No one knew exactly where the alligator came from, but wherever it was, it probably contributed to its unusual colors. Alligators don't naturally turn orange, but environmental influences can change their skin to that color.
Now, another orange alligator has appeared, this one in North Carolina. Myrtle Beach Onlinereports that in Calabash, North Carolina, residents have spotted another orange alligator, who they have named, inexplicably, Donny.
So far there's no indication that the two alligators are connected in any way, but since it is rare to come across an orange alligator, it's easy to imagine these two were hanging out together in the wrong neighborhood. Eventually, they'll shed their orange skin and return to normal alligator color.
Last year, as corpse flowers stunk up conservatories around the country, Seattle's specimen, Dougsley, committed an embarrassing gaffe: it failed to bloom. After opening up only halfway, the massive tropical flower began to decompose, failing to smell even a little bit bad.
"Dougsley appears to have been a dud, and has been removed from the building," the Seattle Volunteer Park Conservatory posted afterwards.
Although the city still stings from this snub, the other plants have been making up for it, Capitol Hill Seattle reports. For instance, right now, the Conservatory is home to its first blooming jade vine.
The eerie plant, which suspends itself from a tree, is covered with claw-shaped flowers the color and texture of mint toothpaste. In the wild, it's pollinated by bats, which hang upside down off its flowers and drink the nectar inside. Cultivating it indoors requires a constant flow of moist air, and a lot of patience—this one has been growing for several years.
According to a post on the Conservatory's Facebook, the jade vine will hang around through mid-March. Although it has big shoes to fill—"Does it smell or eat bugs?" one skeptic wondered on Twitter—we are confident that it will win over the haters.
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 Balancing Bluebottle wasn’t exactly a hit when it first premiered at the Palace Theatre in London in autumn 1908. The star of this short silent film was a common fly turned circus performer, filmed so closely and clearly you could see the hairs on its body, and projected to monstrous size on the film screen. Stuck on its back to a tiny wooden podium, the fly went through its tricks: Rapidly twirling a matchstick, then a piece of bread, a blade of grass, and finally, a ball twice its size while another fly balanced on top.
It was remarkable—so remarkable that it had to be a trick, viewers concluded. After all, the film was being shown at the Palace, a music hall that went in big for vaudeville-type entertainment, and viewers were used to rudimentary cinema “magic” and special effects.
A month later, on November 11, 1908, the film was presented by its maker, 28-year-old amateur naturalist F. Percy Smith, at a meeting of the Royal Photographic Society. The presentation lent the film the authenticity and a context it lacked in its initial showing at the Palace—it was real, nothing faked, and no insects were harmed in the making—and placed it at the fore of a new kind of cinematic experiment: Using a “cinematograph” to offer access to a previously hidden world of nature. Dozens of reports in the press followed. So, too, did a “fortnight’s nervous breakdown” for Smith, whose shy nature might have been better suited to patiently filming flies glued to miniature podiums than dealing with reporters.
The Acrobatic Fly, the 1910 rerelease of The Balancing Bluebottle and on the only surviving footage from the original film.
The Balancing Bluebottle isn’t something we’d pay to see on an iMax screen now. But at the time, the film represented the cutting edge of what was possible in cinema: Using a hand-cranked camera to turn out magnified images of the previously cloistered worlds of the animals, plants, insects, and even microbial creatures around us. After the juggling fly, Smith further expanded the realm of possibility with more technical innovations, including time-lapse, micro-cinematography, and underwater filming. And as he did, he would set the mold for how modern-day nature and science documentaries look, sound, and feel.
Frank Percy Smith was born in 1880 in Islington, a north London neighborhood then witnessing the flight of the middle class to the suburbs. There are few biographical sources available on Smith, but in 1993, Mark Burgess published a thorough and loving piece on Smith in the Quekett Journal of Microscopy; many of the details here are from his account. From an early age, Smith was a tinkerer—he built his first microscope as a teenager, attaching an eyepiece and an objective to a plant sprayer he found in the garden and using a broom handle as a tripod. His particular interest was in British spiders, and he spent hours collecting them in Epping Forest, a short train journey out of London.
Despite Smith’s attraction to natural history, his family pressured him, an only child, to take a job as a clerk for the Board of Education; he began work at the age of 14. He did it—and even designed time-saving devices, such as a rotary duplicator made from a cocoa tin—but he didn’t like it. When he wasn’t working, he was collecting spiders and examining them under his microscope, or reading up on natural history. In 1899, Smith, 19, joined the Quekett Microscopical Club, founded in 1865 for microscope enthusiasts. Soon after, he was supplementing his small income with lectures, aided by “magic lantern” projections of photographs he took himself.
His first experiments with cinematography began in 1908, all because of a pet fly. According to Burgess’s report, “To abate the crushing boredom of his job, [Smith] befriended a bluebottle.” The fly was kept on a leash and fed with milk; Smith took an incredibly magnified picture of the fly drinking, its long, spongy tongue absorbing the milk, and showed it around his office. The story goes that one of his officemates showed the picture to Charles Urban, an early film producer and distributor who specialized in what were called “interest” films, factual films about interesting topics. In May 1908, Urban lent Smith a cine-camera and two rolls of 35mm film, and said, “Show me what you can do.”
Smith came back with footage of dragonflies, wood ants fighting, and ants milking an aphid; he was promptly given another two rolls of film. Now, Smith was working—part-time—for the man who, if he didn’t invent modern, cinematic edu-tainment, certainly did quite a lot to promote it.
“We owe quite a lot of Charles Urban’s particular business acumen, that he saw the scientific side of these spectacular entertainments … It’s representing the world of wonders more or less as a music hall act,” says Dr. Tim Boon, chief curator at the Science Museum of London and author of Films of Fact, a history of science in film.
That cinema, itself a kind of technological marvel, could be used to explain or describe science was an idea present from the very early days of moving pictures, when there was a clear impulse to depict fact rather than fiction. But though travelogues and newsreels had a place in popular entertainment, much of the scientific footage was confined to scientific circles. Urban’s innovation was in realizing that laypeople would be interested as well.
In 1903, he’d exhibited a series of films shot by zoologist and filmmaker F. Martin Duncan at the Alhambra Theatre in Leicester Square, London. The program included the one-minute Cheese Mites, in which a scientific gentleman at lunch discovers, with his handy microscope, a whole world of hairy-limbed, crab-like beasts cavorting on his Stilton. These films necessarily occupied the same physical entertainment space as sentimental songs and bawdy comedy shows—music halls were one of the few places with projectors.
Urban’s partnership with Smith was natural—Smith was himself the product of a self-taught, amateur education in natural sciences. The fly films were Smith’s first release with Urban; Smith later wrote that the fly, that “unconscious little laughter-raiser,” was filmed “as the result of a technical scientific experiment,” an effort to “demonstrate, in the most graphic manner possible, its great strength and power of endurance.” He defended the film, explaining, “A certain element of novelty or humor was often a great assistance” in “introducing educational pictures to the public.”
With Urban’s backing, Smith was well on his way to becoming something unprecedented in his day: A filmmaker. In 1909, Smith began experimenting with stop-motion animation in To DemonstrateHow Spiders Fly, featuring a mechanical spider throwing a thread of silk to the wind to “fly.”
His next great achievement was The Birth of a Flower in 1910, a series of time-lapse—which he called “time magnification”—films of tulips, lilies, roses, and others blooming. That year, Smith—now married—left his position at the Board of Education to become a full-time “photographic expert” in “kinematography”, as he was recorded in the 1911 census. Later that year, Smith and his wife moved to Southgate, a semi-rural North London suburb on the verge of a population boom. The move afforded him more space; his studio there was a large conservatory he’d built to the back of the house, filled with his cobbled-together devices and any creatures he might have been filming.
It’s difficult to overstate the challenges Smith faced in getting the footage he was getting with the technology available at the time. His camera was hand-cranked and large, and his extreme close-ups meant that any vibration could ruin a shot. The film stock required intensely bright light, which was often harmful to the sometimes microscopic organisms he was trying to film. Filming underwater, through a glass observation chamber sunk into a pond, was a damp, dirty business. But he was relentlessly inventive. He rigged up alarms to his time-lapse devices to tell him when to change the film or if something had gone wrong. He was proficient and imaginative in animation—in one 1912 film, he used modeling clay and stop motion to make a lizard melt into a boot. He was patient with recalcitrant animals, but not above poking a porcupine with a stick to get it to show its quills, pushing a badger off a rock wall, or setting a ferret on a small snake, as a test reel shows. And he was persistent, trying for months, even years, to capture the bud opening, the otter catching a pike, the microscopic worlds of organic life hidden in pond water.
But then the war came and cinema-goers had less time for nature. Smith was drafted as a cameraman for the Royal Naval Air Service, eventually filming the surrender of the German fleet from an airship. Even after the war, there wasn’t a lot of call for his work; Urban, who was American, had since moved back to New York. So when Harry Bruce Woolfe, a film producer and businessman, came calling, Smith jumped on board. Woolfe’s company, British Instructional Films, was regularly turning out “interest” films about the recent war, travel, science, and nature; in 1922, Woolfe launched the Secrets of Nature series, short films dedicated to subjects like the life cycle of the newt or insect “infants.” He approached Smith in 1924 to handle insects, aquatic, botanical, and microscopic subjects.
Smith dusted off his machines and got to work. One of his first releases with Woolfe’s outfit, Battle of the Ants, was a staged battle between two nests of wood ants, set up by the Royal Zoological Society. “It was like watching a football match between several thousand players all wearing the same jersey,” Smith recalled. The film was typical of the work Smith would do for the Secrets series: Tightly focused and suffused with a gentle wit and clear affection for his subjects.“He’s got this great line, ‘If anyone ever calls something a pest, then I make a film about it and it becomes beautiful,’” says Dr. Oliver Gaycken, film studies professor at the University of Maryland and author of Devices of Curiosity, about the development of science films in early cinema. “He’s got this kind of devotion to the ugly, the overlooked, and his basic thesis is that the act of filming requires an act of understanding, which makes you love the thing.”
Smith’s devotion to his craft is underscored by the fact that most of his films were shot in his home; his conservatory studio had long since expanded to take up much of the house. The garden was choked with weeds, his frequent film subjects. Insects were everywhere, inside and out. By the later 1920s, the house was being eaten alive by mold of various kinds. It had started with the plates of rotting food and jars of pond water were everywhere, the stars of whatever he was filming; the mold spread, eventually stripping the paint and paper off one whole wall and never fully leaving the drawing room. This became a problem by the end of the decade: His reputation as a cinematic scientist, buoyed by Secrets of Nature, was enough that visiting dignitaries and important people wanted to visit him in his lab and studio. The executives at British Instructional Film, however, aware of the squalor, constructed a fake set for Smith at their studios.
By the end of its run in 1933, Smith had made a third of the 144 Secrets of Nature films, meaning that though he was not the only nature filmmaker, his style of film was fairly influential. His films were in many ways typical of the way nature and wildlife documentary worked then and, some would say, works now. In Battle of the Ants, for example, the titular battle was staged for the benefit of viewers; it would not have happened without intervention by the filmmaker and scientists. While Smith’s work was patiently observational, he was also aware that there needed to be some action—the ants needed to be doing something, we want to see the porcupine’s quills or the ferret take down a snake.
To what degree Smith was responsible for the jocularly anthropomorphizing commentary that accompanied his Secrets of Nature films is unclear; more likely, it was written by producer and editor Mary Field. But he was certainly party to the effort to humanize organisms. This is perhaps best illustrated in his 1931 film, Magic Myxies, a title he came up with after recognizing that a film about myxomycetes, a peculiar, seemingly sentient eukaryotic organism also known as “slime mold,” would need all the help it could get. On discussing the reproductive activities of the “myxie,” the narrator, in plummy, chummy tones, says, “If the Myxie has been so bad tempered that it has failed to find a partner, it is not allowed to become one of the party, but is eaten up. This is a far greater encouragement to matrimony than any tax on bachelors!"
The audience’s expectations of what a film about nature should look like were now set, especially given how popular the series proved to be with audiences and therefore distributors. The Secrets of Nature formula, however, relied on and perpetuated some problematic elements, many of which remain today.
“Unfortunately, in some ways, the manipulation of reality in nature films, with animals in wildlife films, hasn’t really disappeared,” says Professor Larry Engel, a wildlife and nature documentary filmmaker with more than 250 films to his credit and a professor at American University’s film school. “That’s not only disrespectful and unfair to that species, the shark, the porcupine, the tarantula, but it’s also immoral vis-à-vis the viewer, because you’re misleading, you’re lying.” Similarly, the inclination to anthropomorphize, to project human emotions and motivations onto animals, has also not gone away. “That’s where Percy’s generation came from, from sort of an environmental imperialism,” Engel says. “That’s where our industry is, sadly. Not much has changed.”
Smith’s work was the start of a thread that winds through modern-day nature and wildlife documentaries, how we expect them to look and sound like, the sorts of stories they tell—and, perhaps more positively, their mission. Smith wanted to use new technology to make natural science accessible to everyone, to make it astonishing and exciting. “I have always endeavored to administer the powder of instruction in the jam of entertainment,” Smith later said. In that, he certainly succeeded.
Despite his quasi-celebrity status, very little is known about Smith’s private life. “There’s a kind of psychological portrait that I’ve sort of glimpsed the little chunks of that is quite touching. Somebody who was sensitive, shy, who devoted his time and attention to these things that most people would not find interesting or valuable at all,” Gaycken says.
But in the 1930s and ‘40s, Smith was plagued by an intermittent illness; it was quite possibly depression. He seemed to feel himself to be a person out of place in time. “The world now sacrifices everything to speed; quiet seems to be regarded as a detestable condition to be expurgated by any means which applied science can devise,” Smith wrote in the 1930s, “and this state of affairs does not encourage the production of the type of individual who can satisfy himself in an investigation of the hidden beauties of Nature.”
On March 24, 1945, Frank Percy Smith died. The potted biography on the back of See How They Grow, the book that accompanied his film series on plants’ life cycles, claimed that he had been killed in wartime bombing. This is false: Smith, according to the judgement of the coroner, put his head in the gas oven in the kitchen of his Southgate home and killed himself “whilst the balance of his mind was disturbed." Smith was survived by his wife, Kate, and their daughter, but his reputation as one of Britain’s foremost cinematic scientists barely lasted a generation. His technical innovations were largely adopted by other cinematographers, but without tacit acknowledgement of who’d made them; the machines themselves were lost. His name was largely forgotten.
Smith is only now receiving the attention that he deserves for his contributions to science and nature filmmaking, attention he didn’t seek out in his lifetime. “His legacy has not been properly evaluated and will continue to grow ... because there’s a lot of information about him that still hasn’t been evaluated, brought to light,” says Gaycken. “We’ll have to wait.”
Nineteen films of the Secrets of Nature series, including some of Smith’s, were released on DVD in 2010 by the British Film Institute (although not, sadly, to a major sales windfall). In 2013, the BBC aired Edwardian Insects on Film, a look at Smith’s life by a modern-day documentary filmmaker trying to recreate Smith’s iconic bluebottle footage (no flies were harmed in the making of his film). That same year, Tim Boon participated in a half-hour BBC radio program on Smith. This year, Minute Bodies, an edit of Smith’s films put to a musical score by Tindersticks frontman Stuart Staples, will be making the film festival circuit.
Whatever Smith’s legacy turns out to be, it is clear that without him, modern wildlife and nature documentary could look very different. “We wouldn’t have the same natural history television if Percy Smith hadn’t been making those films between the two world wars,” says Boon. “What we would have, Lord knows.”
In June 1994, some fossils from Ontario's Kwataboahegan Formation—a cross-section of earth that is hundreds of millions of years old—were recovered, and, for the next several years, stashed at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.
That was until recently, when some researchers had a fresh look at them, finding something that's a bit terrifying: evidence of the 400-million-year-old existence of a giant worm with a disturbingly large set of jaws.
The researchers, from the University of Bristol in Great Britain and the University of Lund, in Sweden, published their findings today in Scientific Reports.
"Giant," in this case, is a bit relative, as this worm's jaws would've been close to a half-inch, and it would've been up to three feet in length.
Still, that's larger than the worms we see today, and large enough that, should you find yourself alone in the outdoors, any encounter might get dicey, very quickly.
But in a time before humans, this old worm got by on squid, octopus, and small fish, the researchers said. It is named Websteroprion armstrongi, after Derek K. Armstrong, the guy who first discovered the fossil in 1994, in addition to Alex Webster, the bass player for the death metal band Cannibal Corpse because, researchers said, Webster is a "giant" in his field and they are apparently big fans.
"This is fitting also since, beside our appetite for evolution and paleontology, all three authors have a profound interest in music and are keen hobby musicians," one researcher said.
But decades ago, long before Amazon Prime and same-day fish delivery services, when the American shipping industry was still in its infancy, it was similar, if wholly different kinds of companies that helped shepherd home delivery into adolescence: mail-order catalogs, from Sears & Roebuck and Montgomery Ward, namely, two shops you might have heard of.
Both companies' catalogs, each debuting in the late 19th century, successfully capitalized on the expansion of the country's mail and package delivery systems, in particular the novel service of postal delivery to rural addresses. They also coincided with the rise of the American shipping industry, beginning a symbiotic relationship that persists with giants like Amazon today.
Aaron Montgomery Ward, who founded his namesake company in 1872, was the first out of the gate, setting the stage for the mail-order business by delivering products through the budding rail system. As long as you could get to the closest rail station to pick it up, the idea went, Montgomery Ward could help you save a few bucks and get a better selection than the nearby general store—though that move wasn’t obvious right off the bat.
“The original plan of conducting our business, suggested by the growing combination of farmers to deal directly with a house near the base of supplies, was to ship goods by Express, collect on delivery (i.e. C.O.D.) only,” the company explained in a 1875 catalog, “But as time passed and strangers became friends, the necessity of reducing the expenses of transportation became apparent, and we allowed goods to go by Freight to Granges, when the Grange seal was affixed to the order.”
("Grange," by the way, refers to the National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry, a major fraternal organization representing farmers. Its influence, highlighted by its mark on the shipments sent via the rail system, was key to both the success of mail-order houses like Montgomery Ward and the later success of the rural mail system.)
Ward’s business succeeded, despite the fact that he had an early setback after his inventory was destroyed by the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
While Montgomery Ward was growing, a rail employee elsewhere was learning the system from the inside. From his early vantage point at a rail station in North Redwood, Minnesota, Richard W. Sears noticed that wholesalers sometimes had more supply than demand for their products, and took advantage of this at one point by buying a number of watches from a wholesaler below cost, then selling them at a tidy profit. It would soon become an important way for Sears to fill its eventual catalogs.
Sears and his colleague, watchmaker Alvah C. Roebuck, eventually moved far beyond watches, and, by the 1890s, Sears was beginning to outpace Montgomery Ward. Still, both were sizable at this point—and were about to become even bigger, thanks to the federal government at the time.
The biggest problem that mail-order catalogs faced at the turn of the 20th century was the fact that their intended audience—often rural, as that was 65 percent of the U.S. population at the time—didn’t have easy access to mail delivery. Outside of cities, the infrastructure just wasn’t there, and often people had to pay just to get someone to simply deliver their mail to them—let alone parcels, which the U.S. Postal Service didn’t handle at the time.
The solution to this problem was something called rural free delivery, which was heavily pushed by farmers’ advocacy groups. Despite the growing desire to create mail delivery in rural areas, there was much pushback on the issue within Congress due to the high cost, and as a result, the idea only came about in baby steps before finally rolling out wide in 1902.
And with that, mail-order businesses like Sears and Montgomery Ward could now get their catalogs to people around the country.
But it wasn’t an automatic change, of course. This need to get mail to rural areas was a major driver behind infrastructure building, leading to the creation of roads, eventually allowing cars to drive on those roads to deliver mail. Things improved enough that, by 1913, the U.S. Post Office itself was delivering domestic post packages.
Parcel post, which both Sears and Montgomery Ward lobbied heavily for, didn't come overnight, however. Traditional retailers fought the catalog giants on the issue in the political realm, which was part of the reason why domestic parcels came about 26 full years after foreign ones did. But once they did get off the ground, they helped redefine the companies' respective businesses. In the first year the service was available, Sears' sales increased fivefold, and its revenues soon surged.
The commercial machine of home delivery continues to alter the way shipping services and the U.S. Postal Service do business, of course.
More than a century after Sears made his discovery about wholesalers, for example, a businessman who had spent time on Wall Street and dabbled in internet-based technology traveled across the country, inspired by a Supreme Court ruling that changed the parameters of interstate commerce. Simply, the 1992 case Quill Corp. v. North Dakota set the rules so that businesses with no physical presence in a state were not required to collect taxes on sales they made.
Maybe it’s a cliché, but in Australia, sometimes you can’t even enjoy a nice meal without a giant lizard barging in. Luckily, there are fearless waitresses like Samia Lila who will take care of that free of charge.
As seen in a video that is making its way around the internet, Lila, a server at the Mimosa Winery in Murrah, Australia was able to wrangle a massive lizard, dragging it out of the restaurant by the tail. The colossal reptile, a goanna which was first thought to be a large dog, had sauntered onto the open-air deck where diners were enjoying a meal, but Lila just grabbed it and slid it out of the restaurant, while the beast squirmed.
The crowd of diners at the restaurant seemed pleased at Lila’s heroism, clapping and cheering as she went, but according to the Huffington Post, some people who saw the video were critical of the server’s handling of the beast, saying that it was cruel to drag the creature out by its tail.
Lila has said that she certainly didn’t want to hurt the animal, and it did not seem to be damaged by the eviction. Besides, next time you need to get a small dragon out of your brunch date, let's see you grab it by the head.
Most people don't go to the beach expecting to find human remains in the sand, but that's exactly what happens relatively frequently at Raisins Clairs Beach in Saint François, Guadeloupe. Over the past few decades, beachgoers have found bones, teeth, skulls, coffin nails, and, in the 1990s, even a metal bondage collar. It wasn’t until 2013, however, when a large storm surge washed away many meters of the shore, that a likely slave cemetery containing 500 to 1,000 graves was discovered.
Between 2013 and 2014, Guadeloupe’s Department of Cultural Affairs and its National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research launched two rounds of excavations at this otherwise tourist-friendly beach. Among the discoveries was a male human jaw containing incisors that had been sharpened into points, a clue to the deceased's origins being African. They also unearthed signs that the bodies had been buried between the 18th and 19th centuries, further indicating that this site had once been used as a place to bury slaves.
Dominique Bonnissent, regional conservator of the Archaeological Prefecture Department of the Guadeloupe Region of France, tells Atlas Obscura that once the teams determined that the site housed the remains of slaves, no future excavations were planned. “It was the will of the community,” she said, “to preserve this emblematic cemetery.”
What should be done, though, with the human remains and artifacts that had already been excavated? Some people in the community hoped that the nearby Edgar Clerc Archaeological Museum, which specializes in the pre-Columbian history of the Caribbean, or the Memorial ACTe, a slavery museum and memorial that opened in 2015, might be able to house them permanently. Yet according to Bonnissent, neither location had the capacity to properly store archeological artifacts, so instead, the state created a new archeological depository specifically for these remains.
In the midst of making these sensitive decisions, another large storm hit Guadeloupe in 2015, sweeping away more of the beach. Images soon circulated on social media that showed more bones than ever poking through the sand, and many locals were alarmed. In November of the same year, Joël Nankin, an artist living in the area, mobilized a group to take action.
Under pressure from these locals, many of whom formed an association called Silence and Oblivion, in 2015 the government installed an anti-storm surge system at Raisins Clairs, and Bonnissent says erosion is no longer an issue. “There are no more visible bones because they’ve been protected by geotextile formwork,” she says. Sand has also been brought in to refill what was washed away, and Bonnissent suggests that remaining graves are now “protected from swells and trampling by visitors.”
Geotextile formwork is a flexible, cost effective, and durable in situ solution, and for now it will likely protect the cemetery against most storms. Climate change has, however, increased the number and severity of storms throughout the Caribbean, and no formwork is failure-proof.
In 2016, Silence and Oblivion helped to organize Bòdlanmè pa lwen on Raisins Clairs. During this round table event, about 50 public authorities, archeologists, and community members came together to discuss the issues surrounding the cemetery and the development of a memorial project. For the most part, say participants, the conversations have been congenial and solution-oriented, and the government and community have found ways to work together.
Tourists and locals alike still frequent Raisin Clairs, and on most days the white stretch of beach is filled with people swimming, sunbathing, or dozing in the shade beneath seaside raisiniers, a species of tree that grows along this shore bearing fruit that resembles grapes. Food trucks operate just off the beach, and there's even a restaurant where beachgoers can enjoy locally caught seafood while taking in gorgeous views of the ocean.
The cemetery is now marked by two signs indicating its location. Still, despite efforts to respect and defend the space, it’s likely that future storms will continue to churn up bones, teeth, and other culturally important artifacts. Beachgoers should not only take care where they throw down their blankets—they may also want to take a moment of silence for the dead.
Over President’s Day weekend, a crowd gathered at the National Mall in D.C., and around 11 p.m. one of those people was defacing national monuments. Park police discovered strange graffiti first at the Lincoln Memorial, where there were two messages found, and later at the Washington Monument, the World War II Memorial, the D.C. War Memorial, and on a nearby power box.
Because the handwriting and the messages are similar, park police believe one person was responsible for all the messages.
Their content was mystifying. The messages referenced the JFK assassination and the 9/11 attacks. “Jackie shot JFK,” read one message. Another message read“blood test is a lie… leukemia, cancer and HIV.”
These message were written in tight, small spaces, about the span of a person’s hand. The National Park Service is cleaning them with a mild paint-stripper that’s fine to use on old stone; there’s no news yet as to who did this but police are searching for the culprit.
If you were standing by the Lion’s Gate, in the Old City walls of Jerusalem, you might hear this call to prayer:
If you were standing in New Delhi, more than 3,000 miles away, you might hear this one, the same idea shaped by its location:
These are two of close to 200 sounds collected by Cities and Memory, a field recording and sound art project, for its newest and largest collection, Sacred Spaces. The collection includes sounds of prayers, bells, churches, temples, organs, and songs, recorded in 34 countries and organized both by geography and category. You can listen to calls to prayer from around the world, discover the resonances of organs across the U.K., or compare the sounds of a shamanic chant in Peru, a prayer wheel in Kathmandu, and a quinceañera mass in Mexico.
The Sacred Spaces collection began after the U.K.’s Churches Conservation Trust asked Stuart Fowkes, the project’s founder, to document some of the sounds of the churches they care for. Some of these historic churches date back to the 1100s and 1200s, and they’re no longer actively used. Fowkes would coax some sound out of the organs, some 20 feet tall, and a few times got to ring the church bell.
“You go into these old churches, and there’s just a rope,” he says. “You start to pull on it, and the whole church fills with the sound of this ringing bell. You realize that even with a single bell, it’s much harder than it looks, because you have to get the rhythm exactly right, otherwise you get this weird stuttering effect. You have to get into the groove of it. It’s surprisingly hard work.”
Fowkes realized quickly that the project of capturing the sounds of Christian spaces in England could be expanded far and wide around the world. He was expecting the project would draw out the differences among the world’s religions, but instead he found that the collection of sounds highlighted their similarities. A church bell and a call to prayer serve the same function—organizing people’s days, telling them when it’s time to pray.
At the same time, though, these sounds are specificity tied to the place where they’re from. The bells of Villa del Conte, for instance, are so familiar to the people living in this small town in northern Italy that they can distinguish the sound of that bell from any other, says Fowkes. “It’s like an auxiliary heartbeat or the fingerprint of the town,” he says.
One of the features of Cities and Memory is its remixed "memory" versions of each sound clip, reimagined by a sound artist. These versions are meant to invoke the possibilities of places meshed with memory and personality: One person's experience of a place or sound doesn't necessary match with another's. Even the most universal sound is filtered through an individual experience.
The inputs we get these days are different than in the past, though, and some of the sacred sounds collected here are in danger of being drowned out. In Pendock, England, the medieval town that once surrounded the church has disappeared, and the building stands near a motorway. When Fowkes went inside the church to record its organ, the sounds of the motorway intruded on the recording, even through the stone walls of the church. And at the Westerkerk, in Amsterdam, the church bell was barely audible over the sound of the traffic.
“Think about bells in the Middle Ages,” says Fowkes. “The bell would be the loudest sound, outside the sound of a battle or an earthquake that anyone had ever heard. The bell was designed to be the loudest possible sound. Now, you go to a modern city, and the bell is barely audible over traffic.” When we listen to the world, it roars. In some of these sacred spaces, it's still possible to hear the sounds associated with contemplation for hundreds of years.
In 2008, when the Norwegian Government and the Global Crop Diversity Trust teamed up to open the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, they thought they were planning far ahead. The vault—essentially a massive safe deposit box for the world's seeds, kept safe and cold by Arctic ice—is meant to guard against future disasters, like nuclear war or climate change. If such a horror ever necessitates a total agricultural restart, these seeds will be, in the words of their caretakers, "the final back-up."
But the future has a funny way of sneaking up on you. In 2015—much sooner than anticipated—the vault was turned from ark to library, issuing hundreds of thousands of seed samples to the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA). Today, ICARDA is returning the seeds, successfully completing what amounts to the Vault's first real-world run.
ICARDA made their original deposit in 2008, sending hundreds of thousands of seed samples north to the vault from their primary bank in Aleppo, Syria. They figured they would stay there until some global cataclysm. But in 2012, in the face of a mounting civil war, ICARDA was forced to move their headquarters from Aleppo to Beirut. Although the Aleppo vault remained functional, it became increasingly difficult for the scientists to retrieve seeds from it.
So in September of 2015, ICARDA asked Svalbard for their seeds back to ensure they had enough to work with in Beirut despite their limited access to Aleppo. Over the next 17 months, researchers duplicated and distributed the seeds, until, finally, their set was complete. Today, they re-deposited 15,420 samples in the Svalbard vault, including legumes, winter cereals, and forage species, ICARDA reports.
It's certainly not encouraging that, a mere seven years after its creation, global unrest forced the Vault's doors open. "We did not expect a retrieval this early," Crop Trust spokesman Brian Lainoff admitted to NPR back 2015. But in some ways, it was a helpful test run. As the Director General of ICARDA, Aly Abousabaa, put it "we are demonstrating today that we can rely on our gene banks and their safety duplications, despite adverse circumstances, so we can get one step closer to a food-secure world." If we're going to keep the future of plants locked in a box in the Arctic, it's good to know that it works.
Last week, police in Edmonton set aside 24 hours to conduct a crackdown—dubbed the "Big Ticket Event"—on dangerous driving. Their efforts resulted in 2,442 citations for traffic violations, all recorded between last Wednesday and Thursday.
The police department's press release on the operation included one violation that stuck out: a person who was issued a ticket for "having a live ferret around their neck."
An Edmonton police official tells Atlas Obscura that she didn't have any "additional information" on the matter, except to say that the driver was issued a distracted driving ticket, the penalties for which are a fine equivalent to around $217, in addition to points on one's license.
The crackdown was enforced in part using a new distracted-driving law that went into effect in Alberta last year. Interacting with your pet is not specifically outlawed, but the province has said the issue was their "most frequently asked question."
The answer?
"In situations where the driver becomes too involved with their pet, police could reasonably argue that the distraction is comparable to the specifically banned activities of reading, writing, and grooming, and lay a charge," the Canadian province writes on their web site.
Perhaps you think your ferret-handling skills are pretty good, and, in this multitasking world we live in, you can safely drive while dealing with a furry, alive animal near your eyes and ears. But beware, the Edmonton police probably disagree.
For years, computers have provided humans with an endless supply of depictions of cats—cat pictures, cat gifs, cat videos, cat memes. If you really think about it, it's only fair that they should get a shot at creating them themselves. Enter edges2cats, a program that takes your squiggles and turns 'em into cats. Or, at least, tries:
Edges2cats is the brainkitten of programmer Christopher Hesse, who released it a few days ago, along with similar programs "edges2shoes" and "edges2handbags." (Those two are slightly less disturbing.) All of them use what is called "image-to-image translation," in which an AI is trained to transform a simple image—like lines and circles—into a more complicated one, with colors and textures.
This is fairly similar to Google's infamous image recognition network, which is learning to identify everyday objects by looking at tons and tons of labeled pictures. Instead of enjoying exposure to a lot of different images, though, edges2cats has only ever seen Shutterstock photos of cats. Because of that, it thinks everything is meant to be a cat—even a random scribble—and generously helps it along.
Despite edges2cats's obvious utility, it is not for everything. When Atlas Obscura tried to transform our logo, it didn't go so hot:
If you want to try your luck, you can find this nightmare cat generator here: https://affinelayer.com/pixsrv/. Have fun, and be careful.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
When the Century III mall in the south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania opened in 1979, it was the third-largest enclosed shopping center on Earth. With three stories and over 200 stores, it was the place to shop, hang, eat, and make mischief involving the indoor fountain.
Not anymore. In the early 2000s, local competition, a sagging economy, and retailer bankruptcies caused Century III to struggle. Tenant after tenant shut their doors for good, giving shoppers had fewer reasons to make the trek. In 2014, anchor retailer Sears closed, followed by fellow anchor Macy's in 2016.
Century III is now a dead mall—not entirely abandoned, but mostly deserted, and hauntingly so. A few big-name stores, such as JCPenney, Dick's Sporting Goods, and Bath & Body Works, are clinging on, but great swathes of the mall are boarded up and bereft of people.
The above video tour, created by Dan Bell as part of his Dead Mall Series on YouTube, gives a sense of what it's like to walk through this retail graveyard.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
A classified government document opens with “an odd sequence of events relating to parapsychology has occurred within the last month” and concluded with an alarming question about psychics nuking cities so that they became lost in time and space. If this sounds like a plot out of science fiction, it is - but it’s also a NSA memo from 1977.
The first “event” raised by the NSA note is a CIA report which mentioned KGB research into parapsychology. According to this, the KGB used hobbyists and non-governmental researchers to talk to western scientists. This allowed the KGB to collect useful information without putting themselves into a position to accidentally leak confidential information to westerners. According to the NSA note, this tactic yielded “high grade western scientific data.”
The next event described by the NSA note was what appeared to be a Russian provocation, though exactly what sort was a matter of some debate. In June 1977, an American journalist was detained in Russia for receiving a Soviet paper on parapsychology. The paper allegedly documented “PSI” (i.e. psychic) particles within the living cell, allegedly providing a physical basis for parapsychology.
This struck American intelligence as being a form of entrapment, though the goal was uncertain. Some thought it was an effort to provoke radio chatter which the Soviets could trace to get a better idea of the U.S.’s interest and activities. Another theory was that it was simply a warning to the West to stay away from sensitive Soviet research. A third theory was that it was “a double-think ploy to pretend interest in a clumsy manner to make us think that this was really just a deception to trick the West into believing there was interest when there really was none.” While this last theory might sound paranoid, this is how denial and deception operate - and it’s something that Russian counterintelligence has long excelled at.
The section concluded with a note that there had supposedly been a successful demonstration of “telekinetic power” in a Soviet military sponsored research lab, and the alleged discovery of a new type of energy “perhaps even more important than that of Atomic energy.”
The third event was the apparent postulation by “some physicists along with the famous evolutionist, Teilhard de Chardin” that the universe was more of a “great thought” than a “great machine.” According to this view, “the ‘unified field’ on ground of reality is awareness.” The note cited telekinetic experiments and postulated that “awareness focusing” could produce “a new form of energy that moves or perhaps alters matter.”
The report cited British scientists experiencing “poltergeist phenomena” after testing Uri Geller. Objects allegedly left the room, some of which apparently reappeared later. Supposedly, this didn’t surprise unnamed scientists who found it no harder to believe that objects could disappear and reappear than it was to believe in the “detected particles emerging from energy and dissolving or disappearing back into energy.”
From these premises, two types of telekinetic weapons were hypothesized: a telekinetic time bomb and the equivalent of a psychic nuke that could dislodge a city in time and space.
The first involved a member of the command and control staff being kidnapped and subjected to trauma that would allow him to be “suggestively programmed to develop telekinetic effects under stress at work.” The theory was that when an emergency situation arose and the officer was subjected to stress, objects would begin to move and disappear independently “and communications would become impossible.”
The second hypothetical weapon was even more elaborate and potentially terrifying. Citing a prediction of “a massive change which will alter the direction, time, space and energy-matter relationship of our world,” the note wondered what would happen if a group of psychics were brought together. If ten people who were “evidencing disruptive telekinetic phenomena” were brought into one area, would it “cause a chain reaction, causing much matter to reverse direction and sink back into a sea of energy or be displaced in time and space”? The memo concluded by wondering if such an event reach a “critical mass” and affect an entire city.
By an interesting coincidence, the “Philadelphia Experiment” hoax bears some superficial resemblance to the theorized weapon in the NSA note. According various versions of the hoax, the USS Eldridge was temporarily rendered invisible or transported through time and space. The incident is even listed on NSA’s webpage of paranormal topics that they don’t have records on. However, there were other papers prepared on the perceived potential of weaponizing psychic abilities, some of which will be explored later. For now, you can read the NSA note here.
This afternoon, an international team of scientists announced the discovery of not one, not two, but seven roughly Earth-sized exoplanets closely orbiting a dwarf star called Trappist-1. The discovery of this pocket-sized solar system vastly accelerates the quest for life outside our own, the researchers said during a NASA press conference.
Three of the planets—called Trappist-1d, e, and f—are in the star's "habitable zone," meaning their temperatures are in the right range to potentially harbor liquid water on their surfaces. "Having three of these planets in this habitable zone is very promising for the search for life," said Michaël Gillon, the lead author of the relevant study, upcoming in the journal Nature. Early measurements have also indicated that two of the planets, at least, are rocky (like Earth) rather than gassy (like Neptune).
Compared to the star that Earth orbits around, Trappist-1 is tiny—if our sun were a basketball, Trappist-1 would be a golf ball. But it has its planets in a much tighter orbit—it takes the closest planet, Trappist-1b, a mere 1.5 days to go around the star, while the furthest, Trappist-1h, takes about 20 days. This closeness makes up for the star's coolness, and creates possible conditions for organic life.
But before we start sky-fishing for aliens, there are still a number of items to check off the life list. Researchers are particularly interested in the chemical compositions of the planets' atmospheres. The presence of oxygen would indicate the possibility of life, while a particular cocktail of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and methane would make it almost certain.
Even if these three planets turn out to be dead as doornails, the implications of their discovery are still massive, researchers say. In the past, we've assumed that Earth-like planets could only be found around sun-like stars.
But if Trappist-1 is able to collect sizeable, rocky planets in its habitable zone, there's no reason to assume that other tiny stars can't, too. The universe could be full of tightly-packed solar systems with potentially viable planets. "These questions, about 'are we alone?', are being answered as we speak, in this decade and the next decades," said Thomas Zurbuchen, of NASA.
In the meantime, humanity's collective imagination is certainly alive, and speeding along at full blast. A website collecting creative works inspired by the discovery already has two short stories, a graphic novel, and a Dr. Seuss-style poem.
Researchers are happily indulging hypotheticals about the Trappist-1 living experience—the planets probably don't have moons, the sunlight is likely salmon-colored and about as bright as moonglow, and one side of each planet remains dark at all times, they say. NASA has even released a potential tourism poster, based on the fact that the Trappist-1 planets are just a hop away from one another.
If there's one thing we can expect—from Trappist-1 or whatever comes next—it's that what we eventually find will outstrip even our wildest imaginings. "It's very likely nature is way more beautiful and way more amazing than what we've animated here," said Zurbuchen, gesturing at artistic renderings of the Trappist-1 system—sleek, blue-dappled planets dancing around their tiny star. "It's always that way."
The Virgin of Guadalupe is sometimes called the “Patron Saint of Mexico,” and devotional altars to the holy woman can be found all across the country. But now she might also be referred to as the “Patron Saint of Illegal Gas,” after police in the town of San Martin Texmelucan—about 70 miles east of Mexico City—discovered an illegal fuel pump hidden within one of her shrines.
Fuel smuggling is a long-standing issue in the country, with smugglers tapping legitimate fuel pipelines and diverting some of it to makeshift fill-up stations, and now it seems like the smugglers are trying some holy new tactics to hide their stolen gas lines.
According to the Associated Press, local police discovered the secret gas line by following a trail of fuel to what appeared to be a regular altar to the Virgin. When they got closer, they noticed that there was a strange red hose poking out of it. There were also a handful of suspicious “customers” who took off running as the cops got wise to the scheme.
All said, they rounded up six people who were looking to fill up at the tap. Assumedly, the Virgin’s altar was stripped of its material gifts.
In London, the first ever mosque built explicitly as a house of worship was the Fazl Mosque in Southfields, which opened in 1926. But decades before, an immigrant from South Africa opened the city’s first-ever mosque, a makeshift space in his Camden apartment, dedicated to prayer and learning.
Haji Mohammed Dollie came to England in 1894 with his wife and two sons, reports Londonist. He quickly became connected to the city’s small Muslim community, which numbered a few hundred people at the time.
AbdulMaalik Tailor, a tour guide who specializes in London’s Muslim history, first read about Dollie in a biography of Abdullah Quilliam, who had opened England’s first mosque, in Liverpool, in 1887. Tailor started researching Dollie, and he found newspaper accounts telling the story of how Dollie had opened London’s first mosque in 1895. One 1899 story reported:
Gradually the parents themselves took to assembling in Mr Doullie's [sic] house for worship. Gladly did he suffer the intrusion and gladly did he set apart his drawing room, first at Albert-street and now at Euston-road, for the purposes of a mosque.
But there was no other details about the mosque’s location. Recently, though Tailor tracked down a record at the Camden Local Studies and Archives Center that listed Dollie and his address. When Dollie lived there, the street would have been filled with horses and carriages; now it’s a quiet street of row houses with a Whole Foods around the corner and a hidden piece of history tucked into its past.
As new technologies revolutionize and streamline our lives, more and more traditional crafts are falling by the wayside or becoming the domain of hobbyists. Among those that were once ubiquitous, but are becoming more obscure is the art of knot tying—once an essential skill in professions ranging from sailing to farming and today becoming a more and more specialized craft, as the number of people who use the traditional methods of knotting dwindle.
But there are still those, such as the members of the International Guild of Knot Tyers, who are working to make sure that these disappearing skills don’t unravel. The Guild was started in 1982 by Des Pawson, an expert knot tier, and Geoffrey Budworth, a police officer who was no slouch in the knotting department either. Uniting over a love of a new knot that was invented in the 1970s, the Hunter’s Bend, the duo soon came upon the idea of seeking out other knot enthusiasts. Eventually the Guild was formed, becoming an official U.K. charity, complete with government oversight.
“I became interested in knots when I was young, partly as a boy scout and partly as a sailor,” says Colin Byfleet, who is currently serving as the IKTG’s Secretary to the Trustees. “I’m about 74 now, and as I was coming up on retirement, I was living in France at the time, I met a group of people who were demonstrating knots, and that’s where it all started. I thoroughly enjoyed it.”
Byfleet’s lifelong interest in knots may have led him to his involvement with the Guild, but people come from a variety of different points of appreciation for the craft.
Byfleet, for instance, says that he’s most interested in the math and science behind knots, including how modeling projected knots can lead to surprising discoveries about their geometry. He says there are a number of mathematicians who are part of the Guild: “We have a spectrum, from a pure mathematician, all the way through to people who may be unemployed and just do it for fun.”
Expert knotting is generally considered to belong to the maritime world, but members of the Guild use their knowhow for a wide variety of uses. A deep knowledge of knots is needed everywhere from the rigging of Cirque du Soleil acrobats to law enforcement agencies who use forensic knotting, studying and identifying knots to help solve criminal cases in the same way one might study handwriting. “It’s a bit like folding your arms," says Byfleet. "Even if you tie simple knots, you tend to tie them the same way.”
Some members of the Guild prefer to focus on the related craft of rope-making, which in and of itself is a very particular art. Byfleet told us that he knows of Guild members whose focus is on church bell ropes, which need to be made in such a way that they stretch when pulled, making the sound of the bell less harsh and more musical.
While members might join the IGKT for different reasons, the Guild’s goal is always education, getting the word out about the joy of knots, and passing on the craft. They hold around 100-200 events around the world each year, where experts and aficionados come to hold seminars and show off their skills. While there is no directly competitive aspect to the events, the Guild does hold a handful of exhibitions each year to let the most skilled knot tyers, who can create knots with the most finesse and speed, show off their stuff. In an effort to get more kids interested in knots, they’ve also held speed tying contests, which Byfleet says were a pretty big hit.
The Guild isn’t a massive organization, but it does have a healthy roster of around 1,000 devoted members, spread across the world. As Byfleet says, there are an infinite number of knots, so it’s possible that that the Guild will continue to grow. Most standard types of knots, though, have already been catalogued in such books as The Ashley Book of Knots—the closest thing the Guild has to a bible.
With the rise of the internet, where people can share their techniques and skills at the touch of a button, Byfleet says that he can see a day when the Guild no longer serves a purpose, since knot knowledge is now readily available, and communication between experts has never been easier. But it doesn’t seem to bother him. “It might [disappear,] but it wouldn’t worry me if it did, because its purpose is being fulfilled anyway." As he says, learning something from an actual person is still better than just picking it up on the internet.
When Charlotte Carmody went to speak about twilight sleep, shebrought her “painless baby" with her. In churches and in department stores across the United States, in front of crowds of women who had been rallied by the Twilight Sleep Association, she told her story.
After reading a 1914 magazine article about the possibility of painless childbirth, Carmody had made a pilgrimage across the Atlantic Ocean, to a clinic in Freiburg, Germany, for her own delivery. When she went into labor, the German doctors gave her a combination of drugs; the next moment she remembered was waking up more than 12 hours later.
“Perhaps the baby will come tomorrow,” she thought to herself. It was only after a moment that she realized: “I felt lighter, and sat up easily, and my figure had changed.”
Minutes later, a nurse handed over her son. She named him Charlemagne, although at first she didn't believe he was hers: She didn’t remember his birth. “The twilight sleep” had swallowed the experience up and blanked it from her mind.
In later years, twilight sleep, in which women were put into a drug-induced trance, would come to exemplify America’s “knock ‘em out, drag ‘em out” era of childbirth, when women were given little choice about being medicated into a stupor during labor. But in 1914 and 1915, twilight sleep was a cause célèbre among American feminists, who formed twilight sleep associations and tried to spread the gospel. Like today’s home-birth movement, the movement promoting twilight sleep called for women to take control of their birth experiences and speak up against doctors who would deny them this choice.
Carmody, an early adopter of twilight sleep, was one of its fiercest advocates. “If you women want twilight sleep you will have to fight for it,” she told women rallying for the cause, “for the mass of doctors are opposed to it."
But while the feminists running the twilight sleep movement were trying to gain control of their bodies, the method they advocated was turned against them and used to rob laboring women of agency.
The push for twilight sleep started with a McClure’s Magazine article published in June 1914 by Marguerite Tracy and Constance Leupp, who had traveled to Freiburg and come back with glowing reviews of “a new and painless method of childbirth.” This method was safe and successful, they reported, and women from all over the world—from India, Russia, South Africa, and North and South America—were coming to the “odd old town” to experience twilight sleep. One person who had delivered a baby at the clinic declared “she would never again have the blessing of a baby without the attendant blessing of the Twilight Sleep,” the journalists wrote.
Tracy and Leupp described twilight sleep as “a very fine balance in the states of consciousness," which required "special knowledge of the use of drugs that cause it.” Once a woman had gone into labor, she was given a combination of morphine to dull the pain and scopolamine to dull her memory of the experience. (Today, scopolamine is sometimes called the "zombie drug" because its users become susceptible to suggestion but retain no memory of their actions.)
These drugs had been used in the past as anesthetics, but few doctors had adopted them with enthusiasm. But the German clinic, the McClure’s article reported, had reached a technical breakthrough with scopolamine, which allowed the doctors to administer it with more precision and therefore with more success. Women who they treated with these drugs would retain muscle control and would follow orders from doctors, but would remember none of it.
There were some strange conditions that went along with the use of these drugs. Because the women’s state of suspension was precarious, women in twilight sleep were kept in padded, crib-like beds, with eye masks blocking out the light and cotton balls in their ears blocking out sound. Sometimes they were fitted into straight-jacket-like shirts that limited the movement of their arms. When the birth was over, women also often experienced a moment of dissociation, as Carmody did: Had they really had a baby? Was the baby they’d been handed really theirs?
But to Tracy and Leupp, the benefits of this method were obvious. At the time, there was a growing concern, roughly analogous to today’s worry about the overuse of C-sections, that doctors were too quick to use forceps, which could increase risk and prolong women’s recovery time. The Freiburg clinic rarely used forceps in deliveries. The clearest selling point to the journalists, though, was women's experience: They awoke from Twilight Sleep without a memory of the pain of childbirth and were soon out of bed, getting to know their new child.
Carmody was the first woman to travel to Freiburg to give birth after the McClure’s article was published, and she came back with glowing reviews. But she barely beat the rush of American women to Freiburg. Tracy and Leupp’s article, McClure’s later reported, had attracted more attention than any other the magazine had ever published.
Advocates of twilight sleep didn’t want American women to have to travel to Germany to obtain this treatment, though. They started demanding that doctors and hospitals in America give women this option, and they formed the National Twilight Sleep Association to further their cause.
Led by Mrs. C. Temple Emmet, a member of the wealthy Astor family and the first American ever to have a baby at Freiburg, the association quickly formed plans for expansion by sending lecturers around the country and organizing branch associations. Not all of its leaders were from the wealthiest ranks of Americans; the association’s board included an elementary school teacher, a dental nurse, and the wife of a miner. At Twilight Sleep Talks women would extol the virtues of “painless childbirth.”
“I was so happy,” one women declared. “The night of my confinement will always be a night dropped out of my life,” says another. The association celebrated when a “tenement house mother” gave a twilight sleep speech on the corner of her street.
The twilight sleep movement was immediately controversial, though. While feminist women pushed for access to the technique, doctors fought back. They “refused to be ‘stampeded by these misguided ladies,'" historian Judith Walzer Leavitt wrote, in her account of the movement. Doctors wrote in the popular and academic press about the dangers of twilight sleep and argued that one popular article shouldn’t guide medical practice. But the practice also had advocates in the medical community, and soon American doctors were also traveling to Freiburg to train in twilight sleep techniques.
But, as innovators today might say, twilight sleep didn’t scale well. Even in the original McClure’s article, Tracy and Leupp wrote that the Freiburg method was almost impossible to practice in large hospitals, where space and the attention of doctors was at a premium. As twilight sleep was practiced at Freiburg, a woman ideally had her own room, to minimize the chance she’d be disoriented, and the doctor paid close attention to her progress through the whole course of her labor. At Freiburg, the clinic was only able to accomplish this level of care by tripling their delivery room staff, thanks to the support of the Grand Duke of Baden. When doctors and hospitals in America started adopting this technique, they usually were not able devote that same attention to individual women, and the outcomes suffered.
There was also a gruesome aspect to twilight sleep. Although women did not remember having pain during childbirth, they were still experiencing pain. That’s part of the reason their beds were padded and the women's arms constrained—they would writhe and yell during labor. The doctors at the time understood this: "There is as much [pain] as in the ordinary childbirth,” one doctor told The New York Times. “The only difference is that the patient does not remember having the sensation of pain."
Women who took the drugs did sometimes have memories of their labor and the attendant agony. One twilight sleep patient remembered telling the doctor, “I am having a very bad pain.”
“You are having a very bad pain,” he replied. In her memory, the experience was impersonal and far away. But for non-drugged observers, seeing the women’s pain could be horrific. One twilight sleep hospital on Riverside Drive was almost shut down by noise complaints from neighbors, who could hear the laboring women screaming.
For the women who advocated for twilight sleep, though, blacking this out of their memory was considered desirable. “It was an attempt to gain control over the birthing process,” wrote Leavitt, the historian. “Because many of the twilight sleep leaders were active feminists, they spoke in the idiom of the women’s movement.” While to later generations, twilight sleep was a horrifying treatment, in which zombified women were divorced from the experience of giving birth, to this generation, it was a new form of freedom, a way to erase the work and potential trauma of labor.
The twilight sleep movement was short-lived. The McClure’s article was published just before the start of World War I, and soon German technology and ideas were viewed with suspicion. More devastating, though, was the death of Charlotte Carmody, in 1915, while giving birth to her next child, in a hospital in Brooklyn that had adopted twilight sleep. She died of a hemorrhage, and her husband and doctor were both clear that twilight sleep techniques were not to blame. But her death cast a pall on the movement; her own neighbor started an Anti-Twilight Sleep Association. The department store rallies stopped, and the associations soon disbanded.
Twilight sleep, though, stuck around in its own zombified form. Doctors found it convenient to drug women and restrict access to the delivery room, and for decades women were given little choice about whether they’d be knocked out during labor. Scopolamine remained in use until the 1960s, when a new round of journalism about the practice exposed its more gruesome side, including the burns women would have on their wrists from being tied down. What had started as a dream for women, in which the pain of childbirth was wiped away upon waking, had become a nightmare.
On the Scottish island of Unst, boatmen once told stories of an English widow who journeyed out to a tiny, rocky islet on the northernmost point of the British Isles. Lady Jane Franklin would gaze north across the sea and “send [her] love on wings of prayer” to her long-lost husband Sir John Franklin, the famed Arctic explorer and naval officer who set sail in 1845 in search of the Northwest Passage.
“Those who were there said she stood for some minutes on the somber rock, quite silent, tears falling slowly, and her hands stretched out towards the north,” Jessie Saxby, an author of the region, wrote.
While some stories portray Lady Franklin as a weeping widow and devoted wife, she was much more than that. Lady Franklin was an unrelenting force who propelled the search for her husband, along the way establishing herself as an important figure in polar exploration during the late 19th century.
In 1845, John Franklin led two ships, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, carrying 129 crewmembers, into the uncharted territory of the Arctic. They never returned. The lost expedition remains one of the greatest ongoing mysteries in the history of polar exploration. This is in part due to Franklin’s second wife, Lady Jane Franklin, a tenacious, well-traveled woman who fueled a series of polar missions to locate the expedition and find out the fate of her husband. As one newspaper of the era put it, “What the nation would not do, a woman did.”
“The first few [search parties] were created by the British Navy, but when they were unsuccessful, she pushed for American involvement and she actually bought her own ship later on,” says Douglas Kondziolka, a neurosurgeon and professor at New York University Langone Medical Center, who recently presented his collection of Arctic and Antarctic exploration books and documents at the New York Academy of Medicine.
While Franklin may have physically explored the vast frozen land, Lady Franklin had funded voyages that significantly contributed to charting the Arctic.
Lady Franklin was born Jane Griffin in London on December 4, 1791. Her mother died when she was young and her father was a wealthy silk manufacturer. Growing up, she received the limited education available at the time but her father encouraged her to pursue her curiosities. She was self-taught, a prolific diarist and “fiercely energetic,” Johnson wrote. In 1828, at the age of 37, she married John Franklin, who by that time had already journeyed to the Arctic twice. A year later he was knighted for his 1825 expedition, which charted thousands of miles.
Atypical of women at the time, Lady Franklin was an explorer and adventurer herself. Some scholars have called her one of the most traveled women of the Victorian era.
“Few women of her class and era had the opportunity to stamp their presence on so many parts of the world,” wrote Penny Russell in Victorian Studies.
At a young age, Lady Franklin toured countries throughout western Europe with her father and two sisters. She later explored areas of Northern America, countries in Asia, and colonies of South Australia and New Zealand. She once descended down a crater in Hawaii, became the first woman to climb Mount Wellington, and even has a mountain named after her in Victoria, Australia. During her adventures, Lady Franklin faced storms and near-starvation at sea, and experienced travel by many modes of transport, from naval ships, camels, to palanquins and sedan chairs, wrote Russell. When Franklin was stationed in the Mediterranean in 1830, Lady Franklin accompanied him and traveled around Greece and northern Africa with growing independence, said Russell, and had even ventured with only two or three servants.
In 1836, Franklin was appointed governor of the Australian penal colony Van Diemen’s Land—modern-day Tasmania. Because of her husband’s political position, Lady Franklin was able to be involved in the growth and development of the colony. She was extremely passionate about science and education.
“Settler locals soon learned to loathe her for cheerfully replacing balls with public lectures on botany, science and ethnography,” wrote Johnson.
She built a sandstone Greek temple to house a natural history museum, bought 130 acres of land for a horticulture garden, and published a scientific journal. Her “hobbies of hobbies,” she once said, was the foundation of a state college. Lady Franklin was also involved with reforming conditions of female prisons, and—controversially—took two Aboriginal children into temporary care.
“Colonists were appalled by her obvious interest in their affairs, and almost from the moment of her arrival she was mercilessly satirized in the colonial press,” wrote Russell.
The Franklins returned to England when John Franklin was recruited for another expedition to find the Northwest Passage, the sea route through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago that would allow a much shorter voyage from Europe to Asia. While the warming climate has opened the Northwest Passage today, explorers in the 19th century didn’t know that the thick, year-round sea ice made the path impossible to sail through.
Despite being a seasoned Arctic explorer, Franklin and his two ships became trapped in the frozen, desolate land. After three years and no sign of Franklin, the British Navy began sending out search parties and even posted a reward for the crew who found evidence.
“Books were published about the Franklin expedition and the public became very interested in this search for the next 25 to 30 years,” Kondziolka says. “That stimulated a lot of additional people to get involved.”
The most avid and relentless instigator behind the search was Lady Franklin. She wrote to newspapers, rallied helpers and other explorers, pushed government officials, and roused public sympathy for the missing men, wrote Russell.
Previous explorers and crew had survived for four to six years—if they met Inuit, people thought maybe they could stay alive for 10 or 11 years, says Kondziolka. But as the years passed by and there were still no telltale signs of what had happened to Franklin, the British government began to wane in its effort despite Lady Franklin’s petitions and letters to the prime minister and even the U.S. president. Instead of giving up, she took matters into her own hands and funded seven missions to retrieve evidence of her husband’s location, recruiting the help of American explorers.
“One of the things later on, from her perspective, was if her husband found the Northwest Passage before he died and therefore should be given the glory of finding it,” says Kondziolka. The various explorers she commissioned hunted for relics, until in 1859 Francis Leopold McClintock returned on Lady Franklin’s ship the Fox with some dismal news. In a tin under a pile of rocks, preserved by permafrost, was a message that stated (in about six different languages) that Franklin had died within a year of the expedition.
Wanting to retrieve Franklin’s missing written records, Lady Franklin continued to send vessels to the Arctic until her death. She commissioned one final search that set sail on June 1875 only weeks before she died on July 18, 1875.
More than 150 years later, the spirit of Lady Franklin’s search for her lost husband still lives on. In September 2016, the HMS Terror was finally located in its watery grave near King William Island in the Canadian Arctic.
Explorers aboard Lady Franklin's vessels, dispatched to find evidence of her husband's fate, also made many of their own discoveries and documentations. They recorded flora and fauna of the Canadian Arctic, surveyed the west coast of Greenland, and Sir Robert McClure found the Northwest Passage on a Franklin search expedition supported by the British Navy in 1850. Her involvement inspired explorers to reach the most northern tips of the earth.
“She was very responsible for some of the key players, such as getting the Americans involved in polar exploration,” says Kondziolka. “Asking them for help started off a 30-year process of one American expedition after another which eventually led to the accomplishment of going to the North Pole in 1908. That really started with her.”
