The construction crew was trying to save two cornerstone plaques embedded in the walls of a school gym slated for demolition. But they found an extra surprise, too—a forgotten time capsule from 1938.
“We were this close to letting this go away with demo,” superintendent Charlie Dickinson told local news channel KFOR. “I’m tickled to death.”
The Oklahoma school was originally built in 1919, and the gym was updated in 1938. Now the district is building a new school and gym. When they spotted another object near the plaques, “we said, okay, we're going to do this,” according to Dickinson. “It's going to require somebody with a saw.”
Inside the time capsule, they found old newspapers, a textbook of Oklahoma history, and a sealed letter from the school’s founding in 1919.
The school now plans to continue the tradition they didn’t even know they hand. Dickinson's plan for the time capsule material is now to "get copies of it, put it back in that box, seal it back up and put it in a bigger box,” along with material from 2018, when the new building is finished. Perhaps in another eight decades another superintendent will get a pleasant surprise.
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As an anthropology student studying nuclear weapons, Martin Pfeiffer has gotten up close and personal with a lot of strange objects. He's examined preflight controllers. He's cozied up to bomb casings. (Sometimes he even licks them.)
But one of his favorites is a small rock that he got from a friend just before he started his Ph.D. studies at the University of New Mexico. It's a tiny piece of trinitite, a unique, glassy mineral forged in the blast of the first atomic test. His relationship with it is complex: he's glad he has it, but at the same time, he says, "one of my deepest desires is that nothing like it is ever created again."
Over the past few years, Pfeiffer has come to realize that he is not alone. Trinitite is polarizing: in his studies, he has come across people who collect it eagerly and people who refuse to touch it entirely; people who study it scientifically and people who sell chunks of it by the side of the road. "Trinitite has a way of concretizing, or creating a link with, the heritage of the first atomic bomb," says Pfeiffer. "And that can have a lot of stuff attached to it."
Geologically, trinitite is fairly straightforward. When scientists detonated the first atomic test bomb—nicknamed Trinity—in New Mexico's Jornada del Muerto desert in July of 1945, the massive explosion threw sand up into the air, where it was liquified instantly by the heat of the blast. By the time it cooled down again, it wasn't sand anymore: it had reformed into glassy chunks, most an oceanic green. Researchers dreamed up a few different names for it—"atomsite," or "Alamogordo glass," after the town near the test—but "trinitite" is the one that stuck.
Culturally, this is one of the weirdest materials we've got. Very soon after it was created, it was marshaled for rhetorical purposes—purposes, Pfeiffer says, that it has served ever since. "At the end of the day, trinitite is radioactive fallout," he says. "But we gave it a pretty name."
Trinitite. Took years of brilliant effort, engineering, & 2 billion in 1945 dollars but a rare new mineral was made pic.twitter.com/eBMMLpCHYE
Right after the Trinity test, scientists sent out tanks outfitted with soil analyzers, to see how big the explosion had been. They checked the pressure gauges, gamma ray sensors, and neutron detectors that had been installed around the site (the ones that survived the explosion, anyway). Eventually, they ventured out into the newly blasted desert themselves, to see what they could see. Much of this was trinitite, a strange creation left in the destruction's wake. "The crater seems a lake of green jade… 2,400 feet in diameter," TIMEwrote in September of 1945, after a press trip to the site. "The glass takes strange shapes—lopsided marbles, knobbly sheets a quarter-inch thick, broken, thin-walled bubbles, green, wormlike forms."
The bomb's development was famously secret. After the Trinity test, the Air Force told civilians that the overwhelming light and sound was from "a remotely located ammunition magazine" that had accidentally exploded. But by the time of that first press trip eight weeks later, two more atomic bombs—not tests this time—had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, instantly killing tens of thousands of people. There was no hiding it anymore.
Instead, those who had worked on the bomb set out to scaffold a certain story around it. "Access to the Trinity site was used immediately after the bombing for propagandistic purposes," says Pfieffer. As the people of Japan reported more and more deaths from radioactive fallout, scientists toured reporters around the test site, "to scotch these stories," TIME wrote. (Said stories, of course, would turn out to be true.)
The U.S. Secretary of War, Robert Patterson, stood on the cracked ground and told the press that "there is none of this prolonged radioactivity that the Japanese mentioned." Dr. Oppenheimer propped a foot on the stump of the destroyed test tower and smiled for pictures.
Trinitite made up a big part of this narrative. "It was explicitly linked to the project of denying that the atomic bombings of Japan could have caused lingering radiation injury," says Pfeiffer. If the experts could get across that this material—literally made by the bomb, and still swimming with bits of it—was not very dangerous, the rest would follow.
"Reporters… enthusiastically pocketed souvenirs bits of crater glass," TIME reported. At least one, radio host George Cremeens, posed with a chunk of trinitite in one hand and a cigarette in the other. The scientist Robert B. Fortenbaugh, who worked on the bomb, told his local paper he was "anxious" to head back to the site and pick up some samples.
The mineral even went high fashion: in the fall of 1945, the jewelry designer Marc Koven made earrings, hairpins, and a brooch out of trinitite. (His designs were meant to call to mind the bomb itself, "mushrooming skyward atop a pillar of cloud leaving glassy green devastation behind," a press release said.) Newspapers around the country reported when the actress Merle Oberon wore the jewelry to a war fundraiser—thus "discounting all Jap claims," as the Detroit Free Press put it. Other famous women, including model Pat Burrage, also posed for photos decked out in trinitite trinkets.
Trinitite was made into jewelry and used as a political tool to discount claims of Japanese radiation injury. pic.twitter.com/GBKkDBv1ns
— Martin Pfeiffer 🖖🏿 (@NuclearAnthro) June 9, 2017
In the end, this worked a little too well. Although the blast site was open to the general public only two days out of the year, trinitite began rapidly disappearing. "It appears that people snuck in and collected large amounts of it," says Pfeiffer. In 1952, the Army bulldozed the site, burying the remaining material in the ground. (To this day, ants dig pebbles of it up again, Pfeiffer says.) It's now illegal for tourists to pocket found trinitite, as signs around the site loudly announce.
All trinitite currently in circulation is fair game, though. People sell it online, and hawk it by the side of the road. (A "Medium Sample" from unitednuclear.com will set you back $69.) People in the business swap it around—Pfeiffer has called it "the traditional gift of nukewonks"—and collectors pay big for special pieces: black-tinted chunks, which contain melted pieces of the site's iron tower, or reddish ones, which have copper from the cables used to fire the bomb.
Most interestingly to Pfeiffer, museums still display it. The Bradbury Science Museum at Los Alamos has a showcase explaining how scientists have learned more about the bomb by analyzing trinitite. The National Museum of Nuclear Science and History, in Albuquerque, sells it in their gift shop.
At the Trinity site, there's an exhibit where volunteers wave a Geiger counter over a hunk of trinitite, and then over a piece of vintage Fiestaware, a type of dinnerware glazed with uranium. While both are slightly radioactive, neither delivers a particularly harmful dose, especially now, decades after they were formed. "There's a connection between [the jewelry] in the '50s, and having that kind of display set up now," Pfeiffer says.
Pfeiffer still has that small piece of trinitite his friend mailed him. But he's also found that its influence isn't easily contained. It is fallout, after all. "I don't look at it every day these days," he says. "As I've proceeded in my research, I've come to learn—there are reminders of the bomb pretty much everywhere." Most of them just aren't quite as shiny.
The butts—simple line drawings, most made with black marker—display a distinctive form. "The silhouette of three 'cheeks,' so to speak, is the featured signature of the anonymous artist," local news outlet WFLApolitely explains.
The triple-tush has been spotted in at least twenty places in the city over the past few months—including pay phones, trash bins, and walls—after what the Tampa Bay Timesdescribed as a "butt spree."
Thus far, no one knows who is behind the behinds. Law enforcement is keeping a sharp eye out, though:
“The bottom line is whoever is doing this is destroying property,” the assistant police chief, Jim Previterra, told WFLA. And if anyone knows about bottom lines, it's probably the culprit.
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 first dog biscuits did not resemble the bone-shaped delights of today. Developed by James Spratt in 1860, these so-called Meat Fibrine Dog Cakes were woefully square.
Spratt, an American electrician, came up with the idea for a dog biscuit after he witnessed sailors dropping hardtack—an unleavened bread—for the local dogs. He decided he could do the same—and monetize it. His flagship company, Spratt’s, was founded soon after. Their lead product, the Meat Fibrine Dog Cakes, were developed from a combination of wheat, beetroot, vegetables, and prairie meat. (The particular kind of meat in Spratt’s formula was apparently highly confidential; until his death, Spratt “kept in his hands the contract for his meat supplier.”)
At the time, the concept of a food specifically for dogs was alien. According to Katherine C. Grier, author of Pets in America, "until well into the 20th century, most household dogs lived off scraps from the kitchen, often cooked with a starch into something that people called 'dog stew.'" But by the late 1800s, Spratt's had shuttled dog biscuits into the mainstream—especially for dog show contestants. In 1895, the New York Times labeled Spratt’s a “principal food” of dog shows.
Spratt's success soon spawned competition.
Over a decade later, in 1907, organic chemist Carleton Ellis received an urgent request. The owner of a local slaughterhouse was having problems with all of his excess “waste milk,” and he wanted Ellis to help him find a use for it. Ellis would eventually accrue over 753 inventions to his name and would serve as the force behind the creation of margarine, polyester, paint and varnish remover, and anti-knock gasoline. If he found the milk request odd, he did not show it. He agreed to help.
Likely inspired by Spratt's, Ellis decided to turn the waste into food for his dog. After some experimentation, Ellis mixed the excess milk with malt, grain, and other products to form a dog biscuit—baked into what he assumed would be an appealing, rounded shape.
But when he tested the biscuits, his dog refused to eat them.
Ellis was frustrated. Clearly, the biscuit should have tasted great to a dog. He was a MIT graduate; he knew perhaps more than anyone at the time about the compounds in petroleums, oils, and varnishes. He had authored such dense, technical manuals as Hydrogenation of Oils Catalyze and The Chemical Action of Ultraviolet Rays for biscuit's sake! Developing a treat that a dog would eat should not have provided this much of a challenge.
So he decided to do something strange: he changed the design of the biscuit rather than the ingredients. “I had some more biscuits baked from the same stock, but in the shape of a bone,” he toldPopular Science in 1937, “and I found that my dog manifested a tremendous interest in the bone-shaped biscuit.”
Ellis likely did not choose the bone-shape gimmick accidentally. According to Grier, the association between dogs and bones had already been well established. At the time, butchers sold meat with the bones still in, and many families used them in soups and broths. "At the end the bone was turned over to the family dog, who gnawed what was left of it.”
Ellis soon transferred his patent to the F. H. Bennett Biscuit Company (whose name would later change to the Wheatsworth Company), and they began mass-producing his bone-shaped dog treats. In 1915, the biscuits earned the moniker of Milk-Bone for their high percentage of cow’s milk.
The Milk-Bone proved a worthy competitor to Spratt’s Dog Cakes, and in 1931, the snack company Nabisco purchased it. Nabisco’s grocery store connections gave the treat—which was marketed as a “dog’s dessert”—widespread exposure. Add in a slick post-World War II TV marketing campaign featuring the German shepherd from The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin, and the Milk-Bone achieved ubiquity.
Today, dog biscuits in the shape of bones are unquestioned—a cute gimmick that all pet owners can support. But had it not been for the whims of an organic chemist’s dog, they may not have ever dominated the market in the way they do now.
Winsor McCay’s vaudeville act needed a new capstone. Though he had captivated audiences with earlier animated pieces, including Little Nemo, a 1911 film about a child who had amazing dreams, vaudeville success demanded constant innovation. Plus, his most recent production, How a Mosquito Operates (1912), had left audiences puzzled. Many people did not understand how animation worked, and they (wrongly) charged McCay with “performing some sort of trick with wires” to make his mosquito move.
McCay needed to create something extravagant—something whose authenticity no audience member could question—to keep pace with his success.
So he decided to bring a dinosaur to life.
In February 1914, McCay debuted “Gertie the Dinosaur” on the vaudeville circuit. Created from over 10,000 drawings, “Gertie” became an instant hit. It is often credited as being the first animation to feature a character with a distinct personality and as the first work of key frame animation.
In his vaudeville act, McCay would walk onto the stage with a whip, calling out for Gertie. The cartoon started playing. McCay gave Gertie a series of commands, which she then performed in-screen.
"Gertie" grew so popular that, later in 1914, McCay made it into a motion picture, shown above. Highlights of the film include a sea monster cameo as well as Gertie dancing, bowing, eating a rock and an entire tree, and, at one point, hurling a mammoth named Jumbo into the water.
Video Wonders are audiovisual offerings that delight, inspire, and entertain. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
Mallard ducks don't seem like particularly vicious animals. Their chicks are adorably awkward and fluffy, and they stick their butts in the air while they're looking for food. But not all ducks are content to look for plants on the bottom of a pond. Some ducks, such as some mallards in Romania, for example, have developed a taste for other birds.
The ducks were spotted by researchers from the University of Cambridge and Romania's Veterinary and Food Safety Authority at a reservoir last summer. They noticed one adult and ten juvenile mallards along the shore, "vigorously shaking" the vegetation. But then the adult started shaking its head and squishing whatever was in its beak. It turned out to be a fledgling Grey Wagtail. After a struggle with the fledgling's wings, the adult managed to gulp down the poor wagtail whole.
But the mallards weren't done. They went back to the vegetation and flushed out another bird, this time a Black Redstart fledgling, and the juvenile mallards either drowned the fledgling or ate it. Then, the researchers write, they "emerged onto a floating tree trunk for basking and preening as the group entered a phase of rest."
Ducks are known omnivores that sometimes eat fish or crabs when they can't get enough protein in their diet otherwise. But this is the first time they've been documented as cold-blooded killers. "The fact that these individuals seem to have learnt how to hunt birds is pretty extraordinary," Silviu Petrovan, a coauthor of the report, told the BBC. "Potentially there is quite a lot of pressure for those fast-growing juveniles to get animal protein intake, and therefore they are looking at opportunities to supplement that." Ducks haven't evolved to eat other birds, which is why it was so hard for the adult to get that wagtail down. Also, said Petrovan, "digesting bones and feathers – that's not something that mallards have really evolved to do."
In the age of network television dominance, the concept of a “fourth network” that could challenge ABC, NBC, and CBS seemed almost laughable until FOX hit the scene. But long before FOX was hailed as the true fourth network, there was DuMont, an underfunded and largely forgotten broadcast pioneer whose lost recordings have become the stuff of minor legend.
In an alternate universe, not that different from our own, DuMont would have stood right along CBS and the others as one of the original juggernauts of early television. Debuting in 1946, the network was actually started as a ploy to sell televisions. Before getting into the broadcast game, DuMont Laboratories, the company of inventor and TV tech pioneer Allen B. DuMont, was known for being one of the first firms to manufacture television equipment. Launching their own content factory to fill the screens it was selling must have seemed like a no-brainer.
In the late 1930s, DuMont began experimenting with small TV stations in the New York and Washington, D.C. metro areas. Eventually, they all came together as the DuMont Network, which was officially created in August of 1946. By comparison, NBC and CBS launched around 1940-41, and ABC came on the scene around 1948, putting DuMont smack in the middle of the dawn of television programming.
The network developed and produced a variety of shows ranging from early talk shows to inventive crime dramas to ground-breaking science fiction. There was Night Editor, an anthology program where the host, ostensibly the nighttime editor of a newspaper, would narrate and perform stories as though they were requested by viewers. There was the early crime drama The Plainsclothsman, told through the eyes (the camera literally showed viewers his POV) of the titular police officer. And there was Captain Video, often hailed as the earliest science fiction TV show, which followed the low-budget adventures of the Captain and his Video Rangers. DuMont also aired such groundbreaking programs as The Hazel Scott Show, often credited as the first network television show to be hosted by an African-American.
The network offered several shows hosted by the celebrity entertainers of the day, including Ernie Kovacs and Morey Amsterdam. The most successful star to come out of the DuMont era was Jackie Gleason, who developed his career-defining The Honeymooners concept on the variety show he hosted, Cavalcade of Stars.
The DuMont network ran hot and burned out fast. After churning out over 20,000 individual episodes of television over the course of a decade, it shut down. “In 1955 it stopped operating as a network, and the two remaining owned and operated stations were sold to Metromedia in D.C. and New York,” says Weinstein. The newly formed Metromedia company used DuMont's programming as the base of their business, which was later absorbed by none other than FOX in the 1980s. Despite its influential role in the early days of television, DuMont and its shows were largely forgotten, and worse yet, mostly lost.
Unlike today, when most everything is recorded and then broadcast at a later time, all of DuMont’s programs aired live, and were only occasionally recorded. If one of their programs had to be aired at a different time, or by an affiliate station, it would air via kinescope, which was literally just a recording of a television monitor showing the program. “What that meant was, the DuMont network or the airing station wouldn’t have the kinescope, or need to keep it,” says Weinstein. “It had little or no economic value after the initial broadcast. They may or may not get it back from whatever station happened to show the program, but the quality was so poor, and there wasn’t a demand for a repeat broadcast that there would be no economic value for holding on to them.”
Despite those odds, some of the kinescopes did survive. Most can be found in private collections, or in even stranger places. Weinstein says that over 300 DuMont kinescopes were found in an Iowa popcorn factory after having been kept by one of the network’s make-up artists.
That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the number of shows the network produced. According to a popular myth, this is because the majority of the library was dumped into New York Harbor. This story seems to originate from Ernie Kovacs’ wife, Edie Adams, who told a second-hand story of the kinescopes' destruction during a hearing on television preservation in 1997. According to her, during DuMont’s sale, nobody wanted to pay for taking care of the recordings, so they were… dealt with:
One of the lawyers doing the bargaining said that he could "take care of it" in a "fair manner," and he did take care of it. At 2 a.m., the next morning, he had three huge semis back up to the loading dock at ABC, filled them all with stored kinescopes and 2" videotapes, drove them to a waiting barge in New Jersey, took them out on the water, made a right at the Statue of Liberty and dumped them in the Upper New York Bay. Very neat. No problem.
Still, Weinstein is skeptical of this account. To start, Adams stated that the purchase took place in the 1970s, a couple of decades after the network was actually sold. He also just doesn’t think anyone would have kept them around either way. “DuMont was also perennially underfunded. They never had a lot of money, and it’s unlikely they would have kept any sort of warehouse to store these old films," he says. "They were big, bulky, and take up a lot of space. So the short version is, not a lot survived.”
Weinstein says that at least one example of most of DuMont’s major shows have survived in archived collections at places such as New York's Paley Center. It’s difficult to say exactly how much has been lost forever. But as Weinstein puts it, that’s also the great thing about early media: you never know where more of it might pop up. “There could always be another popcorn factory in Iowa.”
Any day now, it seems, the world is going to have a new, record-breaking iceberg. For about three years now, scientists have been monitoring a rift in Antarctica’s Larsen C ice shelf, and today Project MIDAS, which has been closely tracking the rift’s progress via satellite, said that the rift was opening even more rapidly and warned that “it won’t be long now…”
When the iceberg finally breaks off from the ice shelf, what happens next?
It will slowly drift away.
This giant chunk of ice, which will become one of the largest icebergs ever recorded, is already floating on the sea. When it breaks off from the ice sheet, it won’t rush away, but, subject to ocean currents, will likely follow the coast and head out into the Atlantic Ocean.
It will be noisy.
When ice shelves calve icebergs, the ocean gets loud. After B-15, the largest iceberg observed to date, broke off of the Ross Ice Shelf in 2000, scientists monitoring underwater noises with hydrophones picked up strange signals thousands of miles away. They later traced them back to the remnants of B-15—giant icebergs in their own right—which continued to break up over time, filling the water with mournful creaks, cracks, and booms.
It will break up into smaller pieces.
Sooner or later, the iceberg formed from Larsen C will break up into smaller pieces. But small is relative. The new iceberg will be 10 percent of the Larsen C ice shelf, and the rift runs more than 120 miles long. The icebergs formed from its break-up could also be giant. The largest fragment of B-15, for instance, was still 2,470 square miles in size.
These fragments could be around for years.
Depending on how fast they drift out to slightly warmer parts of the ocean, the iceberg and its fragments could stick around for years. Fifteen years after B-15 broke off the Ross Ice shelf, there were still eight fragments of the original iceberg in the ocean. The largest, B-15T, was 12 miles long and 8 miles wide.
The Larsen C ice shelf could continue to disintegrate.
Scientists studying this iceberg calving event don’t see a link to climate change, but it’s still bad news for the long-term survival of the ice shelf. Losing this chunk of ice will make the Larsen C ice shelf less stable, and the Project Midas team has found that, like the Larsen B ice shelf, which lost a big chunk in 2002, the Larsen C ice shelf could start disintegrating after the new iceberg drifts away.
No one is happy to have to respond to a mini-van crash, but it’s even worse when you show up and the scene is infested with poisonous snakes.
That’s exactly what happened to a crew of volunteer firefighters who arrived at the scene of a recent accident.
According to a story on My San Antonio, the vehicle experienced a roll-over after one of the tires blew out while it was on the highway. The mini-van was carrying some 30 snakes, as well as a tortoise, a baby alligator, and a nine-year-old human boy. The two humans involved in the crash, the driver, a herpetologist, and the young boy—his grandson—were taken to the hospital with minor injuries, while the firefighters worked to recapture the animals that had been released.
Among the variety of snakes that escaped were deadly species including rattlesnakes and copperheads. Luckily, no one was bitten during or after the incident.
Late Monday, when everyone in Zach Landis's home in Anchorage, Alaska, was in bed, a black bear burst through Zach's window. After a tense beat, the bear climbed back out through the window, allowing Zach the space to let loose a scream.
Zach, 11, then ran upstairs to deliver the news to his parents, telling them that, "There is a bear in my room."
Police eventually responded, but by the time they arrived, there wasn't much to do except listen to Zach's story and think to themselves that he was probably lucky to be alive.
Officials said that they could only recall one other instance of a bear breaking through a home's glass in Anchorage, though that bear was being chased by a dog.
It's unknown what prompted this latest bear do it—the Landises think the bear might have seen its shadow in the window and become spooked—but experts said that you shouldn't worry much about it happening to you.
"Bears don't—especially black bears don't—just decide, 'I'm going to go running full speed into this window and crash through and see what I can find,'" Rick Sinnott, a former state biologist, told the News.
As for Zach, he says he's fine, though he slept in his parents' room for a few nights after the bear incident.
"I'm not really worried about it happening again, or anything like that," he told the News. "I'm going to sleep down there. I don't want to sleep upstairs."
On October 7, 2008, at quarter-to-six in the morning, commuters waiting for the train at Station 6 in Nubia, Sudan, were greeted to a spectacular display: a massive fireball that streaked through the sky overhead and quickly disappeared.
It seems safe to say that they were surprised. Elsewhere in the world, though, astronomers had been expecting it. This was 2008-TC3—the first asteroid scientists had ever spotted in time to predict its arrival, a feat that hasn't been repeated since.
"It's the only case where an object was discovered in space, before it struck the earth," says Richard Binzel, an asteroid expert and a professor of planetary sciences at MIT. Although Binzel was not directly involved with the effort to track 2008-TC3, he watched it play out in real time, along with much of the rest of the international astronomy community.
As Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society reported soon afterward, it all started on October 6, about twenty minutes before midnight, when the University of Arizona researcher Richard Kowalski "discovered an object… that appeared to be on a collision course with Earth." The object, then called 8TA9D69, was soon spotted by other observatories in Arizona and Australia. They all called in reports to the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center, a NASA-funded group that's in charge of keeping track of the various B-list rocks whirling around our solar system.
The MPC gave the asteroid a more formal, and slightly catchier, name: 2008-TC3. They then set out to get its story straight, and to tell everyone about it. The asteroid was 88 tons, about as heavy as a blue whale, and had a 13-foot diameter, the same as a large trampoline. It posed no danger to Earthlings, as it would almost certainly not survive its passage through the atmosphere.
The next eleven hours was a game of long-distance cat and mouse. "Astronomers around the world scrambled to their telescopes," Lakdawalla wrote. Those who successfully spotted the asteroid submitted their observations to the MPC, which continued to refine its orbit, and thus to tighten predictions about exactly where and when it would hit.
Eventually, they made the final call: it was heading for the Nubian Desert in Sudan, and would enter the atmosphere there at 5:45:28 a.m. local time, give or take fifteen seconds. Different scientists kept an eye on it until 4:40 a.m. Sudan time, at which point the asteroid disappeared into Earth's shadow. Its last hour of approach was shrouded in darkness.
At that point, everyone who had been watching the asteroid hunkered down and waited for it to get here. The Center for Astrophysics put out a press release about the new arrival—which, they wrote, would appear as "an extremely bright fireball traveling rapidly across the sky." The United States also tried to give Sudan a heads up: "There was an attempt to call the embassy in Sudan and say that this event is going to happen," says Binzel. "But it was the middle of the night, and no one answered the phone." One meteorologist, Jacob Kuiper, dialed Air France, and suggested they radio their nearby pilots so that they could keep an eye out.
The impact time came and went. Now, the astronomers faced another needle-in-haystack problem: how to figure out whether their predictions had come true. Satellite images helped them pinpoint the impact spot. An earthquake detector in Kenya picked up the blast the asteroid made as it came through the atmosphere, which verified the time.
Eyewitness reports came in from the people at the train station, as well as one Air France pilot who had been flying over Chad. And although they didn't expect to find any physical traces—it was thought the asteroid would vaporize completely—a team of students and staff from the University of Khartoum went out to search the desert for space rocks.
Sure enough, they ended up discovering 15 meteorites—pebble-sized, jet-black, and "fresh-looking," as the resulting scientific paper put it. Follow-up trips increased the total haul to 280. These were the first rocks ever discovered that could be directly linked to a particular asteroid observed in space, and subsequent analysis of them has helped scientists begin to trace where asteroids come from.
Thanks to real-time international teamwork, astronomers had been able to turn Kowalski's single initial observation into a kind of scientific comet-streak: a 12-hour rush of useful predictions, followed by a long, elegant tail of unique discoveries. Overall, NASA later declared, "the system worked well for the first predicted impact by a near-Earth object."
Encouraging—especially since it will definitely not be the last. "A house-sized object flies in between the earth and the moon at least weekly," says Binzel. "The objects are going to be there no mater what, it's just a question of whether we see them in advance."
The room where Sally Hemings lived was next to Thomas Jefferson’s bedroom. It was about 15 feet wide and 13 feet long. There were no windows. It “would have been dark, damp and uncomfortable,” NBC News writes.
Archaeologists working at Monticello have uncovered the remains of Hemings’ room, which was built in 1809, NBC News reports. For many decades, this room was forgotten; at one point the space was converted to a men’s bathroom to accommodate visitors to the historic house.
Hemings, a slave who is known as Jefferson’s “mistress,” would have lived in somewhat better conditions than other slaves on Jefferson’s property. In the excavation, archaeologists found her room’s original hearth, fireplace, and floors. The excavation is part of a project aiming to tell the full story of Monticello—including the story of the slaves that Jefferson kept.
He was ill-mannered and ill-spoken—a boor, a braggart, a ruffian, a bigot, a hick, and a trickster. His name was Brother Jonathan.
Today he is all but forgotten—eclipsed by his upstanding uncle, Sam. But after the Revolutionary War, Brother Jonathan was the personification of the newly independent American people: clever, courageous, not all that sophisticated and proud of it. He was the everyman incarnate. It was the everyman who had led America to victory. And now America looked to the everyman to lead them out from he bloated shadow of Great Britain.
During the nation’s first hundred years, America tried on many characters in search of the perfect fit for its new independent status. There was the feminine Columbia, the indigenous bald eagle, the stoic Lady Liberty, and the bumbling Yankee Doodle. Out of this personification soup, only a few emerged that had some staying power.
Many of these national stereotypes were depicted in popular ballads and stage comedies before America had even achieved its independence; Yankee Doodle was among them. He was originally a British invention—a caricature of a naive, upstart American colonist who was created as a foil for John Bull: the imposing personification of England. Though he never completely faded out of existence, after the Revolutionary War Yankee Doodle was mostly assimilated into another stage character: Brother Jonathan.
Brother Jonathan was a rustic New Englander who was depicted at various times on stage as a peddler, a seaman, and a trader, but always as a sly and cunning figure. He began to show up in political cartoons in newspapers and magazines during the early part of the 19th century as new and cheaper printing methods developed. It was at this point that American cartoonists transformed Brother Jonathan from a figure of derision into one of patriotic pride.
So who exactly was Brother Jonathan? For decades, his origin story centered around Jonathan Trumbull, the governor of Connecticut from 1769-1784 who was the only colonial governor to side with the patriots during the Revolutionary War. Stories were promulgated that George Washington had nicknamed the governor Brother Jonathan. But history has left us with no such account. The more likely source takes us to England were Jonathan was first used as a derogatory term for puritans and others who opposed the crown, dating back to at least the English Civil War in 1642. But Jonathan was also a common first name in New England, and the colonists who lived in the region during the 17th and 18th centuries were patriots. And so, the British may have glommed onto this familiar derisive term and called New Englanders, and all Northerners to some extent, Jonathans. Whatever the provenance, it is clear that Americans did not enjoy being called Jonathans—that is, up until the revolution. And then they took the name back.
American artists like Amos Doolittle shaped the character of Brother Jonathan into an inspirational hero for the new nation. In the cartoon “Battle of Lake Erie” from 1813, Doolittle depicts Brother Jonathan forcing John Bull to down an unfermented pear drink called perry, which was known to induce an upset stomach. Perry is also a pun. It was the name of the American naval hero, Oliver Hazard Perry, who defeated the British on Lake Erie in one of the decisive battles of the War of 1812. “Take it, Johnny—take it I say,” demands Jonathan as he pours the brew down John Bull’s throat. Brother Jonathan may have been obnoxious, but he got his point across.
While Yankee Doodle was primarily a comedic figure, Brother Jonathan was a more sinister one. Winifred Morgan, author ofAn American Icon: Brother Jonathan and American Identity sees Brother Jonathan during this period as a trickster in the tradition of Native-American and African-American folklore. “Tricksters are phenomenally powerful characters,” says Morgan. “They’re tough, they’re resilient, and Brother Jonathan has those qualities. But tricksters are also sly and self-interested.” And Brother Jonathan had to be. After all, he represented ordinary Americans who were trying to make their way in the harsh new world.
Americans liked to think that their wit and tenacity had won them their independence. They continued to see themselves as scrappy underdogs and turned their noses up at any whiff of pretension. This attitude played out in the political cartoons of the day which pitted Brother Jonathan against John Bull is a battle of old-world pomposity against new-world smarts.
The contrasts were striking. Brother Jonathan was tall, humorous, crude, cunning, plain-spoken, and simply dressed. In other words, the antithesis of the stout, stiff, aging, imperious, well-educated, and highly-cultured John Bull.
Over time, Brother Jonathan lost his barbed humor and gained more xenophobic traits as a mouthpiece for the nativist Know-Nothing party. In the cartoon “The Propagation Society. More free than welcome,” Jonathan embodies the party’s anti-Catholic platform as he protects “Young America” from an invading pope. And Jonathan’s intolerance was far-reaching. In “The reconstruction policy of Congress, as illustrated in California” he is depicted as opposing voting rights for African-Americans and other minorities, asserting “this ballot box was dedicated to the white race alone.”
As the century wore on, Brother Jonathan began to lose his panache and his relevance. Between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, a current of romantic individualism ran through American culture and politics. Americans had considered themselves fiercely independent and rarely in need of the government’s services. Brother Jonathan reflected this attitude. It was always Jonathan (i.e. the people) versus the leaders (i.e. the elites and the government). But all that changed with the Civil War.
The power of the central government had increased considerably during the war. Individual lives were touched ever more by the government through legislation and projects such as conscription laws, the Homestead Act, and the transcontinental railroad. When the war was finally over, individualism was ceded to the more pressing business of reconstruction. As an anti-government figure, this development posed a problem for the sclerotic Brother Jonathan. Americans no longer needed a character to antagonize the government on their behalf. There was another problem, too. Brother Jonathan was a regional character—a Yankee from the North. No self-respecting Southerner or Westerner truly identified with him. He was not a figure who could personify a newly unified nation. That task had to be taken on by someone else.
Uncle Sam had long existed alongside Brother Jonathan, but as a less prominent character. During the Civil War, American and British cartoonists started dressing Uncle Sam in the long-tailed blue coat and red-and-white striped trousers that had been worn by Brother Jonathan. At the same time, Uncle Sam started to acquire Lincoln-like aspects, including as a stovepipe hat and a sizable beard. Eventually, Brother Jonathan faded entirely into the figure of Uncle Sam who became the stoic, sober, adult version of the American government that was needed in the wake of the war.
There is only one known panel in which brother and uncle appear together. “Uncle Sam sick with la grippe,” likely published in 1837, depicts Uncle Sam slumped in an armchair suffering from financial woes while Brother Jonathan stands outside the sick room window beseeching a doctor to cure the ailing Sam.
In the end, Uncle Sam proved to be the more robust of the two. A hundred and fifty years later, Uncle Sam lives on in the cultural imagination, used in everything from wartime recruitment posters to tacky car commercials. Uncle Sam’s identification with President Lincoln probably contributed to his longevity. He also gets points for originality. While Brother Jonathan and Yankee Doodle developed out of British characters, Uncle Sam did not. He was made in America.
It's a beautiful thing when neighbors come together. As the Independent reports, about 1.5 million volunteers spent their Sunday planting trees in Madhya Pradesh, India. They started in the morning, and by the time evening rolled around, they had put over 66 million new saplings in the ground—likely a new world record.
According to the state's chief minister, Shirvraj Singh Chouhan, the volunteers planted 20 different tree species across 24 districts, mostly along the banks of the Narmada river. A video shows people of all ages climbing up and down scaffolded hillsides, digging holes and tucking the young trees inside.
"I am overwhelmed to witness the enthusiasm of volunteers planting trees," Chouhan tweeted yesterday morning, a few hours into the initiative.
India has promised to increase its forests by 95 million hectares over the next 13 years as part of their contribution to the Paris Agreement. This will require covering nearly one-third of the country with vegetation.
Sunday's effort likely outdid the current one-day tree planting record of 50 million, set last year by volunteers in Uttar Pradesh. Guinness World Record officials are expect to deliver an official verdict on this sometime in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, it seems safe to say that everyone has won.
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.
A tractor-trailer with 100 wheels and carrying a 161-ton generator was stopped Thursday in Rhode Island after an employee from the Rhode Island Department of Transportation (RIDOT) spotted it on Interstate 95 in Warwick. The haul is hardly among the heaviest in history, but Rhode Island officials still worry that it could collapse one of several dozens bridges the truck would need cross en route to its destination.
This meant that the truck was stranded on the side of the road before being moved Friday to a nearby parking lot, according to the Warwick Post, while officials figure out what to do. (Update: A spokesman for RIDOT said Monday that the truck is still at the parking lot, and that the situation "likely will not be resolved until Wednesday at the earliest.")
The truck, which weighs 280 tons in total, was set to deliver the generator to a General Electric facility in Medford, Massachusetts, over a route that includes nearly three dozen bridges in Rhode Island alone, some of which are structurally insufficient.
Bay Crane, the company that owns the truck, told WJAR that they expected to have permits for the trip approved, which is why the truck set off to begin with. (After originating in Quonset Point, the truck got about 10 miles into its journey before it was spotted.)
Now a new route to Medford will have to be determined, and bridges along the way assessed. According to the Warwick Post, the generator is one of 18 General Electric expects for delivery to Medford—meaning that this will be the first of many tests for Rhode Island's infrastructure.
Milking a scorpion is not easy. The arachnid may not feel terribly cooperative when you deliver tiny electric shocks and then capture the venom that emerges from its stinger. You need to avoid shocking yourself, for sure, and, depending on the species, the venom can potentially kill you. It's a lot of work and sometimes requires two people for very little payoff—just a tiny amount of venom for medical research. But if milking scorpions happens to be your day job, your days could be about to get a whole lot easier.
The VES-4 robot was developed by a team of researchers from Ben M'sik Hassan II University in Morocco, and it is a lot safer than current methods. The machine holds the scorpion's tail in place while delivering electric shocks to stimulate venom production. It collects and stores the venom, too. The shocks don't hurt the scorpion, and the procedure saves them from having to have their venom glands removed for the extraction.
A safer method for obtaining scorpion venom is a big deal for medicine. Venom from the deathstalker scorpion, found in Africa and Asia, for example, is being used to highlight brain cancer cells so surgeons can remove them. Another scorpion, found in Mexico, produces venom that contains an immunosuppressant that could one day be used to treat autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis. Now scientists can focus on finding uses for venom, instead of worrying about how they'll get more safely.
But, you may be asking, what if I just happen to come across a dead eagle in the wild?
Good question! This is where the National Eagle Repository, the federal government’s official dead eagle processing center, comes in.
Part of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge near Denver, Colorado, the National Eagle Repository is the one place in the nation where deceased symbols of American freedom are sent, as well as the place you can look to for all your legal eagle part needs.
First created in the 1970s, the office as it exists today was established in 1995 as a result of a presidential mandate designed to create a legally regulated method for Native American tribes to obtain eagle parts for use in various cultural activities. The fierce protection of bald eagles in America made the procurement of eagle parts a thorny issue for many Native American tribes who use them—especially the feathers—in their legally protected cultural rites. With the repository in place, obtaining eagle parts is now a perfectly legal process that both helps to protect the animal and the rights of the people who use them.
The late eagles themselves can flow to the Repository from a number of avenues. According to Coleen Schaefer, the Supervisory Wildlife Repository Specialist, eagle corpses usually come from state and federal wildlife officers who find the dead birds in the wild, as well as eagle rehabilitators who end up with birds that just couldn’t pull through. However, zoos and even private citizens may (and, technically, are legally obligated to) send eagles to the facility. While the website calls for all eagle parts, regardless of condition, to be sent to the repository, Schaefer says they mainly get whole eagles. The Repository is refreshingly nondiscriminatory in its desire for dead eagle parts, although, as their website also makes very clear, they should not be sent eagles that have died from the West Nile Virus. This, tragically, is a real problem.
Birds that have been poisoned are also problematic, as the Repository only accepts them after an necropsy has been performed, just as if they were human murder victims.
Schaefer says that in addition to the more standard cases in which the birds die of disease or some other natural cause, they also get birds that were killed in illegal shootings. Once the investigation is complete, the “victim” is shipped to the Repository to be necropsied and harvested for Native American rituals. Sometimes they even come in still carrying their last meals. “We have received eagles where prey are still gripped in their talons, e.g. fish, ducks, etc., and that's always interesting,” says Schaefer.
The National Eagle Repository may not be picky about what birds come to them, but they are incredibly fastidious about the parts they send out to others. When the eagles come to the Repository, they are assessed for their usability to the Native American population, as damaged parts are not acceptable for many of their uses. Schaefer estimates that between 30 and 40 eagles are evaluated each day. “If the bird is best suited to be used for feathers, we hand-pluck the feathers from the wings and tail to provide to the applicant,” she says. (Usable or not, that is a staggering amount of dead eagles, and there are only three staff members working on the eagles full-time.)
If you happen to come across a dead eagle, you should contact a wildlife officer. But in case you decide to take care of that national treasure corpse yourself, the Repository suggests that you wear gloves to protect yourself from disease, place the bird in a sturdy plastic bag to prevent “leakage,” and get it into a freezer as soon as possible. All good rules for handling any dead thing, really.
They also suggest that you transport the carcass in a separate area from yourself in a vehicle. Specifically, the back of a pick-up. During both handling and packaging the eagle, it’s important to remember to be extra careful with the feathers, because if they are damaged, your grimly patriotic submission may all have been for naught.
If Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home taught us anything, it’s that whales are gentle and magical creatures. But unless you are Spock, it still takes guts to touch one, like one Tasmanian diver did when he recently captured his up-close encounter with a southern right whale on video.
According to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the 19-year-old diver, Kaeo Landon-Lane, got a chance to “boop” a southern right whale while on an outing with his father. The father and son had spotted a pair of whales near the surface, and the younger Landon-Lane got in the water to get a closer look.
As seen in the video, the pair of whales slowly come into view through the murk. Eventually one of the whales came close enough to Langdon-Lane that he thought it might run into him, so he put out an arm and pushed off its barnacled snout as it passed.
"I felt its enormity," Landon-Lane told ABC, "being that close to it and feeling so small."
At the beach known as Playa de Gulpiyuri, you can’t see the ocean. Located over 100 meters from the Calabrian Sea, Playa de Gulpiyuri borders a flooded sinkhole—in the middle of a vast field. The beach appears and disappears with the tide, and at its height it stretches only 40-50 meters in length.
According to Oddity Central, underground tunnels—carved out by the salt water—funnel water into the sinkhole and onto the beach, creating miniature waves.
In 2001, the Principality of Asturias, Spain named it a natural monument.
Video Wonders are audiovisual offerings that delight, inspire, and entertain. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
