In the early 1950s, if you wanted to surf in the frigid waters off the coast of Northern California, you didn't have many options—other than to dive in and bear it. Water temperatures don't frequently rise above 60 degrees there, compared with around 70 in San Diego, meaning that long sessions of water sports could turn deeply uncomfortable.
Enter Jack O'Neill, who started making early neoprene foam wetsuits in 1952 and sold them from his famed Surf Shop in Santa Cruz to keep surfers warm while they rode the waves. The first suits just covered the torso, but later versions made by O'Neill in the 1960s were full-body affairs, and the development coincided with an explosion in the popularity of surfing, making O'Neill rich and famous in the process.
— Santa Cruz County (@visitsantacruz) July 9, 2017
O'Neill died early last month at the age of 94, and on Sunday thousands of people across the world honored his passing with a surfing tradition known as a "paddle out," in which surfers paddle out to sea and form a circle in memory of a loved one.
Up to 3,000 surfers participated in a paddle out in Santa Cruz alone (see above), while some 240 paddled out in Cornwall, in southern England (see below), and dozens of others did so near Sydney. (Paddle outs were also scheduled for locations in Canada, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands.)
A mass 'paddle out' in #Cornwall to remember the man who invented the wetsuit. Jack O'Neill died last month at the age of 94 pic.twitter.com/BEQZ08BdIE
O'Neill had a beard and wore an eyepatch, a look that burnished his legend. According to The New York Times, he started surfing to escape the tedium of his day jobs, which included driving a cab and selling fire extinguishers.
“When you get all screwed up, and you jump in the ocean,” he once told surfline.com, “everything’s all right again.”
Even with their massive fore-flippers, humpback whales propel themselves almost exclusively with their just-as-massive back tail. But for the first time, researchers at Stanford have captured a humpback moving itself forward by flapping its flippers. Sort of like a bird.
In a video shared by Stanford University, a pod of whales can be seen milling about when suddenly, one of them gives a big push with its front flippers, in a motion that the story compares to that of seals or penguins. The footage was recorded by a camera mounted on another humpback to capture how the creatures move in their natural interactions. Clearly it didn’t disappoint.
The moment when the whale flaps its flippers is short, but telling, since it was previously thought that they were simply used for steering. In fact, among hundreds of hours of footage of hundreds of whales, the behavior is only seen twice. Its rarity has led researchers to surmise that such movement is only used for short, powerful bursts of speed, which require a lot of power from the whales.
NASA's Juno spacecraft has been orbiting Jupiter since July 2016 and will die by mechanical suicide sometime in 2018. But until then it will keep doing what it's been doing for over a year now: measuring things like electromagnetic waves and radio waves to get a better sense of what Jupiter is actually made of.
There's also a camera, which NASA named JunoCam, which manages to take some amazing pictures—including, soon, of the planet's Great Red Spot, in detail never seen before. On Monday night, Juno is set to make the closest-ever flyby of the Great Red Spot, just 2,200 miles above it (a hair's breadth in planetary terms), in a bid to learn more about the 10,000-mile wide storm that has been raging for hundreds of years.
What do NASA scientists hope to find out? Why the spot is red, for one thing. They suspect that the color may exist just in the top of the atmosphere, and that it's "actually pretty bland in color" below, as one scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory explained. But the latest flyby promises to outdo our last visit to what's been called the "Eye of Jupiter," when Voyager 1 cruised by in 1979, and produced some spectacular pictures of its own.
Since the beloved children’s author Maurice Sendak died in 2012, the foundation set up in his name has been working to collect and sort through his artwork and the records of his life. While working through some old files, Lynn Caponera, the president of the foundation, found the typewritten manuscript for a book. When she looked more closely at it, she realized it was story she didn’t remember, reports Publishers Weekly.
What she had found was the story for Presto and Zesto in Limboland, a work that Sendak and collaborator Arthur Yorinks had worked on in the 1990s and never published. “In all honesty, we just forgot it,” Yorinks told Publishers Weekly.
The book began with a set of 10 illustrations that weren’t meant to be a book at all. Sendak created them for a 1990 performance at the London Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra was playing a 1927 work by composer Leoš Janáček called Rikadla, which was inspired by a set of Czech nursery rhymes. After Sendak created the drawings, his publisher, Michael di Capua, thought they might be turned into a book. But the Czech nursery rhymes were the sort of topsy-turvy, imaginative nonsense that’s incredibly hard to translate. Nothing came of that idea.
But seven years later, after the drawings were used in another symphonic performance, Yorinks and Sendak spent an afternoon playing around with ideas for a new story, inspired by these same pictures. They named two main characters after themselves: Sendak had nicknamed Yorinks “Presto” and himself “Zesto.”
Twenty or so years after the two men did the work, the book will finally be published, next year, a hidden delight and (probably) the last new book we’ll ever have from Sendak.
Summer camp is always noisy, crazy, and full of weird things falling on you. But kids and counselors at a camp outside of Edmonton got one-upped by the sky on Sunday night, after a storm pelted the grounds with hail several inches across.
The hail started falling right as dinner was about to start. "I think it looked like white tomatoes," camper Payton Hicks, who watched the storm from the mess hall, told the CBC.
Others at Camp Evansburg compared the chunks of ice to billiard balls, baseballs, or eggs, and the sound they made to "loud thunder," "people throwing rocks," and "disrespectful kids." No injuries have been reported, but cars at the camp and in the nearby town suffered dents and windshield cracks.
As for the young campers, they enjoyed it, turning the hailstones into makeshift sports equipment. "We even added some of the balls to the [pool] water to make it Antarctica," Hicks told the CBC. "It was awesome."
While impressive, this hail was not record-setting. According to NOAA's Severe Storms Laboratory, hailstones have been discovered that were at least 8 inches across, and the hail size estimation chart on their website includes categories from "pea" up through "softball."
How do chunks of ice that size stay in the sky? As LiveScience explains, a hailstone is formed when water in the clouds comes into contact with an ice particle or a piece of dust and freezes around it. The stronger the wind, the longer the hailstone can stay aloft—and the longer it stays aloft, the bigger it gets.
In other words, the clouds above Camp Evansburg were plotting this prank for ages.
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.
Until 1875, no one in the world knew where babies come from. Ordinary people didn’t know, and neither did the scientists who helped shape the modern world. Leonardo da Vinci didn’t know. Galileo didn’t know. Isaac Newton didn’t know.
They knew, that is, that men and women have sex and as a result, sometimes, babies, but they did not know how those babies were created. They did not know that women produce eggs, and when they finally discovered sperm cells, they did not know that those wriggly tadpoles had anything to do with babies and pregnancy. (The leading theory was that they were parasites, perhaps related to the newly discovered mini-creatures that swam in drops of pond water. This was Newton’s view.)
Why? Why did it take the greatest minds of the scientific revolution—the same individuals who successfully calculated the weight of the Earth, and traced the paths of comets that cut the sky only once in a lifetime—more than two centuries to resolve a mystery that every fourth-grader today could explain?
Because everything to do with anatomy was difficult and uncertain, for starters. Studying the human body required buying corpses from grave-robbers, or bribing hangmen to turn over bodies fresh from the gallows. “You might be stopped by your disgust,” Leonardo da Vinci wrote, no matter how strong your curiosity, “and if that did not hinder you, then perhaps by the fear of spending the night hours in the company of those dead bodies, quartered and flayed and terrifying to behold.”
Da Vinci made the cutaway drawing shown above, of a couple having sex, in about 1492. The drawing has a host of peculiar features. He drew two distinct channels within the penis, though in fact there is only one. In da Vinci’s depiction, the lower channel carries urine while the upper carries semen and connects with the spinal column and brain. (The role of the testicles in all this was not quite clear.) The spinal connection reflected a Greek belief that, in the words of one ancient writer, “sperm is a drop of brain.”
Da Vinci’s transparent woman, pictured below, has design oddities of her own. For a start, she lacks ovaries. As if to make up for that oversight, she has a mysterious tube running from uterus to nipple. That pathway does not exist, except in da Vinci’s imagination, but the idea was that mother’s milk was made from refined, transformed menstrual blood. (This theory, dreamed up by the Greeks, was an attempt to explain why pregnant women and new mothers do not menstruate.)
Especially in anatomy’s early years, before microscopes, sexual riddles were almost beyond reach. Sperm and egg, even if you had known to look for them, were hidden and elusive. The human egg, though it is the largest cell in the body, is only the size of the period at the end of this sentence. Sperm cells, by contrast, are the smallest, far too little to see with the naked eye. (A human egg outweighs the sperm cell that fertilizes it by a million to one, the difference between a Thanksgiving turkey and a housefly.)
Religious faith made matters all the more perplexing. In the early years of the modern age, science and religion were not rivals but allies. All the titans of the scientific revolution were devout. All of them took for granted that, by studying God’s works, they were exalting his creation. But then came trouble.
For God was not simply the Creator who had shaped the stars and planets and made man in his own image. He was the only being with the power to create life. How could it be, then, that an ordinary couple huffing and puffing in the dark could create a new being?
Thus was born the now-bizarre seeming doctrine that eminent scientists espoused for more than a century. The idea was that parents do not create their children. God created every living being, and he had done so in one swoop, at the beginning of time.
That meant He must have stashed away every person who would ever live, all those destined to be born in the year 100, or in the 1200s, or 1500s, or some century still to come. They waited, like a series of ever-smaller Russian nesting dolls, one inside the other, in Adam’s testicles or in Eve’s ovaries. When the time came, each one would have its turn on stage.
All through the late 1600s, the 1700s, and well into the 1800s, this strange theory of conception prevailed. The theory’s very strangeness, in fact, counted in its favor, much as we today pay homage to the grandeur and reach of the “theory of everything” so beloved of modern physicists. In the 18th century, the scientific debate turned not on whether the theory made sense, but on a battle between spermists, as they were called, and ovists.
The spermists focused on Adam. Within his body, they explained, were testicles; in those testicles were sperm cells; in those sperm cells were miniature proto-humans; in their testicles were micro-miniature proto-humans, who had testicles of their own, within which . . . and so on, forever. The ovists endorsed the same hallucinatory picture, except that they placed the endless sequence of nesting dolls inside Eve’s ovaries.
In 1694, a scientist named Nicolaas Hartsoeker drew a picture destined for notoriety. It showed a big-headed person inside a sperm cell, hands clutching knees as if he has been told to brace for a crash. But, contrary to legend, Hartsoeker did not claim he had seen this tiny figure, only that someone might see such a thing when microscopes grew more powerful.
Microscopes would indeed reveal new worlds, but for more than a century they served only to send scientists racing off down blind alleys. The greatest of all microscopic investigators was a Dutch cloth merchant named Antony van Leeuwenhoek. Beginning in 1674, he had spotted tiny, living creatures in drops of pond water, in blood, in scrapings from his teeth, indeed, everywhere he looked. No one had ever suspected such micro-worlds. The idea made no sense, since it implied that God had lavished endless care on creatures destined never to be seen.
On an autumn night in 1677, Leeuwenhoek and his wife made love. He leapt up “immediately after ejaculation before six beats of the pulse had intervened,” and ran to his microscope with a sample of semen. There Leeuwenhoek saw “so great a number of living animalcules that sometimes more than a thousand were moving about in an amount of material the size of a grain of sand.” Thrilled, he dashed off a letter to the Royal Society. He did not say whether Mrs. Leeuwenhoek shared his delight.
But Leeuwenhoek, who had been trying to divine the secret of life, threw away this smokiest-of-all-smoking-gun clues. He decided, on second thought, that he had made a mistake. These tiny swimmers looked as if they were hurrying to some important destination, but in fact they had nothing to do with procreation.
Instead, Leeuwenhoek decided, he had found micro-animals that happened to live in semen. After all, hordes of microscopic creatures seemed to cavort everywhere he looked — in water, in tree sap, on his teeth, between his toes. Why shouldn’t semen have creatures of its own?
Until well into the 1800s, this parasite theory remained the conventional view. One picture from a medical text published in 1840 shows various parasites, including a sperm cell, alongside a tapeworm and other unappealing creatures.
Sperm cells had yet another strike against them. Why, if they were important, had God made hundreds of millions of them, when one would have sufficed? Surely the best of all possible designers would not have been so ludicrously wasteful.
But the true danger for the spermist view was not a scientific objection but a moral and medical one. A wave of anti-masturbation hysteria hit Europe in the 1700s and endured well into the next century. One acclaimed physician produced a best-selling tome warning of the ravages of masturbation. He described one of his patients, a 17-year-old watchmaker. His self-indulgence had left him bedridden and almost unable to move: pale, emaciated, “more like a corpse than a human being.” The unfortunate young man had lost his memory almost completely, though he retained just enough strength to acknowledge the vile habit believed to have brought him to this pass. “A pale bloody discharge issued from his nose; he foamed at his mouth; was affected with diarrhea and voided his feces involuntarily; there was a constant discharge of seminal fluid.” Within a few more weeks, he was dead.
Every medical authority hammered home the same message: every drop of semen was precious. This should not really have counted as an argument against the spermists—semen and sperm cells were not the same thing—but an epidemic of fear was no time for fine distinctions. The spermist doctrine that waste was part of God’s plan had little chance in an era that preached that waste was a physical and moral catastrophe.
It’s tempting to look at our intellectual forebears and smile patronizingly at them. How foolish of them to have chosen to live so long ago. But we should resist temptation. They had set out to explain where new life comes from and found themselves ensnared in a related but even harder question: what is life? A straightforward inquiry about sex and anatomy had transformed itself into a slippery philosophical riddle
For us, it would be as if scientists trying to map the brain found themselves trying to explain, where does hope come from? Where do ideas come from? We still don’t know. We understand perfectly well that brain gives rise to mind; the problem is that we cannot sort out just what that means. The scientists struggling with the babies mystery understood perfectly well that certain bits of matter were alive and others weren’t; the problem was that they couldn’t sort out how that could be.
Today, every 10-year-old knows where babies come from. But for millennia, the deepest thinkers on earth could only guess. That’s progress, but we shouldn’t be too smug. Every generation makes the mistake of thinking that the escalator runs only as high as their floor. Not so. We can be sure that in centuries to come, our descendants will look back at us and quote our earnest beliefs and shake their heads in astonishment.
In recent years, the “sport” of competitive eating has gained greater and greater popularity, and even produced its own small band of celebrity competitors. But centuries before the antics of Takeru Kobayashi, or the dominance of hot dog champion Joey Chestnut (72 in 10 minutes on July 4, his tenth title in 11 years), there was Nicholas Wood, the Great Eater of Kent, who may just be one of the earliest examples we have of a true competitive eater.
Before he came to be known by his more colorful nickname, it seems that the Great Eater was a regular 17th-century guy named Nicholas Wood. As the story goes, Taylor encountered Wood in an inn in Kent, and was amazed to see him devour some 60 eggs, a good portion of a lamb, and a handful of pies—a meal that left him hungry for more.
Wood was a farmer when Taylor found him, but the Great Eater had already gained a reputation as a nearly superhuman feaster. Wood made a name for himself as a glutton by performing feats of feasting at fairs and festivals, as well as by taking part in dares and wagers with nobles. As recounted in Jan Bondeson’s book, The Two-Headed Boy, and Other Medical Marvels, Wood had, at various times, devoured such incredible meals as seven dozen rabbits in one sitting, or an entire dinner feast intended for eight people.
Wood’s reputation was impressive, but he was far from undefeated. On at least two occasions, he was in fact beaten by food. During a visit with a man named Sir William Sedley, Wood ate so much that he fell over and went into a serious food coma. Upon Wood's awakening the next day, Sedley had his men put him in the stocks to shame him for his failure. In another instance, a man named John Dale bet that he could sate Wood’s appetite for just two shillings. Wood took the bet, and Dale fed him 12 loaves of bread that he’d soaked in a strong ale. If it wasn’t the sheer bloating effect of such a terrifying meal that did Wood in, it was the ale, which got him so drunk that he passed out. Dale won the bet, and Wood was once again humiliated.
Yet despite these instances of completely understandable weakness, Wood’s reputation as an eater kept bouncing back, and he maintained a sort of celebrity in Kent. After Taylor witnessed his incredible fortitude at that inn, the poet decided that they could both make some money on Wood’s voracious appetite. As recounted in his very own pamphlet, Taylor offered Wood payment, lodging, and massive amounts of food should he agree to come stay with him for a time in London. Wood had never traveled to London, and Taylor saw an untapped audience for the glutton’s talents.
Taylor’s plan would have had Wood perform daily feats of overeating at the city’s Bear Gardens, which at the time hosted animal fights. Among the suggested meals to give the “most exorbitant paunchmonger” were a wheelbarrow full of tripe, as many puddings as would stretch across the Thames, and an entire fat calf or sheep.
For better or worse, this gluttony exhibition never came to pass, as Wood, who was getting on in years, and who had lost all but one of his teeth from eating an entire mutton shoulder—bones and all—declined Taylor’s offer, saying that he wasn’t sure he’d be able to perform to expectations.
Even though Wood bowed out of what could have been the exhibition of his life, Taylor did not seem to bear him any ill will. A large portion of Taylor’s hagiography of Wood is spent comparing his monumental feats of gluttony to the achievements of historic giants such as Charlemagne and Alexander the Great: “Therefore this noble Eatalian doth well deserve the title of Great. Wherefore I instile him Nicholas the Great (Eater). And as these forenamed Greats have overthrown and wasted countries, and hosts of men, with the help of their soldiers and followers; so hath our Nick the Great, (in his own person) without the help or aide of any man, overcome, conquered, and devoured in one week, as much as would have sufficed a reasonable and sufficient army in a day[.]” The poet’s florid description of Wood gives him such names as “Duke All-Paunch” and the “Kentish Tenterbelly.” Even as his talents faded, it’s clear that Taylor still saw Wood as a champion.
As for Wood himself, according to Bondeson, the Great Eater left Taylor’s house one day and was never heard from again. He slipped away into the fog of history, and yet our love of monstrous appetites has survived him pretty much intact.
Don't worry, your screen is just fine. That's just Bolivia's Salar de Uyuni salt flat, as seen from space. Thanks to the European Space Agency's Copernicus Sentinel-2B satellite, we have a new view of the bright white lake bed, along with its rough surroundings, and the colorful evaporating pools of the national lithium plant.
Salar de Uyuni is the world's largest salt flat, covering about 4,000 square miles—bigger than the state of Delaware—in southwestern Bolivia. Formed when a series of prehistoric lakes dried up, the flat white surface contains as much as 70 percent of the world's lithium reserves. The evaporating pools help separate the valuable metal from magnesium and sodium salts for use in everything from batteries and ceramics to aircraft parts and pharmaceuticals. Bolivia's lithium reserves are the largest in the world, but production of finished compounds still lags behind Australia, Chile, and Argentina.
The vast salt flat also lives up to its name—it is exceptionally flat, with less than 32 inches of surface variation. That extreme flatness, combined with the bright white surface, makes Salar de Uyuni the perfect place for satellites orbiting Earth to calibrate their altimeters and radar.
The rough surrounding terrain includes mountains and the Rió Grande de Lipez delta (in the lower right portion of the photo), where the river trickles onto the salt flat. In the winter, the old lakebed is covered by shallow floods. It's a unique environment, both up close and from far, far away.
On Friday, July 7, firefighters in Worland, Wyoming, responded to a report of a fire at the site of a former sulfur plant. This is hellish sight that greeted them:
That, indeed, is sulfur burning and emitting toxic known as sulfur dioxide—"despite the beautiful flames," and dancing fire devils, the Worland Volunteer Fire Department wrote on their Facebook page.
The fire, which was put under control within 20 minutes, was ignited by the exhaust of an off-road motorcycle, according to the Associated Press, though Fire Chief Chris Kocher said that nobody was hurt and no one was cited for starting the blaze.
All of this means we can all enjoy the beauty of this practical special effect relatively guilt-free. Here is a GIF:
It used to be that a fisherman would come back from a day on the water with nothing but their word as proof of their big fish tales. But in the age of YouTube, we get video right from the boat. Take Sean Moffett, a California fisherman who recently pulled a very, very large catfish out of the water, sharing the video to prove it.
According to KTVU, the fish weighed just over 29 pounds and measured nearly 3 feet in length. And while that might not seem that large for a catfish—some species of which can grow to be hundreds of pounds—Moffett's is a channel catfish, a smaller variety.
Great cocktails go hand in hand with great stories. There are legends about the creation of the Sazerac, the Ramos Gin Fizz, even the Manhattan. But where’s the celebrated origin story of that iconic American pre-dinner drinking hour, the cocktail party? Sources disagree.
Alec Waugh (brother of the novelist Evelyn) insisted in a 1970 Esquire essay that he invented the idea of drinks-before-dinner in the 1920s. Others point to a Tacoma Times article from April 1917 crediting a St. Louis socialite, Mrs. Clara Bell Walsh, as the first to hold a party devoted exclusively to mixed drinks.
By this math, the venerable institution of the cocktail party is exactly a century old this year. But where are the parties celebrating the mixed-drinks centennial? Who was this mysterious cocktail maven anyway? And did she really invent the iconic party style, which Waugh defined as “start[ing] at half-past-five…lasts ninety minutes, at which alcohol is served but not much food”?
Walsh certainly couldn’t claim the invention of cocktails, which had been around for centuries by 1917. Early recipes for alcoholic punches date to the 1600s, but it was the publication of Jerry Thomas’ The Bartender’s Guide in 1862 that marked the birth of the modern cocktail craze. Although Thomas’ guide shows the diversity of cocktails available by the mid-19th century, he doesn’t provide any clues about how to throw a party with them.
Walsh’s mixed-drink mixer emerged from a collision of two distinct trends in American society. As the temperance movement gained power at the end of the 19th century, the availability of public drinking spaces like saloons and hotel bars shrank considerably, reorienting America’s drinking culture to the home. Simultaneously, American society began to shrug off its Victorian conventions. The era of the “New Woman,” lasting from the 1880s to the 1920s, was characterized by women uninterested in stuffy social constraints. New domestic labor-saving devices, such as gas stoves and electric irons, coincided with a move away from a house full of servants and cooks. Elaborate multi-course dinners, beloved during the Victorian age, fell dramatically out of fashion. As a 1906 woman’s guide put it, “Informal entertainment is, as everyone knows or ought to know, a far greater compliment to guests than any formal entertainment, however splendid.” Domestic manuals urged homemakers to shrug off big meals in favor of friendly get-togethers such as afternoon tea parties or receptions.
Casual events centered around the home grew popular, providing opportunities for men and women to socialize and enjoy a mixed drink or two. Hostesses weren’t obligated to provide full meals for guests, only drinks and light nibbles such as sandwiches and salads. As the 1901 Etiquette for All Occasions recommended, “Aerated waters, punch, wine-cup, and lemonade are thought sufficient. The time of the reception being from three until six or from four until seven o’clock, a heavy meal would be out of place.” The time of day, food, and mixed drinks of the 1900s afternoon tea embodied Waugh’s cocktail party definition in everything but name.
But the cocktail had a serious branding problem. Originally a simple mixture of spirits and bitters, cocktails were considered drinks only appropriate for men, too strong for a delicate Victorian woman’s sensibilities. Not that companies in the cocktail business didn’t try to change this. In 1897, the cocktail mixer company Heublein’s tried marketing specifically to women: “In the past the male sex were the only ones privileged to partake of the daintiest of American drinks, the ‘Cocktail.’ With the innovation of Club Cocktails it has been made possible for the gentler sex to satisfy its curiosity in regard to the concoction about which so much has been written and said, and which has heretofore not been obtainable by them.”
Despite Heublein’s best efforts, women continued to be discouraged from drinking cocktails. Social events where such libations were served were morally suspect. In 1903 temperance advocates condemned a party held by the actress Lillie Langtry, where “jeweled gin suckers” purchased cocktails at 50-60 cents a piece. According to Catherine Murdock’s book Domesticating Drink, cabarets and dance halls where alcoholic drinks were served were dangerous, tempting women to drink “Mamie Taylors, cocktails, and other insidious mixtures.”
But for the New Woman, such arguments fell on increasingly deaf ears. Whether in private or public, women were beginning to sip cocktails in ever greater numbers. The same year temperance supporters condemned Langtry, an article in the Chicago Chronicle admitted to the increasing trend of women drinking cocktails: “That many society women drink ardent spirits and sometimes to excess is a well-known fact.” Domestic manuals began to include recipes for harder mixed drinks. A 1909 edition of TheWoman’s Dictionary and Encyclopedia, edited by American culinary expert Fannie Farmer, included recipes for 58 cocktails, including Sours, Martinis, and Manhattans.
The New Women of the 20th century, including one Clara Bell Walsh, took aim at the scandal-soaked image of the cocktail-drinking woman. As Owen Johnson’s 1913 The Salamander put it: “New ideas are stirring within [the modern woman], logical revolts—equality of burden with men, equality of opportunity and of pleasure.” Born in 1884, Walsh exemplified the economic and social independence desired by the new generation. Thanks to her father’s generous will, Clara was a millionaire before she turned 20. Even after her marriage to St. Louis businessman Julius S. Walsh Jr. in 1904, Clara’s personal finances allowed her to pursue her own interests, spending months away from home to race horses or travel to Europe.
As a prominent member of wealthy St. Louis society, Clara was in a position to free the cocktail from its immoral past. Updating the tradition of the informal afternoon tea, Walsh’s 1917 party brazenly swapped low alcohol punches and claret cups for Sazeracs and Clover Leafs. No longer the drinks of seedy dance halls, cocktails were now something any woman could enjoy without reproach. As the Tacoma Times put it:
“Positively the newest stunt in society is the giving of ‘cocktail parties’ … a Sunday matinee affair which originated here … filling a long felt Sunday want in society circles … Mrs. Walsh, because of her innovation has become more of a social celebrity in St. Louis than ever.”
Clara Bell Walsh’s party helped to promote the image of the sophisticated woman as a cocktail drinker. Just three years later, however, the introduction of Prohibition in 1920 brought any public cocktail-drinking to a roaring halt. But the mixed drinks mavens of the 1910s weren’t forgotten. The 1920s flappers who bobbed their hair, threw away their corsets, and sipped drinks at speakeasies saw Walsh and the New Women as inspirations for their new battle for female independence. As Vogue magazine put it in 1930:
“The really smart woman [is] apt to be an anti-prohibitionette…All have in common a certain freedom of mind which is bound to be characteristic of women who lead such crusades…It was such women who went out to fight for a vote…In the War, they drove ambulances as close to the front as possible. They are athletic. [They were] the first to drink cocktails…They pile up the qualities of mind and manner that make leaders.”
Researchers have found secret markings on a Neolithic stone in southern England. Before his investigation of Hendraburnick "Quoit," a large ax-shaped stone, Andy Jones of the Cornwall Archaeological Unit knew that it features numerous cup-marks—round prehistoric engravings common throughout Atlantic Europe. But Jones’s team, which was trying to determine whether the stone was once part of a megalithic structure or tomb, soon discovered nearly 10 times as many engravings the Quoit as was initially thought to hold. The vast majority, however, are only visible under moonlight or the raking light of dawn.
“This large number of cups and lines means that [Hendraburnick 'Quoit'] is the most highly decorated and complex example of rock art in southern England,” the researchers write. The team also found smashed quartz by the site, suggesting that the rock art may have been part of a larger nighttime ritual that went on for many years.
“Quartz has luminescent properties and reflects both moonlight and firelight,” they write, adding that “these luminescent properties are known to have been deployed in rituals in both the Americas and Australia.”
The intention behind the engravings and the nature of the ritual that may have been associated with them is unknown. But, as The Sunnotes, the team may have addressed the question they initially set out to answer. They found evidence that the rock formation was dragged up from a nearby valley, suggesting that the stone was indeed once part of some man-made structure and not just a naturally occurring object of interest.
You can view a scaled-down model of the site below and a map of the engravings here.
In 1933, a group of employees from the U.S. National Park Service found themselves in a bit of a pickle. The NPS was working hard to put together a display for the upcoming Chicago World's Fair, a massive exhibition that promised to draw tens of millions of visitors. They already had a scale model of the Grand Canyon, wood samples from Petrified Forest, and a 12-foot-tall "miniature Mt. Rainer" that experienced a blizzard whenever visitors pushed a button.
But the director wanted to make sure they had something else—a fossilized cycad plant from the end of the Cretaceous period. Thousands had been preserved in the silt beds of South Dakota, and the best specimens were both familiar-looking and clearly ancient. If you were showing off the country's wonders, a cycad was a good thing to include.
The staffers figured they knew where to find one: at Fossil Cycad National Monument, a 320-acre patch of land in South Dakota's Black Hills, just south of Minnekahta. After all, it had been set aside for protection because it was littered with the things. But when they returned, they were empty-handed: not only did they fail to bring back a suitable specimen, they couldn't even suss out where to look for one. "They came back and said they couldn't find the site," says Vince Santucci. "There were no resources left at the location."
Santucci, a senior paleontologist with the National Park Service, is used to digging up and piecing together lost creatures. He's spent the past few decades reconstructing a different kind of extinct thing: the lost saga of Fossil Cycad. One of only a few national monuments in U.S. history to be completely stripped of its status, the site—which started out as a trove of ancient treasures—eventually became the center of political skirmishes, dramatic staged excavations, everyday pilfering, and scientific self-sabotage. "An incredible story emerged," says Santucci.
The tale of Fossil Cycad really starts in the late Cretaceous, when a large clump of prehistoric plants in what would eventually become the Black Hills was buried by a landslide. Over the next 70 million years, the plants slowly solidified, as their organic matter was replaced with built-up molecules of silica and other minerals. In the 1890s, South Dakota ranchers began discovering the resulting fossils in great numbers, nicknaming them "petrified pineapples" and selling them as curios.
Soon, scientists from the University of Iowa, the Smithsonian, and other institutions came out to investigate, and to buy specimens. The fossils were preserved to a unique degree, enabling researchers to dissect and study them almost as they would a living plant. (As Santucci explains, they were also actually cycadeoids, which have different reproductive structures than cycads—but this distinction was not made until later.) By the end of the 19th century, the land around Minnekahta was recognized as a unique and significant paleontological site.
One of these scientists was a young man named George Reber Wieland. A paleontology student at Yale University, Wieland had spent the beginning of his career chasing down dead animals, gaining a certain amount of renown for his discovery of Archelon ischyros, a Cretaceous-era sea turtle that remains the largest known to man.
In 1898, the year after he dug up the turtle, Wieland went to the Black Hills and found something that interested him even more: a fossil cycad, with what he later described as "the most perfectly silicified prefoliate fronds of any yet obtained." He changed his focus to paleobotany, and embarked on a mission to achieve "a complete elaboration" of the structures of various cycad types.
"He became the world's leading expert on fossil cycads," says Santucci, who describes Wieland as "sort of an eccentric, crazy professor." He wrote two books on the subject, American Fossil Cycads and American Fossil Cycads, Volume 2, in which he wrote rapturously of the "superb beauty" of particular cycads while laying out their anatomy and natural history. He even decorated his backyard with some of his specimens, arranged alongside living plants.
All this time, Wieland was also working on a related side project: trying to protect the fossil-rich area in South Dakota from which so many of his beloved specimens came. There were layers upon layers of the so-called petrified pineapples hidden in the dirt, but thanks to the attentions of collectors, tourists, and scientists like himself, they tended to disappear nearly as fast as erosion revealed them. This was, Wieland had written, "the most important of all the American cycad horizons." Was there some way to keep it intact?
In 1906, Theodore Roosevelt gave him a possible way forward by passing the Antiquities Act, which granted presidents the power to designate federal lands as national monuments. Roosevelt quickly began using it, setting aside spaces including Devil's Tower, Montezuma Castle, and the Muir Woods. "Wieland strongly felt that the site that he was working on was worthy of similar preservation," and began lobbying the government to turn it into a national monument, says Santucci. "He invested a lot of energy." During his research, Santucci found copies of dozens of letters the professor wrote to senators and Congressmen, asking for their support.
When that proved ineffective, Wieland dreamed up a different strategy. In 1920, under the auspices of the Homesteading Act—which was more meant to encourage people to move West, not to enable paleobotany—"he actually acquired 160 acres of land in which the fossils were situated," says Santucci. "So he was using that as leverage, convincing the federal government that he would donate it back."
This worked. On October 21, 1922, President Warren G. Harding officially deemed the area protected, placing it under the jurisdiction of the U.S. National Park Service. The paleobotanic deposits at the newly declared Fossil Cycad National Monument were "of great scientific interest and value," Harding wrote in the corresponding Presidental Proclamation. "Warning is hereby expressly given to all unauthorized persons not to appropriate, injure, destroy, or remove any of the fossils of this monument."
Unfortunately for Fossil Cycad, its official recognition as an American landmark came at a difficult time for the country overall. "It was a period of economic hardship," says Santucci. "Fossil Cycad wasn't really developed like other national parks and monuments were." That meant no one was hired to watch over the land. While the superintendent of nearby Wind Cave National Park was put in charge of its overall management, "day-to-day surveillance was entrusted to local ranchers," writes Santucci. The site's only sign—a 15-inch carved wooden plank—abbreviated both "National" and "Monument," but made sure to spell out "NO PROSPECTING."
Despite this lack of amenities, tourists continued to swing by, and to take pieces of the monument home with them. "People reading in newspapers about the monument in the Black Hills would come," says Santucci. Natural erosion meant that new layers of fossils were gradually exposed, creating more buzz and more foot traffic. Such was the Fossil Cycad catch-22: when there weren't any visible fossils, it wasn't much of a monument. But whenever there were enough to attract visitors, those same visitors meant they were quick to disappear.
This cycle happened repeatedly. When the National Park Service sent the superintendent of Yellowstone to check on Fossil Cycad in 1929, he didn't mince words. "There is nothing left that is of interest to visitors," he wrote in his report. Pointing out that the NPS had a reputation to uphold, he continued, "It is a liability, not an asset, to the rest of the system… it would seem to be desirable to discontinue it as a national monument."
For years, government authorities argued back and forth about whether to keep Fossil Cycad on the payroll. Meanwhile, Wieland wasn't one to sit on his hands. In 1935, after the World's Fair debacle, he brought a crew from the Civilian Conservation Corps to Fossil Cycad. As scientists and NPS representatives looked on, the workers dug a half dozen pits, revealing piles upon piles of previously unexposed fossils, over one ton of material.
Wieland had the fossils stored in Wind Park for safekeeping, but when the NPS asked him to write a report detailing the site's precise value, he said he wouldn't do any more work until they had committed to building some infrastructure. Specifically, he wanted a black granite museum where he could display his most interesting specimens.
The NPS called his bluff, suggesting that Wieland seek his own funding, and sending him once again into what Santucci calls "a frenzy of letter-writing" to various politicians. He began agitating for a visitor's center as well, asking students at the Yale School of Architecture to draft design proposals, and trying to convince his own senator to earmark the cost into the Connecticut state budget. (He said no.)
In the meantime, others related to the endeavor began to call Wieland's integrity into question. In 1938, the superintendent of Wind Cave National Park, E.D. Freeland, told the South Dakota Argus-Leader that on several occasions, Wieland had had "carloads" of fossil cycads shipped to New Haven, both from the site itself and from the "protected" stash stored at Wind Cave.
"There is not one specimen at the Wind Cave national park, where every day interested visitors inquire about them," Freeland said at the time. (As Santucci writes, National Park Service geologist Carrol Wegemann corroborated the claim, and Wieland later admitted to having stolen at least 1,000 specimens right before the monument was designated.)
Facing these accusations—and, one suspects, the prospect of having doomed his own monument—Wieland became more and more agitated. He responded to a proposal to build a cycad-related visitor's center at Wind Cave instead as full of "bat dung," arguing somewhat ironically that the fossils must be viewed "in situ," or the site would "mean but little." He called Freeland a "hill billy," and referred to his park as "Windy Cave." "You have stood my good plans off for fifteen years," he wrote desperately to the NPS.
It was all for naught. Wieland died in 1953, and four years later, the monument—which by now just looked like grass, rocks and dirt—was officially abolished.
It has left one legacy, though. Fossil theft is still a big problem in national parks. "Over the past ten years, we have had more than 700 documented instances," Santucci says.
Having pieced together this story, in which such transgressions were taken to extremes, he's since been working its lessons into educational programs. "People are incensed to think that an area that was set aside as a National Park is no longer there," he says. "The circumstances upon which that decision was made, to abolish it—I think it does help us to present the idea that fossils are non-renewable resources." We've already learned that the hard way.
Feral pigeons, which live on every continent in the world except Antartica, are famously adaptable—They shack up all over, from San Francisco to London to Mumbai.
They are also in Calgary, where around 200 of them have made their home on the roof of the South Health Campus, a 269-bed hospital. This was an unwelcome development, since pigeons can carry disease, and they poop a lot.
The hospital's efforts to get rid of them—including with noise, which worked at first, before the birds got used to it—haven't been successful, so recently they chose to get a little more serious. They've hired three baby peregrine falcons, according to the CBC, as a future anti-pigeon patrol.
A falconer, John Campbell, plans to release the falcons from the building, where it is hoped they will hunt down the pigeons and "other small game," the CBC reports.
"You could [use] anything that would scare them, that would go after them as prey," Campbell said. "It doesn't have to be falcons but the falcons work very well."
It will be a little time before the falcons get to the hunting, as just one has fledged so far. In the meantime, though, they're being fed dead pigeons to give them a taste for pigeon blood.
In 1613, the sloth received its English name from a man who'd never seen the animal in the flesh. Samuel Purchas, an English cleric, collected sailors' reports of sights from their voyages around the world. Though he had not been to the Americas himself, he first described the sloth, which is native to Central and South America, in his book, Pilgrimage. Locals, he reported, called the animal “hay” after the sound it made, and because it moved so slowly, the Portuguese called it"preguiça." That might translate as “laziness," but, being an cleric, Purchas translated the word as as “sloth,” one of the seven deadly sins. The name stuck.
From their early encounters with sloths, Europeans did not think much of these creatures. They were described as having humans faces, so artists depicted them as a sort of fuzzy bear with an ape-like head. (There are actually two distinct types of sloths, two- and three-toed, which are less closely related than was originally assumed, but since both move slowly, they are lumped together, even today.) As late as the 19th century, one natural history book describes sloths as “imperfect monsters of creation, equally remarkable in their disgusting appearance and helpless condition."
But in our time, the reputation of sloths has been rehabilitated. This may have reached its zenith with the Great Sloth Meltdown of 2012, when the actress Kristen Bell shared on The Ellen Show the story of just how excited she was to meet a real, live sloth:
Since then, it’s been a popular opinion that sloths are pretty darn cute and amazing. In fact, there’s an entire internet subculture dedicated to “sloth love.”
So which is it? Are sloths imperfect, disgusting monsters? Or are they cute—full stop? Here we present both cases and a chance to resolve this pressing question. After reading the arguments on both sides (and, quick preview, the case for disgusting involves human latrines), please vote in the poll below, which will close at 3 p.m. on Friday, July 14, at the end of Atlas Obscura's Sin Week.
Sloths Are Cute/Amazing
Baby sloths are unreal adorable.
Okay, it’s cheating a little bit to start with baby animals, because most of them are cute. But sloth babies have the particularly adorable characteristic of spending the first months of their lives clinging to their mother’s bellies. Also, look at this one and its giant tongue!
They love hibiscus.
Just as Michael Pollan advises, sloths eat mostly plants. It’s one of the reasons they are so slow—their diet is low-energy, so their metabolic rate is slow, too. Their digestive systems may take an unusually long time to process food, though there’s some debate about that. One of their favorite foods is reportedly hibiscus flowers, which have also become a popular ingredient in human food culture. Sloths: totally on trend.
They sleep in trees.
Sloths spend most of their time high in trees, and they stay there to sleep, too. To make a comfy tree bed, they like to wrap their legs around a trunk, lean back onto a well-angled branch, and tuck their chins to their chests. This looks incredibly comfortable—the ideal way to sleep in a tree, if you are a sloth and can pull off the balance.
They smell like trees.
Sloths move slowly enough that they don’t need sweat glands, and their body odor is minimal. In the wild, they pick up the smell of their surroundings. Sam Trull, of the Sloth Institute Costa Rica, who has rescued sloths and released them into the forest, told Mental Floss, “they smell really good” when they're in the forest. “It’s probably just coming from being in the trees and whatever saps that are getting on them from sleeping and moving in the trees versus living in my living room or sleeping in bags. But they smell like trees now.” Gah.
They squawk.
Sloths make an extremely distinct sound that’s been compared to the squawk of a human infant. It’s ... well, just watch:
Sloths are disgusting
They are covered in algae.
Sloths are ecosystems unto themselves. They have developed symbiotic relationships with algae and moths. The algae grows all over their bodies, in some cases turning sloths a slime-green hue, and moths live in their fur and lay eggs in their feces. The sloths may even eat some of the algae that grows all over them, or absorb some of its nutrients through their skin. Yes, this is cool, but also it is kind of gross.
They have extra vertebrae.
Most mammals, no matter how long their necks are, have seven neck vertebrae. (The vertebrae in, say, a giraffe's neck are much longer than ours, for example.) By contrast, sloths have nine vertebrae in their necks. This enables them to turn their heads almost 360 degrees, like a creepy horror-movie creature. Also, the extra vertebrae can have vestigial ribs sticking out of them.
Their claws are very long.
Sloths need claws to grasp and hang from trees, but close up they are long and creepy appendages. They look a bit like human fingernails that were allowed to grow long and were never cleaned.
They do this sex scream.
Sloths are usually antisocial; they spend much of their lives alone. But when it comes time to mate, a female sloth has to let the males of her species know she’s ready. She does this with a loud and unpleasant scream.
The latrine thing
In 2001, a group of scientists working in the Peruvian Amazon noticed a sloth hanging from the wooden beams over their latrine. It wasn’t just hanging there, though. It was eating from the latrine. “It was scooping with one hand from the semi-liquid manure composed of faeces, urine and toilet paper and then eating from the hand,” the scientists later reported.
This wasn’t just one weirdo sloth, either. The team observed multiple sloths behaving in this way, on 25 different occasions. Though it must have some nutritional value, there’s no definitive answer as to why the sloths were eating human feces. And remember how baby sloths cling to their mothers? It’s hard to see in this picture, but it shows a mom and baby sloth emerging from the latrine together.
You Decide
To review, the case for sloths being cute: Baby sloths have long tongues, sloths eat hibiscus flowers and other plants, they make incredible squawking noises, they have mastered sleeping in trees, and they smell like the forest. The case for sloths being disgusting—they are covered in algae, they have extra, creepy vertebrae and gross, long claws, they screech to attract a mate, and they are willing to eat liquid-y human waste.
What was the chastity belt? You can picture it; you've seen it in many movies and heard references to it across countless cultural forms. There's even a Seattle band called Chastity Belt. In his 1969 book Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), David R. Reuben describes it as an "armored bikini" with a "screen in front to allow urination and an inch of iron between the vagina and temptation."
"The whole business was fastened with a large padlock," he writes. With this device, medieval men going off to medieval wars could be assured that their medieval wives would not have sex with anyone else while they were far, far away, for years at a time. Yes, it sounds simultaneously ridiculous, barbarous, and extremely unhygienic, but ... medieval men, you know? It was a different time.
This, at least, is the story that's been told for hundreds of years. It's simple, shocking, and, on some level, fun, in that it portrays past people as exceedingly backwards and us, by extension, as enlightened and just better. It's also, mostly likely, very wrong.
"As a medievalist, one day I thought: I cannot stand this anymore," says Albrecht Classen, a professor in the University of Arizona's German Studies department. So he set out to reveal the true history of chastity belts. "It's a concise enough research topic that I could cover everything that was ever written about it," he says, "and in one swoop destroy this myth."
Here is the truth: Chastity belts, made of metal and used to ensure female fidelity, never really existed.
When one considers the evidence for medieval chastity belts, as Classen did in his book The Medieval Chastity Belt: A Myth-Making Process, it becomes apparent pretty quickly that there's not much of it. First of all, there aren't actually all that many pictures or accounts of the use of chastity belts, and even fewer physical specimens. And the few book-length works on the topic rely heavily on each other, and all cite the same few examples.
"You have a bunch of literary representation, but very few historical references to a man trying to put a chastity belt on his wife," says Classen. And any literary reference to a chastity belt is likely either allegorical or satirical.
References to chastity belts in European texts go back centuries, well into the first millennium A.D. But until the 1100s, those references are all couched in theology, as metaphors for the idea of fidelity and purity. For example: One Latin source admonishes the "honest virgin" to "hold the helmet of salvation on your front, the word of truth in the mouth ... true love of God and your neighbor in the chest, the girdle of chastity in the body … ." Possibly virgins who took this advice went around wearing metal helmets and keeping some physical manifestation of the word "truth" in their cheeks, like a wad of tobacco, in additional to strapping on metal underwear. Or, possibly, none of this was meant to be taken literally.
The earliest extant drawing of a chastity belt showed up in 1405, in a work on military engineering called Bellifortis, among detailed designs for catapults, armor, torture devices, and other instruments of war. Here's how the belt was depicted:
But not everything in the book was serious. Included in the codex are what Classen calls "highly fanciful objects" for making people invisible. The author, Konrad Kyeser, also makes a couple of fart jokes. Though the chastity belt is depicted in a fair bit of detail, no one has ever found a physical example dating back to this period. Most likely, this image, too, is a joke.
Starting around the 16th century, the chastity belt started showing up more regularly in illustrations, engravings, and woodcuts. Typically, a scene looked something like this. A husband, often an older husband, was leaving on a journey. His wife was pictured, often partially naked, wearing metal underwear. But somewhere in the picture, her lover was already waiting for the husband to leave—with a copy of the belt's key in hand.
What accounts for the persistence of this story? "Male fear," according to Classen. "There’s always a lover in the background who already has the duplicate key, he says. In other words, even in the 1500s, no one took the idea of locked-up metal underwear very seriously as an effective anti-sex device. When chastity belts were depicted, it was in the Renaissance equivalent of Robin Hood: Men in Tights—and the audiences for those pieces of art probably thought the idea of a metal chastity belt just as giggle-worthy as late 20th-century teenagers did.
There are physical examples of chastity belts that have been displayed in museums. But most scholars now think that these metal objects were made much, much more recently than the Middle Ages, and are fantasy objects referencing a past that never really existed. Or, as the British Museum puts it: "It is probable that the great majority of examples now existing were made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as curiosities for the prurient, or as jokes for the tasteless." (These were the Victorians, after all—obsessed with sex and often very wrong about it.)
One of the examples in Classen's book, for instance, has a little heart punched out of the metal front, and a hole that's apparently meant to allow defecation is in the shape of a flower. It's too cute to be real.
Why has the myth of the chastity belt endured? It's hard to disprove an idea once it's firmly lodged in people's minds. As a result, the same scant information has repeatedly convinced generations that medieval men locked up their wives' nether regions. Even the practical difficulties of such a device—as one historian wrote, “How could such a mechanism have been designed to permit the normal activities of urination, evacuation, menstruation, and hygiene, yet prevent both anal and vaginal penetration?"—have not dissuaded people from believing in chastity belts.
"People delight in delving into sex. They can say they only have a historical interest, but in reality they have a prurient interest," says Classen. "It’s a fantasy."
For men, the chastity belt is a fantasy about female sexual appetites—women are so horny that only locking them up can keep them in check. For women, it's a fantasy about male cruelty and control. But for many people, it's simply a fantasy about sex. Even if chastity belts used to enforce medieval fidelity were not real, modern chastity belts, sold as fetish objects, definitely, definitely are.
The iceberg that has been threatening to break from Antarctica’s Larsen C ice shelf has finally made its move. lt is now officially one of the largest icebergs ever recorded—more than 120 miles long, 1,100 feet thick, 2,240 square miles in area, and 230 cubic miles in volume.
Just how big is that? Reporters around the world are figuring out comparisons for an object this large for their readers. It is …
“Twice the volume of Lake Erie,” according to the Associated Press and Project Midas, which has been closely tracking the iceberg’s progress,
Some 600 light-years away, two stars, one very large, one very small, orbit each other. Recently, from the perspective of Earth, the smaller one passed in front of the larger one, a transit that allowed scientists to see the smaller one for the first time.
That smaller one is, in fact, the smallest star ever observed—about the size of Saturn—and, scientists say, about as small as stars can get. Any smaller, they believe, and there probably wouldn't be enough pressure on the stellar core to create the hydrogen fusion reaction that powers many stars, including the Sun.
The discovery was announced Wednesday by the University of Cambridge. The scientists who found the star were actually looking for planets, which are often found by the same method of waiting for them to pass in front of stars—where they dim stellar brightness ever-so-slightly.
"While a fascinating feature of stellar physics, it is often harder to measure the size of such dim low-mass stars than for many of the larger planets," Alexander Boetticher, the lead author of a study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, explained in the announcement. "Thankfully, we can find these small stars with planet-hunting equipment, when they orbit a larger host star in a binary system. It might sound incredible, but finding a star can at times be harder than finding a planet.”
The star has been christened EBLM J0555-57Ab and, according to scientists, shares a lot of features with stars such as Trappist-1, which was recently found to be surrounded by seven temperate planets (one of which may, perhaps, possibly, be conducive to life). But EBLM J0555-57Ab has no planets—just a parent star that it orbits in a lonely dance that will likely continue for tens of thousands of years.
Abraham Lincoln had a problem. During his 1860 campaign as a Republican candidate for the American presidency, in an era after the birth of the photograph but before its widespread dissemination in the media, many of the country's citizens could only guess at what he looked like.
Rumors of his ugliness proliferated. The North Carolina newspaper The Newbern Weekly Progresswrote that Lincoln was “coarse, vulgar and uneducated,” while the Houston Telegraph opined that he was “the leanest, lankiest, most ungainly mass of legs, arms and hatchet face ever strung upon a single frame. He has most unwarrantably abused the privilege which all politicians have of being ugly.”
One woman, Mary Boykin, claimed Lincoln was “grotesque in appearance, the kind who are always at the corner stores, sitting on boxes, whittling sticks, and telling stories as funny as they are vulgar.” In fact, many Democrats sang an anti-Lincoln rallying cry that concluded with: “We beg and pray you— Don’t, for God’s sake, show his picture.”
Though the rumors of Lincoln’s ugliness stayed mostly within Democratic circles, Lincoln was not anxious to let the idea spread. So he turned to Mathew Brady, a well-known photographer with a studio on Pennsylvania Avenue. In many ways, Brady was perfect: though Brady himself had bad vision and did not take many of his own photos, he “conceptualized images, arranged the sitters, and oversaw the production of pictures.” Plus, according to the New York Times, Brady was “not averse to certain forms of retouching.”
In February 1860, just before Lincoln gave the Cooper Union Address that would help secure him the Republican presidential nomination, Brady had Lincoln pose for what would soon become one of the first widely disseminated photographs of the future president.
The background is bare: Lincoln places his hand on two books, his eyes on the viewer; behind him is a column and a neutrally colored wall. But to quash once and for all the rumors of Lincoln’s ugliness, Brady added some special effects. He focused excessive amounts of light on Lincoln’s face in order to distract from his “gangly” frame. He had the future president curl up his fingers so that their remarkable length would go unnoticed. Brady even “artificially enlarged” Lincoln’s collar so that his neck would look more proportional.
(The neck critique, apparently, was a popular attack line on Lincoln’s appearance—after attending Lincoln’s inauguration in 1861, one Virginia man wrote that Lincoln "is a much better looking man than he is represented in the papers to be, not being so extraordinarily tall, nor having such a very long neck either.”)
Soon after it was taken, the Brady photo was plastered across American newspapers, including Harper’s Weekly, and featured on numerous postcards. In some reproductions, artists tinkered further with Brady’s creation; apparently, “subsequent versions of this famous portrait also show that artists smoothed Lincoln's hair and subtly refined his features.” Though this kind of tinkering is familiar today, with public figures enduring intense pressure to look their best at all times, it was quite new in 1860.
Regardless, the photo received such a rapturous reception that Lincoln later said, “Brady and the Cooper Institute made me President.”
After his election, Lincoln kept returning to Brady for portraits. In all, Brady produced more than 30, including the images that are now memorialized on the penny and the five-dollar bill.
But Brady’s tweaks of Lincoln’s appearance were not the most conspicuous edits made to his photographs.
After Lincoln's assassination, there was a dearth of “heroic-style” pictures of the president. So one portrait painter got creative. On a print of the late president, Thomas Hicks superimposed Lincoln’s head onto the body of John C. Calhoun—the virulent racist and slavery proponent who did not exactly see eye-to-eye with the 16th president.
Engraver A.H. Ritchie created the Calhoun print in 1852. The original included the words “strict constitution,” “free trade,” and “the sovereignty of the states” on the desk papers. But when it was altered to feature Lincoln instead, the words were changed to“constitution,” “union,” and “proclamation of freedom.”
For a century, no one noticed. The famous photo was only recently revealed to have been faked.
Photojournalist Stefan Lorant was compiling photos of Lincoln for his book Lincoln, A Picture Story of His Life (first published in 1957, then revised in 1969) when he discovered something odd: in the Hicks print, Lincoln’s mole was on the wrong side of his face. After some investigation, he realized that Lincoln’s face in the print exactly matched his face in Brady's five-dollar bill photo—except in the print Lincoln's face was flipped, making Lincoln’s mole show up on the opposite side.
Apparently, Hicks hadn’t noticed this discrepancy when superimposing the picture onto Calhoun's body.
But this high-profile precursor to a Photoshop edit was not only used on photos of Lincoln. Brady often altered images: for a group photo of General William Sherman's staff, he edited in a member who couldn't attend. In fact, Brady even asked soldiers to “pretend they were dead” for some of his famous Civil War portraits.
At least Lincoln, despite all of the posing Brady had him do, never had to lie on a battlefield and feign death for the sake of a Kodak moment.
Lisa Stubblefield has a tiny store-on-wheels. Known as the “Tiny Fashion House,” she brings it to events to promote her brick-and-mortar clothing store, the Front Porch Boutique, located in Rolla, Missouri. The 13-foot fashion house is equipped with fitting rooms and racks of clothes that customers can peruse.
On Friday, she brought it to the Food Truck Showdown in Springfield, Missouri, and parked it in a roped-off section of the Battlefield Mall.
The next morning, Stubblefield was shocked to learn that someone had driven off with it. She immediately posted video surveillance of the incident on Facebook, requesting help in locating the stolen store.
Eventually, a woman messaged Stubblefield to say she had seen the store parked in her neighborhood in Pittsburg, Kansas—over 90 miles away.
According to The Joplin Globe, Stubblefield does not know why anyone wanted to steal the house. It has neither a kitchen nor a bathroom, and would not make for a very suitable home.
"I have a feeling it was on a whim, but I don't know," Stubblefield told the news outlet.
On Tuesday, Stubblefield drove the Tiny Fashion Home back across the Kansas-Missouri border. “She’s back!” Stubblefield exclaimed in a Facebook post.
