Last year Tabetha Boyajian, an astronomer now working at Louisiana State University, published a paper about a star that had something strange blocking its light. The Kepler telescope had captured the star’s light in a pattern of flux that had no obvious explanation; Boyajian looked for one until she convinced herself that the star was “truly something that is unique,” she told Atlas Obscura.
The flux indicated that something unusual was circling the star, but what could it be? The most dramatic explanation was that it might be an alien megastructure: if we were to detect an alien megastructure, it probably wouldn’t be a spherical object, and whatever was orbiting this star wasn’t spherical.
Even the scientists who proposed this possibility didn’t think it was likely, though. “It is probably something natural that we just haven’t thought of yet,” Boyajian said.
Now, a team of scientists from Columbia and UC Berkeley have released a paper detailing one such hypothesis: the strange behavior of the star’s light is due to the “inspiral of a planetary body or bodies.” In this theory, the star sucked up a planet at some point, which would have made it quickly brighten, and the flux in the light is the part of the after-effect, as the star returns to its more normal state. The flux could also be due in part to fragments of that planet—or from its former moons.
This theory has been raised before, but this paper details it out more convincingly. The astronomers who floated the possibility of an alien megastructure also considered this possibility, and one of them, Jason Wright, now writes that this new analysis shows that “the hypothesis may be plausible after all” (although he adds plenty of caveats to that assessment).
That doesn’t mean it’s the explanation, though. Other natural phenomenon are still in the running and, until there’s broad agreement on what exactly is happening here, there's always the unlikely chance that the culprit could be an alien megastructure after all.
Wellington, New Zealand is considered to be the windiest city on the planet. This is good for the local wind turbines and dramatic hair-blowing photoshoots, but not so great for passengers aboard planes landing at Wellington International Airport. On days when a gale is blowing, aircraft tilt and sway as they descend to the runway, occasionally having to abort the landing at the last moment.
In May 2016, an Air New Zealand flight experienced “massive lifts and drops, ups and downs, with a lot of banging and crashing and lots of squealing,” passenger Carl-Ann Herbert told the New Zealand Herald. It was a similar story a few months earlier, when another Air New Zealand flight, according to passenger Eleni Kanelos, "moved side to side, then it just dropped and there were a few screams."
The video above shows some of the more hairy descents at Wellington airport, including two in which the pilots had to abandon their landing plans at the last second and head back into the sky for another go-around.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
The Underground Boxing Gym in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, has all the usual accoutrements of a traditional fighters’ gathering place: a ring, some heavy bags, dumbbells, mirrors, pull-up bars, and old fight posters. But to enter this place on a typical weekday evening is to discover a scene slightly out of step with the usual image of pugilistic education: gathered across the length of the gym is a troop of children—as young as 5 and as old as 15—diligently attending to their calisthenics. Later, they’ll don headgear and oversized gloves and proceed, in pairs, to duke it out in the ring.
Despite its name, the Underground Boxing Gym occupies the entire third floor of a commercial building just off of the B/Q subway station in Sheepshead Bay. In a canny bit of advertising, the gym’s logo — a billboard-sized poster of a hulking bear with boxing gloves lifted to its muzzle — can be seen overlooking the elevated subway platform.
Sheepshead Bay, along with neighboring Brighton Beach, is home to one of the largest Russian-speaking communities in the United States, an enclave growing denser each year. The bear, a centuries-old Russian symbol, is a fitting masthead for a locale where a cup of borscht is found without Yelp.
From the doorway of the gym, two tykes can be seen crawling through the ropes of the ring, their slightly bemused parents watching from the benches. Victoria Irlinksy, the mother of Alan, a six-year-old newcomer to the gym, sees boxing as an occasion for her son to grapple with real-world responsibility. “[Boxing] teaches them the basic principles of self-defense and discipline,” said Irlinksy. “They’re boys. They need to get their energy out somewhere and this is the best place for them.”
For Igor Rabinsky, whose son Lenny, 10, has had more than a few run-ins with bullies at school, the gym has instilled his son with the kind of confidence that makes him less likely to be picked on. “Lenny’s character has totally changed,” he says. “He is sure of himself. The [bullies] see that and think twice now.”
Boxing as a social crusading tool has been well-documented. It took a troubled Mike Tyson (who, admittedly, would stay troubled throughout his career) out of the streets of Brownsville and made him the heavyweight champion of the world. But as the gym’s founder and sole trainer Ilia Mesishchev makes clear, his ambitions for his fighters are measured on a much more moderate—but no less important—scale—human decency.
“People have to be polite to each other,” Mesishchev says. “The kids learn it here. Boxing isn’t about aggressive attitudes. It’s about human beings recognizing other human beings. If you don’t respect the other guy in the ring, you don’t respect yourself.”
Still, the bad reputation persists. In addition to being reduced to a sport that has scant mainstream appeal, boxing’s inherent violence carries with it a stigma that middle-class America won’t likely embrace anytime soon. Irlinsky, though, scoffed at the suggestion that boxing was more dangerous than other sports. “In hockey, half of those players don’t have their teeth!” Irlinksy countered. “And don’t get me started with football…those kids have concussions by the time they are twenty. Here, the kids wear all the safety gear and everything is controlled by the trainer.”
Then she reframed the question. “What sport isn’t violent?”
If the usual American conventions seem obscured in the Underground Boxing Gym, it’s probably because the gym’s ethos is derived from more hardscrabble origins.
The neighborhood’s heritage is emblazoned on the walls of the Underground Boxing Gym, which is lined with flags that recall the 15 constituent republics of the Soviet Union. No, this isn’t a bastion of ex-Soviet tribalism (politics, much less Putin, have no place here). Nevertheless, the gym’s cultural roots and the ubiquity of Russian makes it an intuitive and accessible extension of the larger Sheepshead Bay community. “It’s like a home for many of the people who come here,” Mesishchev noted. “They feel comfortable here.”
To compare the Underground Boxing Gym solely to a kindergarten would be to overlook the gym’s broader client base, which includes two undefeated prizefighters, Golden Glove amateurs, and a mix of high school students and 9-to-5ers. The kicker? Everyone trains together. Most boxing gyms, like weight rooms, are a free agent’s paradise that operates on an open schedule, allowing the client to conduct their own workout. The reverse is true for The Underground Boxing Gym, where the neophytes learn by training alongside seasoned boxers, and where, as Mesishchev puts it, the dedicated separate themselves from the flakes. The democratic conditions are what make it possible for Artom Oryschenko, a diminutive but highly-skilled 12-year-old Ukrainian, to lead a pack of adults and tots alike through the warm ups—all under, of course, Mesishchev’s dutiful direction and workgroup philosophy that is less newfangled than you might think.
A forty-something expat from Belarus who had success in the amateur ranks on the Israeli National team before diving into coaching full time, Mesishchev is a proponent of what is colloquially referred to, in some circles, as the Soviet Style of boxing, a reference to Russia’s stellar amateur boxing program when the Iron Curtain was still up. For newcomers who are serious about amateur boxing, Mesishchev will turn them on to a grainy YouTube video of a certain Russian boxing squad undergoing various plyometric and shadowboxing drills together. “Don’t tell anyone about this,” Mesishchev cautioned, as though he were safeguarding a secret formula. More than anything else, Mesishchev maintains, the Soviet Style upholds a generous, collaborative spirit based on fine-tuning the fundamentals.
If you’re just looking to hit the heavy bag for a few rounds and twiddle around with the speed bag, the Underground Boxing Gym is probably not for you. Scarcely can you get away with throwing a flimsy jab before Mesishchev—or, say, his top professional, Constantin Bejenaru, an undefeated cruiserweight from Moldova—reprimands you. Boxing, in one of its few positive epithets, is often referred to as “Sweet Science” to describe the strategic, calculated moves a fighter makes inside the ring. It’s a sentiment that underscores the pedagogical nature of the Underground Boxing Gym.
But if it sounds as though the gym peddles in anachronism, there are current developments on the professional level that legitimate Mesishchev’s ex-Soviet thinking. In recent years, boxing has seen a wave of fighters from Eastern Europe fill its ranks. Bona fide knockout artists like Gennady Golovkin (Kazakhstan) and Sergey Kovalev (Russia) have earned not only the admiration of the most dedicated fight fans but have also begun to catch the attention of the casual observer. There is also Vasyl Lomachenko (Ukraine), a two-time gold medalist and current champion in the 130-pound division, who some believe might be the most talented fighter in the world. Mesishchev is proud to be associated with this new demographic but demurred when asked if he sees this as marketing potential for his gym. “I don’t want to use their names for commercial purposes,” he said, adding that tending to his stable of fighters is more than enough.
“We’re one big family here,” Mesishchev says, as he unlaces the gloves of one his fighters. “We don’t have good guys or bad guys. Yes, some are better than others but what we are is one family.”
And like the home of any family, the Underground Boxing Gym has no lockers.
“I’ve never had anyone tell me they had their watch, keys or wallet stolen,” Mesishchev said. “This is what I mean by respect and education. Boxing is a hard, sweaty, painful, bloody job and let’s face it, not everyone is going to be a world champion. But they leave as good people.”
Hanging outside the homes across Bermuda are little vials of fluid that are the locals’ secret to predicting the island weather. Or so they say.
Bermuda has a long tradition of using shark oil as a meteorological tool, but the true efficacy and mechanics of the predator’s oil is a matter of debate. According to the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences (BIOS), the local tradition of using a vial of shark oil to predict the weather has been in place for up to 300 years.
"Now where they developed, I don’t know," says Captain Alan Card, a lifelong Bermuda fisherman, now 69. "I can remember 65 years ago seeing a bottle of shark oil hanging down at the marina." Card has been looking to the barometers for just about his entire career. "The best one that I’ve seen used to be down at Somerset Bridge," he says. "Someone either broke it or stole it. You’d get to that barometer and think, ‘Huh. We’ve got some weather coming. It might not be today mind you, but we’ve got some weather coming.’"
The construction of the barometers is exceedingly simple—it’s just a small amount of oil extracted from a shark liver, sealed in glass. Sometimes that means a jar, an old wine bottle, or a more artful custom container. According believers in the barometers, like Card, the devices are able to predict oncoming weather with a fair degree of accuracy. When asked if they were effective, Card responded with a simple, "Hell, yeah."
Thatcher Adams, a local shark oil barometer expert who was referenced in a 1985 article in Yachting Magazine, said there are at least 40 different readable signals that can appear in a given oil barometer. Most of the readings have to do with the small amount of sediment contained in the liquid.
"We’ve got one batch in either a scotch bottle or a rum bottle, a Bacardi bottle, something like that," says Card. "It’s got two inches of white sediment on the bottom of the bottle." On days with perfect weather, the oil is clear. On overcast or rainy days, "you’ll look at it and you’ll find a little spiral or a little peak in the sediment. Then other days you look at it and it’s absolutely cloudy. It looks like milk, you can’t see through it."
The oil is said to begin swirling as hurricanes approach, and the way the sediment slopes can show which direction the wind is coming from. But the barometer is not just capable of predicting extreme weather—small variations in the peaks and valleys on the surface of the sediment, or crystals forming on the glass, are believed to portend more subtle weather situations.
An unsourced, but hand-drawn diagram of a shark oil barometer on Bermuda.com shows a few of the basic signs to be read from shark oil, including summer rains, which are indicated by rising bits of sediment, called, “rain seeds.” This diagram suggests that the sea can be predicted by the oil, the weather by the exposed glass, and even the horizon based on the surface of the oil. Along the top, it is rather poetically noted, “As The Oil, So Is The Sea / As The Glass, So Is The Sky.” Card says that it can take years of practice to learn to read shark oil, getting used to comparing its behavior to the actual weather.
While the construction of the barometer is simple, according to local lore, the collection of the main ingredient is surrounded by its own set of beliefs. In an article published by the BIOS, they not is believed that in order to extract the most accurate oil, the fluid must be taken from a small dusky shark (known locally as "puppy sharks"), ideally during a full moon. The relation between the phase of the moon and the efficacy of the oil seems to echo the general changes in the weather that accompany the shifting tides.
Card's account of the liver collection process is a bit more utilitarian. "You take a piece of the liver and put it in a stocking, for argument’s sake," he says. "You hang it up somewhere where it doesn’t get stinking in the bedroom. Outside somewhere. And over a period of days, the oil would leach out and fall in the bottle. You seal the bottle, and there you go, you’ve got your shark oil."
In terms of the science behind the fluctuations in the oil, traditional barometers work by measuring changes in atmospheric pressure, but shark oil barometers don’t seem to have any scientifically observed correlation to the air pressure. The science behind them is as murky as shark oil on a stormy day.
One theory posits that the oil reacts to the atmosphere while it is still in the shark, giving them an internal warning to avoid stormy waters, but the extracted oil doesn’t seem to prove that. Another, seemingly more outlandish theory, posited by Adams in the article in Yachting, is that the oil reacts to infrared radiation, which subtly affects the temperature of the liquid. According to a study conducted by BIOS, the oil does seem particularly sensitive to temperature, so maybe Adams’ theory has some merit.
We may not know exactly what drives shark oil barometers, but several hundred Bermudians still hang them outside their houses and around marinas. And they're not just for show. "We look at it," says Card. "Not on a daily basis, but when we know the weather’s gonna get shitty, I’ll ask them, ‘What’s the shark oil doing today?’"
In China's Jiangxi province, in the country's southeast, a hydropower renovation project has revealed a centuries-old statue of the Buddha, his head peaking just above the water.
The statue was discovered in the Hongmen Reservoir, a vast water project that was constructed in 1958 and subsumed 63 villages and towns. Recently, reports Xinhua State News, during construction on a hydropower gate, the reservoir's level dropped 30 feet, and locals discovered the head of the statue exposed, just above the new water line.
Archaeologists have been dispatched to make a more thorough survey of the area. Based on the style of the statue's head, archaeologists believe it dates back to the Ming Dynasty, which ruled from the 14th to 17th century. The receding water also revealed an imperial decree and rectangular holes in the reservoir wall, which indicate that a building, likely a temple, had once been constructed here.
In October 1999, Ukraine’s secret service showed up at the home and office of Sergei Piontkovski, a marine biologist, and started raiding his files. They were looking for information about plankton.
Piontkovski was a leading scientist at the Institute of Biology of Southern Seas in Sevastopol, Ukraine, and since the fall of the Soviet Union, he had been working with colleagues in the West to analyze huge troves of ocean data that Soviet ships had collected around the world during the Cold War. The investigation focused on the grant money that Piontkovski and his colleagues had received from western institutions, but the New Scientistreported at the time that there could be another reason for the Security Bureau’s interest in the scientists and their plankton data—some of their studies focused on tiny bioluminescent organisms that could help military forces detect enemy submarines.
For decades, during the Cold War, both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. had a military interest in bioluminescent organisms, which use a chemical reaction to produce a brief glow when they’re stimulated. The light of tiny ocean creatures had revealed on occasion the locations of submarines in World War I, and both militaries imagined that they might be able to use this natural phenomenon more systematically in anti-submarine warfare.
But despite those serendipitous illuminations of otherwise stealthy submarines, harnessing bioluminescence for human purposes proved somewhat elusive. While the Navy’s interest expanded scientific understanding of this phenomenon, the light of the ocean’s tiny creatures was difficult to bend to a military will.
In November 1918, toward the end of the Great War, a British ship gliding on the surface of the ocean, off the coast of Spain, noticed a strange shape down in the water. It was blue, glowing, and suspiciously large. The ship attacked. The hunch that the sailors had found something suspicious was correct: they had destroyed a German submarine that had agitated a field of bioluminescent plankton, which lit up and gave away its position.
Sailors had long noticed the transcendent light of “milky seas,” where glowing plankton gathered en masse and lit the water up. The Arabian Sea was known to glow, as were the seas around parts of Indonesia. But there was little known about the bioluminescent properties of the ocean in general. Scientists did not yet know how abundant bioluminescent organisms were, where they might be found, or how brightly their light shone. In 1966, when the U.S. Naval Oceanographic Office published a study that collected for the first time reports of bioluminescence going back centuries, the office’s commander wrote that the study of these organisms had gone “sadly neglected for a long time.”
In the second half of 20th century, though, the U.S. military had a pressing reason to learn more about these creatures. Facing down the Soviet superpower, the Navy had to plan how to transport ships full of men, tanks, and other war equipment across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe, if World War III had broken out as a ground war. To cross the ocean, these ships would have to pass by Soviet submarines, hidden as well as they could be. Any method of detecting them could be of use.
The U.S. had a defensive interest in bioluminescence, too. “A lot of the research into anti-submarine warfare had to do with how the Soviets might detect our submarines,” says Donald Daniel, a security expert who in the 1980s wrote a guide to anti-submarine warfare. “The United States did an excellent job of silencing its submarines, and we were looking at different detection strategies largely because we wondered what they could get us with, if they couldn’t get us with acoustics.”
The Soviet Union, it turned out, was also interested in bioluminescence. From 1970 to 1990, ships equipped with monitoring equipment were cruising the open waters of the oceans, surveying their characteristics. Back then, large portions of the ocean were still a mystery: it was in these same years that satellites launched into space starting giving the first comprehensive scientific overviews of the world’s watery reaches. Soviet scientists on these long cruises were casting bioluminescent sensors into the water, where they would capture a certain volume, agitate the water to set the organisms aglow, and measure their light.
At the same time, the U.S. Navy was working to better understand bioluminescence in its own way. After a preliminary assessment of its possibilities in 1970, the Navy worked to better understand where and when they might find bioluminescence. The U.S. strategy used more limited surveying to try to develop a model for how bioluminescent organisms acted and where they would show up. Ultimately, the goal was to monitor the oceans’ bioluminescence by air or from space, and catch the subtle signals that would indicate the movement of ships.
By the end of the Cold War, neither side had succeeded in turning bioluminescence into a strategic advantage, though. “While it was an interesting idea, in terms of practical relevance, it was turning out to be way too hard,” says Daniel. The light-sensing technology wasn’t quite good enough to be of use; distinguishing bioluminescence sparked by whales or schools of fish from bioluminescence from submarine movement proved difficult.
In the 1990s, Soviet scientists like Piontkovski started collaborating with British and American institutions who were interested in the same problems they were. In 1997, for instance, Piontkovski worked with scientists in the U.K. and the U.S. to analyze the bioluminescence data collected over 20 years of Soviet Ocean surveys. At the same time, even with the Cold War over, scientists were making progress in understanding the ocean’s bioluminescent qualities and how bioluminescent organisms themselves worked. The Navy had developed standardized instruments to measure bioluminescence, a huge boon for researchers. Through the 2000s Naval researchers were still expanding a database of bioluminescence measurements, and funding was still going to scientists to develop models that could predict what the bioluminescent signature of a ship might look like.
The next step in creating a predictive system would have involved creating a program that could take particular inputs and spit out a hypothetical bioluminescent signal for a given object. “That kind of fell apart,” says Michael Latz, a scientist who had worked on this idea, with government funding. “I don’t think that part has happened.” Funding for this sort of work has also dried up, and a recent government research project to create “better predictability of bioluminescent organism” finished work in 2014. “We are not currently doing any research on the topic,” a spokesperson for the Office of Naval Research says. Despite all the Navy’s efforts, bioluminescent organisms never quite cooperated, it seems.
After a community group in Shropshire, England, decided to have a donated piano tuned, the tuner made an incredible discovery. Inside the upright piano, first sold in 1906, there was a hidden stash of gold.
The group immediately reported the find to authorities, and the gold has been taken to the British Museum. Authorities aren’t giving out details about what exactly was found, but it’s supposed to be “highly unusual in nature” and “made mostly of gold.” (One source mentions coins.) Whatever it is, it is apparently remarkable.
“They laid this stuff out and I was like 'whoa', I'm an archaeologist and I'm used to dealing with treasure but I'm more used to medieval broaches,” the British Museum’s Peter Reavill told reporters.
The United Kingdom actually has a law to deal with discoveries like these, the Treasure Act of 1996. For the hidden gold to officially be declared treasure, “it must be substantially made of gold or silver and have been deliberately concealed by the owner with a view to later recovery,” the Shropshire Star reports.
If the original owner is not found and the hoard is declared treasure, then it will belong to the Crown. The museum will be able to buy it, and the tuner and the piano owners will get a reward—a finder’s fee, essentially. But authorities are still trying to trace the piano’s ownership history and find the original owners of the gold. If they do, perhaps we’ll find out what exactly is in this giant pile of gold—and why it was hidden in the first place.
On the afternoon of April 22, 1954, reporters massed at a press conference in Bonn, Germany. They’d been invited to meet one Nikolai Evgenievich Khokhlov, a captain in the Soviet Union’s newly minted security force, the KGB. Well, a former captain. Khokhlov had arrived in Germany tasked with assassinating the leader of an anticommunist organization. Instead he defected, tipping off the target and surrendering himself to U.S. agents. He was now no longer at the center of a murder plot, but a media event.
The 32-year-old Khokhlov was a “slight, scholarly-appearing blond young man. He was neatly dressed in a dark blue suit. He wore glasses,” reported TheNew York Times. The Times reporter observed that the defector was self-possessed and calm, “adroitly” fielding questions in Russian.
Though Khokhlov’s press conference came just weeks after another high-profile defection of a KGB official in Australia, his actions were thrilling enough to grab headlines. Even better, he had brought with him the exotic murder weapons constructed for the plot: two seemingly normal cigarette cases. “But they are ideal weapons for an assassin,” wrote the Associated Press at the time, “because of their innocent appearance, lightness and efficiency.” Flip the lid of the case back, and it revealed what appeared to be rows of run-of-the mill smokes. But press a concealed button, and a tiny four-inch-long pistol hidden inside would fire hollow-nosed bullets spiked with potassium cyanide. Upon being fired, the “resulting noise is no louder than the snap of the fingers and might pass unnoticed in the moderate conversation in a normal office,” wrote the AP.
Khokhlov later testified before the U.S. Congress about Soviet intelligence activities and became something of a media star. His story inspired a four-part series in the Saturday Evening Post called “I Would Not Murder for the Soviets,” and in 1957 he published a memoir, In the Name of Conscience. That was also the same year the KGB made an attempt on his life. After giving a speech in Frankfurt, Khokhlov had been served a cup of coffee, which he wrote in his memoir “did not seem to me as good as usual.” Soon he felt tired, and a “strange weight oppressed” his heart and stomach. Khokhlov collapsed in a parking lot. He had been dosed with thallium, a slow-acting poison that causes considerable pain before killing its victim. Khokhlov was lucky, though, and ultimately recovered after weeks in the hospital. His poisoning had coincided with the successful launch of Sputnik, and he reflected upon this in his book. “I, too, was an exhibit of the achievements of Soviet science,” he wrote. “Totally bald, so disfigured by scars and spots that those who had known me did not at first recognize me, confined to a rigid diet, I was nevertheless also living proof that Soviet science, the science of killing, is not omnipotent.”
Having defected from the KGB, survived a poisoning attempt, and spent years in the media spotlight, it might be natural to assume Khokhlov was ready for some peace and quiet. And he did eventually fall into the life of an academic, beginning studies at Duke University in the 1960s. But in the end, it’s clear Khokhlov was never meant to lead an ordinary life.
While studying psychology at Duke, Khokhlov found himself in the orbit of one of the university’s most eclectic personalities, Joseph Banks Rhine, or J.B. Rhine. Rhine was a botanist from Pennsylvania who went on to study psychology at Harvard and became fascinated by what he called “extra-sensory perception”—the idea that the human mind had powers beyond the known senses. He studied clairvoyance, ESP, and telepathy, and eventually founded the Institute for Parapsychology at Duke. The lab (which still exists today as the independent Rhine Research Center) has the distinction of inspiring the scene in Ghostbusters where Bill Murray’s Peter Venkman tests his students’ clairvoyant capacities with a deck of marked cards. (In a weird coincidence, the assassination plot that sparked Khokhlov’s defection was called Operation Rhine.)
It was under Rhine’s tutelage that Khokhlov’s interest in the paranormal flourished, and it was also how he found himself at the Institute for Parapsychology on September 1, 1966, presenting a paper called “The Relationship of Parapsychology to Communism.” A number of paranormal researchers had assembled at the institute, whose base was a stately white house with a porch and balcony.
“In Soviet Russia considerable interest has been aroused in research in parapsychology,” Khokhlov began. Russian character, Khokhlov told the Institute’s attentive dinner guests, made for a people “specifically sensitive to matters relative to the mystical side of the human psyche” and “to a world beyond the sober reality of sense.” He then lectured the group about Russian scientists who had undertaken studies of ESP dating back to the late 1800s. He told them that the Soviet government actively encouraged such study, and name-checked prominent Russians (from astrophysicists to philosophers) who supported parapsychological inquiry. He described studies in which subjects had been able to perceive images from over a distance of nearly 2,000 miles. He concluded his talk on a hopeful note, saying, “The fate of the world today depends on the common understanding by the whole human race of what a human being really is. Here we are, on this side of the Iron Curtain, a small group of parapsychologists, trying to enlarge the common notion of man. And there are they, men of science and spirit, who are striving for the same higher goal.”
Rhine published the paper in a book, Parapsychology Today, and offered the ex-KGB officer a position on his staff once he had earned his doctorate. But Khokhlov declined. He later wrote in an email to the author Stacy Horn, who chronicled the goings-on at the Institute in her book Unbelievable, that he had lost faith in Rhine’s propensity for “pure statistical manipulations without touching the inevitable issue of human consciousness and its metaphysical essence.”
Khokhlov eventually went west, to California, hotbed of all things metaphysical. He became a professor at California State University, San Bernardino, where he continued to study parapsychology. There he hosted talks on psychic phenomena (“If you think you’re a psychic, or just interested, come and feel the vibes next Tuesday,” read a notice for one of his workshops in the school newspaper.) He taught courses in experimental hypnosis, and delivered lectures on spiritual life. He gave interviews on parapsychology and on his KGB years to David Brinkley and 60 Minutes. The U.S. government even tapped him to study parapsychology in the Soviet Union on its behalf.
Khokhlov became a U.S. citizen in 1970. In 1992, Russian President Boris Yeltsin pardoned him.
Over the years, his interests expanded beyond parapsychology. He learned computer programming and dedicated himself to environmentalism, eventually launching a “computerized carpool” that matched students with others nearby so they could commute to school together.
In 2007, the man who had fled Soviet Russia and survived a poisoning succumbed to a heart attack at 84. His papers, including his work on parapsychology, reside at the Hoover Institute, a think tank at Stanford University.
In Khokhlov’s writing, it’s easy to see a direct line between his abhorrence of the Soviet system and his attraction to the ethereal promises of the paranormal.
“Nothing can arrest the disintegration of inhuman rule,” wrote Khokhlov in his 1957 memoir. “The very qualities that communism has attempted to read out of existence—conscience, honor, loyalty to God’s commandments—are making for its collapse. In the final analysis, these elements will prove stronger than the rational ‘material’ forces.”
Hey, you: Are you looking for a part-time job? Do you love caves and have a "Christian outlook"? Are you willing to relocate to Austria?
If so, the town of Saalfelden has an empty hermitage with your name on it, the Local reports.
The hermitage, which is over 350 years old, is built into a natural cave just above Lichtenberg castle. Although it lacks heat and running water, it's rich in spiritual comforts: it's apparently very peaceful inside, there is a chapel right next door, and no computer or television is allowed.
The town is hiring an occupant for April through November, after which it's too cold to live up there. Besides the aforementioned Christian outlook, qualifications include self-sufficiency, "peace with [one's] self," and friendliness—in a twist, a main hermit duty is greeting and speaking with the cave's many visitors.
The position tends to be hotly contested. In 1970, a local who didn't get the job shot at the door of the hermitage in anger, proving that he would have been the wrong choice.
If this is the opportunity you've been waiting for, you can send your CV, a cover letter, and a current photo to the address here.
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 April of 2015, farmer Pham Dinh Huyen of Quang Binh, Vietnam set to work on his new fishpond. He had barely started digging when his shovel hit a rock. He pried it out and put it aside, but then he hit another, and another. Eventually, he had 20—large, oblong slabs of various sizes, some of them pointed at the ends.
So he did what you do when, in Vietnam, you find a bunch of weird rocks all together—he hit each one with the flat of his shovel, and listened. And lo and behold, they rang out clearly, in varying tones. He called his local museum, and they confirmed his suspicions—Huyen's future fishpond was a musical graveyard. He had dug up one of Vietnam's many ancient lithophones.
Rocks, to most of us, seem cold, inert, and boring. Across time and all over the globe, though, people have taken them and made them sing. The lithophone—a set of ringing stones carved and arranged to allow for musical performance—can be found everywhere from Scandinavia to Indonesia, says Mike Adcock, a musician and lithophone enthusiast who has spent years compiling a book on the subject. In Argentina, they're carved out of quartz; in Namibia, pounded into large boulders. Some researchers even think Stonehenge is a giant lithophone.
In Vietnam, they're called đàn đá'. Most are chunks of volcanic rock or of schist, a kind of layered slate, that have been carved into a more sonorous shape. Experts think they date back anywhere from 3000 to 10,000 years—younger than the pan pipe, but older than anything with strings. As more and more pop up all over Vietnam, archaeologists attempt to solve the many mysteries that dog them, and musicians figure out how to add their unique tones to an already-rich folk tradition.
The first đàn đá discovery occured in 1949, when a group of construction workers in the Central Highlands dug up eleven stone slabs. The stones were vertically oriented and huddled together, and word of the strange find soon spread to a nearby town, Ndut Lien Krak, where ethnologist Georges Condominas was living and working. As Adcock describes in a recent paper, Condominas was drinking rice beer with some friends when they got to talking about the stones, and, intrigued, he asked to go see them. He obtained permission to bring them with him back to France, where he sent them to the Musée de l'Homme.
Archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists puzzled over the stones, until someone decided to put them in order from largest to smallest, and lay them over a pair of supports, like a xylophone. "It immediately became apparent…that this was undoubtedly a musical instrument," New Scientist wrote in 1957. "It was possible to play tunes on them ranging from a simplified version of Claire de Lune to Pop Goes the Weasel." The markings on them were identified as remnants of the tuning process.
This initial đàn đá is, like so many colonial-era artifacts, still in Paris. But since its identification, more and more have turned up. Experts seek them out on archaeological digs, but laypeople also find them while planting yams and, like Huyen, building fishponds. A musician named Pham Van Phuong, who actively seeks them, has found five separate sets in one stream, and other amateurs go out đàn đá-hunting in their spare time, the way New Englanders look for arrowheads."It's like people lugging around metal detectors," Adcock says. "Everyone wants to go out and find something really genuine and discover it."
This discovery is, in some ways, the easy part. Much harder is looking back in time and trying to figure out who used the stones, and exactly what for. Some minority groups in Vietnam have long kept ringing stones to scare animals and birds away from crops—but these are structured as wind chimes or hanging gongs, different from the lithophones, which are often found laid out and accompanied by mallets. Other clues come from comparing the tones available in đàn đá to those of better-known ancient musical traditions, like Javanese gamelan music. It's possible that ancient emigrates to Vietnam held these scales and songs in their heads, and sought to recreate them with the materials of their new environment.
But it's difficult to know for sure. "One of the things about instruments is there's very little evidence," says Adcock. "You can see rock paintings, and there's no doubt that's a picture of a bison." But for most of human history, music was lost to time as soon as it was made: "We've got nothing to go on except circumstantial evidence, and markings on a stone."
This hasn't stopped people from embracing this new old tradition. Folk musicians have incorporated the đàn đá into tunes and styles that didn't originally include it, playing fast and melodious, rather than ringing and repetitive. "They're creating a revival, rather than recreating one," says Adcock. Newly built, portable dàn đá can be found in instrument shops across the country. One enthusiast in Ho Chi Minh City has built a giant twelve-stone lithophone, tuned just like a piano. He keeps it in his office, at a luxury toilet engineering firm, and plays it for guests.
Not everyone is convinced that the đàn đá's deserves this place in the pantheon. The specimen at the Musée de l'Homme came with its own skeptic, Fritz A. Kuttner, a musicologist who maintained for decades that it wasn't an instrument at all. "Any long and fairly thin stones will emit some kind of sound," he wrote in 1953. "To qualify as lithophones… shaped stones have to show some evidence, not just of shaping, but of acoustical and mathematical knowledge and skills." Because the stones are not tuned to any known tone system, Kuttner argues, they shouldn't make the cut. Other modern Western scholars, like anthropologist Roger Blench, have told Adcock that the đàn đá's utilitarian role as a crop protection device disqualifies it from ancient instrument status. Adcock rebuffs this, saying these critics are hamstrung by reliance on conservative, Western-centric definitions of music.
Granted, Adcock says, some of the discoveries are hard to swallow. People have claimed to find hundreds of stones at once, which Adcock says is unlikely. Phan Tri Dung, the luxury toilet engineer from Ho Chi Minh City claims his instrument is a recreation rather than an invention, and that it's proof that ancient Vietnamese music was built around the Western scale, against the conclusions of most of the country's musicologists. Although his instrument is amazing, Adcock says, his conclusions are probably not accurate. A certain number of the many finds likely fall under this category.
Others, though, are rock solid. Experts in Vietnam have authenticated at least 200 different stones over the past few decades, and some now reside in museums and shops. Others have been sold to collectors and historians, who, by comparing different instruments and keeping careful track of their pedigrees, can draw new conclusions about their origin and evolution.
Adcock himself has not learned how to authenticate individual instruments. But he is most convinced by the argument from human nature, both compelling and difficult to prove—that everyone who has access to a noisemaker eventually wants to experiment with it. "I think we can assume that people who are making sound, that they would have been making whatever equivalent to music there was at that time," he says. "Why wouldn't they have? It's fun." He should know—since beginning to study lithophones, he has started a band, carving his own instruments out of roof slate. Someday, someone will dig one of them up and wonder what he was thinking.
Earlier this week, a Reddit user with an unprintable name discovered a weird thing about their boots: They left swastika tracks behind.
"There was an angle I didn't get to see when ordering my new work boots..." The user wrote, posting the picture above.
The post drew over 5,000 comments, and, within 24 hours, the attention of the boots' maker, a company known as Conal International Trading Inc., according to the Houston Chronicle.
Conal subsequently recalled the boots, called Polar Fox Boots, because, according to the company at least, the whole swastika thing was a design flaw.
Do you remember Weepuls? A booming public relations trend in the 1970s and 1980s, they could often be found sitting on car dashboards, or clinging to the tops of computer monitors. For a time, fuzzy little pompoms with googly eyes were the only way to advertise. Even if you didn’t know what they were called or where they came from, you're likely to have run into more than a few of them.
Weepuls, for those who may still be a bit baffled, are a customizable promotional tool created in the 1970s. Your average Weepul consists of a little round ball of colored fuzz, with a pair of eyes glued to it, plus two little antennae. They're mounted on flat sticker-bottomed feet, to which is usually attached a little paper or fabric banner. Inexpensive, whimsical, and able to promote pretty much anything, Weepuls enjoyed a couple of decades of ubiquity in the age of physical advertising. And while today they're not exactly ubiquitous, Weepuls are still alive and kicking.
The company that originally invented the Weepul is still the official producer and trademark holder of the promotional toy. According to a 2013 account of their creation forwarded to us by current Vice President of U.S. Operations for Weepuline, LLC, Michael Crooks, the original Weepul was created on a whim by a bored toy company employee in 1971.
Tom Blundell, having recently left service in the U.S. Army, was working at his parents’ plush toy company, BIPO. Heading out on a week-long vacation, Blundell’s parents left him in charge of the facility while they were gone, and as a young executive, he quickly grew bored. Looking to fill the time, he started fiddling with some of the raw parts laying around the office. He glued some googly eyes to a little pompom that they usually used for a nose on one of their dolls. To keep it from toppling over, he gave it feet, splayed in a parade rest “V” he had learned in the Army. It was a fun way to kill some time, but Blundell placed his new creation on the desk and promptly forgot about it.
When his parents got back from their trip, they immediately called Blundell over the weekend, saying that they needed to talk about his creation. He figured he might be in trouble for goofing off, and was in for a dressing down, but when he got to the office on Monday, his father was elated. He saw the puffball as the company’s next big product. A cheap, easy-to-make toy that could sell in the millions. In Blundell’s own words, which are surprisingly personal given that he’s talking about the creation of a tiny bit of promotional swag, “I had managed to dodge many bullets while I was in Vietnam but I had just dodged the biggest one ever, the wrath of my father.”
Blundell’s mother suggested the addition of the antennae, and the tiny creatures were off to the races. They were dubbed “Weepuls,” a portmanteau of “wee people,” a name they scavenged from an earlier doll that never made it off the ground.
At first, the fuzzballs were sold to variety stores such as Kmart and Woolworths, as little toys. But a few years after their original launch, the company started adding the now-standard banners to the feet, which originally included generic catchphrases such as “Smile” or “Have a great day!” In 1976, after Blundell graduated college, he purchased BIPO from his parents and began pushing Weepuls into the world of advertising and promotion. By 1979, Blundell had introduced the customizable ribbon, and began showing the Weepuls at advertising trade shows.
In 2013, Blundell sold BIPO, which was renamed Weepuline, LLC. He claims that between 1971 and 2012, they had manufactured over 400,000,000 Weepuls.
The success of Weepuls in the American market didn’t go unnoticed, and a version of the little toys hit the Netherlands in the 1980s under the name “Wuppies.” This Dutch version of the product caught fire with the help of the children’s singer Father Abraham. Abraham created an entire album of songs to promote the fuzzy figures. One of the songs, “Wij Zijn de Wuppies,” or “We Are The Wuppies,” became a small hit in 1981, making it to number 14 on the charts in the Netherlands.
Decades later, the promotional company Interall Group brought Wuppies back to celebrate Holland's appearance in the 2006 World Cup, producing some 15 million of the things for sale in partnership with the Dutch grocery chain Albert Heijn. The Wuppies were given away with a set purchase amount and could be collected and traded for larger Wuppies. The promotion proved so popular that there were reports of people breaking into cars to steal the coveted large-size Wuppies.
Back in the U.S., the original Weepul never quite experienced the same fevered resurgence in popularity, but it never stopped innovating either. The standard alien puffball has been elaborated on over the years, and can now be ordered in dozens of different colors, patterns, sizes, and textures. Simple additions such as little cardboard arms and funny hats have made them yet more customizable and expressive, and product upgrades such as Crooks’ own idea to create tear away banners that can act as coupons, have kept them viable.
The official Weepuls catalogue now features around 200 variations, including versions decrying smoking and bullying, Weepuls shaped like animals or computers, and matching wedding sets, all still hand crafted. In 2016, Weepuline even proudly introduced paired Weepuls to celebrate same-sex marriage. Their brand keeps growing, even if you'd long since forgotten about them.
In February 2015, skiers and visitors at Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada may have spotted a man in a pair of snowshoes trudging back and forth though deep snow. The footprints he left behind made up detailed shapes of a howling wolf, a maple leaf, and a massive snowflake on the slopes of the Rocky Mountains. They are three examples of Simon Beck's "Snow Art"—temporary geometrical masterpieces that can only be fully appreciated from above.
This video, produced by Banff & Lake Louise, shows a cinematic montage of Beck's process. It was his first artistic venture on North American snow, having left behind other fractal art in snowy fields of the French Alps and Norway. He's even made pieces on sandy beaches.
Previously an engineer and mapmaker, Beck goes to extreme efforts to execute these complex, large-scale pieces. He uses a map drawing of the design, a baseplate compass, a prismatic compass, and dons warm socks, boots, and snowshoes. A single creation could take about 11 hours, thousands of steps, and total up to 25 miles of walking, according toSlate. At the 50-second mark, you can watch a time-lapse of Beck stomping out the outline of a wolf. The approximately 1,500-foot snowflake (his largest-sized drawing at the date of the video) took Beck over six hours of trekking through snow.
Beck has completed 240 drawings in the past 12 years, reportedAccuWeather in 2016. While these intricate images in the snow are beautiful, there is also a deeper meaning within his work. “There’s also an environmental message,” Beck told AccuWeather. “Snow is beautiful; we need snow. We need winter and we shouldn’t wreck it too much.”
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.
In December of 1964, a little more than a year after he gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington, Martin Luther King, Jr., traveled to Europe to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. A few days before he made his way to Oslo, he was in London, giving a speech to activists in England. A correspondent for Pacifica Radio was at the event, which was sponsored by the group Christian Action, and he recorded it.
I want to talk with you mainly about our struggle in the United States and, before taking my seat, talk about some of the larger struggles in the whole world and some of the more difficult struggles in places like South Africa. But there is a desperate, poignant question on the lips of people all over our country and all over the world. I get it almost everywhere I go and almost every press conference. It is a question of whether we are making any real progress in the struggle to make racial justice a reality in the United States of America. And whenever I seek to answer that question, on the one hand, I seek to avoid an undue pessimism; on the other hand, I seek to avoid a superficial optimism.
The reverend goes on to talk about the history of racial oppression in America and the civil rights bill, voter registration in the American South, economic divisions, apartheid in South Africa, Barry Goldwater, Nelson Mandela, and nonviolent resistance. He ends the speech on a note of hope:
With this faith, we will be able to adjourn the counsels of despair and bring new light into the dark chambers of pessimism. With this faith, we will be able to transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace and brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to speed up the day when all of God’s children—black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, Hindus and Muslims, theists and atheists—will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"
Less than four years after receiving the peace prize, King was assassinated, in April 1968.
Today, machine-made voices talk to us all the time. They act as personal assistants for our cell phones, manage our smart homes, and, occasionally, call from unrecognizable phone numbers to tell us we are final contenders in big-money sweepstakes.
Electronic voices may be commonplace now, but the road to speech synthesis is littered with the remains of devices that promised to bring us the voice of the future—but didn't last beyond their novelty value.
One of the most fascinating relics of this quest for electric speech is Bell Labs’ Voder, the first device to bring us wholly synthetic speech. Even if it sounded like a robot demon.
The Voder, which debuted in the 1930s, was the creation of acoustic visionary and Bell Labs inventor Homer Dudley. In the late 1920s, Dudley had created the much more well-known “channel” vocoder, which coded human speech across telephone lines by turning incoming speech into electronic signals, then replicated it on the other end using electric sounds meant to mimic a person's voice.
The Voder went one step further: it produced speech without the input of the human voice. Operators played it like a futuristic organ, but instead of creating music, it created talk. As a feature article in the Smithsonian’s Science News Letter from January 1939 described it, the Voder was the “first device that actually creates human speech.”
The wonder expressed in the article is tempered a little by future shock. "[The authors] slip between personifying it and calling it an 'it.' So there’s definitely an anxiety about whether there’s a human intelligence here," says Lilia Kilburn, an MIT anthropologist who studies interactions between people and sonic technologies, and who has researched the cultural significance of the Voder and numerous other voice synthesis machines. "It’s interesting to hear how technologies like Amazon’s Echo are discussed with the same strange cocktail of fear and reverence now."
The Voder was a beast to operate. The machine could create 20 or so different electric buzzes and chirps, which the operator would manipulate using 10 keys, a wrist plate, and a pedal. The spectrum of buzzes and hisses could be orchestrated to mimic speech using the 10 keys to play a range of sounds, which could switch between voiced (anything that uses the vocal cords, like "uuuuh") and unvoiced sounds (sounds that don't use the vocal cords, like "sssss") with a click of the wrist bar, while the pedal would affect the pitch of the “voice,” which could create a range of inflections.
Creating words with the Voder required thinking about the various sounds that combine to create a single word, and the subtle changes that affect its meaning. It was a difficult and unnatural process, and only between 20-30 people ever even learned how to use it.
As Kilburn says, like the vocoder, and many other early speech synthesis technologies, the voice produced by the Voder was most often meant to be male, but the device was primarily operated by female phone operators. In fact, according to that same 1939 Science News Letter, Riesz and the other engineers had named the Voder, “Pedro,” after Brazilian emperor Dom Pedro, who was said to have listened to a telephone and exclaimed, "My God! It talks!"
All difficulty aside, when the Voder was finally unveiled at Bell Labs during the 1939 New York World’s Fair (the same world's fair that featured Elektro, The Smoking Robot), it certainly seemed like something straight out of the future. For the first time, a robot was speaking all on its own. Or that's how the presenters spoke about it.
The device was demonstrated by Mrs. Helen Harper, who was the central operator of the Voder and trained all of the other users. In an audio recording of a demonstration of the machine, Harper says that it took her around a year to learn how to operate it herself.
Harper was seated behind a sleek console, with a towering art deco image of a shouting man emblazoned on the wall behind her. While Harper ran the Voder keys, a presenter would walk people through the Voder’s vocal capabilities. During the presentation, Harper made the Voder say the same sentence in a number of different inflections, utter a phrase in French, imitate the wobbly effect of an elderly person’s voice, and even do an impression of a cow.
The Voder’s speech came out a little hard to understand, and even a bit unsettling. According to Kilburn, even more than the voice itself, the concept of a talking machine must have seemed somewhat uncanny. "That’s so spooky to people," says Kilburn. "We speak automatically, but we don’t like to think that something can speak automatically for us."
The Voder was shown again during San Francisco’s Golden Gate International Exposition in late 1939, but after that, the machine disappeared almost instantly. The machine was never meant as a commercial product but rather as a sort of proof-of-concept showcasing the astounding work taking place at Bell Labs at the time.
Nonetheless, Pedro the Voder can still be remembered as a fascinating glimpse at the roots behind vocal synthesis technology that we take for granted today in technologies such as Siri—not to mention the last time anyone attempted to play the human voice like a piano.
When a flood hits a city, it’s all hands on deck. Last weekend, as the Truckee River in Reno overflowed, emergency crews and contractors rushed out to evacuate homes, built barriers, and sandbag roads.
This time, one particular set of helpers stood out: heavy-machine operators, sent to snatch huge pieces of debris out of the water with even huger pieces of equipment.
As the Reno Gazette-Journal reports, these operators are the first line of defense in a flood. Without them, flotsam can pile up quickly, straining bridges and causing the water to rise further. Passers-by quickly renamed them the “bridge ninjas,” and shot footage of them nimbly yanking everything from logs topicnic benches out of the rushing water. They’d load up a nearby dump truck, and then cart it all away. (More videos of their smooth moves are available in this tweet roundup, also from RGJ.)
“It’s like bobbing for apples,” one operator, Chad Olson, told the outlet. Another, Jim Duncan, compared it to a video game, though with slightly higher stakes—if the excavator’s claw hits a pillar, it could tear the bridge apart.
No bridges were harmed, though. After about 20 hours of work, the ninjas plucked their last log, with no trouble. This display of skill may have something to do with how much they enjoy the job: “I would do it all day long,” says Duncan. “It’s fun.”
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
The modern use of the term "easter egg"—not the holiday treat but rather a hidden joke or surprise item inserted in a piece of media—originated with Atari in 1979, when a developer snuck his name into a game hoping to get some recognition as the creator. But these surprise treats, hidden to all but those who look closely enough, aren’t only lurking in the digital world. Some of the best easter eggs are snuck into the physical architecture around us.
The excellent thing about architectural easter eggs, be they tongue-in-cheek, carved out of spite, or simply placed as a fun treat awaiting an observant eye, is that they endure in the landscape around us, becoming a sneaky and often confusing part of history. Here are five hidden carvings that dot historic structures with a bit of human nature.
On the southern window of Brno’s Church of St. James, one sculptural element of the impressive church seems somewhat out of place: an indecent little two-headed man cheekily displaying his bare butt to the world.
There are two legends attributed to the little man, both involving the competition between this Gothic church and a nearby cathedral. The spires of the two churches both towered high, but St. James’ ended up being taller by roughly 30 feet. As the story goes, the naked man and his bottom were added on as a middle finger from the winning church to the losing one. Alas, some historians claim the legends are apocryphal, and that the rude sculpture is merely a strange but not uncommon piece of Gothic adornment.
The Church of the Jacobins is a Gothic mass of brick and stone, decorated inside with elaborate trompe l’oeil walls and soaring pillars. Most famously, it houses the remains of St. Thomas Aquinas. A lot less famously, it has a strange little carving of a person seemingly crushed by a pillar near the golden reliquary where the saintly remains are entombed.
Just behind the altar is a double column that sits on a square base. Look down towards the floor and you’ll see, sticking out, a peculiar pair of bony hands and chubby crossed feet, their meaning and origin unknown. It is all too easy to miss to the casual passer-by. Some of the church tour guides don’t even know the crushed little man is there.
The sixth-largest cathedral in the world, this stunning neo-Gothic construction is a functioning place of worship as well as a popular tourist destination. Nearly half a million people enter through its doors each year, many of them just to admire its breathtaking beauty. It’s perhaps fitting, then, that the cathedral offers a bit of tongue-in-cheek eye candy for the dedicated architecture enthusiast—a well-hidden, but very official, carving of Star Wars villain Darth Vader perched high among its many spires.
This great Florentine cathedral has many details that are often invisible at first glance. Among them, on the left side, is a stone bull’s head.
While no one is sure exactly why the bull was put in place, there are some prevailing theories. Local legend says that during the construction of the cathedral, one of the stonemasons had an affair with the wife of a rich shopkeeper in the area. When her husband discovered the betrayal, he decided to lodge a complaint directly to the ecclesiastical court, which ended the affair.
Heartbroken, the stonemason decided to take revenge by creating a passive-aggressive symbol of his love. The mason placed the bull’s head so that the animal’s horns were pointing right toward the shop of the husband as a concrete reminder—pun intended—of who his wife truly loved.
The centuries-old Cathedral of Salamanca has several unusual carvings, but none so surprising as an astronaut. The little space man is an approved and modern addition to the Gothic cathedral, which underwent restoration work in 1992.
Among the other recently added images are a dragon eating ice cream, a lynx, a bull, and a crayfish. Despite there being clear documentation of the astronaut being a recent addition, it has already fueled ideas of ancient space travel and alien interventions.
Imagine if underneath major metropolises there were spherical nuclear shelters that contained more cities—mini-Manhattans buried thousands of feet in the ground.
In the 1960s, architect and city planner Oscar Newman rendered what such a fantasy would look like beneath New York City.
In the December 1969 issue of Esquire, Newman published a peculiar map of a colossal nuclear city deep below New York. The purely imaginary proposal, titled Plan for an underground nuclear shelter, was complete with an entire labyrinth of buildings encased in a metal sphere along with a helicopter, Coca-Cola ad, and air filters.
Newman’s take on the limited space of New York City and the atomic world of the 1960s gives “the opportunity to explore the notion of living in this entirely different environment,” says Katharine Harmon, author of You Are Here: NYC: Mapping the Soul of the City.
The vibrant, sci-fi city Newman depicted does not follow traditional cartographic conventions. Plan for an underground nuclear shelter falls under what Harmon calls “creative cartography.”
“This encompasses innovative mapping and mapping of the imagination, and includes ‘maps’ that can be called illustrations—any visual that navigates a place or idea or state of mind,” she says. “I would classify Newman’s map as pictorial, and illustrating a fantastical idea.”
During the 1960s, the Cold War and prospect of nuclear weapons being deployed served as alarming inspiration for artists and writers. Plots in science fiction and artistic renderings featured post-nuclear apocalyptic universes, emulating real fears within society. Newman was no different. The map was inspired after he had heard about the 1962 Storax Sedan nuclear test—a shallow underground mining test that created a massive crater in Nevada. The crater is the largest man-made crater in the United States.
Newman also had intimate knowledge of the layout and architectural facets of New York. In 1972, he published the book Defensible Space in which he used New York as a case study to examine crime rates in high-rise apartment buildings and housing projects. He imagined how a subterranean miniature city under New York might look and function if giant chunks of earth were cleared using advanced nuclear equipment.
The nuclear shelter is a miniature copy of the city above it. The top half of the sphere would be inhabitable, structured to support streets and buildings that appear to arranged radially. Beneath the mini-city is a grid network that provides energy and allows the city to function. A small helicopter can be seen hovering in the upper left corner of the sphere, perhaps monitoring the city from above.
Harmon appreciates the “wackiness” of the nuanced details in the map, such as the lone projected Coca-Cola ad on the ceiling of the sphere and the Q-tip-shaped air filters. The dome has a series of connected tubes that project the filters above ground so that people below can get fresh air—the blue-green structures new additions to Manhattan’s original skyline.
Circulating fresh air into the underground city was one of Newman’s primary concerns, as he wrote: “The real problem … in an underground city would be lack of view and fresh air, but consider its easy access to the surface and the fact that, even as things are, our air should be filtered and what most of us see from our windows is someone else’s wall.”
It’s clear that such a proposal is implausible, and it’s likely that Newman drew the map for Esquire as a riff or joke on his urban planning, says Harmon. John Ptak, blogger of JF Ptak Science Books, calls it “a terrifically bad idea.” On his blog, Ptak reviewed the impracticalities of pursuing Newman’s plan:
"The author of this plan speculated on building this spherical city in Manhattan bedrock—a structure which so far as I can determine would have a volume of 1.2 cubic miles (5 km3) with its top beginning some 1,200 feet under Times Square. It's an impressive hole "just" to dig—it would be a goodly chunk of the volume of Lake Mead. And it would make the world's largest man-made hole—the Bingham Copper Mine in Utah—seem like the very beginning efforts to digging this beast out to begin with."
Newman did not detail what exactly the cities would be used for: alleviating overcrowding; alternative space in the event of nuclear war; or luxury futuristic get-away. While Newman’s atomic city map may be categorized as sci-fi fantasy, it does inform us of 1960s nuclear culture.
“Maps enable us to explore other territories, including products of other imaginations,” says Harmon. “Newman uses illustration skills to illuminate a concept both ‘practical’ (a solution for protecting a large population from nuclear war) and wildly impractical (nuclear detonations as the means for creating the cavity), serious and whimsical.”
Map Monday highlights interesting and unusual cartographic pursuits from around the world and through time. Read more Map Monday posts.
A couple of months ago, at a city-owned lot in Bradenton, Florida, resident John Lundin started noticing something strange.
The lot had always attracted homeless residents as well as some illegal dumping, but Lundin said that what he began seeing was more striking: used toilet paper.
“I hate to say I’ve been analyzing the garbage, but I have," Lundin told the Miami Herald. "Something strikes me about this as being almost professional in the consistent way it’s done.”
Bradenton's public works department has cleaned up after each dumping episode, while also trimming a few trees to make lot more presentable. But city officials don't have many more answers than Lundin, leading them to speculate on who or what is behind the toilet paper.
“I question the motivation behind this and who is trying to make who look bad and for what reason,” City Administrator Carl Callahan told the Herald.
Some think the dumping might be related to local politics and the recent election, or its perhaps rooted in a failed library project proposed for the site years ago, though, in any case, Lundin said that the toilet paper dumpings have been tapering off a bit in 2017.
“I don’t know if this person was just running out of garbage or just got tired because it seems like a lot of work to carry all that garbage in here every night," Lundin told the Herald. "Or maybe he’s just stocking up.”
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
I have a song stuck in my head right now. A jingle, really.
It’s been stuck in my head for the last 15 years, at least. It’s probably stuck in your head, too—and if you’re near Chicago, it’s been stuck in your head since the days of disco.
It’s the work of a man who spent decades trying to sell us carpet. Hardwood flooring too, maybe windows as well, but mostly carpet. You might know the tune. It goes like this: “FIVE EIGHT EIGHT, TWO THREE HUNDRED, EMPIIIIIIIIIIIIRE.”
Because of this man and the fact I can’t get this stupid song out of my head, I feel compelled to write about carpet, which—despite the hipsters embracing hardwood flooring, remains the most popular type of surface found in a home.
According to statistics from from Marketing Insights, the carpet industry, represented 41.9 percent of all flooring surfaces as of 2015. While significantly more popular than any kind of flooring, it saw declines that year, falling in comparison to hardwood flooring (13.8 percent), ceramic (13.1 percent) and vinyl flooring (11.3 percent). Carpet remains the most popular kind of flooring, but it’s losing ground.
But it’s also covered a lot of ground. It goes back thousands of years.
Carpet has a long and storied history, with one of its earliest examples coming from Siberia.
The Pazyryk Carpet, which was excavated from a burial mound in 1947, was an incredible find at the time, as it was a nearly-2,500-year-old carpet that was largely intact, due to its being frozen in a block of ice. The details captured on the fabric, which is believed to be the world’s oldest pile carpet, are impressive—24 cross-shaped figures, 28 men on horseback, 24 deer. While the carpet’s colors have faded, the details can still be made out.
Clearly, carpet has come a long way from that early, fairly pristine example. As you might have learned from history class, parts of the world like China, Iran, North Africa, and Afghanistan each have distinctive styles of carpet that tell significant stories about the ancient cultures in each of those regions. (If you really want to dive into the history behind these different styles, there’s actually a website titled CarpetEncyclopedia.com, which is my new favorite website.)
Of course, the industrial revolution played an important role in the uptake of carpet globally. Improved manufacturing processes certainly helped—most notably, Erastus Bigelow’s invention of the power loom in 1839. (And it wasn’t even the most impressive thing Bigelow did! He also founded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which means that he’s indirectly responsible for the Bose Wave.)
But it wasn’t just improved manufacturing that played a role, even if it did help us mass-manufacture Oriental rugs. Perhaps the most important innovation in the world of carpet came out of Dalton, Georgia, once known as the bedsheet capital of the world. A key invention that came out the bedsheet industry, says the Dalton-based Carpet and Rug Institute, was the invention of the mechanized tufting machine in the 1930s. It was a byproduct of minimum wage laws that were getting too high to make hand-built tufted bed sheets tenable.
It also had the side effect of making carpets made of tufted fabric into a natural next step for the industry.
“Machinery was developed for making chenille rugs and was widened, creating larger rugs and broadloom carpet,” the institute notes on its website. “At the same time, machinery was changing; developments of new fibers accelerated the growth of broadloom carpet.”
Eventually, Dalton’s primary industry, helped along by the eventual uptake of synthetic materials, transferred to the puffy carpet you’re surrounded by everywhere in your empty apartment.
Another major innovation in carpet that can be mostly credited to the industrial era is the wall-to-wall, or fitted, carpet.
The carpet style had some precedent in Europe, where it had seen uptake in the 18th century. Reflecting that point, Louis XVI gave George Washington a fitted carpet for his home at Mount Vernon as a welcome-to-the-global-neighborhood gift of sorts. (With the U.S. seal woven into the rug, it wasn’t like the French leader intended it for anyone else.) Washington, concerned about accepting gifts, wouldn’t take it himself.
But in 1897, Sarah Yates Whelen, whose great-grandfather came into ownership of this rug as a result of this problem, gave it back to to the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association for its original purpose, explaining its history in a letter:
This carpet was made by order of Louis XVI of France, for George Washington, President of the United States, and was sent over during the first years of his administration, when Philadelphia was the National Capital. As he was not allowed to receive present from foreign powers, the carpet was sold to my-great grandfather, Judge Jasper Yates, and remained in the old family mansion at Lancaster until about thirty years ago, when it came into my possession.
As I consider Mt. Vernon the proper place for such a relic, if the ladies of the Association will do me the honor of accepting it I will send it at once to your care to the address you may designate. In giving this carpet to the association, I request that it be places it will not be used continuously and that a card of explanation be placed upon it.
(Imagine what it must have been like for this family, having to constantly explain where they got this weird carpet from.)
It also helped that we actually figured out a way to clean our carpets while they were still on the floor.
That part, however, wasn’t easy. The rise of carpet created a major problem for the the public, which suddenly had these massive pieces of fabric to clean. And we didn’t have vacuums way back when. We tried all sorts of things to keep our carpets pristine, including:
Druggets. Before it was possible to Stanley Steem carpet, it was very common to use heavy pieces of wool called druggets, which were designed to help protect the expensive rugs in areas of heavy use. They were also called “crumb cloths.” Essentially, you were covering the carpet with another carpet you didn’t really care about.
Used tea leaves. After tea leaves were spent, it was common to take those leaves and sprinkle them on the floor, only to sweep them off after. In the 19th century, damp tea leaves were recommended for this purpose. The 1899 book The Expert Cleaner: A Handbook of Practical Information for All Who Like Clean Homes, Tidy Apparel, Wholesome Food, and Healthful Surroundings (what a title!) explains it like this: “If the carpet is of dark color or yellow tints, damp tea-leaves scattered over it before sweeping will improve the colors and give it a fresh, clean look.” Today, dry ones are recommended instead, and for a different purpose—reducing odor and bacteria.
Beating. J.R. Burrows & Company has a lengthy list of historic carpet-cleaning techniques collected from vintage publications, and is very much worth a read. Perhaps the most interesting such technique highlighted involved literally beating the carpets—putting the rugs on a clothesline and taking a large paddle to the carpet to beat out the crumbs and dust. “There was a time when all work of this kind, done by hand, was preferred; but in the absence of men who do it thoroughly, and the lack of available space for such operations, the improved carpet-beating machines are heartily recommended,” stated the 1884 publication Carpet Notes. Vacuums couldn’t come soon enough.
Uh, contraptions. The greatest carpet-related patent you’ll ever find was created by a guy named Warren P. Miller, who created what could be best described as an inverted vacuum. Essentially, the 1883 invention involved rolling up the carpet onto a machine that would then blow off the carpet. “It is the object of the present invention to provide an apparatus by which the dust and other loose impurities can be easily and effectually removed from carpets and other fabrics without the necessity of shaking, beating, or otherwise operating upon-them in a manner which is more or less damaging,” the filing, which looks hopelessly convoluted in comparison to modern solutions, stated.
Carpet sweepers. The turning point in the complicated process of cleaning carpets came in 1876, when Michigan inventor Melville Bissell invented a mechanical sweeper with built in rotating brushes. This device could pick up many more particles than a broom could, and the general idea behind the carpet sweeper would be the basis for nearly every other popular carpet-cleaning product that came after. Well, minus whatever Warren P. Miller built.
The carpet sweeper eventually gave way to the vacuum, which then gave way to more elaborate ways of cleaning carpet. One of those methods was popularized by a guy named Jack A. Bates, who came up with the idea for a service that could elaborate clean carpet with the help of a whole lot of hot water.
The name of his company? Stanley Steemer. The company’s big idea started with just a $2,300 equipment investment, but eventually the company needed many more investments, because the equipment didn’t always meet Bates' exacting standards.
“My dad always had big ideas. We just needed follow-through. We had bought some (carpet-cleaning) equipment, but it fell apart,” noted Wesley Bates, Jack’s son, in a interview with the Columbus Dispatch. “So we said, ‘Fine, we’ll build it ourselves.’ We went through a lot of trial, tribulation, arguments. It was unbelievable.”
The company, whose name is designed to evoke steam-driven automobiles, gradually grew into the country’s largest carpet-cleaning business, with more than 300 franchisees in 48 states.
Stanley Steemer and similar companies rely on a hot-water extraction process (which pushes out dirt and stains with really hot water, then sucks it back up) to clean carpet. It’s often referred to as “steam cleaning,” but it’s sort of a misnomer, because it’s water, not steam, that’s doing the cleaning. (The reason you need a company to do this for you is that the equipment isn’t cheap.)
Anyway, going back to the beginning, I have to ask: What’s the deal with that Empire jingle, anyway? Why is it so annoyingly tuneful as a jingle?
Empire didn’t always have that jingle. Starting in 1959 as a Chicago-based plastic covering company, it eventually moved into carpet and wood flooring, the two things for which it is best known today.
In the 1970s, the company crossed paths with an ad copywriter named Lynn Hauldren, who had to promote this brand all over Chicagoland. The jingle was his idea (he even sang it, with the help of a male-female barber-shop quartet), though it wasn’t his idea to show up in the commercials—that was Empire founder Seymour Cohen’s idea.
“If I’m not mistaken I think we auditioned several dozen actors for the part before Seymour said to me, ‘You do the commercial, Lynn,’” Hauldren told the Chicago Tribune in 1997. “So I did, and I still insist the first … 50 or so we filmed are unwatchable today.”
The commercials are interesting, because it’s a rare example of a TV ad concept expanding from a local audience, at a cost of $30 per commercial in the 1970s, to a national one. Not that it was a perfect transition. There were slight creative challenges when Empire had to change its branding to account for the national audience (it was originally just “588-2300 Empire,” now it’s “1-800-588-2300 Empire … Today,” reflecting the company’s now-awkward name). But it worked. He became a mascot.
Hauldren died in 2011, but he survives in a virtual form, selling carpet installation to the masses like the Orville Redenbacher of flooring.
