The cyanometer, invented in the 18th century by the Swiss scientist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, had one evanescent purpose: to measure the blueness of the sky.

In 1760, when he was 20 years old, Saussure traveled from his home in Geneva to the base of Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in the Alps. Saussure, a brilliant student from a wealthy family, had already finished his studies at the Academy of Geneva, where he would soon be made a professor, at just 22 years old.

But at this moment he was free to explore, and he was captivated by the mountain, which had never been climbed—not all the way to its top, 15,774 feet above sea level. The young scientist dreamed of standing at the summit, and he offered a generous reward, of an unspecified amount, to the first person who reached it.

Twenty-seven years later, Saussure stood at the top of Mont Blanc. The year before, in 1786, a crystal hunter and a doctor had made it to the summit, and now, with the help of a mountaineering team, Saussure had reached the pinnacle, too. 

At the time, mountain climbers had observed that as they climbed higher, the sky turned a deeper blue. “Ce phénomène m’avoit souvent frappé,” Saussure wrote. “This phenomenon had often struck me,” and as he prepared to summit Mont Blanc, he wanted a way to measure the color of the sky. He brought with him pieces of paper colored different shades of blue, to hold up against the sky and match its color.

In the next few years, Saussure refined this idea into a tool for measuring blueness, his cyanomètre, a circle of paper swatches dyed in increasingly deep blues, shading from white to black. Using this tool, which in its most advanced iteration included 52 blues, he showed how the color of the sky changed with elevation.

The color he had measured at the top of Mont Blanc, he later determined, corresponded to a blue of the 39th degree; that measurement was later surpassed by the famous geographer Alexander von Humboldt, who took his cyanometer on journeys across the Atlantic, to the Caribbean, the Canary Islands, and South America, measuring the color of the sky all the while. In 1802, Humboldt took the tool on an ascent of the Andean mountain Chimborazo, where he set a new record, at the 46th degree of blue, for the darkest sky ever measured.

Saussure had a theory for what these gradations might show. He believed the color of the sky was related to the color of moist particles found in the atmosphere and that these color measurements might show that to be true. But the many measurements made with his tool yielded little insight, and the cyanometer fell out of favor as a scientific tool. The true cause of the sky’s blueness, the scattering of light, was discovered decades later, in the 1860s, Saussure’s circle of blue had already fallen into obscurity.

Today, the Musée d’histoire des sciences Genève has an 18th-century cyanometer among its holdings, but there is occasional interest in reviving Saussure’s poetic idea in new contexts. In 2009, a German artist created a “new cyanometer, and last year the artist Martin Bricelj Baraga brought a modern cyanometer to a public square in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, for a six-month installation. Ljubljana’s cyanometer broadcast data about air quality, but it did what Saussure originally intended—it allowed people to note the particular blueness of the sky and its subtle changes over the course of a day.

Some of us like a good stroll through the grass. So do giant alligators, apparently.

The Lakeland PD, which calls the alligator "HUGE GINORMUS VERY LARGE," reports that Lakeland local Kim Joiner captured the alligator on its constitutional at Circle B Bar Reserve, a wildlife preserve in Lakeland, not far from Tampa.

"He was the biggest gator I have seen out there. I have been going out there for years too," Joiner told local news.

The gator is estimated to be about 15 feet long; if that's accurate, the alligator, who has been nicknamed Humpback, could be of record size. Currently, the Florida state record for longest alligator is held by a male alligator who was 14 feet, 3-1/2 inches long, according to the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. The largest alligator ever caught was 15 feet, 9 inches long and was captured in 2014 by a family in Alabama. That alligator is now on display at the Montgomery Zoo.

Police in Xi'an, capital of China's Shaanxi Province recently raided an illegal replica of the world-famous Terracotta Army, and leveled it to rubble. That’s what happens when you try to fool tourists.

As reported in The Irish Times, the counterfeit soldiers were discovered at the Suyuanqinhuangling resort in Lintong, not a great far from the actual historic statuary army. The large resort, covering 600 square meters actually had a pretty good scam going until the cops got tipped off thanks to an online complaint.

The resort was working in conjunction with local guides and taxi drivers to bring gullible tourists to their attraction instead of the real deal. These con artists would then collect a commission on delivering their marks. In addition to scamming visitors out of an authentic experience, a local official also noted that it hurt tourism in the area in general.

Officers destroyed around 40 statues, leveling them to bits. Hopefully this will send a message to other imposter tourist attractions: watch your back.

In the summer of 1974, a pod of pilot whales swimming near California's Catalina Island heard some unexpected sounds. Coming through the water was a familiar set of messages—swooping whistles, keening cries, and zippy chirps. It sounded like a pilot whale, but not one they had ever heard before, and talking absolute gibberish. As they swam up to investigate, they must have realized their mistake. This wasn't a pilot whale. It was a U.S. Navy submarine—150 feet long, made of titanium, and speaking their language.

Look back into U.S. military history, and you'll find a menagerie of animals—bomb-carrying bats; bioengineered spy cats; pigeons trained to rescue soldiers lost at sea. A newly declassified report housed at Government Attic reveals another attempt at zoological mastery: Project COMBO, a plan to let U.S. submarines have underwater conversations by disguising them as whale sounds.

During the Cold War, military researchers had to figure out how to look, listen, and communicate deep beneath the sea. For inspiration, they often turned to marine creatures. The U.S. studied beluga whales, which echolocate, to beef up their own sonar capabilities. They trained a bottlenosed dolphin named Taffy to carry equipment and lead divers to safety. The Soviet Union had, essentially, suicide-bomber dolphins, which would dive under ships with bombs strapped to their backs. Scientists on both sides thought bioluminescent plankton might help with submarine detection.

Project COMBO was an attempt to address a perplexing Cold War problem: It's difficult to communicate quietly with a submarine. High-frequency radio waves, the messaging medium of choice for armies and navies, don't travel well through salt water. Low-frequency ones are better, but sending them out requires massive broadcast antennae, so most submarines can only receive messages in this format, and can't answer back. And although regular sound waves broadcast well, they can be easily intercepted—even sending a simple "hello" to a friend risks giving away your position to an enemy.

In 1959, experts at the Naval Electronics Laboratory realized that some denizens of the deep were communicating just fine underwater, and over great distances: whales and seals. If American submarines could make their own animal calls, and associate each with a simple message, they could talk to each other without blowing their own cover. A certain click might mean "I'm a friend," while a particular whistle was "follow me." The messages would be "but a small portion of the total biological chorus," the recently declassified report assured. The Soviets, used to the undersea cacophony, wouldn't suspect a thing.

So once again, the military set out to steal some animal secrets. In 1965, researchers took to the seas, studying species and recording sounds to determine which would best suit their purposes. For maximum effectiveness, they were looking for "cosmopolitan" whales, comfortable in all parts of the ocean. The sounds had to be relevant throughout the year—no mating calls, for example. "Well-known dialects" should be avoided, too, in case a savvy interceptor noticed, say, a Caribbean-accented whale in the Pacific.

The Navy came up with a three-part longlist of whale and seal species whose sounds would work best. For large whales—a good option in noisy seas—the humpback came out on top, thanks to its large menu of "howls, moans, grunts, cries, yelps, and low-frequency pulses," and a tendency to sing for hours at a time. The wide-ranging pilot whale won out among small ones. (Orcas, with their "raucous screams," came in second.) Thanks to their small, coast-hugging ranges, the pinnipeds—seals and sea lions—were all wildcards, suitable only for specific regional conversation.

For the test, the Navy chose the pilot whale, which offered a variety of warbles, whistles, and squeaks. Using their recordings, a minicomputer, and sound generation software, they synthesized six different pilot whale sounds, although they imagined more were possible—maybe even a "code of the day," they wrote. They also synthesized a background "ocean chorus," which served as extra camouflage in case the real ocean was too quite.

On the receiving side, submarines were already equipped with spectrographs, which transform incoming sound waves into visual charts. Since the coded pilot whale sounds were synthesized, and therefore identical, receiving and decoding them was merely a matter of recognizing a particular pattern as it came through the machine. A real whale's call, with its unique combinations of pitch and timbre, would produce a slightly different readout, and could be weeded out as noise with the help of recognition software.

In the summer of 1973, with everything in place, the Navy hit the ocean with the new sounds. Positioning themselves off of Catalina Island, 150 feet underwater, they blasted their squeaky, warbly codes through a transmitter. The receiver, placed at varying distances away, plucked the messages out of the noise flawlessly. Another test, in the fall, went deeper down and extended the range. In June of 1974, they sent out a real submarine, the USS Dolphin, which successfully transmitted sounds to a receiving ship—and, in a true vote of confidence, attracted a pod of pilot whales.

After these testing successes, researchers were left with a lot of work to do. Although they had the pilot whale on lock, they wanted to expand their repertoire by inventing "techniques and equipment to synthesize large whale sounds and small whale screams." They still had to create scalable versions of their tools, including the call generator and the spectrograph-recognizer. Looking ahead, more problems loomed: the researchers figured this was a good enough idea that the Soviets would steal it, at which point American submariners would need to add another skill to their arsenal. "Fleet sonarmen must become more familiar with bioacoustic signals," they wrote—inspiring thoughts of submarine soldiers, facing long days underwater, taking up sonic seal- and whale-watching.

But their hopes, alas, were too high. "It was never successful," writes Dr. Christopher Willes Clark, founder of the Cornell Bioacoustics Research Program, in an email. "The process of projecting coded 'whale' sounds out to functional distances is not viable." Despite the promise of those initial tests, the technological barriers proved too large to overcome, and subsequent attempts in future years also failed. By now, Clark writes, there are better ways to accomplish the same goal—laser communication, for instance.

Even if the technology had worked out, a few sentences in the report betray another concern that could have sunk the project: for whale sound signals to be properly clandestine, there need to be actual whales around to camouflage them. Although the report points out the necessity of tracking whale numbers, it assumes that "conservation measures should guarantee populations at least as large as present ones." Instead, in the years since 1975, plenty of whale populations—including the screaming orca and the prolifically musical humpback—have declined, partly due to Navy research, which, until recently, was killing them with ultra-loud sonar. Even if Project COMBO failed, we can learn from it: If we want to secure ourselves with whale technology, we've got to protect them, too.

Naturecultures is a weekly column that explores the changing relationships between humanity and wilder things. Have something you want covered (or uncovered)? Send tips to cara@atlasobscura.com.

Right now, there's a curious low industrial hum emanating from what used to be a fish market built in 1769. At De Vishal gallery in Haarlem, Netherlands, a large nine-pipe organ operated by burning candles purrs a continuous concert.

In the video, Dutch artist Ronald van der Meijs shows his elaborate musical mechanism. Inspired by the Muller Organ housed at Grote Kerk church next to the gallery, the series of pipes looks like a massive artillery weapon connected to wooden beam air ducts. The intricate system requires careful maintenance—van der Meijs changes out the candles multiple times a day as they burn.

For the pipe organ, "the candles are the musicians," van der Meijs explains. The candles vary in size. As the wax melts, the pitch of each pipe shifts slowly and irregularly. The shortening of the candles causes a vertical movement in each mechanism, pulling a wheel connected to a brass valve at the front end of each pipe. Opening the valves allows for different toned pitches. 

As you approach the instrument, the humming sound becomes more intense. Even though the low tones change pitch as the candles melt, it's so slow and subtle that you probably won't catch it. To hear the whole concert, you may have to sit and listen to the soothing earthly tones for hours. 

You can bask in the meditative sound of van der Meijs' pipe organ in person at De Vishal until January 22.

The 1986 edition of the International Collection of Interior Design, a trade magazine for those in the business, issued a bold statement regarding bathrooms:

“The era of the utilitarian, puritanical bathroom is over and now it is returning to center stage as the place for luxurious, sophisticated relaxation in the home.”

The 1986 bathroom would bring back the grand indulgences of the Romans, who surrounded themselves with plush beauty during their ablutions. This elevation of the master bathroom from the “necessary room” as it was euphemistically called, to its reign as the cornerstone of the master suite, was such a rapid and recent development, that it is easy to take it for granted.

Bathrooms haven’t changed much since indoor plumbing became a standard feature in newly built homes at the turn of the 20th century.  This, coupled with changing societal expectations regarding the frequency of bathing and new technology such as the flush toilet, swiftly ushered in the era of the modern bathroom.

Indoor plumbing coincided with the discovery of germ theory—the idea that disease is spread by germs. More importantly, germ theory linked cleanliness to the prevention of illness.  The intersection of science, technology, and societal pressures for cleanliness ultimately led to the development of the “hygienic” bathroom—one clad in tile and other hard surfaces, absent of carpet, heavy drapery, or other porous soft goods thought to be good places for germs to fester. The easier a bathroom was to clean, the more proper, safe, and sanitary it (and the people who used it) was. 

The hygienic prototype, aided by the new marvels of mass production, swiftly became and remained the standard. The typical bathroom is a five-foot-by-eight-foot square room with a bathtub, a toilet, and a pedestal sink. The pedestal sink may be swapped out with a vanity sink, the bathtub with a tub/shower combo or a shower stall, but the basic composition of three porcelain fixtures in a small room has remained relatively unchanged throughout the decades.

The consistent design schema of bathrooms is linked to a number of factors. Ease of cleaning was the main appeal in bathroom design—hence the popularity of tile walls and floors, as well as porcelain fixtures. The vanity sink, for example, did not become popular until the 1950s, when new materials such as formica and MDF made them less expensive as well as easier to clean and maintain.

In addition, Americans have always had a difficult time talking about intimate matters, including bathroom activities. The impropriety of such dirty acts as passing bowel movements made the bathroom a place that remained out of sight and out of mind, clinical in its aesthetic and unchanged since its inception. A recent article for The Atlantic pointed out that discussing or depicting the bathroom (specifically the toilet) on television was considered obscene until as late as the 1970s.

House size, however, was the main concern. At the turn of the 20th century, the vast majority of Americans lived in cities, and dwelled in townhouses, apartments or tenements. With the availability of mass-produced housing and inventions such as the streetcar, more affluent families expanded into the first generation of suburbs, located within the outer limits of the city.

The first generation of these houses, built from the 1890s to the early 1920s, took after farmhouses and Queen-Anne-style architecture, were the largest of the kit-houses, boasting 3 or more bedrooms as well as a parlor for entertaining. Still, despite their size, very few had more than one bathroom, as bathrooms were still rather expensive to build in the days before the fixtures could be cheaply mass-produced.

The majority of the kit houses from the '20s and '30s (which made up most of the U.S.’s suburban stock) were bungalows—small, one-story houses boasting two or three bedrooms and a single bath.

The bathroom was a utilitarian place, and its aesthetics came secondary to its functionality. There was no need for a large bathroom or multiple bathrooms in early suburban life, as space was scarce and fixtures were expensive. The Great Depression and World War II stalled residential construction, creating a huge need for housing in the 1940s. Coupled with the invention and proliferation of cars and housing incentives provided for veterans through the GI Bill, modern tract suburbia was born.

Despite the incentives to buy, the GI Bill only covered housing which conformed to the guidelines set by the Federal Housing Authority’s mandates: a price range of US$8,000 to US$10,000 and a size range of 800 to 1,000 square feet. Thus, houses built in 1950 were even smaller than those built in the previous 30 years, boasting a mere two or three bedrooms, a kitchenette, and one bathroom. These houses also boasted an open floor-plan in order to make them feel much less cramped than they actually were. Families sacrificed privacy for comfort.

However, it was during the 1950s that new and exciting technologies came on the market for the bathroom: hairdryers, built-in ventilation fans, warming units, and a plethora of new catchy products for haircare and makeup.

All of these new gadgets required space, and Americans wanted bigger and more spacious houses, especially since the two-car attached garage was becoming more and more common and desired. A garage was a huge chunk of square-footage, and house size grew accordingly.

The '60s and '70s saw further expansion out of cities into rural areas, and house size increased due to the inexpensiveness of rural land.

More square-footage meant more luxury. For example, standard queen- and king-sized beds didn’t even exist until the end of the '50s. In response, the bathroom, for the first time in decades, had begun to change. The biggest change was the dawn of the commonplace master bath. House size was only one factor that facilitated this new luxurious feature.

Newly constructed neighborhoods featured infrastructure for more efficient plumbing and water management, leading to an increase in bathrooms in the home. Gone were the days when flushing the toilet meant a scalding surprise. More space meant that unlike their FHA-mandated predecessors, new houses boasted less-open floor-plans, offering the marital couple privacy. In addition, the sexual revolution of the '60s led to more open-mindedness about private matters, as well as a penchant for plush new features like jacuzzis and garden tubs.

These factors stuck with the American public, and the master bathroom took off, becoming standard on all new homes by 1980. However, these bathrooms were still rather modest, like the one above. 

The growth of houses, while generally on the increase since 1960, stalled in the '70s due to an energy crisis. When the '80s rolled around and energy became cheap again, there was an explosion in homebuilding, and the homes kept getting bigger and bigger. The introduction of new construction materials (e.g. vinyl siding) and relaxed mortgage lending practices in the '80s and '90s meant it was easier to get a bigger house for less money. The outsourcing of labor during the Reagan and Clinton eras made consumer goods less expensive, and Americans consumed new goods—including luxury goods now available at a lower price point—like never before. Thus, the master bath exploded.

Societal changes have played a role in the growth of the master as well: women entering the mainstream workforce and the rise of the working couple meant families earned more, had more stuff, and needed more space. The puritan notions of the bathroom as a dirty place no one talked about were over—now was the time for sunken tubs and flaunted luxury.

The story of the master bathroom was long in the making. A space we now deem a necessity is only around 36 years old. It’s one of many examples of how a cocktail of social, technological, and economic influences combine to create new standards of living, and change the face of not only architecture, but how we live.

In the 1800s, people were just as crazed about cats as we are today. But instead of memes, Instagram posts, and viral videos, the Victorians had satirical comics and chronicles.

English cartoonist, and evident cat fanatic, Charles Henry Ross wrote an epic encyclopedic book detailing the intricacies and culture of cats. InThe Book of Cats. A Chit-Chat Chronicle of Feline Facts and Fancies, Legendary, Lyrical, Medical, Mirthful and Miscellaneous, Ross makes an argument in support of the animal. Published in 1868, Ross read over 300 books, browsed newspapers, drew 20 illustrations, and gathered a mass of anecdotes about the fondness and repulsion towards cats. 

The Book of Cats, he explains, is not “strictly zoological.” Rather, Ross says the origins of the cat-call, how people believed cats could predict the weather, and why some fainted at the sight of cats, among the collection of whimsical 1800s feline facts.

During the late 1800s, cats did not have the best reputation. While there were some like Ross who appreciated the furry creatures, many Victorians saw them as nuisances and “cruel” companions. When he excitedly told his friends of his plan to write a book about cats, they mocked his idea and argued that dogs, horses, pigs, even donkeys were better suited for a book. In his research, Ross found that many of the authors of cat books were prejudiced against the animal, and “knew very little about the subject.”      

“Need I tell the reader who has thought it worth his while to learn anything of the Cat’s nature,” he writes, “that there are countless instances on record where Cats have shown the most devoted and enduring attachment to those who have kindly treated them.”

The Book of Cats addresses the wild, popular fears regarding cats—rumors flying that their scratches were venomous and that their breath sucked the life out of infants. In comparison to the smooth cut left from a knife, the thin scratch from a cat’s sharpened nail often festered, leading people to believe their claws were venomous, Ross explains. In addition to avoiding their claws, some would lose their wits at the mere sight of a cat. Conrad Gesner, a 16th-century botanist, documented men losing their strength, perspiring, and fainting when they saw a cat. A few have reportedly fainted after seeing a picture of a cat.

One of the most ridiculous accounts, according to Ross, were of cats accused of killing babies by stealing their breath. In 1791, the Annual Register published a story of an 18-month-old infant who died “in consequence of a Cat sucking its breath, thereby occasioning a strangulation.”

There were thousands of tales and numerous articles of the same vain, depicting cats as villainous, deathly creatures. However, Ross tries to clear up these rumors, quoting a friend and surgeon who stated that the anatomical formation of a cat’s mouth makes it impossible for it to suck a child’s breath. The surgeon proposed that if a cat were truly responsible, perhaps it’s feasible for it to lie over an infant’s mouth for the warm exhalations.

Beyond erratic fears, others believed cats had supernatural powers and psychic abilities. The Chinese reportedly used to peer into cats’ eyes to determine the time, while the playfulness of cats is said to indicate an approaching storm, Ross writes.

“I have noticed this often myself, and have seen them rush about in a half wild state just before windy weather.” People postulated that cats felt an irritation under the skin when it was about to rain, showing discomfort and unease.

He also details a method to feel shocks from a black cat, which were said to be highly charged with electricity. To produce the effect, he instructs the reader to place one hand on a black cat’s throat, while running the other down its back. One should then be able to feel the electric shocks on the hand on the cat’s throat.

Feline powers were also thought to help cure illnesses. Those who suffer from rheumatism often felt an improvement in their condition in the presence of a cat. There was a saying that collecting three drops of blood taken from under a cat’s tail, mixing it with water, and drinking it would cure epilepsy. Others thought the brain of a cat could cast someone under a love spell if taken in small doses.  

The term “cat” was an integral part of 1800s language, with Victorians often referring to the animal in slang and proverbs. For example, “cat o’ nine tails” was the colloquial name for a kind of whip that branched into nine knotted cords. Used as a form of military punishment on soldiers and sailors, the whip produced lashes on the back that looked like claw marks. Salt miners used to call common granulated salt “cat-salt,” while the catkin flower got its name from the Dutch who thought the hanging rope shape was similar to a kitten’s tail. Not all cats are afraid of water—there was even a type of Norwegian ship called a cat, Ross says.

When someone was caught playing a trick, they may plea “cry you mercy, killed my cat!” to try and escape punishment. The French also had proverbs about cats, such as “elle est friande comme une chatte,” which means “she’s as dainty as a cat.”

Ross went to great lengths to clear up the cat’s reputation. Little is known about how many copies circulated of The Book of Cats or how receptive people of the 1800s were to Ross’s argument. While many of these superstitions and legends seem outlandish today, it reflects Victorians' fascination with one of our most beloved domestic animals—in addition to their mystery. 

In 2009, after the first inauguration of President Barack Obama, which was attended by a record 1.8 million people, the ground of the National Mall was wrecked. As those hoards had moved over the lawn, they ground the crown of the grass plants, the part where new growth originates, into the frozen soil. After the inauguration, the Mall was more hard-packed drag-race strip of dirt than park.

That won’t happen—can’t happen—this inauguration. The National Park Service has just invested $40 million in refurbishing the long expanse of the Mall with carefully designed turf. The most recently reconstructed section has been closed for the past few months, as the grass settles in and puts down deeper roots. January 20 will be the first time the public is allowed in, and even the smaller crowd of this inauguration, expected to be around 800,000 people, is a threat.

The Park Service now has a challenge—to keep the Mall from becoming a dust bowl or, since a warm spell is thawing the ground, a mud bowl. Its staff is mobilizing to protect its new turf.

In Pierre L’Enfant’s 1791 plan for Washington, the Mall was designated a grand avenue with a canal running down one side. In the early decades of the city’s expansion, that vision never quite became real, and during the 1800s, the Mall had developed into a different sort of public space, dotted with gardens, greenhouses, a market, and a train station.

In 1901, a congressional commission, determined to redesign the park, swept all that away. The McMillan Commission conceived of a new vision for the Mall, one they said reflect L’Enfant’s original plans. They wanted a giant lawn.

Despite their ubiquity today, lawns were once the height of luxury. The most desirable lawn aesthetic, an expanse of neat, uniform green blades, requires that the lawn be mown. In the era before lawn mowers, that had to be done either by grazing animals (declassé) or by hand-cutting (very chic). Keeping a large lawn, like the Tapis Vert at Versailles, was extremely expensive; aristocrats all over Europe made the investment.

When the McMillan Commission made its recommendation, its members had in mind those palatial lawns of European royalty. By the early 1900s, though, grass was a more democratic luxury. Frederick Law Olmsted had designed one of the first suburban developments in the U.S. with a tiny lawn for each house, and the lawn mower, first invented in the 1830s, was becoming a consumer product, complete with its own engine.

When the Mall’s green expanse was first planted more than a century ago, though, the space was little used, compared to today. Grass isn’t normally a natural resource that people think about protecting, but most lawns aren’t subject to this level of wear.

“Grass is something that’s taken for granted,” says Michael Stachowicz, the Mall’s turf specialist. “People can grow it in their yard and it’s fine. But I don’t have 30,000 people a day going over my lawn.”

Since the Mall’s last renovation, around 1976, there’s been a major revolution in grass cultivation and technology, spurred by the late 20th-century boom in golf course construction. We know much more about growing grass now—the best mix of plants, the ideal soil conditions, the correct irrigation. Those best practices have been applied to the Mall, where the grass now grows in an engineered, very sandy, and aerated soil. “We’re building 18 acres' worth of turf like we used to built 5,000 square foot golf greens,” says Stachowicz.

The technology to protect turf is a relatively recent invention, too. For the inauguration, contractors are bringing in special panels, 16 square feet each, to cover up the grass. To the human eye, they look white, but they’re actually translucent, which allows light to reach the grass and keep it healthy. The bottoms of the panels are honeycombed with small, square cells that protect the grass crowns from being crushed and act like mini greenhouses.

Right now, 800,000 square feet of Mall is being covered with approximately 50,000 of these panels, each 16 feet square—so many that they had to be borrowed from sports stadiums across the country. (“Basically we’re looking at nine baseball stadiums worth of flooring,” says Stachowicz.) When they’re lifted back up, the Mall might actually be greener, after the sad winter grass spends a few days insulated from the elements.

The grass isn’t the only element of the Mall that needs protecting from the crowds at inauguration. Trees are boxed off, so that people don’t trample the soil around them or damage the trees themselves. Places like the steps of the Lincoln Memorial are also covered with special flooring to protect the pavers.

Even after the crowds have left, the Park Service staff needs to keep vigilant as the infrastructure of inaugurations is removed. “Leaving is a lot more chaotic than set-up,” says Stachowicz, and they have to make sure that trucks don’t run over lampposts or post-and-chain fences—“That happens!”

The Park Service has spent basically the entire Obama administration making the Mall look nice again. The job now is to make sure it doesn't get ruined on Trump's first day.

Sanj Maisuria’s house in Edmonton, Canada, had a secret hidden in its walls since 1957—a report card for one Maureen Kiernan, who, it’s easy to imagine, tried to hide her bad grades by slipping the card into a crack.

Maisuria’s contractors found the report card while renovating the house, reports the Edmonton Journal. It’s not clear how the card made its way into the walls, but the grades was not good. “Maureen’s marks are dangerously low!” the teacher wrote.

Her written language and spelling, her math skills, and social studies were all poor. She did slightly better in science, where she was marked “fair, below average.” In English Literature, Health and Personal Development, and Phys Ed, she got a B, average.

The school also graded “Growth in Citizenship.” Maureen’s self-respect was a 2 (good), as was her cooperation and dependability. But her creativeness and judgment were both poor, according to the teacher. The only perfect mark she got was in courtesy.

When Maisuria first saw the card, he imagined finding its owner. He was able to find her son, but the girl with the bad marks had died, at 69, in 2012. She was, writes Juris Graney for the Journal, “co-operative, dependable, a person who showed consideration for the rights and feelings of others, a person with self-control and poise”—proof that math grades aren’t the most important thing in life.

For months, hunters in the Canadian territory of Nunavut have had to deal with a mysterious foe—a pinging sound coming from deep beneath the Arctic Ocean. The noise, which can be heard through the hulls of boats, may be scaring away the sea mammals the hunters rely on for food, the CBC reported in November.

The noise is most prevalent in a narrow channel called Fury and Hecla Strait. Normally teeming with seals and bowhead whales, it has been strangely empty this past year, area representatives told the outlet.

Although many theories have been raised—sonar surveys, construction, a Greenpeace conspiracy to keep seals out of hunting grounds—none have been borne out. A military plane, sent to investigate in early November, turned up only "two pods of whales and six walruses," and zero unusual sounds.

But Canada isn't giving up. According to the CBC, the Canadian Forces will send two acoustic specialists north to the nearby town of Igloolik, where, aided by their own ranger patrol, they will talk to locals to learn more about the tricky sound. 

What they do after that remains to be seen. Best of luck, acousticians, and beware Cthulthu.

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.

For some, 43 wax likenesses of U.S. presidents in a maze of dimly lit rooms is a ready-made nightmare. For others, they’re a solid business investment.

When Gettysburg’s Hall of Presidents and First Ladies Museum announced it would be closing back in November, they also scheduled an auction of their life-like commander-in-chiefs. The bidding finally kicked off shortly after 10 a.m. on a dreary recent Saturday morning. Wax President George Washington quickly sold for $5,100. Next, John Adams went for $1,600. Then Jefferson at $2,400, and so on, until every president—and first lady—from Washington to Obama (who fetched $2,000) had found a new home.

“We really did not expect them to go that high,” says Carol Metzler, vice president of Gettysburg Heritage Enterprises, the company that owned the museum. “But it was a very pleasant surprise.”

The museum itself opened in 1957 as a kitschy roadside attraction situated between Gettysburg National Military Park and the main part of town. According to the Washington Post, a couple hundred thousand people visited annually during the first few decades of the museum’s existence. But in recent years, attendance dropped precipitously, forcing owner Max Felty’s hand (which isn’t made out of wax). He told the The New York Times that even 2016’s intense presidential election didn’t seem to be enough to push people through the doors.

Still, there’s something about a life-size wax president that holds one’s attention. “You can see pictures of presidents on the internet, but it’s not the same as this,” says Carol Hunter, while her two little girls were busy peering up in a mixture of awe and confusion at Wax President George H.W. Bush. Twelve-year-old Derrick Lang, roaming the museum with his dad about an hour before the auction, says he often passed by this building but had never been inside. He wanted to stop by before all of the presidents were gone, plus he was hoping to bid on President Eisenhower. Unfortunately, even if Lang had saved every last penny of his allowance, it’s unlikely he could have afforded the general-turned-president. Wax Eisenhower went for $2,600.

Several presidential doppelgängers went off to museums or historical sites, but a large percentage sold to private collectors. Scot Fisher of Villanova, Pennsylvania, bought not only Washington, but also Abraham Lincoln (who went for the day’s high of $8,500) and Ulysses S. Grant. Overall, Fisher spent nearly $20,000 on wax presidents. His reasoning was fairly straightforward. “I’m just a history buff...and (these wax figures) are a piece of Americana.” When asked if he plans to display them in his dining room or kitchen, Fisher chuckled. “We’ll figure it out,” he says. Next to him, his wife’s smile got bigger.  

Nicole Murphy won the auction for William Henry Harrison ($3,200), a man who was president for only 31 days. But she was quick to point out the ninth president was not for her. She’d flown in from Los Angeles to act as a “middleman” for a buyer she says she’s not at liberty to disclose. Why Harrison? “(He’s) unexpected, I suppose,” says Murphy of her mystery client. “Eccentric people have eccentric interests.”

In general, the wax first ladies sold for far lower prices. Perhaps this was because, unlike their life-size male counterparts, they’d been constructed at two-thirds the size of a normal human, making them all about 3 feet 10 inches tall. While no one remembers for sure why the first ladies are smaller, the consensus is that it was probably a cost-cutting measure. The miniature figures are clothed in replica gowns measured and sketched from those housed at the Smithsonian. Mary Todd Lincoln ended up the highest-priced first lady at $900, while Hillary Clinton went for $675. Karina Montgomery, a junior at Slippery Rock University minoring in history, was able to purchase Lucy Ware Webb Hayes for the reasonable sum of $325. Montgomery says she plans on proudly displaying Mrs. Hayes in her college apartment.  

One more obvious buyer at the auction was Tom Ryan, president and CEO of Lancasterhistory.org, the organization that operates the onetime home of 15th President James Buchanan. Prior to the sale, Ryan hoped that President Buchanan’s well-known troubles as president would help keep the cost down. “If the price conforms to the reputation that most historians hold of him,” says Ryan, “he should be rather inexpensive.” Several hours later, he bought Buchanan for $4,000.  

The auction concluded a little after 4 p.m., by which time the winning bidders were already busy removing wax figures from their museum pedestals, where many had stood for almost 60 years. It was a bittersweet day for those who saw the Hall of Presidents and First Ladies Museum as part of the fabric of Gettysburg, the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the American Civil War. But every single glass-eyed icon found a new home, even James Monroe (who sold for the day’s low of $1,000). Says Metzler, “(They’re) obviously a conversation piece... now people at home can have cocktails with Washington or Lincoln.”    

In the Namib desert, the land is patterned with mysterious circles, arranged in a regular pattern. Across the expanse, rings of high grass cordon off empty spots of sandy orange ground. The origins of those circles have never been determined.

For years, scientists have debated the cause of these “fairy circles," and recently a sharp divide has separated partisans of two competing theories. One gives credit for creating the circles to sand termites; the other to the plants.

Now, a new paper published in Nature suggests that both theories could be true and that the behavior of both sand termites and plants could contribute to creating the haunting pattern that has obsessed so many scientists.

Seen from above, the fairy circles dot the ground with such regularity that it’s hard to believe they’re natural. Along the circumference of the circles, the plants grow high, so that each fairy circle has a thick, fuzzy border. Scientists who ascribe to the plant theory of fairy circles think that plants competing for water self-organize into these patterns. The roots of stronger plants keep others from growing nearby, creating bare patches in the soil. Those bare patches, in turn, collect water that nourishes the stronger plants, reinforcing their dominance and sustaining the circles.

In 2013, Norbert Jürgens,  a professor at the University of Hamburg, published a paper in Science, reporting that he had found sand termites living among the fairy circles. According to the termite theory, the tiny insects eat away plants to form circles of bare earth. The water collected in those circles, in this theory, benefits both the plants surrounding the bare patch, which grow high, and the termites, which need water to thrive.

Since Jürgens published his theory, a rash of reports supporting the competing plant theory have come out. Last year, scientists also published a new piece of evidence for that side of the argument, when fairy circles were found in Australia.

Before this discovery, the Namibian circles were the only example of this strange phenomenon, and the Australian circles jived with the plant theory, that the arid environment and competition among plants for water created the magical pattern. When Stephan Getzin, a lead advocate for the plant theory, studied the Australian circles, he found no evidence of termites living in the area, either. (Knowing the scrutiny their research would be under, he and the team were exacting in their search for termites, he told The New York Times.) In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Getzin argued that the discovery of the Australian fairy circles shored up the plant hypothesis.

Corina Tarnita, the lead author of the new Nature paper, came to fairy circles via termites. Tarnita is a mathematician who models ecological systems, and in 2015 she and a group of colleagues published a paper showing how termite behavior could interact with plants’ own organization to form patterns at different scales. Their work built on previous research by one of the collaborators, Rob Pringle, on patterns created by termites, and in the 2015 Science report they argued that such patterns could help stabilize ecosystems and resist desertification. When they read Jürgens study on a fairy circles, Tarnita and Pringle thought, “Here’s another example of what termites could do.”

As they learned more about fairy circles and the debate around the cause, the researchers thought that both sides of the argument had some plausibility to them. After all, their own work already showed how plants and insects could both contribute to forming patterns. But there had been much more mathematical work done to shore up the plant theory. “The termite theory did not have the same mathematical backing,” says Tarnita.

The new Nature paper fills that gap, but also provides a model for how two processes, termite colonization and plant self-organization, could contribute to creating the fairy circles. First, they created a model, based on termite colony dynamics, that reproduced the pattern of the Namibian fairy circles. But they also considered the possibility that the plants could be contributing simultaneously. In this model, the termites and plants interacted—termite nests create bare patches, which, under wet conditions, are filled back in by plants. When it’s dry, though, the model shows “dense, tall grass rings” growing around the patches, similar to the grass rings observed in the field.

What that means, to Tarnita, is that either plants or termites could be responsible for the large-scale pattern of fairy circles, but that it’s also possible they’re both part of the answer. “Two very different processes, coordinated by very different organisms, could lead to that exact same pattern. That’s fascinating,” she says. “The next thing, though, is we can go further than that by combining them.”

The model also produced a result that the researchers weren’t expecting, which could be a sign they’re on the right track. The model showed that wet seasons would create small, regular clumps of plants in between the fairy circles, along with larger, random clumps during wet seasons, a feature not previously documented. But when couple of the team’s collaborators went out to the desert to photograph that vegetation, they found those large clumps of grass, just as predicted by the model.

This won’t be enough to convince plant partisans that termites are causing the fairy circles. “The model's output is in better accord with the observed patterns,” says Walter Tschinkel, a biologist at Florida State University who has studied the circles. “However, the assumptions made about the biology and behavior of the termites are completely untested. The causes of fairy circles can only be established through manipulative experiments, and these are still lacking.”

Tarnita recognizes that. “A model can never say this is exactly how it is,” she says. “A model can show you what’s possible and reveal new features, and show that combining different basic principles you get a better description of the system. But you have to test these idea with manipulative experiments in the field.”

She and her collaborators are considering options for how to take that next step. But to her what’s most exciting is what this line research indicates about how patterns might form in nature. “Patterns are much more prevalent than we would have thought 20 or 30 years ago,” she says. “There’s this wealth of simple interactions leading to emergent behavior in systems that we would not have guessed at before the advance of things like Google Earth and satellite images.”

Part of what’s fascinating to her is how different natural mechanism might create these same patterns. How many mechanisms might it take to create one pattern? How many patterns are there in nature? How many different mechanisms can lead to the same patterns? However much these dazzling designs might seem like the work of fairies or some other magic, she wants to know the natural explanation behind them.

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

In January of 1977, FBI director Clarence M. Kelley received a much-anticipated memo from the Office of Professional Responsibility, informing him that the Martin Luther King Task Force had had completed its investigation.

The Task Force had been formed the year prior, in response to the fallout from a Congressional hearing that had revealed the extent of the Bureau’s domestic surveillance, particularly in regards to civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The revelations had been so damning, in fact, that they had cast doubts on the integrity of the FBI’s investigation into King’s murder and added credence to the theories that the Bureau was somehow responsible.

Disproving the latter was the Task Force’s primary concern, so the bulk of the report involved reviewing the case files for evidence that the FBI had, though action or inaction, aided or abetted James Earl Ray.

While the report found that the investigation had been hampered by a lack of coordination between the FBI, the Attorney General’s Office, and the Memphis Police, there was no evidence that the Bureau had done anything to sabotage the investigation, and had indeed pursued things within the full extent of its abilities.

But rather than exonerating the FBI, it was in evaluating those abilities that the Task Force uncovered its most damning findings. The second, shorter, and much more incendiary part of the report covers the extent of the Bureau’s “surveillance and harassment” of King at the behest of J. Edgar Hoover.

The Task Force found the investigation eventually became something of a personal vendetta for Hoover …

with certain CONTELPRO elements - such as the infamous suicide letter - blatant civil rights violations.

The Task Force was so worried about the extent of this extralegal surveillance becoming public, either through King’s relatives or even worse, FOIA requesters, that they recommended the evidence sealed and destroyed as quickly as possible.

The report closes on the strong recommendation that, in order to avoid risking the loss of the public’s faith in institution, the FBI never again overstep its bounds and engage in this kind of illicit, illegal behavior.

The reader can decide the extent to which the Bureau decided to heed that advice.

The first part of MLK’s FBI file is embedded below.

Who is the real Alice King Chatham, sculptor of helmets worn by monkey astronauts?

That was the question posed to a panel of four celebrities—one of whom was Betty White—in the August 31, 1964 episode of the game show To Tell The Truth. The host, Bud Collyer, presented three people to the panel, all of whom claimed to be King Chatham. 

As you can see at the 18-minute mark in the video below, the celebrities interrogated the women with questions. Two were impostors, their answers all lies. One was the real King Chatham—a sculptor who helped craft the earliest space helmets of the United States Space Program.

“I have cast in wax the heads of the seven Mercury astronauts,” the host Bud Collyer read from a statement King Chatham wrote, before the panel spoke to the women. “These models were used to design for each man a perfect fitting helmet liner.”

None of the celebrities were able to correctly identify King Chatham, whose exact contributions to the field of space helmet design are the subject of debate.

During the height of 1960s space and flight exploration in the United States, Alice King Chatham worked behind the scenes creating partial-pressure pilot suits, test dummies, oxygen masks, space beds, and helmets for NASA and the U.S. Air Force. She even helped design suits for the television show Star Trek.

In the early 1940s, King Chatham was working as an artist and sculptor when she was recruited by the Air Force to help make the first successful oxygen breathing masks worn by all American World War II pilots. She was involved in an array of major experiments, studies, and projects, from creating space helmets for the 1963 first man-in-space program Project Mercury to designing prototype suits for monkeys that flew in the Aerobee sub-orbital rocket tests during the 1940s.

It was not uncommon for female artists to be recruited into the U.S. Army for their skills during wartime. Around 1943, King Chatham had been sculpting ducks, dogs, and horses at the Art Institute in Dayton, Ohio, when she received a request from the head of the anthropology unit at Wright Field’s Aero-Medical Laboratory, Francis Randall. “As an artist and sculptress she understood the human body,” reported Lee Street for The Baltimore Sun in 1953.

In the '40s, new fighter planes were reaching increasingly higher altitudes, requiring pilots to wear pressurized masks to avoid blacking out during flight. King Chatham's sculpting expertise was needed at the Wright Air Development Center, the Air Force base near Dayton, for a crucial mission: to help perfect an oral-nasal oxygen mask for pilots traveling above 20,000 feet. The various designs and prototypes eventually led to the mask that became ubiquitous head gear among World War II pilots.  

King Chatham became an expert of the flight helmet and the lab’s equipment specialist for personal protective gear. She is credited with developing a new pressure helmet that improved an iteration of the 1946 S-1 pressure flight suits, and special ear counter-pressure devices.

Scientists came to King Chatham with a list of different criteria for different kinds of helmets—one with a breathing tube, a microphone, and an opening for liquid feeding. She would, over several months, fashion experimental models out of rubber, plastics, and fabrics. 

 “The professional men at the Laboratory admit they don’t know how she does it,” Street wrote.

King Chatham’s lab often smelled like a zoo, says Street. She fitted oxygen equipment to many animals that flew in tests, including guinea pigs, rabbits, pigs, and a 140-pound Saint Bernard. King Chatham also made clothes for monkeys, outfitting them in tiny pressure suits and helmets for the Aerobee rockets that flew 34 miles above the Earth. However, one accomplishment under high debate and speculation is her involvement with the X-1 project, the top-secret rocket plane piloted by Captain Chuck Yeager that would break the sound barrier in 1947.

According to her obituary and authors of the book Mothers of Invention, King Chatham had to create a special helmet that would protect Yeager from the extreme pressures of the high-speed flight. It’s said that she had tested several different prototypes, which led to the actual helmet Yeager wore during the X-1 mission. However, research by Shayler David and Ian Moule in Women in Space contradicts her ownership of the helmet’s design. Yeager stated that he had built it himself by cutting a World War II tank helmet and fastening it to a leather flying helmet. King Chatham may have been a part of designing pressure helmets of Yeager’s later X-1 missions.

Her work designing oxygen masks and pilot helmets for the Air Force led her to NASA. For the Mercury Project, she was commissioned to create the helmets, casting each of the astronauts’ heads in wax to get perfect, custom headgear. “All the astronauts are extremely stable, and have great personalities,” King Chatham told Mary Ann Callan for the Los Angeles Times in 1961. “They were easy to work with, even though the fitting took half a day each.”

King Chatham would often be the lone woman assigned to projects. During her employment at Douglas Aircraft Company in Santa Monica, California in the 1960s, she was the only female developing features to add comfort in personnel gear, wrote Callan. She had the unprecedented task of thinking “of everything, because there is simply no ‘room service’ in a space capsule.”

While the exact details of her contributions to space and aviation innovation remains unknown, it’s clear that King Chatham’s career as a space sculptor was captivating, indicated by the amazed cast of To Tell The Truth.

King Chatham died in Los Angeles at 81 in July 1989. A number of her early art sculptures were placed on display at the Dayton Art Institute, according to her obituary.

“What Alice did exactly is currently debatable,” Bruce Hess, historian at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base says in Women in Space, “but she undoubtedly was involved in those pioneering steps involving manned space exploration and flight.”

It's winter, and the highways are icy. What do you do? You can cover them with salt. You can spray them down with de-icer. Or you can do like they just did in Dodge County, Wisconsin and let someone accidentally spill hundreds of thousands of sticky Skittles all over the road.

According to the Dodge County Sheriff's Office, the Skittles—all red ones—were found on Tuesday night, around 9 p.m., after falling off a flatbed pickup truck. When the Highway Department arrived to clean them up, they were treated to "a distinct Skittles smell," Sheriff Dale Schmidt told WISN. Photos show the tiny lentils, denuded of most of their color, strewn across both lanes.

Schmidt later learned that they were a reject batch, and were traveling to a nearby ranch to become supplementary cattle feed. (When the price of corn is high, farmers give their cows leftover candy, which is a cheap source of carbs.)

Instead, no one will eat them. As Schmidt pointed out to WBAY, "They're past the 5- or 10-second rule."

(For more sundries accidentally discarded at high speeds, check out our 2016 truck spill map.)

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.

Even at one of the most famous monuments in the world, there are still secrets to be uncovered.

At Rome’s Colosseum, in an area around the steps leading to the basement, the skull of a horse was found, while the area was being cleaned up, reports the Local.

The head is dated to the 12th or 13th century, when the Colosseum was being used for more practical purposes than gladiatorial battles. In the 12th century, parts of the amphitheater were rented out for residential or commercial use; in the 13th century, a powerful Roman family controlled the structure and turned it into a castle/fort situation.

This new find, according to the city’s Superintendent for Archaeological Heritage, should be taken as indication that the Colosseum still has places that need exploration. If there’s a horse head just lying around, who knows what else might be hidden away?

The year is 1813. You’re an undergraduate at the University of Oxford, enrolled in a course on the science of geology. The teacher, a man clad in long black robes and grasping a large hyena skull, rushes toward you and bellows, “What rules the world?” You have no clue what this man wants you to say. You draw back in your chair, eyes wide, and squeak out, “Haven’t an idea.” The lecturer rears back and shouts: “The stomach rules the world! The great ones eat the less, and the less the lesser still.”

The teacher is William Buckland, a man whose passion for geology and paleontology was matched only by the voracity of his stomach. As eccentric as his character was—complemented by a blue pouch at his side stuffed with mammoth teeth and skin, petrified feces and that hyena skull—what passed his lips was much more bizarre. 

William entertained guests at his home and the college with exotic meals of things like hedgehogs, roast ostrich, porpoise, crocodile steaks and even cooked puppies. His son, Francis, had an equally egalitarian palate. Together, they viewed Noah's Ark as a dinner menu.

It’s unclear exactly why William embraced such a curious diet. Most likely it was a combination of fame and curiosity. His father was educated, but their family lived modestly. Through luck and hard work, he entered Corpus Christi College, a small but prestigious branch of Oxford. While a young professor at Oxford, he was hard-pressed for money so he amped up his eccentricities in lectures to attract fee-paying students with racy jokes and profanity.

There appears to be no clear incident or time period when William started taking a fork and knife through the animal kingdom, but it could have been his doubling-down on eccentric behavior for widespread notoriety. Patrick John Boylan, a geologist who wrote his doctoral thesis on William in 1984, said as much: “Buckland progressed from a relatively modest middle class provincial background ... by means of his extraordinary hard work, innate intelligence and ability, and considerable charm (of which his well documented eccentricities were an integral, and probably deliberately contrived at times, part).”

William had a fondness for mice served on toast. The common mole held the crowning achievement of the vilest dish he had eaten until he chewed on the bluebottle fly. His house was stuffed to the brim with bones and fossils and bustled with pets like guinea pigs, at least one pony, snakes, frogs, ferrets, hawks, owls, cats, dogs and a pet hyena named Billy. Outside, the children liked to stand on a large pet tortoise while foxes and chickens ran about.

When Buckland was visiting an Italian cathedra some time between 1826 and 1836, a priest told him the slick floor was due to the miraculously ever-flowing blood of sacrificed martyrs; he knelt, ran his tongue across the ground, and declared the liquid to be bat urine. Most notably, William allegedly ingested the 140ish-year-old mummified heart belonging to King Louis XIV of France. The heart had been stolen during the French Revolution until William’s friend, Lord Harcourt, somehow acquired it. When Harcourt withdrew the heart from a silver snuffbox, William quickly popped it in his mouth. Whether trying to determine its geological origin (perhaps he thought it was a stone), or whether he wanted another notch on his apron (most sources seem to agree with that theory), he gobbled it up. The most well-known tale says William announced “I have eaten many strange things, but have never eaten the heart of a king before” before poor King Louis’ heart dropped to Buckland’s stomach.

No matter his outlandish behavior, William was and remains a respected scientist in his field—he excavated one of the oldest human remains ever found, pioneered the modern sciences of geology and paleontology and became Dean of Westminster Abbey. Not everyone liked his eccentricities—Charles Darwin called him a “vulgar and almost coarse man” driven more by notoriety than his love of science.

William's son, Francis Trevelyan Buckland, was born in 1826. Like his father, Francis was a committed zoophagist—an indiscriminate eater of animals in what must be the most literal interpretation of Genesis 9:3: “Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you.“ In fact, Francis probably ate a number of more strange things than his father (albeit not the heart of a king).

Francis was a short man with a consistently disheveled appearance, but was jovial and popular, with a childlike view of the world. It’s little wonder why Francis developed his eccentricities. Take this account from Francis’ own diary when he was just seven years old:

“A live turtle was sent down from London.... My father tied a long rope round the turtle's fin, and let him have a swim in 'Mercury,' the ornamental water in the middle of the Christ Church Quad, while I held the string. I recollect, too, that my father made me stand on the back of the turtle while he held me on (I was then a little fellow), and I had a ride for a few yards as it swam round and round the pond. As a treat I was allowed to assist the cook to cut off the turtle's head in the college kitchen. The head, after it was separated, nipped the finger of one of the kitchen boys who was opening the beast's mouth. This same head is now in my museum.”

Eating was one of the first things that landed Francis in trouble. According to William, when his son was two-and-a-half years old, he ate the end of a candle. As punishment, William shoved him inside the thorny furze bush for 10 minutes. He probably would have avoided punishment if it were a stray field mouse.

Like his father, Francis went into the sciences and studied at Oxford. He pursued paths of zoology and naturalism but trained as a surgeon, trading  fish for human corpse parts to further his studies. Although he wasn’t a great student and strayed from his medical path as time went on. In his day he was best known for his writings; he travelled extensively and wrote popular articles about the world’s natural curiosities in a more casual tone that differed from the stuffy literature dominating Victorian Britain.

Growing up in a house of exotic pets, it’s no wonder that Francis began his own menagerie at college. Before entering his chamber, first you might smell a rotten odor. Opening the door, you would see“an eagle, a jackal, besides marmots, guinea-pigs, squirrels and dormice, an adder and many harmless snakes and slow-worms, tortoises, green frogs, and a chameleon. Skeletons and stuffed specimens were numerous...” Oh and that smell? It wasn’t only from his tiny zoo. Francis had been dissecting a cat and kept the corpse in a box under his bed.

His most notorious companion was a bear cub named Tig, whom Francis dressed in a cap and gown appropriate for the Christ Church College at Oxford. The bear attended wine parties, performed tricks, liked to suck fingers, and roamed the streets for candy when left unattended. Sometimes Francis took rats and de-fanged snakes from his coat at parties to further the entertainment. Francis owned several monkeys throughout his life. Two of them, Jacko and Jenny, he served port every Sunday and beer during the week. When Jacko died, he turned his hide into a tablecloth as an act of memoriam.

Whether at home or elsewhere, guests were served steaming plates of boiled elephant trunk, boiled and fried meat taken from the head of a porpoise, roasted giraffe necks and rhinoceros pie. Boa constrictor, sea slugs and ear wigs made their way to his stomach, although he ended up hating those last two. When he heard a panther had recently died at a zoo, he had the curator dig up the corpse and send over some panther chops (“It was not very good.”)

Not all of this was done just for the palate. While much of Francis’ omnivorous nature stemmed from simply wanting to know what the animal kingdom tasted like, there was a scientific reasoning behind other meals. In 1860, he founded the Acclimation Society of Britain; its goal was to find and introduce exotic fauna to the country in order to gain another food source. Their dinners included things like Syrian pig, sheep from China, curassow and other animals from across the globe. Because of their population, Francis advocated for horse meat, but it tasted awful. He suggested it be served to prisoners instead.

While the Acclimation Society was fruitless and Francis never achieved the level of prestige his father reached, his advocacy and research calling for responsible fishing and fish farming helped prevent Britain from overfishing. His good nature and love of life translated to his writing and his lecturers were well-attended. He was more a popularizer of science—something of a Neil deGrasse Tyson—than a hardcore academic. When he died at just 54, papers around the country wrote mournful memorials praising him. Unfortunately, history has mostly forgotten him until very recently. A British author just wrote a book about this obscure oddball of the Victorian age—maybe the Bucklands can still inspire a whole new generation of omnivores.

Before majestic skeletal structures of centuries-old species are placed on display at museums, an intricate process takes place behind the scenes. Hundreds and thousands of hours are spent removing the delicate fossils from bedrock.

The time-lapse video above shows Natural History Museum of Utah preparator Nathan Ong at work excavating prehistoric ribs, vertebrae, and a large Mastodon tooth. It's a fossil preparator's job to gently uncover and prepare paleontological specimens for both study and exhibit. Ong's work requires careful brush, chisel, and scraping technique to extract the precious specimens. 

He uses probes, scalpels, toothbrushes, dental picks, microscopes, and power tools to break away at the rock and sediment. When researchers in the field come across bones at an excavation site, they'll dig around the specimen, wrap them in plaster, and send it to a fossil preparation lab. At the 36-second mark, you can see Ong using hand power tools to remove rocks in one of these large plaster casings. He also uses glue to mount the pieces.

"Where most people see Tyrannosaurus or Hadrosaurus, I tend to see the product of millions of hours of dedication," Ong says in the video.

Sharp observers will notice something strange about the attractive residences lining Am Fischtal, a bucolic street in the Zehlendorf section of Berlin. On one side, the buildings have flat roofs, while on the other they are pitched: a situation that is less architectural happenstance than the result of a so-called “roof war,” waged in the Weimar Republic and which embodied many of the deeper conflicts that roiled Germany in the years before the Nazis came to power.

Flat roof advocates argued in the 1920s that they were less expensive to build and maintain, in addition to fitting in with Modernist ideas about minimalism and functionality, like using roofs as terraces. But the pitched roof partisans—including many nationalists—argued something entirely different: that flat roofs were a blight on traditional German architecture, or, as the critic Paul Schultze-Naumburg wrote, “immediately recognizable as the child of other skies and other blood.” Other critics were more explicit. The architect Paul Bonatz, for one, said that flat roofs bear “more resemblance to a suburb of Jerusalem than to a group of homes in Stuttgart.”

The two sides met on Am Fischtal, which today survives as a literal and figurative monument to the Weimar Republic’s increasing political divide. The flat roof residences came first, part of a housing development built by a leftist housing cooperative between 1926 and 1932 known as Onkel Toms Hütte, or Uncle Tom's Cabin, an unlikely moniker borrowed from a nearby tavern which was named after the Harriet Beecher Stowe novel. Across the street, GAGFAH, a housing cooperative supported by conservative white collar unions, built their response in 1928: a community called Fischtalgrund, which consists of 30 buildings with 120 housing units. The roofs, of course, were pitched.

“What happened in 1928 in the quiet Berlin forest suburb,” Bruno Taut, the architect who designed Onkel Toms Hütte later wrote, “was like an omen of that which all Germans experienced in 1933”—when the Nazis came to power.

Before residents moved in, Fischtalgrund opened first as an exhibition in September and October 1928, its location inspiring the press to run stories about the “Zehlendorf Roof War,” and, indeed, it made good copy. The public, also, was interested: a year earlier, a flat roof housing development built in Stuttgart attracted nearly 500,000 people during an exhibition, in the process casting a spotlight on flat roofs.

But for the architects involved, the debate was more nuanced. Heinrich Tessenow, the lead architect behind Fischtalgrund, publicly rejected the idea of a war.

“Here as there, this is essentially a serious search for the best architectural solutions,” he said then. Meanwhile, the architect Walter Gropius, a well-known flat roofer and ostensibly Tessenow’s opposition, insisted “the question of whether a roof is flat or pitched is to be answered solely on the basis of practicality, technology, and efficiency. It is a mistake to make it a religious symbol, as is the case in the battle around the new architecture today.”

Still, such conciliatory comments were often downplayed or ignored in press reports, and, symbolically, the roof debate evolved as a proxy for the fight over Germany’s future.

On Am Fischtal, it was the flat roofers who struck the opening blow. Onkel Toms Hütte was developed by GEHAG, a cooperative housing corporation owned by blue collar unions with left-wing political affiliations that, during the 1920s, was one of the leaders in creating better housing for Berlin workers, who up until that time typically lived in crowded and unsanitary tenements called rental barracks.

GEHAG had hired Bruno Taut to be its chief architect in 1924. Although not well remembered today, Taut was a part of a group, including Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier, who popularized Modernist architecture in Europe during the 1920s. At Onkel Toms Hütte, Taut led a team of architects in creating a new community of approximately 1,900 housing units in colorful rowhouses and small apartment buildings with flat roofs spread across several blocks.

And in 1926, just as Onkel Toms Hütte began construction, the roof debate intensified, prompting GAGFAH to scramble a response, which would turn out to be Fischtalgrund, in which 17 architects designed new houses and small apartment buildings, all with pitched roofs. To lead their effort, GAGFAH chose Tessenow, an architect who used traditional designs but also emphasized that “the best is always simple,” an approach similar to Modernist thinking. While the political debates raged, in other words, the architects working on Am Fischtal were never that far apart.

Today, Onkel Toms Hütte celebrates its architectural legacy and in particular Taut, who left Germany when the Nazis came to power and died in 1938 while working in Turkey. There is a monument dedicated to him in the community, while the roof war itself is also commemorated by an interpretive sign on Am Fischtal.

Karl Kiem, a German architectural historian, argues that apart from their contrasting roofs, the two developments share many similarities, such as their human scale and balance between built form and landscape. The roof war is a reminder of a divisive past, but flat and pitched roofs have co-existed for nearly 90 years and together they form a listed historic district, suggesting that now Am Fischtal is a symbol of harmony, not conflict.