with the usual board," he says. “The purpose of this would be to sell it to Star Trek fans who would want it sitting at their table, to show off that they got a set.”
Given the continued experimentation with three-dimensional chess variants, as well as the popularity of Tridimensional Chess (even as a prop), why hasn’t the variation taken off? Where are the international three-dimensional chess tournaments? How come Tridimensional Chess hasn’t seen a Quidditch-like league spring up among fans and players (beyond something like this small Facebook group)?
For the most part it has to do with a lack of other players or availability. Given the extreme challenge of mastering a game like three-dimensional chess, there is almost no professional payoff, other than love of the game.
According to Dubeck, becoming a 3-D chess wiz could even make you worse at traditional chess. “If you start fooling around with something three-dimensional, it may be confusing your mind while playing at regular chess, so it may actually work negatively,” he says. “Therefore, why should I spend time on something I can’t use, which in fact may make me a worse chess player?”
Dubeck isn’t confident that a major chess variation will ever truly take off, due in large part to the struggle to make it commercially viable. Respectfully, doctor, Spock would disagree.
In 1985, the Astoria opened in London as a live music venue, where for decades some of Britain’s greatest bands played for packed houses and London’s LGBTQ nightlife thrived. But before this spot on Charing Cross Road was a nightclub, it had been a theater, a cinema/ballroom, and back in the 18th and 19th centuries, a warehouse for Crosse & Blackwell, one of the country’s pioneering food production companies.
The ketchup wasn’t the sugary, tomato-y ketchup that Americans love today. It was mushroom ketchup, an earlier iteration of the umami-heavy sauce, similar to a mild soy sauce. (Atlas Obscura has experimented with making mushroom ketchup in the past, and we can report that it is not terrible but not great.)
But the ketchup bottles were just one part of the collection of jars, which may be the “biggest collection of pottery ever discovered in a single feature from an archaeological site in London,” according to a representative of the Museum of London Archaeology. The trove included jars meant for mustard, preserved ginger, and piccalilli, a type of spiced pickle relish, adapted from Indian pickle recipes. There were also earthenware jars meant for marmalade, raspberry jam, and plum jam, the London blog IanVisits reports: Crosse & Blackwell was one of the first companies to industrialize jam products.
When some very old foodstuffs—like, most notably, 2,000-year-old bog butter found in Ireland—are found, there exists the possibility that someone might taste them. In this case, sadly, most of the jars were empty and broken—we'll never know what 18th century ketchup tasted like when aged a good one to two hundreds years.
One day in 1932, Russian avant-garde artist Vladimir Tatlin ventured from his studio in Moscow’s ancient Novodevichy convent to a country field. After five years of work, he wanted to test what would become his final major creation: a human-powered flying machine.
The apparatus, named Letatlin, (an amalgam of his name and the Russian verb letat’, or “to fly”) consisted of a body basket for the human operator engineered of bent wood and wings spanning almost 10 meters (33 feet) across, sheathed with parachute silk. The bird-shaped contraption was held together with steel cables, leather and whalebone; custom-made metal bearings ensured efficient movement.
Three Letatlins were built, one left purposely as an uncovered skeleton structure for demonstrations: Tatlin expected that this particular model would be useful when industry adapted his design for mass production.
Passenger flights had already existed in Russia for a decade, and a factory in Moscow that year launched serial production of small civilian planes. But Tatlin envisioned his project would become a more tangible, household consumer item for the newly forged Soviet man, giving the masses access to affordable flying equipment that would make airborne commutes as common as bicycle rides. Soviet schools would hold classes for children on mastering the art of flight, he believed.
Tatlin was already in his late 40s at the time, having etched his name in the history of the avant-garde movement as the father of Soviet constructivism, the philosophy that art must construct the new material reality rather than exist abstractly for its own sake.
Tatlin’s projects ranged from the utopian to the mundane, including the tiered revolving Tatlin tower meant to house Communist party officials, an ultra-efficient stove that could heat the entire house with two logs, clothing, and even children’s sleds and sippy cups. Christened the Russian Da Vinci as the movement’s most polymathic member, Tatlin had nursed the idea of Letatlin in his mind since he worked as a sailor in his early 20s, observing seagulls.
“Letatlin is not just a symbol of avant-garde art but one of the entire Soviet era at that time, when there was a feeling that something entirely new was possible,” says Irina Pronina, an expert at the Tretyakov Gallery. It embodies the idea of takeoff and flight, the idea of freedom for the individual to be airborne, she says. “We don’t know the mechanics of flight on Letatlin, but it must be the same principle as flying in your sleep: the sensation of running and then suddenly lifting off the ground.”
Letatlin’s fate is also symbolic of the fate of the entire avant-garde movement, which was squashed by the Soviet government in the 1930s. The process of shutting down creative freedoms had already started by the time Tatlin got around to testing his creation, making it the swan song of avant-garde art in the Soviet Union. He was never able to get it off the ground—the field test had to be aborted due to damage during transportation that could lead the test flyer to crash.
Two of the models have been lost. One, with the exposed wings, miraculously ended up in Russia’s unique but overlooked Central Air Force Museum outside Moscow, an errant, underfunded asset of the defence ministry dedicated to the history of aviation which is kept alive largely by efforts of volunteers. Letatlin’s disintegration prevented it from being transported beyond the premises despite regular requests by major museums. The avant-garde idea of human freedom to fly as a bird was grounded at a graveyard of rusty machines.
“We don’t have the definitive answer to the question if it is possible or not to fly on the Letatlin,” says Pronina, who, together with colleagues, in October loaded the contraption onto three trucks to transport it to Moscow for eventual restoration. She says the fact that it survived decades of spartan storage conditions is a “miracle” and now a team of restorers is brainstorming for the right approach to rescue it from oblivion. “There are reconstruction methods, their supporters say we shouldn’t labor over rusty and torn fabric and use new material, but then the authenticity of this piece, which has its own life and wrinkles, like a human face, will also disappear,” she says.
Though Tatlin inspired generations of other artists, many of which are being showcased around the world as art museums commemorate the centennial of the 1917 Russian Revolution, his original works are rarely present in these retrospectives. “Many of his original works are no longer extant and exist only as later reconstructions,” say the curators of the current exhibit “A Revolutionary Impulse” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Pronina hopes that a restored Letatlin can rekindle interest in Russian avant-garde art, which is mostly sidelined in its home country in favor of more conservative styles. “We want the interest in the avant-garde to go beyond the professional art community,” she says.
“Letatlin is like a wondrous bird, it does not leave anyone indifferent and inspires the simplest of questions: what is it? What was this artist dreaming of?”
Starting tomorrow, commuters in northern Norway who flip on their car radios as they head into work may be greeted with the sweet sound of... nothing.
In a world first, the Norwegian government will begin turning off the country's FM radio network on Wednesday morning, Agence France-Presse reports. The shutoff will start in the Arctic town of Bodø tomorrow, and will slowly spread southward over the course of the year.
FM is being run out of town by Digital Audio Broadcasting, which is cheaper and, supporters say, offers more reliable sound quality. It also has room for more channels, and better lends itself to things like broadcast archiving.
Although other European countries are also considering a switch—Switzerland is next in line—these concerns are more urgent in Norway, where a spread-out population and rollercoaster topography mean it's expensive to get a signal to everyone.
But there are some holes in the new system, too—on the user side. Most cars aren't equipped with DAB radios, and adaptors can be expensive. A recent poll found that only 17 percent of those surveyed supported the switch. "It's completely stupid, I don't need any more channels than I've already got," Oslo resident Eivind Sethov told AFP.
In a possible homage to those who think this decision is bad luck, Bodø will switch off its local FM station at 11:11:11 AM tomorrow, January 11. Until then, don't touch that dial.
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.
When American families sat down for dinner in 1918, the table would often be lined with meatless and wheatless dishes. Depending on the day, a meal might start off with rolls made with a blend of graham and rye flour, a main course of broiled salt mackerel, and end with a piece of Lintz Tart—a pastry made without wheat flour.
After the United States joined the Allies in World War I in April 1917, the tightened food regulations altered the pantries, recipes, and diets of people on the home front. To help manage wartime supply, conversation, distribution, and transportation of food, the government created the U.S. Food Administration, helmed by future president Herbert Hoover. Part of the department's role was to invent dishes—and reinvent favorite ones—to help Americans integrate alternative ingredients into their meals.
The U.S. Food Administration wartime photos and recipes, discovered by the National Archives and Records Administration, reveal almond paste cannoli, Alcazar Cakes made with potato flour, and tests to perfect the “War Bread” loaf. Confectioners even came up with candies made out of honey, molasses, and maple sugar instead of cane sugar.
“For me, it was exciting because I really enjoy this kind of history,” says Kelsey Noel, an archivist at the National Archives and Records Administration who helped digitize the photos. “Having this ability to see into the daily lives of the people who had to hold down the home front is really cool.”
About five months after the United States entered the war, Hoover led a campaign to eliminate waste and distribute food and resources to Allied forces in the barren battlefields of Europe. The effort relied mainly on volunteerism. By October 1917, the administration persuaded almost half of the nation’s 24 million families to sign pledge cards adhering to food rationing.
Beef, pork, wheat, dairy products, and sugars were rationed and sent to the soldiers abroad. Herds of cattle had been depleted or deliberately killed off because of the lack of fodder. Wheat was more easily transportable than other vegetables and fruits.
The administration stated that people didn’t need to eat less to save, but simply find substitutes for foods that were in high demand. Families shifted their diets to poultry and fish in place of beef and mutton. Wheat was replaced by potato flour, corn, oats, and rye in baked goods. Vegetable oils replaced animal fats.
“These particular recipes [from the U.S. Food Administration Educational Division] were mainly about finding other cereals to substitute for the wheat or wheat flour,” says Noel. The recipes feature "a lot of rye" as well as some bran.
For example, a batch of a dozen Biltmore Bran Muffins calls for bran and rye flour instead of wheat flour, and a half-pint of molasses instead of sugar. Sixty pieces of sweet Genoa Cake (which contains no flour at all) requires two pounds of almond paste, sugar, and 20 eggs all beaten together with corn starch and melted butter.
The U.S. Food Administration turned to home economists for advice on how to use these food substitutes, creating an Education Division. Individuals experimented with ingredients to see what tasted and worked best in dishes. During World War I, potato flour was extensively used for mixing with other bread flours, according to the U.S. Tariff Commission. It became a prime ingredient in “War Bread,” which was ubiquitous in homes and military kitchens.
“They seemed to be pushing potatoes,” says Noel, who has tried baked goods made with potato flour and deems them “very good.”
The administration found that potato flour’s ability to absorb moisture allowed bakers to produce a greater number of loaves than they would only using wheat flour in the bread. In 1918, the five potato flour factories in the United States produced 2,500,000 pounds of flour.
The department also came up with alternative recipes for sweets. The ships that imported sugar from the Caribbean were repurposed into military vessels limiting trade, explains Tanfer Emin Tunc in the journal War in History.
“Sugar has been costly, but whether this was due to a real shortage or to manipulation we did not know,” writes Mary Elizabeth who wrote War Time Candies, and proposed different kinds of candies made from honey, molasses, maple sugar, fruits, nuts, raisins, and chocolate.
Informational materials were primarily catered to women, who drove food production, purchase, and preparation. Editors from women’s magazines joined the Education Division and helped publish planned menus in pamphlets, magazines, newspapers, and cookbooks. Approximately 80 percent of content between 1917 and 1918 contained advice to homemakers in the form of menus, recipes, short articles, and special holiday food tips, writes Stephen Ponder in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly.
Posters and billboards covered city buildings, advertising that “Food Will Win the War.” On certain days throughout the week, families were encouraged to design meals without meat or wheat flour. “‘Wheatless Mondays and Wednesdays, Meatless Tuesdays, and Porkless Thursdays and Saturdays’ became a mantra in many households,” writes Tunc.
The administration also discouraged stockpiling food, warning that food hoarders were “working against the common good and even against the very safety of the country.”
The campaign succeeded in doubling food shipment to Europe within a year, and reducing the United States’ consumption by 15 percent from 1918 to 1919.
Noel hopes the World War I recipes will inspire others to share their own family’s wartime recipes that have been passed down by generations. Recipes are unique in that they are kind of tangible history that people can interact with, explains Noel. “There’s something that’s very personal when looking at recipes and food.”
When I told friends in the Pennsylvania suburb where I grew up that I was going to college in Canada, their responses tended to come in two forms. One was about the weather; to a southern Pennsylvanian, any temperature below 25 degrees Fahrenheit is cause for panic. The other was a volley of linguistic stereotypes about the nation of Canada, involving either “aboot” or “eh.”
Canadians are not particularly amused when you eagerly point out their “eh” habit, but the word has become emblematic of the country in a way that is now mostly out of their control. In response, some have embraced it, adopting it as an element of Canadian patriotism. But what even is this word? How did it come to be so associated with Canada?
“Eh” is what’s known as an invariant tag—something added on to the end of a sentence that’s the same every time it’s used. A tag, in linguistics, is a word or sound or short phrase added after a thought which changes that thought in some way. The most common tags are question tags, which change a thought into a question. “It’s a nice day, isn’t it?” would be one example. The tag “isn’t it” turns that statement of fact into something that could prompt a response; the speaker is asking for confirmation or rejection.
But “isn’t it” is a variant tag, because it will change based on the subject and tense of what came before it. If you’re talking about a plural subject, you’ll have to change that tag to “aren’t they,” and if you’re talking about something in the past you might have to change it to “wasn’t it.”
“Eh” is invariant because it doesn’t change at all based on what you’re talking about; it remains “eh” whether you’re talking about one subject or many, now or in the past. But it’s also a lot more flexible than other tags—it isn’t just a question tag, but can be used for all kinds of things, and Canadians exploit this capability.
There are a few major ways a Canadian could use “eh.” The first is while stating an opinion: “It’s a nice day, eh?” Another would be as an exclamation tag, which is added to a sentence in order to indicate surprise: “What a game, eh?” Or you could use it for a request or command: “Put it over here, eh?” And then there’s the odd example of using it within a criticism: “You really messed that one up, eh?”
Jack Chambers, a linguist at the University of Toronto, writes that these “ehs” are all of a piece. “All of these uses have one pragmatic purpose in common: they all show politeness,” he wrote in a 2014 paper. Using “eh” to end the statement of an opinion or an explanation is a way for the speaker to express solidarity with the listener. It’s not exactly asking for reassurance or confirmation, but it’s not far off: the speaker is basically saying, hey, we’re on the same page here, we agree on this.
Even in the use of “eh” as a criticism or a command, the word seeks to find common ground. If I say “you’re an idiot, eh?”, what I’m saying is, you’re an idiot, but you should also think you’re an idiot, and our understanding of you as an idiot finds us on common ground.
As a command, “eh” is singularly weird. Elaine Gold, the founder of the Canadian Language Museum and a recently retired lecturer at the University of Toronto who’s studied “eh,” used the example of a military sergeant shouting, “Forward march, eh?” It’s a command, but emphasizes that the listeners agree with it, that somehow the decision to march has been made and agreed upon by everyone. In that sense it also serves to weaken the speaker’s position: it removes the speaker from a place of power and puts some of that power in the hands of the listener. Theoretically, in response to “Forward march, eh?”, a listener could say, well, no, I’d rather not. It invites the listener to be a part of the speaker’s statements.
The final and most unusual use of “eh” is in what’s called a “narrative ‘eh’.” This is the variety you’ll hear in skits like SCTV’s Bob and Doug McKenzie: it’s found during stories, following individual clauses. “So I was walking down the street, eh? And I saw a friend of mine at the store, eh? And so I thought I’d say hi, eh?”
This use of “eh” is a bit different from the others; Chambers says the narrative “eh” is used to indicate to listeners that the story is continuing, to make sure the listener is still listening, and to signal that the listener should not interrupt because there’s more to come.
“Eh” has proven to be a very difficult thing to study; as an oral tic, it’s rarely written down, and studies have relied on self-reporting—basically, asking people whether and how they use the word. “It's a very hard thing to do research on, really hard to quantify how much it's used, who uses it, how it's used,” she says. Those self-reported studies are necessarily flawed, as Canadians have a tendency to underestimate their use of the word. Gold told me about several instances in which people insist they hardly ever say “eh,” before using the word without realizing it in subsequent thoughts. (“I hardly ever say ‘eh,’ eh?”)
Because it’s so hard to study, it’s not really known where “eh” came from, or precisely when it entered the Canadian lexicon. Gold says that by the 1950s, the word was firmly established enough that in some articles it’s already identified as a Canadianism. Today, it’s actually heard outside the country as well; the sections of the U.S. Upper Midwest that border Canada often have “eh” speakers, and it’s fairly common in New Zealand as well. It is possible that the word came originally from some population of Scots-Irish immigrants, a major early group in Canada. “Eh” is still used in Scotland and in Northern England, but it’s used in a much more limited way, primarily to indicate that the listener hasn’t heard the speaker—it means “what?,” or “pardon?” In Canada, it’s mutated into a much more versatile interjection.
With the caveat that self-reported studies are not all that accurate, Canadian linguists seem to agree that “eh” is much less common in Canada’s cities and more common in rural areas, especially in the sparsely-populated west. “It’s considered rural, lower-class, male, less educated,” says Gold. Aside from males, those groups are all stigmatized, which means that any language features associated with those groups are stigmatized as well. Within Canada, saying “eh,” especially the narrative “eh,” is considered kind of a hick thing to do. This does not appear to have lessened the essential Canadianness of the word.
Other dialects of English and other languages have some similar tags. “Right,” “okay,” “yes,” and “you know” are all used in some of the same ways as “eh.” In French, “hein” (pronounced “anh,” the same vowel sound in “splat”) is quite similar, as is the Japanese “ne,” the Dutch “hè,” the Yiddish “nu,” and the Spanish “¿no?” These differ in some ways from “eh,” as “eh” can be used in some ways that the other tags cannot be and vice versa, but what really makes “eh” different is less about the way it’s used and more about its place in Canadian society.
“It's really come to mean Canadian identity, especially in print. Even though urban people might not be using it so much anymore, in print it's huge,” says Gold. The stereotype of Canadians saying “eh” is so strong that Canadians have ended up reclaiming the word for themselves, even those Canadians who don’t actually use it very often. A popular children’s book about Canadian culture is titled “From Eh? To Zed.” The first prime minister of Canada, Sir John A. Macdonald, is often referred to as “Sir John Eh.”
This isn’t uncommon; groups have a tendency to snag linguistic stereotypes and wave them with pride. In the US, perhaps the best example would be the citizens of Pittsburgh, who have turned “yinz,” their take on “y’all,” into mugs, t-shirts, and banners, and even refer to themselves as “Yinzers.” It’s messy when applied to an entire country, especially one as varied as Canada—a significant part of the population would never use the word, and would instead use “hein”—but it’s stuck.
“Eh” may be associated with another stereotype of Canadians: the idea that they’re polite to a fault. After all, as Chambers noted, “eh” is a signal of politeness and seeking accord. Wouldn’t it stand to reason that an unfailingly polite population would make good use of “eh”? But Elaine Gold, who I should add was extremely polite during our conversation, disagrees. “There have been lots of articles about how ‘eh’ is used because we’re so nice. Like where someone else would make a strong statement, we undermine it a little, because we want to be friendly and inclusive,” she says. “I don’t know how much of that is true.”
But when your country’s most identifiable linguistic feature is a word that indicates inclusiveness, an openness to discourse, and a moderating effect on strong statements, it’s not such a crazy thing to assume that perhaps those qualities might be found in the people of that country as well. Even if the stereotype of the obsequious Canuck comes from outside the country, from brash Americans who don’t much care whether or not the listener feels included in their statements, Canadians have claimed “eh” as their own.
During the 19th century mineral rush that earned Nevada the nickname "the Silver State," boom towns popped up left and right across the desert. Unfortunately, only a few survived. The rest were abandoned. Houses, schools, saloons, hotels, general stores, and mines were left to deteriorate amidst the tumbleweeds.
Fortunately for adventurers, many of these ghost towns have survived into the 21st century, albeit a little worse for wear. Here are six eerily empty ghost towns in Nevada awaiting your exploration.
Like many Nevada ghost towns, Belmont was a silver boom town. It was founded in 1866 and it grew fast: Within two decades it was a full-fledged town. It was the seat of Nye County, and it had a music hall and a hotel named the Cosmopolitan. But Belmont's good fortune didn't last. The silver mines were tapped out and the shifting prices of minerals left the town unable to keep up economically. By the early 1900s the town was already on its way to being deserted.
Perhaps because of its intense though short-lived success, Belmont's buildings are surprisingly well preserved. The courthouse, a saloon, and a couple of mills are still standing, while portions of other buildings remain. The little ghost town hidden in the shadow of the Toquima Mountains has won some admirers. A restoration group is working on preserving the ruins while a period-authentic bed and breakfast has opened for business on what used to be Main Street. Further down the road is Dirty Dick's Saloon, a recreation of the town's first bar.
St. Thomas was founded by a tiny group of Mormon settlers in the 1860s who believed they were proving ground in Utah. When both the settlers and the state realized that they were in fact in Nevada, the government brought down taxes on the residents, including owed taxes from previous years. Unable to fork over the gold the state was demanding, the town was abandoned in 1871. It was inhabited off and on over the following decades, but when the Hoover Dam was built a new lake emerged from the rising waters of the Colorado River, which completely drowned St. Thomas.
Today, after rampant water consumption has drastically lowered the level of the lake, the remains of St. Thomas are beginning to surface. Building foundations and chimneys are beginning to rise above the water, reminding visitors of the town that once was.
Nelson was once the site of the scandalous Techatticup Mine. An area rich in gold, silver, copper and lead, the land was mostly settled by Civil War deserters, and was the site of one of the largest booms the state of Nevada ever encountered. Its seedy population coupled with land disputes made for many fights, many of which ended in murder. This bloodshed coupled with frequent flash flooding from El Dorado Canyon left Nelson uninhabitable before long.
What remains of Nelson lies above the flood channels, a few scattered ranch houses, the remnants of a Texaco station, and the standard weather-torn buildings and machinery. Used as the location for many photo shoots, music videos and several films, the site features one unusual spectacle of a small aircraft seemingly smashed nose-first into a dune. The plane is not a true relic, but a fabricated wreck from the 2001 crime film 3000 Miles to Graceland.
Anson Phelps Stokes was a wealthy railroad magnate who poured his money into development and infrastructure in the desert outside Austin, including this castle, the most lasting piece of his legacy. The three-story structure was commissioned by Stokes in 1896. It was modeled after an Italian tower and constructed from local granite. In its heyday, the tower was lavishly decorated; each floor had a fireplace, and the Stokes family could look out over their surrounding land from two balconies and the battlement terrace on the roof.
The Stokes reign, however, was short. The family traveled west in 1897 and spent about a month in the castle. It would be their only visit. A little less than a year later, embroiled in an embezzlement scandal and the silver mine’s decline, Stokes sold both the mine and his brand new castle. It lay abandoned for many year until it was purchased by a distant relative in 1956. Now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the idiosyncratic tower endures, not quite like anything else you’ll see along an American roadside.
Unionville's story is that of so many boom towns. It grew quickly in the decade after the Civil War during a silver rush, then declined just as quickly when the mines dried up. As such, many buildings in the hamlet of Unionville appear frozen in time, unchanged since when they were abandoned in the 1870s and '80s.
Visitors come to gaze upon the cabin Mark Twain once lived in and leave but the scant residents of Unionville (there are roughly 20) assure there is lots more to be found in the surprisingly lush valley. There is a B&B in town, and apparently fish are plentiful and neighbors are friendly.
Gold Point (also known as Lime Point and Hornsilver at different points in its history) was more successful than other mine towns, operating prolifically even through the Great Depression until World War II called for a halt on nonessential mining. After this the town was largely deserted, and would have been left for dead if not for Herb Robbins, a Las Vegas wallpaperer who visited Gold Point and fell under its spell. He and a friend each purchased homes for sale in town, later convincing others to do the same. After winning big in Vegas, Robbins was able to practically purchase all of Gold Point. He set about restoring buildings to open them to the public, all while simultaneously acting as fire chief and sheriff.
Visitors can stop by Gold Point and stay awhile. The cabins, though beaten by time on the outside, have been beautifully restored and filled with precious antiques on the inside. The sheriff will be happy to regale you with stories of its history illustrated by his 9,000 photos of local mining history. Proper "miner's breakfasts" are provided and if you're lucky, there might even be a gunfight while you're in town. Staged, of course.
"It's another evidence of the desperation the homosexual campaign has reached in its effort to put homosexual lifestyle, which is a deathstyle, across to the American people."
A lobby group called Protect America’s Children made this statement in 1978—about a doll.
That year, the release of Gay Bob, billed as the world’s first openly gay doll, caused a minor sensation. Enraged consumers complained that a toy with a homosexual backstory would lead to other "disgusting" dolls like "Priscilla the Prostitute" and "Danny the Dope Pusher." Esquire awarded Gay Bob its “Dubious Achievement Award.” And anti-gay organizations across the United States blustered.
Gay Bob, who was meant to resemble a cross between Robert Redford and Paul Newman, was blond, with a flannel shirt, tight jeans, and one pierced ear. The doll gave anti-gay organizations plenty to fear; intrinsic within it was a celebration of gay identity, evidenced by Gay Bob’s programmed speech. “Gay people,” Bob said, “are no different than straight people… if everyone came ‘out of their closets’ there wouldn’t be so many angry, frustrated, frightened people.”
In a cheeky move, the box in which Gay Bob was packaged came in the outline of a closet, so that when he left his box, he was literally coming out of the closet. Gay Bob explained: “It’s not easy to be honest about what you are — in fact it takes a great deal of courage… But remember if Gay Bob has the courage to come out his closet, so can you.”
The affirming message was no accident. The doll’s creator, Harvey Rosenberg, a former advertising executive who developed marketing campaigns for various corporations, wanted Gay Bob to “liberate” men from “traditional sexual roles.” He created the doll soon after a series of shocks rocked his life: in quick succession, his marriage fell apart and his mother became seriously ill. He decided that his next projects would need to be of great personal significance.
Though Gay Bob was certainly humorous—the doll was designed to be anatomically correct, and prominent gay activists such as Bruce Voeller told reporters that people should “deal with [the doll] lightly and enjoy it”—Rosenberg’s intentions seem to have been sincere. When asked why he would pour $10,000 of his money into the Gay Bob’s production, he replied, “we had something to learn from the gay movement, just like we did from the black civil rights movement and the women's movement, and that is having the courage to stand up and say 'I have a right to be what I am.’”
When Gay Bob hit stores in 1978, that right to be gay and equal was once again under attack, most notably from Anita Bryant, a singer and well-known brand ambassador who mobilized opposition to a Dade County, Florida ordinance that outlawed discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Fixating on its impact on public schools, Bryant claimed that the existence of LGBT school teachers would threaten the well-being of local students. “Homosexuals will recruit our children,” she warned. “They will use money, drugs, alcohol, any means to get what they want.” In June 1977, she had the rule repealed, and her anti-gay crusade—which gained widespread media attention—sparked similar ventures in Minnesota, Oregon, Kansas, and California.
Gay Bob, which sold 2,000 copies in its first two months, appeared in the heat of these political battles. It was no real flashpoint of its own, but it served as a humorous trophy—and a sign of changing times—for those fighting against Bryant.
Initially sold through mail-order ads in gay-themed magazines, Gay Bob soon expanded into boutique stores in New York and San Francisco. Rosenberg even pitched it to major department store chains, one of which liked the idea (but ultimately did not purchase it). And, it turns out, those consumers who feared the introduction of more “disgusting” dolls were partially correct—Rosenberg soon gave Gay Bob a family of his own, with brothers Marty Macho, Executive Eddie, Anxious Al, and Straight Steve (who lived in the suburbs and wore blue suits), and sisters Fashionable Fran, Liberated Libby, and Nervous Nelly.
In 1961, all around America, small, cylindrical canisters were being installed at the top of Western Union telegraph poles. The canisters were colored white and topped with a Fresnel-type lens, the same refractive technology that allowed lighthouses to beam light far from its source. These lens, though, were not meant to beam energy outwards but to capture it. In the case of a nuclear attack, they would provide the first alert to the military’s nuclear commanders, signaling where the Soviet Union had hit the United States.
The “Bomb Alarm System,” designed and implemented by Western Union, wasn’t a secret, but it was unobtrusive enough that unless you were looking for it, you wouldn’t know it was there. Operational from 1961 to 1967, it was a part of the hidden infrastructure that was rapidly built to allow the U.S. military to respond to nuclear attacks—an extensive communications and monitoring system that presaged today’s networked world.
The bomb alert system depended on the unique wave shape of the thermal radiation created by a nuclear blast. As Clarence Deibert, the engineer in charge of designing the system, explained in the January 1963 Western Union Technical Review, a nuclear explosion creates energy with a shape that “distinguishes it from all natural sources of thermal radiation”—two pulses, one fast and short, the second slower and longer. The lenses that topped the alarms contained photocells that would register only that particular wave shape. Flashes of energy from a storm or other natural burst would not trigger it.
These alarms were arranged in triangles around about 100 cities and military sites in the U.S., on Greenland, and in the U.K. The three points of the triangle were far enough apart that even if one alarm was destroyed in the blast of a nuclear bomb, the other two should register the attack. At all times, each alarm was transmitting a special tone to a nearby station, via commercial telephone or telegraph lines. That tone meant the system was green—that no explosion had taken place. But if the alarm registered that specific wave of thermal radiation, it would transmit two different tones, in quick sequence, that would turn the system red.
That alert would reach military commanders on maps at central locations—the Pentagon, the North American Air Defense Command, and at Strategic Air Command, the hardened underground command center where the military’s nuclear commanders sat. The SAC headquarters, in particular, had a giant wall of maps on which they could monitor the state of the Cold War’s nuclear stand-off. The “big board,” as it was called, was 264 feet long and two stories high; originally, military aides rode in cherry-pickers to update the board, which showed everything from strike routes aimed at the USSR to military exercises taking place at that very moment. An early warning system was supposed to alert the military to approaching bombers or missiles, but the bomb alarm system would be the first signal that a nuclear weapon had hit the United States.
At the time, these networks were “the most advanced communications system ever built,” the military claimed. But it had weaknesses. Once, a single downed AT&T switch convinced military leaders the country had been attacked when they couldn’t reach major command post, as journalist Eric Schlosser writes inCommand and Control, his book on nuclear weapons and safety. In a real attack, the infrastructure that was supposed to send these type of alerts could be destroyed by strategic strikes on key network nodes.
In its drive to solve these problems, the military started laying the groundwork for the communications infrastructure of today. By the end of the 1960s, the bomb alarm system was outdated, as new satellite monitoring replaced it. And concerns about the robustness of military communications in a nuclear attack inspired RAND researcher Paul Baran to propose a network of distributed communication—an idea that evolved into the military’s revolutionary ARPANET and matured to become the internet.
In a New York City apartment, a woman was startled when she heard a loud crash in the kitchen. "I freaked out for a couple of minutes," she told the New York Daily News. When she calmed down, she went to investigate.
She heard the sound of a person panting and breathing hard in her kitchen walls.
The woman, Gjyste Margilaj, lives on the first floor of the building. The man in the walls had recently moved into the building's fourth floor. But he ended up in her apartment from the roof, from which he had climbed into an air vent that led to Margilaj's kitchen walls.
The man said getting into the vent was "the initiation for being new to the building," the New York Post reported.
The building is seven stories tall, and the man fell six stories before being stuck. He was trapped in the wall for 40 minutes before emergency responders were able extract him. They had to break the wall down. The man suffered only minor injuries.
Atlas Obscura endorses the exploration of the strange spaces in your apartment building, but be sober and be safe!
Every year at Christmas, a giant tree towers outside of Vienna's Schönbrunn Palace, impressing guests and glowing gently in the night.
And every year after Christmas, employees take the lights off the tree, chop it into pieces, and feed it to the local elephants.
This year's tree officially became a snack yesterday morning, the Local reports. The Schönbrunn Palace pachyderms shuffled out of their enclosure and began happily munching on the remains of the 18-foot spruce.
Used to punier plants, the animals seemed excited at the opportunity to eat something bigger than they are. "It is really something extraordinary for them, because it takes them quite a while to get through such a large portion," keeper Andreas Buberl said.
This is also a tradition at the Berlin Zoo in Germany, where every elephant gets five or six trees to eat. Experts say the oils in evergreen trees are good for the animals' digestion, while the bark helps clean their teeth.
In Vienna, the zoo's other residents, like rhinos and water buffalo, got smaller saplings—rejects from the annual Christmas market. It was likely the best-smelling zoo day of the year. Happy holidays, everyone.
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.
In the hot, smoky kitchens of 17th-century Europe, you’d find a lot of things you’d never see in kitchens today; a large open fire, an iron roasting spit, and oh—a giant hamster wheel-like contraption holding a small, live, constantly running dog.
For hundreds of years the now-extinct turnspit dog, also called Canis Vertigus (“dizzy dog”), vernepator cur, kitchen dog and turn-tyke, was specially bred just to turn a roasting mechanism for meat. And weirdly, this animal was a high-tech fixture for the professional and home cook from the 16th century until the mid-1800s.
Edward Jessy included the turnspit dog in his 19th-century book Anecdotes of Dogs, and he remembered it well from his youth. “They were long-bodied, crooked-legged, and ugly dogs, with a suspicious, unhappy look about them, as if they were weary of the task they had to do, and expected every moment to be seized upon to perform it,” he reminisced.
Turnspit dogs came in a variety of colors and were heavy-set, often with heterochromatic eyes. They were short enough to fit into a wooden wheel contraption that was connected to ropes or chains, which turned the giant turkey or ham on a spit for the master of the house.
It seems weird to bring an animal into the cooking process, let alone create a breed to fit a piece of kitchen equipment. But when the turnspit dog was first documented in the 15th century, cooks were desperate to relieve themselves of what was smoky, sweaty, tiring work. Large and royal houses in particular tended to impress guests with elaborate feasts of multiple types of game. Hunks of meat were either boiled or roasted over an open fire; the latter was not only considered most delicious, but in the UK, a hallmark of proper cooking.
Unfortunately, fire was tricky to control—you couldn’t leave, say, a goose on the flame without risking an unevenly cooked dinner. To cook meat thoroughly, kitchen staff stabbed each piece with the heavy iron spike of a roasting spit, which rotated via a looped chain and hand crank. The cook or the “spit boy” turned this contraption for long, hot hours by the flame. When an invention to ease the process materialized, every well-attended kitchen saw it as a must.
As you might imagine, turnspit dogs had a difficult lot in life as far as working dogs go. According to Stephen Coren in his book The Pawprints of History, the lucky ones “worked in pairs, with one dog trading places with its mate every couple of hours.” Dry heat radiated from toothsome foods the dog could never quite reach, and turnspit dogs weren’t necessarily supplied with water on-shift. Coren adds that for the tired pups “that were considered lazy, the cook might put a hot coal into the wheel to make the dog move its feet more quickly.”
It’s uncertain exactly what breeds of dog the turnspit came from, but it is widely believed that the Welsh Corgi and various terriers were involved. Charles Darwin pointed to turnspits as an instance of genetic engineering, and by the 1600s, the turnspit dog industry brought them into many households, taking the hardest kitchen task out of the hands of humans.
Turnspit dogs weren’t confined to the kitchen; they also drove “fruit presses, butter churns, water pumps and grain mills,” says Coren, and one hopeful inventor even drafted a patent for a dog-powered sewing machine that never quite made it to production. In the United States, where the breed was more rare, they mainly worked cider mills and hotels. When they weren’t being used as a Flintstones-style living motor, their furry little bodies were brought with their owners to church, and used as foot warmers.
Despite their treatment, turnspit dogs were by many accounts clever animals, as dogs go. In The Illustrated Natural History, John George Wood writes that turnspit dogs “were quite able to appreciate the lapse of time, and, if not relieved from their toils at the proper hour, would leap out of the wheel without orders, and force their companions to take their place, and complete their portion of the daily toil.”
Turnspit dogs were highly specialized for their main task; their heavy weight gave them the power to turn a wheel of 30 pounds or more, and they were bred with the compulsion to move continuously. John Caius, who wrote Of Englishe Dogges in the 1500s, wrote that turnspit dogs “so diligently look to their business that no drudge nor scullion can do the feat more cunningly.”
If you’re getting ideas about fashioning your own dog-sized wheel, though, it’s unlikely to be as effective. Lucy Worsley, chief curator at the Historic Royal Palaces in London and food historian Ivan Day attempted to coax a dog named Coco to power the spit roast at the George Inn on the BBC series History of the Home, to no avail. These dogs were wildly popular despite some predictable drawbacks; Worsley cites that one 18th-century turnspit owner complained of their dog “getting in the way of the fire” and “doing his business all over the kitchen.”
Some humans loved their turnspit dogs; Queen Victoria kept three as housepets, rather than kitchen tools. Some wrote narratives about them; an 1864 poem review from The Book of Daysdescribes a turnspit dog called Fuddle who is so angry at his servitude he complains to his brethren about the evil cook over a pile of savory, hard-earned bones. The “stood in awe of whip and bell;” but when the cook enters the room and pets her dogs, Fuddle has a change of heart:
He licked his lips, and wagged his tail, Was overjoyed he should prevail Such favour to obtain. Among the rest he went to play, Was put into the wheel next day, He turned and ate as well as they, And never speeched again.
The short, chubby, depressed cooking dog couldn’t escape her task for hundreds of years, but by the turn of the 20th century, animal rights activist groups made people question the decision to use a living, suffering dog as a kitchen gadget in the home. According to food historian William Woys Weaver, the treatment of Turnspit Dogs in an 1850s Manhattan hotel so angered activist Henry Berg that it inspired him to found the ASPCA.
In Dogs, H.D. Richardson writes that “Fortunately for humanity, mechanical contrivances have, in these countries at least, superseded the necessity of thus torturing a poor dog.” The clock jack, a weighted pulley that turned meat automatically, became the new high-tech spit-turning tool of choice, and as gas ranges overshadowed the open-fire cooking method completely, the Turnspit Dog drifted fully out of use and breeding programs.
Genetics don’t disappear that quickly, of course; Richardson also noted that a Welsh dog called the “bowsy terrier” resembled a possible terrier/turnspit dog mix, so there might be some turnspit dog-descended canines out there yet. These days, however, the last pure turnspit dog, still fluffy and brown, currently rests in well-earned peace at Abergavenny Museum in Wales, as a taxidermy exhibit.
Artist Movana Chen spends much of her time next to a large ball of tangled strings of paper. The pages of old books, magazines, diaries, and maps become woven sculptures and dresses—the shreds of paper are Chen's string for knitting.
Since 2003, the Hong Kong-based artist has been weaving shredded paper to create a variety of knitted art pieces, from a 50-foot-long carpet to mummy-like bodysuits. In this video produced by South China Morning Post, Chen shows her 2013 exhibition KNITerature at ArtisTree Gallery in Hong Kong. At the 33-second mark, you can see her busy fingers working traditional needles to weave the threads of paper together.
"Knitting paper is very different from knitting wool yarn," Chen says in the video. "You just need one string when knitting wool, but you need several strings when knitting paper. So it takes a lot of time."
She was first inspired to knit with paper after being assigned the long, laborious duty of shredding confidential documents as an accountant. Chen still uses the original shredder from her accounting days to create the material she needs for her pieces.
Chen initially focused on clothing, her debut paper knitted garment a dress comprised of discarded magazines (a durable paper to work with, according to Chen). Later, she moved onto full suit sculptures, or "body containers," which she wore around Hong Kong in a 2013 performance art piece. The suit, seen at the 1:15-mark, was knitted with shredded traveling maps. In 2007, she and a colleague wore body containers linked at the head and moved about the busy streets of Seoul. The performance of coordination and communication was meant to symbolize the relationship between North and South Korea, reported the South China Morning Post.
The 50-foot-long paper knitted piece titled Knitting Conversations and her body containers were displayed in the KNITerature exhibition. Knitting Conversations involved the work of 150 knitters around the world who contributed personal books of sentimental value. According to her website, the project is ongoing. Chen hopes to collect more than 10,000 knitted paper pieces from people around the world.
"People think I'm destroying history by shredding," Chen tellsSouth China Morning Post. "But I don't think so. I'm transforming it to another way of communicating … and I let people become closer through the project."
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.
For years, Abul Bajandar had massive growths on his hands, which were actually warts, but looked like branches from a tree. This led to Bajandar being dubbed "Tree Man," in addition to a lot of misery.
The extremely rare disease, known as epidermodysplasia verruciformis, is a skin disorder that can result in the growth of macules and papules, or swelling and discolorations that grow bigger over time. Bajandar, a father, couldn't pick up his daughter, eat by himself, or work. (He was a rickshaw driver before the condition began to take hold.)
But last week, doctors in Dhaka, Bangladesh said that after "at least" 16 operations, they had fixed Bajandar's hands, and perhaps permanently cured him.
“I never thought I would ever be able to hold my kid with my hands,” Bajandar told Agence France-Presse. “Now I feel so much better. I can hold my daughter in my lap and play with her. I can’t wait to go back home.”
Bajandar, 27, is expected to be released from the hospital in the next 30 days, and, he says, will start a business with the donations he's received since his sickness made international headlines last year.
In the meantime, his wife and daughter remain with him at Dhaka Medical College and Hospital, where he's optimistic he can return to normal life.
"I hope the curse won't return again," he told AFP.
Nearly 30 years before Helena Rubenstein and Elizabeth Arden launched their beauty brands, a former servant girl from Canada created the American hair salon industry, designed the first reclining salon chair, and went on to establish retail franchising as we know it today. Along the way she empowered thousands of young women and amassed a fortune.
Martha Matilda Harper was born in 1857 into a working class family in Ontario, Canada. At the age of seven, her father bound her out in servitude to an uncle, and she was sent 60 miles from home to begin a life of drudgery. Eventually, she went to work for a German holistic doctor, who taught her his revolutionary ideas about hair care. Harper learned about stimulating blood flow to the scalp through vigorous hair brushing, and the importance of hygiene; all new ideas at the time. She embraced the doctor’s practices and her own hair flourished. Before he died in 1881, the doctor gave Harper his secret hair tonic formula, little knowing the effects his small bequeath would have on Harper and American society.
The next year Harper immigrated to Rochester, New York, once again as a servant, but she had the tonic and a plan.
“At the end of the 19th century, Rochester was a hot bed of innovation. If you were slightly weird you fit in, so it was the perfect community for someone who was daring to introduce a new concept,” says Jane Plitt, author of Martha Matilda Harper and the American Dream: How One Woman Changed the Face of Modern Business.
Soon Harper was delighting her new employer, Luella Roberts, and Roberts’ affluent friends with her hair skills and secret tonic (an organic shampoo). During the Victorian era, people either didn’t wash their hair, or used harsh soaps. Women had their hair done at home by servants, or independent hairdressers, but Harper had the revolutionary idea of opening a public hair salon for women.
In the midst of planning her new venture, Harper got very ill, and was nursed back to health by a Christian Science healer. The experience turned her into a lifelong Christian Scientist, and the church’s teachings and organization would have a profound effect on Harper’s business.
In 1888 Harper used her life savings of $360 to open her first salon. That same year, George Eastman launched Kodak in Rochester with $1 million in venture capital. Convincing women to have their hair done in public would be a tough sell, so Harper chose the location of her salon strategically. She used connections through Roberts to secure space in the prominent Powers Building in downtown Rochester, and placed a large photograph of herself showcasing her floor-length hair on the door.
The customers did not come, so Harper employed a brilliant marketing tactic. Next door to her fledgling salon was a children’s music school, which lacked a waiting room. Every day well-heeled mothers would bring their children to class, only to be left standing in the hall. Harper invited the women to rest in her salon, and lured them into trying her services; what would become known as the Harper Method.
After nearly a quarter century in servitude, Harper knew how to pamper her clientele. She designed the first reclining chair so they could have their hair washed without getting shampoo in their eyes, and had a half circle cut out of her sink (with running water) for ladies to rest their heads. The emphasis was on customer service, long before the term was coined. Once women experienced the Harper Method, they were converts.
Her clients were made up of an unlikely blend of society ladies and suffragists, whose movement was spearheaded in Rochester. Soon Harper was catering to both circles, and women in each sphere were spreading the word about the new salon. Susan B. Anthony was a friend and client.
“What was significant was it was a combination of the hoi polloi ladies who came as customers along with the suffragettes who helped network the business,” says Plitt. “Alexander Graham Bell’s wife Mabel became a client, and she brought Grace Coolidge, the future First Lady, and Grace brought [socialite and social activist] Bertha Honoré Palmer. It was women’s networking at its best.”
Palmer became such a fan that she insisted Harper open a shop in her native Chicago in time for the world’s fair of 1893. Harper shrewdly replied that Palmer needed to get a commitment from twenty-five women to patronize a Chicago shop.
With the commitment secured, Harper had to figure out how to expand her business with her limited resources. According to Plitt, she looked to the Christian Science Church for guidance. Under the strict direction of founder Mary Baker Eddy, the church maintained satellite operations throughout the country. Harper decided this was the model she would replicate.
She also incorporated the goal of the suffragists to empower women. In particular, Susan B. Anthony advocated women having financial independence in an era when women had very few rights, least of all financial.
“She used the model to enable other poor servant girls and factory girls to transform their lives,” Plitt says.
By dictating that poor women would open the first 100 salons, in one fell swoop Harper became a pioneer of social entrepreneurship and modern franchising. (The word franchising comes from the French, and literally means “to free from servitude”.) Ray Kroc of McDonald’s is widely credited with being the father of American franchising, but Harper beat him to it by 60 years.
The first two franchises were opened in 1891 in Buffalo and Detroit. Franchisees had to purchase Harper’s chair and sink (which she unfortunately did not patent) and all of her products. Because the women—who became known as “Harperites”—usually lacked the funds for the upfront costs, Harper loaned them the money to buy the franchise.
In 1893 Harper opened her Chicago salon in time for the fair, and she continued to expand; eventually having over five hundred shops globally, including one in each of the fifty states, a network of beauty schools training women in the Harper Method, and a factory in Rochester to manufacture her organic products. As her empire grew, the rich and famous flocked to her shops.
Harper’s loyal clients included members of the British royal family, the German Kaiser, the actress Helen Hayes, and Rose and Joseph Kennedy (and later, Jacqueline Kennedy and Lady-Bird Johnson). While negotiating the Treaty of Versailles, President Woodrow Wilson traveled to Paris nightly to the Harper salon to have his scalp massaged. Hair treatments for men—including massage—were a novelty, and one of Harper’s many innovations.
Sally Knapp, 81, is one woman whose life was changed by Harper. She entered Harper’s beauty school in Rochester right out of high school.
“I was a Harper girl, and graduated in 1954,” Knapp says. “At the time beauty schools did not have the best reputation. They seemed dirty to me, and Harper was different, the approach was different. It was on hair care rather than simply coiffing.”
In 1957, Knapp took over a Harper salon in Baltimore, and ran the business for 50 years.
“She gave me my career and I think she gave me some principles of how you treat people. The idea of caring for people came from my training, and that definitely came from Martha,” Knapp says.
Harper never lost sight of her original goal of empowering women. Her salons offered childcare and were open in the evening to accommodate busy women’s schedules. Unlike John Rockefeller, who lived in a fortress, Harper’s Rochester mansion was open to all “Harperites” when they came to town.
She refused to marry until she was fully in control of her empire, and at the age of 63 married Robert MacBain, who was 39.
She stepped down as CEO in 1932 and MacBain took over. He began to transform the company, introducing chemical dyes and permanents (which were forbidden under Harper, who strictly used natural products) and the female “esprit de corps” was gone, according to Plitt. Harper died in 1950 at the age of 92, and by the time MacBain sold the company in the 1970s, it was a shadow of its former self. The last Harper salon closed in Rochester in 2005.
The woman who transformed the lives of so many, and changed the face of American business never got her due in life. While the remaining “Harperites” are fiercely loyal, Harper’s is a name largely forgotten.
“She’s important as a national business figure,” says Sarah LeCount, Collections Manager at the Rochester Museum & Science Center, which has a large collection of Harper artifacts, including two of her shampoo chairs.
“She really felt that by developing her salon system she was helping women establish a financial life of their own beyond their husband’s, or allowed them to live without a husband.”
In 2001 Harper was posthumously honored with an award from the International Franchising Association; and was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2003.
“She is lost in history and I think it’s too bad,” says Knapp. “It happens and makes you wonder about your worth sometimes in life. Martha stood for a lot of things and it’s a shame that it’s been lost in the history pages.”
In 1923, the year after the founding of the Soviet Union, the Lomonosov Porcelain Factory in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) produced a unique chess set. Since originating in sixth-century India, chess designs had been inspired by military battles, royalty, even nature; now, the inspiration was ideology.
The chess set produced in Lomonosov had two very distinct sides. For the pieces in white, the king is a skeleton, wielding a femur bone as a scepter. The queen unashamedly displays an abundance of riches. The bishops are the tsar's imperial guards, and the pawns are bound in chains. These are the pieces for the capitalist side.
The communist side—in red, naturally—is led by the king, who is a blacksmith, and queen, who carries wheat. The pawns are female farm workers and the bishops, red army colonels. The message wasn’t subtle, but it was evidently popular: the Communist Propaganda Set became one of the most copied in the world.
This extraordinary set is just one example of the designs featured in Master Works: Rare and Beautiful Chess Sets, published in February by Fuel. As the book shows, even with the apparent limitations of structure—32 pieces across 64 squares—there is capacity for unusual and inspired design.
Some designs, as with the Communist Propaganda set, arose from ideology. Some were born out of wealth, such as the opulent rock crystal and silver set from 16th-century France. And some were made from necessity, such as the cardboard pieces created during the 900-day siege of Leningrad in World War II.
AO has images of these unusual designs, and more, from Master Works.
Sid Saunders, 73, was walking through Marline Wood, in East Sussex, England, when he come upon a “bit of concrete just poking out of the undergrowth,” as he told the Hastings Observer. He found the concrete was wedged well into the ground and started clearing the area of undergrowth. There, buried for years, was a tiny headstone, no higher than his calf.
The stone was overgrown with moss, but when Saunders cleaned it off, he could read its inscription:
In Memory of the Little 🐇 Duchie Born August 1869 Died December 1882
(There really is a small image of a bunny dug into the stone.)
Duchie lived 13 years, a long life for a rabbit but within the realm of possibility for a well-loved pet. The rabbit’s name, Saunders thinks, indicates that it’s part of the Dutch rabbit family. Because the Duchie lived so long and got a bespoke headstone, it’s likely he or she was the pet of a well-off family.
When a neighborhood changes, the food options do, too. Hole-in-the-wall joints become, say, avocado-toast emporiums. Whole bodegas go organic.
Right now, no one knows that better than the hairy-legged vampire bat. New research from Brazil shows that the species, which once relied exclusively on bird blood, has incorporated a new food source: people.
Researchers from the Federal University of Pernambuco tested feces from a hairy-legged colony in northeast Brazil, and found human blood, New Scientist reports. "We were quite surprised," the lead researcher told the outlet. In the past, the bats have been quite picky, choosing to abstain from food rather than drink mammal blood.
But as humans move into the forest, and more feathery snacks are driven out, the bats are apparently changing their palates. The researchers also found chicken blood in the samples, showing that the bats were likely visiting local farms for dinner.
This is more than just freaky—a bat bite can transfer parasites or infectious diseases, and garlic and silver bullets aren't much help. Researchers are currently following up with nearby residents to assess the frequency and timing of the bites.
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.
