It was a stomach-turning scene as a truck filled with offal flipped on its side and blocked a small highway in Wairoa, New Zealand, the New Zealand Herald reports.
The crash occurred Friday at 7 a.m., on State Highway 2. "About three quarters of the truck's load spilled onto the road," deputy fire chief Barry Gasson told the Herald. "You are talking sheep heads and other animal remains, along with diesel and oil from the truck."
"It was all over the road," he continued. (Graphic photos from the scene, which you can see here if you're so inclined, back him up.) The driver suffered minor injuries, and was treated at the scene.
On Facebook, Wairoa Police praised local drivers, who they said showed extreme tolerance as they waited for cranes to clear the road. Nothing like seeing a bunch of severed heads to keep your own problems in perspective.
The animals in the image above are elephants. They were drawn sometime around the 13th or 14th century in a medieval bestiary, a type of book that described animals large and small, real and fantastic. But to a modern eye the line between the real and the imagined is often blurred. Unicorns and two-legged centaurs were listed alongside lizards, weasels, pelicans, and panthers, and in the stories these books told, griffins carried away oxen and dug for gold in mines, while dragons fought with elephants that looked as unreal as any mythical beast.
In England and France, these bestiaries were most popular during the Middle Ages, but they had their origins in the ancient Mediterranean, when scholars in Egypt drew from the works of Aristotle, Pliny, and their like to create the first of these books. Bestiaries were supposed to describe the natural world, but the world they depicted is often hard to recognize. Even the very real animals could be made into unrecognizable beasts, like the elephants above.
Elephants in medieval bestiaries came in all shapes and sizes, few of which resembled real-life elephants. They might have horse-like legs and tails and misshapen feet or look more like pigs. Sometimes their ears were missing; sometimes their trunk was so long it would drag on the ground. The trunks and the tusks were most often twisted into surprising shapes and angles: One very memorable elephant looked like a dog with the tusks of a boar and a strange, long nose.
Look at a series of these images, and sometimes patterns emerge. For instance, while the trunks of elephants rarely looked like they do in real life, they often looked like trumpets. Could that be a clue to these unusual images? Why did so many artists copy that detail, when so many other features were left the imagination?
One of the mysteries of the bestiary form is what the first one looked like. The tradition is usually traced back to the Physiologus, a book that no longer exists. It’s thought that it was written around the 2nd century A.D., in Alexandria, by a scholar working in Greek, and much of what’s known about it is derived from later translations into Latin. It would have contained the descriptions of a selection of animals, perhaps 50 or so, and relied on the standard works of natural history of the time, including Aristotle’s History of Animals and Pliny’s Natural History.
But the Physiologus did not follow the rules of scientific observation, as we understand them today. Its author described a world created by a Christian God, where the scientific and religious observations were not neatly divided. It was “a compilation of pseudo-science in which the fantastic descriptions of real and imaginary animals, birds, and even stones were used to illustrate points of Christian dogma and morals,” wrote Florence McCulloch in Mediaeval Latin and French Bestiaries, a foundational text in the modern study of medieval natural history. As Ann Payne, a curator at the British Library put it, the author’s “purpose was to analyze the habits of beast and to elicit from them what they were supposed to tell him about the ways of God, of Man and of the Devil.”
Elephants, for instance, starred in a story about sex. The bestiaries’ fascination with elephants’ sex lives had both a naturalist and a religious angle to it. Bestiary writers appeared to be genuinely trying to theorize about how elephants procreated: They were just so large and heavy! How did the male avoid crushing the female?
But the bestiaries’ accounts of elephants’ love life also focused, in more detail, on their relative chasteness. Elephants were said to have no desire to have sex, or to be slow to sexual arousal. In these stories, elephants had one mate and stayed true to that partner. To reproduce at all, the elephant couple would have to go east to the garden of Eden, where the female would pick the fruit of the mythical mandrake, a sort of human-plant hybrid, and offer it to the male elephant.
Were medieval people really meant to believe that’s how elephants mated? According to bestiary scholars, they were not as gullible as us modern, post-Renaissance people would like to believe. As McCulloch explained, back in 1962, the bestiaries’ audience understood these were didactic stories. They didn’t believe that elephants had to eat human-plant hybrids in order to do it.
In the 21st century, though, people are all too willing to believe that medieval artists and writers were doing their best to document natural history, using limited information. Images from bestiaries are often framed as efforts “based on hearsay” or “descriptions of travelers.” King Louis IX of France gifted King Henry III of England an elephant in 1255, and the elephant came to live at the Tower of London, which at the time was used as a castle and residence rather than a gloomy prison. It’s often said that after that, British artists were able to draw the elephant more naturalistically.
But the trunks portrayed as trumpets hint that this judgment isn't quite right. There are plenty of written descriptions of the elephant’s trunk, and none of the ones I found describe it as “shaped like a trumpet.” Aristotle explained that the elephant’s trunk “is capable of being crooked or coiled at the tip, but not of flexing like a joint, for it is composed of gristle.” Hexameron of Ambrose, writing in the fourth century A.D., noted that an elephant has a hollow, “projecting trunk” that it uses to suck up huge quantities of water and pour them down its throat. One medieval writer said it is “like a snake, fortified with a wall of ivory.”
The only reference I could find connecting an elephant’s trunk to a trumpet was Aristotle’s note that though an elephant makes a sigh-like sound using its mouth, “if it employ the trunk as well, the sound produced is like that of a hoarse trumpet.”
There’s more evidence, too, that bestiary artists were making a choice when they drew elephants in these less-than-naturalistic ways. In her book Medieval Bestiaries: Text, Image, Ideology, Debra Hassig (now Debra Strickland, a senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow) details how the naturalism of elephant images in bestiaries has little relationship to the appearance of that very real elephant in the Tower of London.
“There are very naturalistic renderings of elephants in some of the earliest English manuscripts, and very non naturalistic examples in some of the later ones,” she wrote. “The degree of naturalism found in a given image must have been the result of the artist’s decision, even in the wake of direct observation of a live specimen ... In the bestiaries, fidelity to living creatures was not necessarily the artist’s goal." In other words, the bestiary artists were making choices, and they sometimes chose not to depict the elephant in the most naturalistic way possible. Instead, they followed a different set of guidelines, focused on the story the image might tell rather than its fidelity to what the eye might see.
Is it possible that the artists drew the elephants’ trunks as trumpets to symbolize the sound the trunk made—to communicate the sound as part of the image? If bestiary stories were meant to be allegorical, if the images are already telling a story, if they were making those choices on purpose, perhaps this detail is just one more part of that system. Medieval artists might not have been working with the exact same information that we have now, but that’s not why their drawings look strange to us. They were communicating facts and ideas using a language we no longer understand.
Tucked away in a small, unassuming building in the town of Hólmavík, in Iceland’s Westfjords, is a museum that holds some truly gruesome displays of 17th century sorcery. There are pants made of human skin, which are said to give the wearer unlimited wealth; you can see magical sigils called staves, thought to offer powers ranging from the ability to see ghosts to making someone fall in love; and strange two-headed snake creatures that are born to steal goat’s milk.
While all of this arcane weirdness could be viewed as little more than an out-of-the-way collection of oddities, for both the curator of The Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft, and the town of Hólmavík itself, the exhibitions here are an important reminder of a darker time in local history. Oh, and they're also really great at bringing in tourist dollars.
The museum was established in 2000 by a group of people from the town aiming to drive tourism to the area, led by the impish Sigurður “Siggi” Atlason. During the 17th century, Iceland experienced what Atlason calls a “witch craze,” not unlike the early American persecution of so-called witches in Salem. While there were examples of alleged sorcerers being hunted down all across Iceland, a great many of the reported cases stemmed from the Westfjords. Ever since, the whole region has maintained the air of a place steeped in magic and folklore.
“It's the landscape, it's the history, it's the tales from this area,” says Atlason. “People from other parts of the country, they always believe that people here in Strandir, which is the east coast of the Westfjords, they have knowledge of occult. [The people in these remote locations] are supposed to be strange, and have some knowledge that nobody else has.”
As a way of both embracing this local history, and highlighting an evocative sliver of Icelandic culture, the group landed on the idea of a sorcery museum. The concept presented the museum's creators with a few unique challenges. For starters, focusing on the rituals and witchcraft of 17th century Icelandic sorcerers meant finding a way to create an exhibition of occult artifacts of which there are no surviving examples. It took them over two years researching annals, grimoires, priest books, and judge’s papers from the time to put together a collection of the strangest and most bizarre workings they could find.
"This actually could have been something else," says Atlason. "This small museum could have been a research center about whales, or whale-watching, or hiking paths, or whatever, but the dozens [of locals] that were involved, including me, we have all been quite interested in history, especially myth and folklore."
To bring these centuries-old rituals and symbols to life, the group employed a team of designers who had experience working in film and television. Working from historic descriptions, they were able to recreate such gruesome sights as a pair of necropants (the fleshy translucence and realistic hair are even more disturbing up close), and an undead skeleton bursting through the concrete floor (a ritual for creating a zombie is another highlight of the museum).
Even with the logistics of the place sorted out, some people in the area were not exactly enchanted by the idea of a witchcraft museum. In addition to a negative response from some conservative Christian opponents, many locals in the tiny communities around the Westfjords still felt the pain that the witch craze had brought to their ancestors hundreds of years before. “We are talking about family, and friends, and therefore, there were people in this area that really disliked this idea,” says Atlason. “We had to go do some radio interviews, and confront some very strict conservatives. And we lost all the debates there, because you don't want to start to be unreasonable and start to speak about stupid things.” Despite the vocal opposition, when the museum finally opened, Atlason says his opponents realized that it was neither blasphemous nor insensitive to the memory of those who had died during the witch craze. The museum became a hit.
Five years later, they were able to expand to a second location in the Westfjords, called the Sorcerer's Cottage. Atlason would like open a third exhibition in still a different town in the area, stressing the need to lure tourists to neighboring small towns. “This project is about supporting the tourism. Not only in Hólmavík. Hólmavík is part of the area, and the coast is quite long. And that is why we did not build one big one here in Hólmavík.”
Today, The Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft draws regular crowds to Hólmavík, who come to see the necropants or the “Invisible Boy.” But for all the popularity of the more sensational aspects of the museum, Atlason still sees it as a reminder of the hard lessons of witch hunts past.
These days, visitors to the museum who catch one of Atlason's talks might hear him compare Iceland’s 17th century witch craze to the modern rise of Islamophobia. He's not shy about the fact that much of the sorcerous artifacts on display, and the violence that accompanied them, were a direct response to the complicated class and power systems at play in 17th century Iceland. He sees that same fear-mongering and social control at play today. “We just have to have more sense, because this is happening now. Same thing. It is a kind of witch craze, it is a witch craze against them. It is sad, because we have seen it so many times. We are always talking about this.”
Beachside sculptors, eat your hearts out—Sudarsan Pattnaik just built the tallest sandcastle in the world, on a beach in India.
Pattnaik's creation, which is themed around world peace, is 48 feet tall. It features doves, scalloped edges, man-sized turrets, and a massive sand portrait of Gandhi.
The sculpture was unveiled today at Puri Beach in Orissa, India, after four days of gritty construction work, the Times of India reports. The folks from the Guinness Book of World Records were on hand to give Pattnaik the award, previously held by American Ted Siebert.
Pattnaik, who broke Siebert's record by 3.75 feet, is a professional sand sculptor. He has a school, the Sudarsan Sand Art Institute—30 of his students helped him with this sculpture—and over his career, he has taken home 27 championship prizes in international competitions. Three years ago, he received the Padma Shri, one of India's highest civilian honors.
This is his first Guinness World Record, though. In the photograph of him receiving it, both he and the award are dwarfed by the scale of his creation. Hey, you're not crying—that's just sand in your eye.
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.
While passing through airport security recently, an 80-year-old South Carolina woman submitted her cane to be screened.
Inside, a TSA official said Thursday, they found a hidden sword, according to WYFF.
The woman, who was not named, apparently knew nothing about it, and was let go, while the cane was confiscated, Mark Howell, a TSA spokesman, told the station. Howell added that the incident was a reminder that hidden swords in canes might be more common than you think.
That's because they are frequently purchased secondhand, officials said, which means that there could be thousands, if not tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands—or even millions?—of cane users worldwide, who are, quite possibly unwittingly, armed for battle.
As the sun shines on Earth, it creates three distinct long shadows in a triangular shape behind it. The darkest of these, as you can see in the video above, is a triangle within the wider triangle, known as the umbra. But on each side of the umbra is the penumbra, lighter shadows, accounting for some of the sun's rays that manage to sneak by our orb.
As it orbits Earth, the moon passes through these shadows on a (somewhat) predictable basis, creating shades of colors on the moon one doesn't commonly see. In a full lunar eclipse, for example, when the moon passes through the umbra, it goes red, creating a blood moon. But tonight it will only go a little bit darker, as it will only be passing through the penumbra.
You should try to see it! Which you can as long as you don't live in Australia, or parts of East Asia and Alaska, where it will not be visible. At 7:43 p.m Eastern time, look up at the sky, hope that it's not cloudy, and experience your moon, since it will also be full (a requirement for eclipses).
Eclipse or not, the February full moon has long been referred to as the "snow moon," which, according to Farmer's Almanac, was one of a number of nicknames given to various moons by American Indians.
Meanwhile, around seven-and-a-half hours after eclipse, while the snow moon is still snow mooning, a comet, called 45P, will streak across the sky. The comet will fly by around 7.4 million miles from Earth, which should make it visible if you look to the east around 3 a.m., according to USA Today. Seeing it with the naked eye might be a challenge, though, so try using binoculars or a telescope if you have one.
If you miss the penumbral lunar eclipse, you will have to wait until at least 2018, as astronomers say it will be this year's only one (lunar eclipses happen up to five times a year, with only a third of those being penumbral.) But if you miss the comet you'll be in for a slightly longer wait, as it won't fly by again until 2022.
Back in June of 2016, Tess Newall wore her great-great-grandmother's wedding dress to be married. The lacy dress had been made by hand in 1870, and it was still in tact all those years later—Newall only altered the top.
A few months after her wedding, Newall took the dress to the dry cleaners, like you do. The next month, though, that shop closed and went into bankruptcy. Newall couldn't get the dress back; recently she posted on Facebook that the dress was probably sold. She was sending out a plea to the world—if anyone found the dress, she wanted it back.
It turned out, though, the dress hadn't gone that far at all. Though the firm dealing with the bankruptcy had told her the dress was long gone, the landlord of the building where the shop had been located went into check.
The dress was there, crumpled in a corner.
It still needs cleaning, but Newall is "absolutely over the moon" to know it's not lost, according to the BBC.
The heart shape, with its rounded top and pointy end, is pretty innocent for a graphic: ❤️️ lacks the ribald connotations of a lipstick smack, or the peach emoji. But when using it to mean "I love you," we may be calling back to something slightly more risqué: an ancient contraceptive.
Silphium, which once grew rampant in the ancient Greek city of Cyrene, in North Africa, was likely a type of giant fennel, with crunchy stalks and small clumps of yellow flowers. From its stem and roots, it emitted a pungent sap that Pliny the Elder called "among the most precious gifts presented to us by Nature."
According to the numismatist T.V. Buttrey, exports of the plant and its resins made Cyrene the richest city on the continent at the time. It was so valuable, in fact, that Cyrenians began printing it on their money. Silver coins from the 6th century B.C. are imprinted with images of the plant's stalk—a thick column with flowers on top and leaves sticking out—and its seed pods, which look pretty familiar:
So what was so great about silphium sap? According to Pliny, it was a kind of cure-all, used to treat everything from chills to fevers to corns. (Best of all, he wrote, "it is never productive of flatulency.") Hippocrates said it could be used as a poultice, or to soothe the stomach. Cooks also used the plant in their recipes, perhaps the same way we use fennel seeds today.
It may also have been used as a type of birth control. "Anecdotal and medical evidence from classical antiquity tells us that the drug of choice for contraception was silphium," writes the historian John Riddle in Eve's Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West. He points to the ancient physician Soranus, who suggested taking a dose of silphium "the size of a chick-pea" once a month, both to prevent conception and "destroy any already existing."
In his Poem 7, Catullus wrote that he wants to share as many kisses with his beloved "as the number of Libyan sands that lie in silphium-bearing Cyrene." It's not too hard to imagine that he's providing two prescriptions at once here: one for getting busy and one for preventing unintended consequences. Riddle also describes another, more explicit Cyrenian coin: "A seated woman has silphium at her feet, while one hand touches the plant and the other points to her reproductive area."
Not everyone buys Riddle's theory about silphium's ancient use. In a 1994 New York Times article, other experts called it an "intriguing hypothesis" but went no further, saying there's not quite enough evidence to crown the plant as a common form of ancient birth control. And even if we grant it that status, it's still a bit of a leap from "heart-shaped seed of ancient contraceptive plant" to "enduring symbol of love." There are also plenty of other theories about where the heart shape came from, ranging from a Catholic saint's divine hallucinations to a bad organ description by Aristotle.
Today, ancient silphium is likely extinct, which bodes poorly for everyone who may have pledged eternal love via the shape of its seed pod. But there's another plant that was probably used for contraception: the wild carrot, which is still around. If you want to show your Valentine truly undying love, consider drawing a different vegetable this year.
On January 3rd, 1944, the USS Turner was undergoing routine drills off the coast of New Jersey when an explosion tore through its stowage. As blast after blast rocked the naval destroyer, nearby ships rushed to save those onboard—but when she sank, around 8:30 in the morning, she took 136 sailors with her.
For years, the Pentagon marked these men "missing." But thanks to a new collaboration between a WWII historian and the Department of Defense, they may be found after all.
As the Washington Post reported, the case was reopened last year, when WWII historian Ted Darcy dug up documents that indicated four of the "missing" men had actually been buried—in a military cemetery in Farmingdale, Long Island. At the cemetery, he found four white graves marked "Unknown U.S. Sailor," along with the date of the Turner's sinking.
Darcy thinks more sailors may be buried there, too. Now, The DoD is officially looking for more details, the Associated Press reports.
Even with the government on the case, there's still a long road ahead. In order for to justify disinterment—required to identify buried remains—more paperwork needs to be unearthed, something that could take years. And at least one sailor rescued from the sinking ship doesn't think many bodies were recovered in the aftermath.
But relatives and descendants of the fallen soldiers, who have gone without any clues for over seven decades, are somewhat relieved. "I'd like to see if we can have closure on this," Richard Duffy, the nephew of a sailor killed in the blast, told the AP.
Marjorie Avery, who is now 82 and was the daughter of the Turner's captain, had a bittersweet response when informed that her father might not be missing after all. "Oh my goodness," she said. "I would've liked to have known that."
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 nurses, clad in pink, crowd around the man on the hospital bed. Posing, their bodies are pressed against his. Even though you can’t see their mouths through their face masks, you can tell from the crinkle of their eyes that they are smiling, grinning even. The man looks jovial, his head tilted to the side and his mouth open as if he were shouting a greeting or something funny for the camera. He’s middle-aged, and his chest is bared through a noisily patterned bathrobe, all the better to show off the dramatic incision that bisects his body, held together with stitches.
The nurses are so adoring, the man could be a movie star. He is a celebrity, but not for the usual reasons: In 1968, during a seven-hour surgery throughout which the medical team listened to pop-music, Frederick West became Britain’s first heart transplant recipient. The picture is one of many images that subsequently flooded the media to sate the curiosity of a transfixed public.
Just five months before, on December 3, 1967, the South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard transplanted the heart of a 25-year-old car accident victim into the chest of 55-year-old Louis Washkansky, a grocer suffering from congestive heart failure. Washkansky lived only 18 days after the procedure, but Barnard’s feat nonetheless kicked off what the media dubbed “The Year of the Heart Transplant”. In 1968, as Vietnam, protests, and space exploration claimed headlines, so did the over 100 heart transplant surgeries that took place around the globe. The world looked on in awe, at times enthralled or appalled at the revolutionary surgery, and the media and medical world obliged their fascination by serving up breathless, constant coverage.
Prior to the reality of transplantation in the hospital, the general public was offered images of transplantation by Hollywood via such medical horrors as 1940’s Black Friday, in which Boris Karloff plays a doctor who endeavors to save a critically injured friend by replacing part of his brain with that of a dead gangster’s. His friend survives, but is embedded with the criminal’s personality. This kicked off decades of U.S. horror flicks depicting the dangers of brain, face, and even skin transplants. In 1969, on the heels of the Year of the Heart Transplant, Mexican audiences were treated toLa Horripilante Bestia Humana (The Horrible Man-Beast) about a man implanted with the heart of gorilla who goes on a killing spree. Suffice to say, fear and fascination swirled around the idea of replacing one’s organs with a stranger’s.
West, a 45-year-old married building contractor, had the distinction of receiving his transplant not only during the Year of the Transplant, but during what the media was reporting as the busiest week of heart transplants ever. In London, as West was receiving the heart of a 26-year-old construction worker who had fallen to his death, two other men were being implanted with new hearts in the United States. They were: Joseph Rizor, a 40-year-old carpenter from Salinas, California who would be given the heart of a 43-year-old man who had died of a brain hemorrhage; and Everett C. Thomas, a 47-year-old Phoenix accountant who would receive the heart of a 15-year-old female who died of an accidental gunshot. All three surgeries would be reported on nearly daily, with doctors and hospitals frequently updating the press.
West’s operation was an object of national obsession in Britain, and it kicked off an unprecedented relationship between the media and the medical world, as historian Ayesha Nathoo meticulously chronicled in her book Hearts Exposed: Transplants and the Media in 1960s Britain. Photographers and reporters mobbed the hospital; one member of the operation team described a street clogged with arc lights and so many people “the whole thing looked like a royal wedding being watched”.
The hospital went to extraordinary lengths to accommodate the press. They held a hastily assembled press conference where attendees fought and shoved each other, and reporters were admitted into their halls. “As West was recovering,” wrote Nathoo, “photographers and film crews were allowed right inside the hospital space, turning the patient ward into a television studio and bringing the hospital world into public view.” In addition to posing with smiling nurses, West was photographed winking for the camera and even filmed playing chess.
On May 5, United Press International reported that West had given a “weak thumbs up” following his surgery. Meanwhile, Riznor’s lungs were “confused” by his “borrowed heart” and, once his respirator was removed, Thomas was able to talk with his wife. That same day, the National Heart Hospital told the Associated Press that West lay upon a “sterile shrine”. West’s surgeon, Dr. Ronald Ross, defended the surgery against critics as “morally correct and morally acceptable”, stating that the only alternative for West was death. The same AP article related the strange anecdote of Thomas’ first post-surgery moments. He wrote a note to his wife asking her if he had a new heart or if his own heart had been repaired. She informed him that he now had the heart of young girl.
Survival for early heart transplant recipients was far from guaranteed; many died within months, or even hours, of operation. This was the sad fate of Rizor, who died just four days after his surgery at Stanford University Medical Center. But West and Thomas persevered, and their stories were celebrated. On May 29, the Los Angeles Times ran a photo of West (in the same noisy bathrobe) wearing a doctor’s stethoscope and gazing down at his chest as he performed the strange act of listening to his own, brand-new heart. Thomas modeled for publicity photos in which the sports fan donned a helmet and posed as if about to toss a football. When he returned to work, the media snapped shots of him sitting behind a desk and talking on the phone. He was photographed on a fishing trip with his wife and two sons.
The press transformed doctors into celebrities, too, especially Barnard, who had performed the fateful 1967 surgery in Cape Town. It helped that Barnard was photogenic; young and slim, with dark, straight hair and a toothy smile, he was dubbed “The Film Star Surgeon”. He made television appearances and was photographed vacationing, posing in speedboats and strolling down a frothy beachfront with his bikini-ed wife.
He graced the cover of Time and Paris Match. On May 7, Barnard paid a visit to West at the National Heart Hospital. He was greeted by a churning crush of reporters and cameramen. In a photo of the event, it is hard to pick Barnard’s face out the crowd; today it’s a media scrum more suited for Britney Spears than a doctor.
Sadly, like many of the patients before them, West and Everett did not live long. West died of a massive infection six weeks after his operation; he never went home. Everett, the banker who had returned to work and embarked on fishing trips with his family, lived 205 days—longer than any other U.S. heart transplant patient at that time—before dying two days after receiving a second heart transplant. Their deaths, of course, were noted by the press.
Following The Year of the Transplant, the number of surgeries plunged. In 1970, only 18 were performed. Of the patients operated on around the world in 1968, two thirds perished within months, days or hours. In Britain, heart transplantation was abandoned at the end of 1969 for a decade. The crush of media coverage was not without consequences. Nathoo argued in her book that the press “was central to bringing about the moratorium.” Experts and pundits debated the effectiveness and ethics of heart transplant surgery in every medium; the public became increasingly leery of the surgery, wondering if donors were truly “dead” when their hearts were removed. The number of willing donors plummeted.
Posing in his bathrobe, West would never know the complicated legacy of his glamour shot, nor would he ever know another Englishman, John McCafferty, to whom his own life is indelibly linked. In 1982, McCafferty would receive a heart transplant and go on to live 33 more years, earning a Guinness World Record as the longest living heart transplant patient to date.
In 1893, when Herbert Smith arrived in Honolulu after sailing from Liverpool, England, the island kingdom was in disarray. American immigrants had overthrown Queen Liliʻuokalani and taken over administration of the islands; within a few years, the United States would annex her kingdom.
Smith was a draper from Manchester, who came to live on the islands for a year or so. He wrote to his family back in England of his journey and what he found. He also took a series of photos that captured life around Hilo Bay, on the Big Island.
He took shots of sugar plantations, banyan trees, a turtle being made into a mean, fishermen, kindergarten students, and skilled surfers, who were riding the waves long before the sport became popular elsewhere.
Smith's family kept the album for years and recently decided to sell it: it'll be auctioned by Bonhams on March 1 in London, as part of a Fine Books and Manuscripts sale.
Valentine's Day doesn't have to be about candlelit dinners and heart-shaped boxes of candy. For those of you still scrambling, we've compiled a list of last-minute gift ideas that, much like our 2016 holiday gift guide, takes cues from the unusual and fascinating stories we've shared on Atlas Obscura over the past year or so. Whether you relish the romance of it all or seek a darker interpretation of this annual holiday, we've got something curious and unexpected for you.
Victorian Flower Dictionary
Bouquets aren't always just bouquets. Sometimes, they contain secret messages. Or at least, that was the case during the Victorian era, when people used floriography, a form of communication based on floral arrangements, to express sensitive emotions. A flower dictionary became essential for those who wished to send and decode such messages. Try your hand at botanical cryptology with this modern-day version.
You could pull a Lloyd Dobler and try to woo your date by standing outside their window with a boombox. Or, you could play "What Is Love," Haddaway's mega-hit from 1992, on a homemade music box and see how that goes.
Vinegar valentines, also known as penny dreadfuls or comic valentines, were the snarky alternative to a traditional card for that not-so-special someone. The sender could not only express disinterest in the recipient anonymously, but also get in an insult or two for good measure. You can find a selection of old vinegar valentines on eBay, replete with Victorian sass, or you could get into the anti-spirit of the holiday and make one yourself.
Irv Teibel was an audio pioneer who believed that listening to the sounds of the natural world could produce myriad benefits for the human mind. He recorded oceans, storms, the ambient sounds of a swamp, and much more. Teibel ultimately released 11 installments of his series environments, but it's environments 5 we recommend for your Valentine's Day enjoyment. Side A features a female athlete's heartbeat, which the album liner notes suggest is ideal for "lovemaking and meditation."
If you didn't think socks could be romantic, think again. These socks are knitted by people living on the volcanic island of Tristan da Cunha. Traditionally, they were used to express affection for the recipient, with the number of stripes on the sock indicating the degree of endearment.
Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders
Are you and your partner looking to get off the beaten path in 2017? Pick up a copy of our New York Times bestselling book. Celebrating more than 700 of the world's most extraordinary and unusual places, this tome offers travel inspiration for those who prefer their vacations to be filled with the hidden, the unexpected, and the curious.
The Rose of Jericho, also known as the Resurrection Plant, may look dead, but don't be fooled. With a little bit of water, the persistent plant will open up and turn green again. Once the water is removed, it will go back to being a desiccated mass.
Kaleidoscope of Butterflies Poster from Pop Chart Lab
This butterfly print from our friends at Pop Chart Lab is sure to impress the entomologist in your life. Depicted are almost 50 species of the winged insects, from the iridescent blue Ulysses to the camouflaged dead leaf.
$29 from Pop Chart Lab (use code PCL-VDAY20 at checkout for 20 percent off this and other posters)
Love Fucking Sucks T-Shirt From the Museum of Broken Relationships in Los Angeles
Maybe you just broke up with someone. Maybe you're pretty unhappy about it. Maybe all these Valentine's Day gift guides make you want to claw your eyes out. Maybe you're over the whole flower-card-chocolate industrial complex. Then the Museum of Broken Relationships in Los Angeles has the perfect shirt for you.
In Japan and Korea, and increasingly in the U.S., blood type personality theory has become a guiding principle for some in the dating world. The idea is that your blood type indicates your personality, and so biology becomes a handy cheat-sheet for matchmaking purposes. The theory lacks scientific grounding, but if you're still interested in trying it out, all you need is to know your blood type and that of your intended partner.
From 1974 to 1976, the photographer Langdon Clay took portraits of lonely cars on New York City streets. The cars sit by themselves, without a driver or passenger in sight. Some are covered in frost from a cold winter's night, while others prominently display the dents and bruises accrued over their driving lives. If you're alone this holiday and feeling a little dreary, meditate over this collection of long-gone cars and remember: everything is impermanent.
Surprise your sweetheart with a trip to Venice! Join us this July as we explore the hidden side of this beloved Italian city. Together we'll see forbidden islands and secret canals, indulge in local food and music, and celebrate the end of the Plague at the 500-year-old Redentore Festival. Your hosts include the psycho-mambo brass band Gato Loco, who will perform for you during the trip.
A Cabbage, or a Carrot, or a Piece of Celery, or Even a Radish
Sure, you could go the cliché "box of chocolates" route this February 14. But why be like everyone else? Instead, purchase your partner some produce... and then turn that produce into a musical instrument and play it with your nose. If you need some inspiration, vegetable artisan Junji Koyama has an entire YouTube channel where he plays the cabbage slide whistle, the celery nose flute, and the radish ocarina.
On Monday, the North Ayrshire Council, which represents some 136,000 people in southwest Scotland, issued a warning on their website: beware, they said, of poisonous parsnips at the local beaches.
The plants in question, known as Hemlock water dropworts, are not actually parsnips, they just look like parsnips. They've been spotted on beaches in Ayrshire, on the Scottish coast, around 25 miles from Glasgow.
The council is especially urging pet owners and parents to be vigilant. If consumed, the plants can be deadly for animals, while just touching them can produce severe burns for humans.
The Hemlock water dropwort "can often be found in shallow waters and is most toxic during late winter and early spring time," notes the Ardrossan Coastguard Rescue Team ("Search and Rescue—it's what we do") on Facebook.
The plants have been known to be poisonous for decades now, if not millennia. In fact, they might have been responsible for what Homer called the risus sardonicus, or the "sardonic grin," a bizarre distortion of one's face. In ancient Sardinia, the plant was fed to older residents who could no longer care for themselves, Scientific Americanreported in 2009, thus giving them a grin before they were ceremonially killed.
The symbol of the jester, or joker or fool, has inspired thrones, playing cards, and comedic fart acts. But there's one particular image of the king’s fool that has remained a true mystery among cartographers and historians.
In the engraving above, colloquially referred to as the Fool’s Cap Map of the World, the intricate bust of a court jester—complete with bells and bauble—includes a face showing the world as it had been charted in the 16th century. Despite researchers making close examinations of the map, they can only speculate why, when, and by whom this peculiar map was made, explains the map journalist Frank Jacobs on his blog about strange maps.
The Fool’s Cap Map of the World “is one of the biggest mysteries in the history of western cartography,” Jacobs writes.
This is what we do know about the map: measuring about 14 inches by 19 inches and printed with a copper-plate engraving, researchers estimate that the map dates between 1580 and 1590. That's because it matches the Ortelius oval map projections that had become common in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.
The Fool’s Cap Map of the World isn’t the first time the world has been visually mocked by a jester. In 1575, the French mapmaker Jean de Fourmont created his own foolscap map with a chart framed by the hood of a jester. While de Fourmont’s map is slightly smaller, and more oval in shape, the similarities are uncanny, writes Anne Chapple in Studies in English Literature. Academics believe that de Fourmont’s map most likely inspired the illustrator of the Fool’s Cap Map of the World.
The identity of the mapmaker is another unsolved mystery. In the left-hand corner, the name Orontius Fineus is inscribed, which is Latinized for Oronce Finé, a French mathematician and cartographer. Some claim Finé to be the illustrator, but he died at the age of 50 in 1555, before the map has been estimated to be published. Jacobs suggests that his name appears because he could have been the map's subject of ridicule. In 1524, Finé was jailed for practicing judiciary astrology, in which people would reason, make predictions, and even base medical decisions off of star charts and arrangements. Finé’s role in the map's creation remains a subject of speculation.
Many scholars believe that the mapmaker was Epicthonius Cosmopolites, whose name is mentioned in the left-hand cartouche: “Democritus laughed at it, Heraclitus wept over it and Epicthonius Cosmopolites portrayed it.” Still, very little concrete background information has been found. The Fool’s Cap Map of the World has created an array of deep, and dark, interpretations the world.
Traditionally, the fool was one of the only people who could freely criticize the monarchy. Some academics have thus interpreted that the map was created as a commentary on the inaccuracy of depictions and charts of the world in an age where much of it had yet to be thoroughly documented and discovered. Maps of this era were even known to be altered visually to support certain political ends.
“One way of reading the image would suggest that all seemingly universal truths, all apparently trustworthy knowledge or authoritative maps, are partial and untrustworthy in that they conceal a hidden social ordering,” writes David Turnbull in the book Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers.
Others see a more melancholy outlook on the world. The Latin phrases inscribed on the jester’s cap, staff, and shoulder belt lament the vanity of the world and the foolishness of those who love it, writes Chapple. On the staff is the phrase “vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” and one of the medallions of the shoulder belt says “oh, the worries of the world.” The quote on the bottom of the map, from Ecclesiastes, sums up the message of the map: “The number of fools is infinite.”
“The world is, quite literally, a foolish place,” writes Jacobs. “The uncomfortable truth told by this map is that the world is a somber, irrational and dangerous place, and that life on it is nasty, brutish and short.”
Map Monday highlights interesting and unusual cartographic pursuits from around the world and through time. Read more Map Monday posts.
Sometime around 12,000 years ago, a group of Paleolithic people went to the a beach on the Mediterranean Sea and gathered up pebbles. They were looking for a certain size and shape of rock, small and oblong. When they had collected enough, they used the pebbles for a special purpose: to apply red ochre coloring to the body of a dead person, as part of a funeral rite.
Millennia later, researchers have discovered 29 of those pebbles in an important Paleolithic gravesite. According to their analysis, published in a new report in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, those ancient people then purposefully broke the stones by hitting them at their center.The researchers believe they were “killing” the stones, breaking them of the power they had obtained from touching the dead body.
The cave where the pebbles were found, the Caverna della Arene Candide, is on the coast of Italy, not far from Genoa. It was rediscovered in the 1860s and has long been a source of evidence for archaeologists about the traditions of people living far in the past. Archaeologists have found 19 well-preserved burials here, including one of a young man buried 23,500 years ago.
The pebbles the researchers examined still had traces of red ochre on them. Archaeologists have found similar evidence of people breaking objects as part of funeral rites, but none that goes back this far in time. "If our interpretation is correct, we've pushed back the earliest evidence of intentional fragmentation of objects in a ritual context by up to 5,000 years," the study's lead author said in a release.
The USSR was first established in December of 1922, but months earlier, the new nation's future leaders ordered the deportation of a large number of Russian intellectuals.
The idea to exile the ideological opponents of the new Soviet state had come from Vladimir Lenin himself. In May of 1922, Lenin sent a letter to the head of the GPU, the state security organization in charge of, among other things, dealing with dissidents and enemies of the Soviet state. The letter ordered the director, Felix Dzerzhinsky, to organize teams to research the backgrounds and political leanings of academics and writers. Dzerzhinsky, a loyal Bolshevik, set to work and established a pair of committees, one to create a list of troublesome professors, and another to focus on students.
By mid-August, the individuals targeted by the GPU began to be arrested under the auspices of anti-Soviet activity. Prominent among them was the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, but the arrests targeted a wide array of thinkers, including “philosophers, economists, sociologists, scientists, journalists and other intellectuals.” The majority of those singled out by the GPU were not active counter-revolutionaries, but people who had intellectual differences with the Bolsheviks’ government plan.
Berdyaev, for instance, was a Christian philosopher. An anti-authoritarian in general, he did not believe that Communism was compatible with a truly equal society. Boris Brutskus, an economist, had been vocal in his belief that the proposed economic structure of the USSR would fail. Yuly Aykhenvald, a literary critic, had been critical of Leon Trotsky.
On September 28, 1922, loaded with its cargo of exiled thinkers and their families, the ship Oberbürgermeister Haken disembarked for Germany. And in November of that year, a second German vessel, the Preussen, carried yet more deported thinkers to Germany as well. All told, some 220 prominent intellectuals were forcibly removed from Russia before the official establishment of the Soviet Union.
Those who were deported on what are now remembered as the “Philosophers’ Ships” had lost the homeland they had spent their lives trying to improve. Some, such as Berdyaev, who along with some fellow exiles started a philosophical academy, were able to continue their intellectual careers in Europe. Others were not so lucky, falling into poverty and destitution.
At the time, the Philosophers’ Ships were portrayed by the Soviet Union as a peaceful, humane answer to dealing with problematic dissidents. On the rare occasions when this mass deportation is remembered today, it's often as just another blip in the rise of totalitarianism in Russia. The reality is that it signaled a clear shift toward enforced anti-intellectualism.
Sure, the human heart is a wonder—it keeps us alive, it's literally electric, it's the metaphorical seat of the soul, and so on. But can it regenerate itself? Does it pump exclusively clear blood? Can it freeze and then come back to life?
Some animal species' hearts can do this and more. We scoured the animal kingdom for cardiac marvels, from the depths of the ocean to the top of the Himalayas. Here are some of the strangest we found, divided into categories for your convenience.
Bugs
Earthworm
Depending on how you define your terms, earthworms either have five hearts, or no heart at all. While they lack the chambered, muscular organ that normally comes to mind, they do have five special blood vessels, called aortic arches, that contract in order to pump blood through the worm's body. Look really closely at a specimen, and you can see the arches squeezing and releasing. So if you break an earthworm's heart, don't worry—it has four more.
Cockroach
A human heart has four chambers, each with a specific job—if any of them fail, it's bad news. A cockroach heart, on the other hand, has 12 to 13 chambers, all arranged in a row and powered by a separate set of muscles. This built-in redundancy means that if any one chamber fails, the cockroach is barely affected. We humans have been outmatched once again.
Marmalade Hoverfly
Marmalade hoverflies like to linger in the air over flowers, harvesting as much pollen as possible in one trip. To do this, they've evolved what is essentially a one-track heart—it spends almost all of its time and energy pumping blood forward into the head and thorax, where the wing muscles and mouthparts are. The abdomen gets only the occasional kickback, when the heart would otherwise be resting.
Fish & Their Neighbors
Zebrafish
Sure, the zebrafish looks like your average pet store minnow, but under that stripy exterior beats what is, effectively, a superhero's heart. In 2002, scientists discovered that if you cut out up to 20 percent of the zebrafish's lower ventricle, they regenerate all that lost tissue within a couple of months. This happens thanks to specialized muscle cells that not only promote their own growth, but jumpstart the production of new veins. By studying these self-healing hearts, researchers hope to eventually apply their strategies to human organs.
Ocellated Icefish
Ocellated icefish live about a kilometer down in the Southern Ocean, which is the one next to Antarctica. How do they cope with the cold? Partly thanks to their tickers, which are much larger, and about five times stronger, than your average fish heart. Their blood also lacks hemoglobin, the red protein that normally binds to oxygen—instead, thanks to the low temperatures, oxygen is dissolved directly into their plasma. Because of this, they have clear blood. Icefish indeed.
Cuttlefish
Like all cephalopods, the cuttlefish has three hearts—one for each gill, and a third for the rest of its body. Research has shown that cuttlefish in cold waters have larger hearts than those in warmer waters, to enhance aerobic capacity. They also have hemocyanin instead of hemoglobin in their blood, which means that their blood is blue. Very aristocratic.
Birds
Blue-Throated Hummingbird
You've probably heard that hummingbirds flap their wings 15 times per second—so fast that the human eye just sees a blur. Enabling that wingspeed is an even faster heart, which in the blue-throated hummingbird has been measured revving up to 21 beats per second. This efficiency helps enable the hummingbird's unparalleled ability to bring oxygen to its muscle mitochondria, which researchers say "may be at the upper limits of what [is] structurally and functionally possible" for vertebrates.
Bar-Headed Goose
Migration is tough on every bird, but the bar-headed gooses' route is particularly taxing—they head straight over the Himalayas. Flocks are regularly observed winging it through mountain passes about 20,000 feet above sea level, powered by unusually strong hearts, which are connected to the flight muscles by super-organized sets of extra capillaries, and can pump five times faster in flight than at rest. They're also able to hyperventilate without getting dizzy, which helps.
Emperor Penguin
Emperor penguins are famous for the softness of their hearts. Serial monogamists, penguin couples spend most of each year tending each other, their eggs, and their chicks. Less well-known, but equally important, is the slowness of their hearts. While diving, emperor penguins can dial back their heart rate to about 15 beats per minute, shutting off blood supply to all but the most vital organs and doling out only as much oxygen as is necessary for deep-water hunting. And when they come back up, they do so at a sloping angle, like a scuba diver avoiding the bends.
Reptiles & Amphibians
Wood Frog
Plenty of animals, from bears to groundhogs, slow down their hearts when hibernating—but as far as we know, only wood frogs can stop the beat completely. During the winter, these frogs essentially become frogsicles: thanks to special solutes in their cells, they can halt metabolic activity and allow most of their body water to solidify, all without any lasting damage. Their hearts take it in stride, stopping when the world freezes and starting again when it thaws out.
Glass Frog
All frogs have three-chambered hearts, with two atria, which receive blood from other parts of the body, and one ventricle, which shunts it back out again. Glass frogs are unique in that you can actually see this happening—their translucent abdominal skin provides a great view of the heart at work, as well as the blood vessels snaking through its other organs.
Python
If a human heart is filled with fat, there's cause for concern, but if it's a python heart instead, things are going great. After one of its famously giant meals, a python's heart increases in size by about 40 percent, swelled up by fatty acids absorbed from the meal. (This speeds up digestion, which still takes days.) Its blood gets so full of the fatty acids, it turns opaque—"like milk," researcher Leslie Leinwald told National Geographic.
Mammals
Blue Whale
Popular legend holds that a blue whale's heart is as big as a car, and that a human could crawl through its aorta. This isn't quite true—those that scientists have on hand are closer to "the size of maybe a small golf cart or a circus bumper car for two," and the aorta could barely fit a human head, as scientist Jacqueline Miller told the BBC in 2015, after dissecting one. Still not too shabby, though.
Giraffe
You know those carnival games where you hit a lever and, if you're good, the target shoots six feet up into the air? A giraffe's heart has to do that all day, every day, fighting the pressure of gravity to get blood up to the head. He manages this by having extra-thick, extra strong cardiac walls, and blood vessels that expand and contract quickly and easily. The blood vessels also get thicker as the giraffe's neck gets longer, so that they don't collapse under the increasing weight.
Cheetah
A cheetah's resting heart rate is around 120 beats per minute, about the same as a jogging human's. But while the human heart rate tops out around 220—and takes a little while to get there—the cheetah's heart skyrockets to 250 BPM in a few seconds. This ramp-up is so intense that it limits the cheetah's sprinting time to about 20 seconds, after which her organs would become so hot they'd be permanently damaged.
Some stories are so good that they’re told over and over again, morphing in their details but staying the same in their essence. In Europe’s High Middle Ages, one of the most persistent stories was a gruesome tale of love and cannibalism, the Legend of the Eaten Heart. For years, starting in the 1800s, scholars tried to sort through the story’s many versions to puzzle out where it had originated, but there was a difficulty—one Indian version of the exact same story that had to be somehow factored in.
The scholars who collected versions of this story counted them differently, but there are somewhere between about 14 and 24 distinct tellings, starting around 1150 A.D., as an aside in the story of Tristan and Iseult. In the most basic version of this story, a married woman takes a lover, and her husband finds out. When the lover dies or is killed, the husband takes possession of his heart, cooks it, and feeds it to his wife, who dies shortly after.
There are two main variations, dealing with how the lover dies. In one version, the husband tracks down the lover and kills him. In the second, the lover dies some other way, usually when he goes off to the Crusades. He wants his heart removed and sent back to his lady love (this was a popular gesture at the time), but while the heart is en route, the husband intercepts it and takes possession.
No matter what, the wife eats the heart. That’s a key bit. She almost always dies after that, usually by throwing herself out the window or refusing to eat, sometimes both. Occasionally she dies of grief. When she survives, which is rarely, she ends up in a convent. Although she’s always in love with the dead man, in some versions of the story, her love is innocent and never consummated. More often, though, she’s an unrepentant adulteress. In one of the most famous versions, the Lai d’Ignaure, there’s not just one but 12 women involved, all of whom have cheated on their husbands with the same man.
Besides being a thrilling tale about a woman or women being tricked into cannibalism, the legend of the eaten heart is a story about power. Who wins in the end, the husband or the wife? Different versions have different answers to that question: sometimes the husband is explicitly punished for his transgressive act by a vengeful relative of his wife or by being exiled from his home.
There’s a Christian overtone to the story, too, in the ritual consumption of the body; in Ignaure, the 12 women stand in for 12 apostles, and it’s not clear that they’re the villains. In A Perverse History of the Human Heart, the scholar Milad Doueihi writes that the story is a sort of parody, working at “the intersection between Christian and Greek mythology,” drawing on both the story of Christ and of Dionysus, who is cooked and eaten by the Titans and reborn from the one organ they don’t consume, his heart. In Consuming Passions, another scholar, Merrall L. Price argues that the Christian overtones of consuming the heart allow the women in the stories to “regain a final dignity” and “punish their husbands doubly in choosing to die.”
For many years, it was thought that this story came from Europe. Most of the extant versions came from European literary traditions, in England, Germany, France, and Italy. There was one Swedish version, too. In the 1880s, though, one folklore scholar found a version of the story that included all the key elements in the Punjab district of India, and everyone studying this story had to scramble to account for that. Was the Indian version derivative of the European versions, or vice versa?
Some scholars changed their allegiance to a possible origin outside of Europe; others staunchly defended the status quo. But an influential article published in 1911, dedicated to understanding the interrelationship of the stories, had a different answer. That paper showed that it was most likely the Indian version of the story. The European versions, particularly those in southern Europe that inspired the version in Boccaccio’s Decameron, most likely came from the same, unknown source. No one place could definitely lay claim to this story—it’s just a classic.
In 2013, researchers excavating a convent in Rennes, France dug up a 450-year-old lead coffin. Inside, they found a strikingly well-preserved body, wearing leather shoes and swathed in religious cloaks.
They also found something else—another, much smaller lead box, in a familiar shape. When they opened it up, there was a human heart inside.
As National Geographic reports, the body was that of a 17th century noblewoman, Louise de Quengo. The heart belonged to her husband, a knight named Toussaint de Perrien.
Historians already knew that European aristocrats were occasionally buried apart from certain of their body parts, generally for political and religious purposes—to maximize prayer sites, or, if the deceased perished far from home, to pay fealty to their country.
But according to new research from France's National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research, Louise and Toussaint are the only dead couple on record to have done it for love.
"Toussaint de Perrien died in 1649—seven years earlier than Louise—and was buried 125 miles away" from her home in Rennes, National Geographic writes. But first, his heart was cut out and stashed in the lead container. Louise hung onto it until she died, too, and then she literally took it with her to her grave.
There's another piece to the puzzle: when researchers performed a CT scan of de Quengo's body, she, too, was missing her heart. They figure Touissant probably has it. Happy Valentine's Day, everyone.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
Fingernails have a functional purpose—they’re shells for our fingertips—but they sure come with an annoying side effect.
That effect? The fact that, every couple of weeks, you have to cut them. No matter who you are, you have to go through this process where small pieces of your keratin fly everywhere because you’re shoving them in a nail clipper. But the modern nail clipper is a fairly recent phenomenon, roughly as old as the Swiss Army Knife. Which means that for most of human history, clipping one's nails was a little harder than digging your rusty clipper out of the medicine cabinet.
Nail-clipping history, it turns out, is also surprisingly complicated, a hygienic practice that at times was shrouded in superstition, in addition to including a lot of unknowns. Who invented the ubiquitous modern nail clipper? That's one fact, for starters, that we might never know.
Around 1875, patents for the modern nail clipper began to appear, with the first such trimmer, designed by a man named Valentine Fogerty, though the design of his device could best be described as a circular nail file rather than a keratin clip. The first design in the USPTO’s files that I could find with anything in common with modern designs came from inventors Eugene Heim and Oelestin Matz, who were granted a patent for a clamp-style fingernail clipper in 1881. (These days, standard nail clippers are so common that any patents on them have long since faded away, though that hasn't stopped new variations from being created, much like with the umbrella. Who hasn't ever wanted a nail clipper that automatically stores your nail clippings?)
Both devices were trying to solve a problem that, before then, was solved with old-fashioned knives. Take the patent for R.W. Stewart’s finger-nail cutter, which has more in common with peeling an apple than pressing a clamp. And if you’ve ever used a paring knife to peel an apple, that’s how fingernails were cut before there was a designated tool for it, whether using an actual knife or small scissors. In fact, based on my research, terms like “trim” or “cut” generally weren’t used to describe the process until the 19th century. Before that, we described it as “paring.”
Still, by the end of the 19th century, superstitions about how and when to trim fingernails were pretty common. An article published in the Boston Globe in 1889 (though credited to the New York Sun), noted that one superstition of the time was that people couldn’t cut their fingernails on weekends out of fear that it might lead to back luck.
“It is unlucky to cut the finger nails on Friday, Saturday or Sunday,” the article explained. “If you cut the on Friday you are playing into the devil’s hand; on Saturday, you are inviting disappointment, and on Sunday, you will have bad luck all week. There are people who suffer all sorts of gloomy forebodings if they absentmindedly trim away a bit of nail on any of these days and who will suffer all the inconvenience of overgrown fingernails sooner than cut them after Thursday.”
(Let’s be honest: This superstition sucks. A much better superstition: The idea that white specks on the fingernails would lead to good fortune.)
But all this chatter about paring knives and superstitions only gets us back two centuries. Where do we go after that?
Well, since we don’t have a firm backing for a lot of this historic stuff, literature is a helpful friend. In 1702, for example, Irish dramatist George Farquhar’s The Twin Rivalsmakes a reference to nail-paring.
“… I found another very melancholy paring her Nails by Rosamond’s Pond," according to one passage, "and a Couple I got at the Chequer Alehouse in Holboure; the two last came to Town yesterday in a Weft-Country Waggon.”
Going back further, we know a few other things about fingernails, like the fact that the longer your nails were during China’s Ming Dynasty, the less likely it was that you did hard labor. But our interest in well-groomed fingernails comes from even further back: the ancient Romans, to be specific.
Again, the evidence comes from literature. The satirist Horace repeatedly touched upon fingernails in his works. In the work Satires, dated 35 B.C., Horace came up with the idiom of biting one’s fingernails out of nervousness (or as he put it, with some modernization, “… in the composition of verses, would often have scratched his head, and bit his nails to the quick.”)
But a later work, the first book of Epistles (circa 20 BC), offers up the largest historic hint. In a passage where he introduces an auctioneer, he also makes reference to the process of nail trimming in ancient barber shops. A modern reference from Poetry in Translation:
Philippus the famous lawyer, one both resolute
And energetic, was heading home from work, at two,
And complaining, at his age, about the Carinae
Being so far from the Forum, when he noticed,
A close-shaven man, it’s said, in an empty barber’s
Booth, penknife in hand, quietly cleaning his nails.
Also in Horace’s time was a pivotal moment in the history of nail polish. Egyptian pharaoh Cleopatra, who lived between 69 and 30 B.C., was known for using the juice of henna plants to paint her nails in a rust-red color—and due to the social code of the time, she was one of the few to dye her nails red.
Going even further back, there’s a reference to trimming fingernails in the Old Testament, Deuteronomy 21:12, replete with some ancient gender politics. Per the New American Standard translation:
When you go out to battle against your enemies, and the LORD your God delivers them into your hands and you take them away captive, and see among the captives a beautiful woman, and have a desire for her and would take her as a wife for yourself, then you shall bring her home to your house, and she shall shave her head and trim her nails.
So, a written acknowledgement of fingernail-trimming that dates back to, roughly, the eighth century B.C.—long before Valentine Fogerty’s existence.
But let’s say, after reading all that, you’re more interested in where nail-clipping is going, rather than where it’s been.
To put it simply, the clipper has evolved in some weird ways in recent years, including:
Giant handles: Do your toenail clippers need a strong grip so they don’t keep falling out of your hands? If so, the well-reviewed Bezox Precision Toenail Clippers might be your ticket. Maybe they’re overkill, but so are your toenails.
A rotary turn: One of the problems with standard-size fingernail clippers is that one hand is often stronger than the other, meaning that when your non-dominant hand cuts, it’s more likely to slip, making it more likely to bend a nail. A potential solution the the problem comes in the form of a rotary nail clipper, which turns the clamping motion on its side.
Really long clippers: Combining the first two items in a wacky way is the Antioch Clipper, a device introduced in 2011 to make it possible to clip toenails without bending over at the waist—which may be of benefit in some cases, but lends itself to a design that is best described as a combination nail clipper and pair of tongs.
Really expensive clippers: Do you really need the world’s best nail clipper at your disposal, as the Khlip Ultimate Clipper describes itself? Perhaps not, even though it “gives you increased control and leverage as you trim your nails” due to its award-winning design. A Gizmodo review really says it all: “The Klhip Ultimate Nail Clipper Is Ultimately Just Expensive.”
Going electric: The Vanrro V1, a futuristic nail clipper, is looking for support on a crowdfunding site, though the term clipper is actually a misnomer—it’s really a nail grinder, kind of like the sort they sell for dogs. But the attempt has only raised $210 so far, and a similar effort shut down with no notice whatsoever last month. Hey, at least the clippers don’t support IFTTT.
But maybe the real issue isn’t the clippers—but that you don’t know how to clip your nails the right way, to ensure they’re even all the way around. Fortunately, there’s plenty of advice on that.
“Look at all ten nails and pick out the shortest, or that with the smallest amount of ‘white’ at the tip,” notes Deborah Lippmann a celebrity manicurist, in an article at GQ. “Use that nail as a reference to ensure all nails are being filed to a uniform length and shape.”
Lippmann also recommends using an actual emory board on your nail, treating your cuticles right so as to avoid hangnails, and to leave a sliver of “white” at the top of the nail.
The best-looking fingernails, in other words, aren't cut with anything special, they are just the ones with the most TLC.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
