People in the late 1800s really did not like waiters. Though waiters were still a novelty—they sprung up with the rise of the restaurant earlier that century—they had come to be regarded as a burden to service and, especially in the United States, were assailed for their unpleasantness.

Channeling this resentment, an 1885 New York Times editorial claimed that servers in restaurants were “one of the necessary evils of an advanced civilization” and noted that “the only occasion when a gentleman was excusable for using profanity in the presence of ladies was when it became necessary to blaspheme concerning the dereliction of waiters.” This is because waiters represented a special kind of annoyance: in a restaurant, a customer is “preyed upon by the thought that [his waiter] is hovering over him, watching his every movement, and ready to ‘size him up’ in proportion to the amount of his order.”

Another driver of the anti-waiter sentiment was the expectation of tipping, a European import that was maligned in the United States as “offensively un-American." Because waiters were already viewed as a strain on customers, the prospect of tipping them was outrageous.

A popular 1916 book, The Itching Palm: A Study of the Habit of Tipping in America, noted that “the gift of a quarter to a waiter as a tip is an unsound transaction because the patron receives nothing in return—nothing of like substantiality.” Harper’s Monthly Magazine in 1913 said tipping was “a gross and offensive caricature of mercy… it curses him that gives and him that takes,” and as far back as 1877, the New York Times lamented, “When the waiter rushes forward to take your coat, hang it up, drag out your chair . . . for this wonderful galvanization of the waiter, what does it mean? Merely that he considers it probable, nay certain, that some of the silver change in your pocket will be transferred to his.”

By 1926, the “waiter” brand had in some circles grown so toxic that one organization—the United Restaurant Owners Association of New York—called for a new label: “the term ‘waiter’ has taken on a menial significance,” they said, because few people recognize the “skill and even artistry necessary” for the job.

By then, it was too late. Many people were already through with what one newspaper later memorialized as the "testy servant problem," and they wanted waiters gone.

Beginning in the late 1800s, restaurants went to great lengths to develop “waiterless” systems to please their customers. These mostly failed attempts tried replacing waiters with a mix of conveyer belts, dumbwaiters in the centers of tables, and—in one particularly odd case—500 mini electric cars.

In 1896, German engineer Max Sielaff, the inventor of the vending machine, teamed up with a candy company to open the most enduring such waiterless restaurant: the Automat.

The way Automats worked was simple. The walls inside each store were lined with a series of small windows, each of which contained an item of food. Customers inserted a coin, and the window unlocked, allowing them to pull out a meal. There were no waiters, no tips, and food came fast.

The first Automat, which opened in Berlin as an extension of Sielaff's increasingly ubiquitous vending machines, featured a lavish dining room complete with stained glass windows. The place was a hit.

Besides a contempt for servers, the invention of the Automat was also about making restaurants more efficient in an increasingly fast-paced and industrialized culture. This was especially true in Germany, where the anti-waiter sentiment does not seem to have been as strong. But in the United States, it was a different story.

The success of Sielaff's Automat drew the attention of Joseph Horn and Frank Hardart, a business duo that owned quick-serve lunch counters in Philadelphia, and they purchased the technology. Horn & Hardart bet that Americans would flock to this new style of waiter- and tip-free restaurant.

They were right.

In June 1902, Horn & Hardart debuted their first Automat in Philadelphia. It became an immediate sensation, and by 1912, they expanded into New York City, unveiling a two-story location in Times Square to an enthralled crowd. Horn & Hardart Automats expanded especially rapidly during the Great Depression, when their cheap and quickly prepared food was in high demand. One woman remembered Automat customers “pouring free ketchup into glasses of free water and drinking a Depression cocktail.”

By 1927, there were 15 Automats in New York City. Around World War II, at the height of the Automat’s popularity, Horn & Hardart had over 80 locations in Philadelphia and New York. They were serving 350,000 customers per day.

To an American public tired of dealing with—and tipping—waiters, Automats were a revolution. But the essential irony is that these restaurants were anything but automatic. According to Automats, Taxi Dances, and Vaudeville, “while automats were hailed by the thrifty populace as being ‘waiter-free’ and—even more appealing—‘tip free,’ someone had to cook the food, stock the little compartments, keep the floors clean, bus the tables, refill the sugar and condiments," among other responsibilities.

In New York, thousands of Automat employees prepared meals in a secret kitchen, then slipped them on to a “rotating pivot… into which was carved a series of open slots for food.” Once a customer grabbed an item of food from one of the Automat’s windows, the pivot rotated, and another item took its place in the window.

In the original Automat in Berlin, only cold foods like sandwiches were stocked in the windows. If customers wanted something hot, an employee would receive the order through a labeled compartment, make the food, and then lift it into a compartment for the customer to take. It was like waiter service—but with a wall in between.

Yet customers were so enthralled by the idea of an automatic restaurant that they often failed to understand that these "waiterless" eateries were staffed by waiters in all but name. In 1917, when 300 Automat employees went on strike for better wages, the New York public was baffled, and a New York Sun article labeled the Automat worker strike "the Strike Invisible."

In the end, the existence of a large staff may not have mattered. By the middle of the 20th century, the wave of anti-waiter hysteria that catapulted Automats to prominence seems to have dissipated. Around the same time, Automats were losing their ubiquity as other, more convenient fast-food restaurants—like McDonald's—began cropping up. But though the last Horn & Hardart Automat closed in 1991, anti-waiter sentiment hasn't faded completely: just read Yelp reviews.

Ironing has never been so cool. Benjamin Shine, an artist who splits his time between London and Sydney, has become a pioneer in what he calls "painting fabric"—using irons to create portraits in cloth.

As a member of a family of garment manufacturers and a one-time employee of a fashion company, Shine has long seen the art in clothing materials. But he decided to capture that beauty in a nontraditional way: rather than designing clothes for people, he decided to design the people into the clothes.

One of his most famous works, The Dance, is made from 2,000 meters—or 1.2 miles—of tulle.

Video Wonders are audiovisual offerings that delight, inspire, and entertain. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.

Archaeologists in Egypt have recently discovered some religious scrawlings on a cave wall, that date back to the 13th-14th century.

Medieval grafitti discovered in Egyptian cave https://t.co/y2B3kyQYF0

— IBTimes UK (@IBTimesUK) July 21, 2017

The graffiti was carved into the wall of a cave on Egypt’s Red Sea coast, according to the International Business Times. Of the Arabic proclamations so far identified, some of which have been worn off by erosion and time, are religious statements, translating to things like, “No God except Allah,” and “May God forgive him and his parents and all the Muslims. Amen." The writing is thought to have been the work of medieval pilgrims.

The Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities is looking into granting the cave protected status so that it can be protected for further study, hopefully giving a window into the lives of the people who made the grafitti.

Graffiti might still be cool, but it certainly isn’t new.

On Iona, an island off the western coast of Scotland, there's an abbey and a nunnery, but there also used to be a wooden hut. The hut, which burned down long ago, was rumored to belong to Columba, the 6th-century saint who is credited with helping to bring Christianity to the region.

Last week, the University of Glasgow announced that they had, for the first time, found definitive proof that the hut does, indeed, date to the time of St. Columba. The hut is likely St. Columba's "cell," where he wrote while looking at the mountains.

“This discovery is massive," Adrián Maldonado, one of the archaeologists who worked on the project, said.

The archaeologists used carbon dating to judge the age of some charcoal that was excavated from the location in 1957. The process confirmed that the charcoal was from the time of St. Columba.

“The remains on top of Tòrr an Aba had been dismissed as from a much later date," Thomas Clancy, a historian at the University of Glasgow, said. "Now we know they belonged to a structure which stood there in Columba’s lifetime. More than that, the dates, and our new understanding of the turning of the site into a monument not long after its use, makes it pretty clear that this was St. Columba’s day or writing house."

St. Columba was born in 521 and lived in Ireland until 563, when he was exiled to Iona after a bloody dispute with a local cleric. He died on the island in 597, having written 300 books in his lifetime, according to legend.

The team of scientists wasn’t looking for evidence of human sexual behavior many years ago. They were studying the purpose of a particular protein, MUC7, when they discovered that one group of people, living in Sub-Saharan Africa had a version of the related gene that looked very different from the gene in other populations.

The team was using a set of 2,500 genes from modern humans to study MUC7, which helps give spit its particular consistency. In a subset of people, though, the gene that codes for MUC7 was more similar to the analogous gene in Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA, the team reports in Molecular Biology and Evolution.

The scientists believe this gene variant was introduced through “archaic introgression”—some ancient human having sex with some ancient human subspecies, whose identity is now lost.

That pairing would have occurred about 150,000 years ago, long after the two subspecies of human had split off from each other. But evidence that it happened is still hiding in our genes and adds more evidence that long ago, when there will still many types of hominins on earth, being a member of Homo sapiens wasn’t as simple or as unique as we once thought.

When you're hungry, but the fridge is nearly bare, what do you do? Reach for some eggs, of course. As the Local reports, polar bears in Svalbard, Norway have come to the same conclusion after being forced out of their regular hunting grounds by melting sea ice.

Traditionally, polar bears travel up to the frozen Arctic for the spring, where they hang out on ice and hunt for blubbery ringed seals until the floes melt and they return to land. But as Arctic sea ice dwindles, and the bears lose their favorite hunting ground earlier and earlier in the year, they've been turning to alternative food sources. Often, this means eggs—which, like seals, are rich in calories and fat.

At the moment, there are six bears in Svalbard scrambling up the joint. Researchers from the Norwegian Polar Institute have seen them nose-deep in three or four dozen eggs—enough to turn their snouts canary-yellow, they reported.

This is not a new phenomenon. Another study, released earlier this year, tracked polar bears in Svalbard during 2006—another low year for sea ice—and found that they spent a lot of time near goose nesting grounds.

And all these Norwegian bears are rank amateurs compared to one individual seen in Canada in 2010, who, according to National Geographic, "devour[ed] more than 800 eggs in four days."

This change of diet isn't great for the polar bears, who the researchers say may have fewer cubs as a result. It isn't great for Svalbard's birds, either. "This is putting a great pressure of populations of eider and geese," Geir Wing Gabrielsen, a senior NPI researcher, told Klassekampen, and it could have a broad impact on the ecosystem as a whole.

That's a lot of hurt for a bachelor-style meal. At least put some salt and pepper on there, guys.

In November 1788, a group of fine young men founded one of New York’s original social clubs, which they named the Calliopean Society. The club had an “express purpose”—to improve the educations and minds of its 20-odd members.

At every meeting, club members gave speeches, presented essays, and debated important questions of the day: Has the discovery of America been of general good for mankind? Is war justifiable? Should any crimes besides murder be punished with death? Sometimes they even talked about girls. (Is beauty or wit more beneficial to the fair sex?)

The society was “one of the first of a type of masculine literary cabal that would become common after 1800,” writes David S. Shields, an English professor at the University of South Carolina. Over time, club society flourished in New York, encompassing everything from James Fenimore Cooper’s Bread and Cheese Society (its name came from the tokens used to elect new members) and the Turtle Club, whose beefsteak dinners the writer Joseph Mitchell memorialized, and evolved into more modern forms such as the Players Club, a private social club for people in theater and arts, or the Wing, a modern club for New York women.

Then as now, New York’s original 18th-century social clubs were formed, in part, to enhance the social status of their members. At a time when few people had access to intensive education, young men of ambition started forming clubs to improve their minds and enhance their reputations as political and literary movers and shakers. “Writing and publishing meant asserting their political worth in the new republic,” writes Andrew L. Hargroder, a graduate student in history at Louisiana State University, in the New York history blog Gotham.

With the structure and camaraderie of the club to guide them, members could be bold, and take on questions and political positions that the city’s elite might not consider, in addition to publishing cheeky, amusing literary essays. By 1793, the Calliopean Society’s offshoot publication, The Drone, was presenting works such as “The Science of Lying” and “A Dissertation on Jack-asses.” One essay attempted to assess, with candor, the character of one of the club’s members, who was later revealed to be the author himself. “Tho’ far from being advanced in years," he wrote of himself, "he is what the ladies are please to term an old bachelor; and with his present disposition he will not be soon induced to change his situation."

One of the key ways the men of the Calliopean Society sharpened their literary skills, though, was through debate. In advance of most meetings, they decided upon a question to address. (Members were required to submit suggestions.) A rotating selection of club’s members took sides, each equally represented, and prepared their arguments. At the next meeting, each side argued its case and the members voted on the outcome.

The results were recorded in the club’s minutes, a fat book of unlined pages now held by the New York Historical Society. Below is a selection of the questions the Calliopean Society debated in 1792, the year they formed The Drone. After you submit your answers, the choice the society made will be revealed: See how close your opinions are to those of these 18th-century strivers.

To an observer, the massive, spinning airflow that sometimes trails behind a plane is a beautiful sight. But to NASA, this airflow—known as a wingtip vortex—was a problem in need of exploration.

The vortices, which appeared behind the wings of their aircraft, could be quite dangerous for a pursuant plane: they could make this second aircraft unstable, sometimes causing sudden rolls and altitude dips. NASA knew how the vortices were created: planes generate lift through the difference in air pressure between the top and bottom halves of the wings, a discrepancy that also leaves a rotating airflow—the vortex—trailing the plane’s wingtips.

Aerodynamicist F. W. Lanchester noted this phenomenon back in 1907, but NASA only seriously experimented with the vortices later, during the 1970s. Their goal was to identify the specific dangers the vortices presented and the various factors (such as plane size) that exacerbated them. Larger planes, they found, created larger and more dangerous vortices.

The video above comes from NASA's newly released video archive, and shows a 1970s wingtip vortices test at Langley Research Center in Virginia. The results are visually stunning.

Video Wonders are audiovisual offerings that delight, inspire, and entertain. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.

When you hear the word toboggan, you might think of a long, flat sled popular throughout Canada, northern Europe, and the upper reaches of the United States. Or, if you’re from the American South, you might picture a knit hat worn in the cold. Most subscribers to one definition likely don’t realize the other exists.

But this is no isolated case of regional discrepancy. “Toboggan” is one of a vast array of words used to describe a knit hat.

The divergence between the two forms of toboggan is relatively easy to track: the use of “toboggan” to mean “sled” dates back to 1829, a French-Canadian adaption of an Algonquian word. Because of the freezing conditions, toboggan riders often wore knit hats to keep warm. These hats soon became known as “toboggan hats,” but since at least 1929, that second word has been dropped. In the American South, where snow is rare, the connection between “toboggan” and “sled” faded, and the primary definition of “toboggan” thus became the hat. In fact, some Americans might be shocked to learn that toboggans are also sleds.

The history of these regional names for knit hats, however, begins much earlier.

The modern knit hat appears to trace its origins to the Welsh town of Monmouth, whose proximity to Archenfield—a popular wool-producing town—made it a natural knitting hub. Monmouth’s most beloved knitted product? A round hat topped with a “button.”

During the 15th and 16th centuries, the Monmouth cap achieved ubiquity throughout Europe. According to A Short History of the Monmouth Cap, “capmaking so flourished under the Tudors that cappers came to occupy such municipal posts as bailiff, burgess, and juror.” In fact, a 1571 English statute required that “all [males] above the age of six years … wear upon the Sabbath and Holydays, one cap of wool knit, thicked and dressed in England,” while non-noble wives “were constrained to wear white knit caps of woolen yarn.” By 1576, the Welsh hats were so popular that they officially had their own name: in a letter dated to that year, Lord Gilbert Talbot of Goodrich Castle gifted his father “a Monmouth Cappe.”

In the 1620s, the Monmouth cap traveled to Jamestown, Virginia. In a pamphlet, Captain John Smith recommended that colonists bring one with them, a suggestion that inspired British companies to export a number of Monmouth caps into Jamestown.

The hats, which were “much favored by seamen,” also wormed their way into the navy in the 17th century. First in England and, later, the United States, they became a seafaring staple. Sailors who were “watchstanding,” or keeping lookout, often wore variations of Monmouth caps, earning the hats the still-popular name of “watch cap.”

Contemporary with the rise of the Monmouth cap, the toque—a prototype of the modern-day chef’s hat—was also gaining popularity in France and other parts of Europe. The toque, whose name likely derives from the Breton (of the Celtic region of Brittany) word for hat, soon spread to French-Canada, where fur traders embraced a modified version of it.

Today, many Canadians—and some residents of the northern reaches of the United States—refer to knitted hats as “tuques” (though the spelling is controversial). An offshoot of this word is the chook, or chuke, which is common parlance in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

In South Africa, Australia, and parts of the United States and Canada, knit hats are known as beanies. But the term "beanie" did not always refer to a knit hat: in the early 20th century, beanies were the multicolored caps, often equipped with propellers, that children wear.

Other names for knit hats include woolly hats, stocking caps, Mössas, and skull caps. Amish and Dutch communities might call them “sipple caps.” A knit hat with a pom-pom, known as the tophue, was popular in Denmark in the 19th century. In England, these hats might be called "bobble hats," though this name can also be applied even if the hats lack a pom-pom (a bobble).

A "Benny hat" is another British term for a knit hat, so named for Benny from the TV show Crossroads (1964 - 1988), who refused to take off his knitted blue cap. Another variation, the jeep cap, traces its roots to the U.S. in World War II—but many Americans know it as the "Radar cap," because it was a favorite of the M*A*S*H character Radar O'Reilly.

The regional names are multitudinous. So we want to know: Where you are from, what do you call knit hats?

Like a guinea pig, it was seven inches long and furry. Unlike a guinea pig, it had eight legs.

Last week, British moving men found themselves scuttling away in fear after they discovered a stowaway—a huge huntsman spider—hidden among the parts of a swing set, according to a release from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA). The arachnid had just completed the 10,000-mile journey from its native Brisbane, Australia, to Surrey, England.

Fortunately, he found some snacks for the three-month trip. Annie Janes, an RSPCA officer, said they’d found the spider nestled among empty locust shells. However, she said, “It’s a long time to go without water." While such a long journey is unusual, it's not unheard of. In the past, huntsman spiders have stowed away from Costa Rica to Scotland and Taiwan to East Sussex, England.

Huntsman spiders are nomadic by nature. They don’t make webs, but instead forage and hunt locusts, beetles, and small lizards. Some varieties are also open to unconventional kinds of transport. One gets around by cartwheeling or hand-springing at speeds of up to a yard a second.

The vagrant spider's fate is yet to be determined. After a big drink of water on arrival, he was relocated to the Heathrow Animal Reception center in Hounslow, London. No word yet on where he goes next.

Today, we understand that the universe is expanding, but back in the 1920s, even Albert Einstein thought the universe was static; he even altered his famous theory of general relativity to make it work in a fixed universe. While we now know other galaxies are drifting apart faster and faster, we're still not entirely sure why. So, in 2020, the European Space Administration will launch Euclid, a satellite that will spend six years mapping the cosmos. But before Euclid looks into the depths of time and space, scientists need to figure out how to process the mountain of data it will collect. To do that, they've created a gigantic chunk of a mock universe using a supercomputer in Switzerland.

It took 80 hours for the computer, known as the "Piz Daint," to generate two trillion dark matter particles, which then formed into 25 billion simulated galaxies that occupy a virtual space the same size as the one Euclid will survey for real. Euclid's observation of galaxies and how they distort light will help scientists learn more about dark matter and dark energy—the forces believed to be driving universe expansion.

The model galaxy catalog will be distributed to more than 1,000 scientists involved with the Euclid mission so they can experiment with the best ways to collect and process data. They will work out a plan for who will analyze what, because when you're mapping the universe, practice makes perfect.

Bug swarms are common enough in Saskatchewan that there probably isn't much left that surprises locals. A little over a year ago, for example, tent caterpillars took over for awhile. Two years before that, there were a lot of midges. This year, there were giant swarms of mayflies, recently filmed forming columns that resemble mini-tornadoes.

This video was shot July 13, by a woman in Courval—about 90 miles west of Regina and 80 miles from the Montana border—where an expert told the CBC that the bugs were in the midst of mating. The whole exercise, which usually occurs annually, is fleeting. Most females are dead within five minutes, and the males fly off to die alone, sometimes within hours. Millions of eggs are created, full of future mayflies doomed to repeat this appropriately violent and vital ritual.

Snooty, the world's oldest captive manatee—and easily the world's most beloved—died Sunday at the South Florida Museum, just a day after celebrating his 69th birthday.

Snooty's age was remarkable for several reasons. Manatees in the wild generally only live to around age 30, while the next oldest manatees ever to live in Florida died at ages 59 and 48, according to Live Science.

Snooty was born in 1948 in an aquarium operating out of a sunken Danish warship, before he was eventually moved to the South Florida Museum in 1966. He became Manatee County's official mascot in 1979. His death was ruled accidental, officials said, after he somehow gained entrance to a tube not normally accessible to animals. (The circumstances are still under investigation.)

But in life—and, possibly, in death, too—Snooty was unable to shake a certain conspiracy theory that took root over the years. This Snooty, it posits, might not be the original. Had Snooty been secretly replaced at some point with a younger manatee? Museum officials have long denied it, but it never stopped the rumors.

"That was a popular thing to do years ago: If you lose one marine mammal, you'd get another one and just give it the same name," one official told the Associated Press in 2013, likely referring to parks such as SeaWorld, which used the name Shamu for multiple orcas around the country. "In our particular case, it's not true."

The museum's evidence? Distinctive scars, for starters, in addition to a muscled upper body and (very) large tail. Marty Clear, a reporter at the Bradenton Herald, outlined some other issues with the theory on Friday:

Besides the logistics, there are some problems ... Capturing wild manatees and keeping them (except for rehabilitation) is illegal, so the museum would have had to do something very, very bad, or done business with someone else who had, and hoped they wouldn’t get caught. Or they would have had to strike a deal with a facility that kept manatees. There are not many of those, and they’re not likely to sell their creatures. (And if they sold them, people would know about it.)

Sparing any illegal—and highly discoverable—manatee-trafficking, the Snooty that recently passed was the one and only.

So what becomes of the Snooty fans now that he's gone? One man is trying to honor Snooty with a statue. That fan, Anthony Pusateri, launched an online petition Sunday night to replace a Confederate statue in Bradenton with one for Snooty.

"By doing so, the Confederate monument could possibly be moved to a museum (or other more appropriate location) out of everyday public eye and a more positive symbol then take its place," Pusateri wrote.

By late Monday afternoon, there were 1,900 supporters.

The glory days of U.S. Route 66 may be in the rearview, but its legacy continues to grow at stalwart roadside outposts like the Heart of Route 66 Auto Museum, which is almost finished building a (potentially) record-breaking oddity.

The museum recently added the crowning medallion to a giant novelty gas pump, which, they say, is the tallest in the world, according to KTUL. Like so many over-sized installations before it, the world’s tallest gas pump—in total, 66-feet tall, of course—is being installed in front of the museum not just as an homage to the road’s history of kitsch, but as a beacon to passing travelers, hopefully luring them in for a visit.

The illuminated top-piece alone measures an impressive 14-feet tall; crews completed its installation Friday.

"This is by far the craziest thing I've ever decided to build, but it's worth it," Clint Oare, who built parts of the pump, told KTUL.

Once it is complete, museum officials plan to have it checked by the Guinness World Records to make its title official. Until then, the sign will just stand as another in a historictradition of giant things off the Mother Road.

This past Sunday, July 23—around 3 A.M.—a D.C.-area apartment-dweller decided to finish up his weekend chores. He tied up a bag of garbage, pulled it out of the bin, walked it over to the building's trash chute, and sent it tumbling down.

In a flash, he was struck by a familiar sinking feeling—had he dropped his cell phone? Bending down to check, he found himself overcome by a slightly less familiar sinking feeling: he had fallen into the trash chute.

Person trapped in trash chute 777 7th St NW. Person conscious and alert. Working on rescue plan. pic.twitter.com/yTFXJuYelu

— DC Fire and EMS (@dcfireems) July 23, 2017

Luckily, there was enough room in there to maneuver around. As the Washington Post reports, the man managed to get himself upright, find his phone—whether it had actually fallen in with the trash, or had just been in his pocket the whole time, remains unclear—and call 911, which dispatched a rescue crew.

Video from WTTG shows about a half dozen firefighters gathered in the apartment's hallway, discussing strategy and checking up on their victim through the wall.

7th St NW: adult male removed from trash chute using a harness and haul method. Victim treated & released on scene. pic.twitter.com/0fABraLLAr

— DC Fire and EMS (@dcfireems) July 23, 2017

After pumping fresh air down into the chute with a hose, the firefighters eventually got a harness on him and pulled him back up out of the muck. He was treated on the scene, and released in good condition (and with his phone) about an hour after he had fallen in. Not a bad start to the week.

Forty or so years ago, rock legend Alice Cooper and art legend Andy Warhol were both in New York City and spending a lot of time in the same place, including the legendary music club, Max’s Kansas City. In that now-mythic time, Warhol was famous but not quite so famous as he would become. Cooper’s girlfriend at the time, Cindy Lang, befriended the artist and discovered that Cooper and Warhol had an aesthetic touchstone in common—the electric chair.

In one show, Cooper staged a fake electrocution; Warhol had made a silkscreen print of an identical chair, used to execute the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, The Guardian reports. Lang decided that they could use one of Warhol’s prints. At the time, it cost $2,500.

Now, prints from that series have been sold for up to $11.6 million. Cooper’s, it turned out, was sitting rolled in a tube, in storage.

The print was rediscovered after Cooper’s longtime manager happened to have a conversation with an art dealer about how valuable Warhol’s work had become. When the manager mentioned Cooper had one of these prints, the dealer “advised him to find it,” The Guardian reports.

It’s unclear how much this particular print could fetch, since it’s unsigned, though thought to be authentic. For now, there is no plan to sell it; Cooper may hang it in his house.

Tristan Gooley is an expert at what he calls "natural navigation." In a series of fascinating books, most recently How to Read Water, but also The Lost Art of Reading Nature's Signs and The Natural Navigator: The Rediscovered Art of Letting Nature Be Your Guide, he shares incredibly useful tips and insights aimed at helping people notice simple truths about the world around them. Gooley's particular genius is that once he shows you something about nature that you didn't realize before, you'll never be able to not see it again.

Recently, we sat down with Gooley and asked him to share five of his favorite natural navigation tricks with Atlas Obscura readers. The illustrator Chelsea Beck then took Gooley's concepts and created gorgeous animations for each one. The words that accompany them are Gooley's.

1. You can use the crescent moon to find south (or north)

The next time you see a crescent moon, draw a line that joins the horns together in a tangent, and then extend that line until it touches the horizon. In the northern parts of the world, at the bottom of the line, you’ll be looking roughly south.

This method isn't perfect, but it gives you a very fast, rough-and-ready measure. The higher the crescent moon is, the more dependable the method is, so if the moon is just about to set or it’s just risen, it won’t be quite as good. But as a very fast, very simple check on which direction you're facing, it's one of the best.

Some people are curious why this works. It’s because the sun and the moon rise in the east and set in the west, broadly speaking. So they’re moving in an east-west plane, which means when they’re not in the same part of the sky, what we call a New Moon, they’re either east or west of each other. We know the moon doesn’t have any light of its own, so when we see the bright side of the moon, what it’s effectively doing is pointing at the sun. So when we join the dots, what we’re really saying is it must be pointing east or west, we don’t necessarily know which one, but if we draw the tangent line, we know that’s 90 degrees to an east-west line, so it has to be a north-south line. And where it touches your horizon has to be either north or south—note that if you’re in the Southern Hemisphere, then the line would actually point you to the north.—T.G.

2. Paying attention to birds can help you predict the weather

An awareness of wind direction is a very important part of natural navigation. It's often one of last useful clues left when all others have deserted us.

The next time you're walking through your neighborhood, keep an eye out for groupings of birds perched high up, say on the apex of a roof or on telephone pole wires. If you notice that they’re all mostly facing one way, there’s a pretty strong chance they’re facing into the wind. Why would that be? Well if you think of aircraft, they always take off into wind, that's just basic aerodynamics. So it’s the most sensible direction for a bird to be facing, all else being equal, in case they have to take off suddenly. It’s their equivalent of being on the runway ready to go.

Now try checking in with the group of birds in your chosen location regularly, say three or four times a day. If you suddenly notice that they’re all facing a slightly different way, they’re telling us that the direction of the wind is changing. And a significant shift in wind direction is a very strong indicator that the weather is about to change.

The thing to keep in mind with birds, like all animals and indeed people, is that individuals might do anything. So if you see an individual bird doing something, it might be interesting, it might be worth watching. But if you see a whole load of birds behaving in a certain way, then that's a pattern.—T.G.

3. Most trees grow in a check mark shape

Obviously, all green plants need sunlight. So it’s logical that plants will, all things being equal, tend to grow more abundantly on the side the light comes from. In the northern parts of the world, where the sun is due south in the middle of the day, that means plants are growing more abundantly on the south side.

Try noticing this in a tree the next time you take a walk outside. You should see that there’s more tree on the south side, unless there are other factors—for instance there are amazing examples of glass buildings that can make trees grow the wrong way. But generally speaking, there should be more of the tree on the south side.

Next, take this one step further. Because of a botanical effect called phototropism, all the branches on a tree are trying to grow toward the light. On the south side, they can take a fairly direct route. So they curve toward the sun, which creates a slightly more horizontal branch. On the north side, they’re still trying to grow toward the light, but they can’t take a direct route because the trunk and the rest of the tree are in the way. So they end up growing towards the sky. This is how you end up with what I call the “check effect," which is especially noticeable in trees. Together, the whole shape looks like a check mark.—T.G.

4. At a T junction, you can usually tell which way to turn

Let's say you're out hiking, and you've lost confidence in your route. If you come to a T junction, you may even panic a bit: Which way should you turn? But the thing is, you're very likely to be able to notice which way most people have turned here over time. More often than not, there’s a strong trend.

You might think it’s a 50-50 decision, but in fact it’s quite rare for the attractions in both directions to be equally strong. There’s nearly always a slightly bigger town, or even just a café that’s very popular—some reason why people turn one way more often than the other. The classic shape you get, for example, is when a bit of corner cutting goes on, so if there's grass where you are, you end up with the grass suffering in that corner of the T junction.

With practice, you'll start to see this in almost all environments. Even with a paved sidewalk, if you get your eyes low with low light, you’ll notice a little bit of shine and various other clues. It works absolutely everywhere. If you’re lost in the woods, or anywhere there’s a path network, there’s a temptation when you reach a crossroads to go, “Oh God, I don’t know which way to go.” But it’s nearly always a gift, because on average, if you turn the way most people have already turned, you’re nearly always going to be heading toward civilization.—T.G.

5. You can use Cassiopeia to find the North Star

To use Cassiopeia to find direction, we’re going to try to use it to find the North Star. Why are we trying to find the North Star? As its name suggests, the North Star is due north (technically, it’s within one degree of due north). If you can identify the North Star, you can draw a vertical line down to the ground, and you’ll be looking north.

There are lots of different ways to find the North Star, but Cassiopeia is one of the fun ones. So how do we find it? You're looking for five stars that are in the rough shape of a W. It’s not a perfect W—it’s a little stretched on one side and little squished on the other side, but it is quite a recognizable shape. Over the course of the year, Cassiopeia wheels anti-clockwise around the North Star.

So to start, look for a constellation in the shape of a W. Keep in mind that as it wheels around, depending on the time of year, you might see it on its side, or as an M—but if you think of it as a W you’ll always be able to orient this trick correctly. Once you've found the W, imagine laying a tray, just a flat tray, across the top of the W. Next, wheel that tray roughly 90 degrees anti-clockwise, so it’s pointing away from the W. Then, double the distance of the tray. Start looking in that part of the night sky, and you’ll find a star. That’s the North Star. This will work anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere.

One of the things about the North Star is if people aren’t familiar with it, they tend to think of it as the brightest star in the night sky. But in fact, the North Star isn’t all that bright—it's going to appear the same level of brightness as the stars in the W of Cassiopeia. But, what the North Star does have going for it is it’s on its own. You won’t see anything of comparative brightness in that part of the sky. And this trick doesn’t point perfectly at it: what this does is get you to the part of the night sky where the North Star is, a rough little target of where to look. If you find yourself looking at two or more stars close to each other, that's one way to tell that you are definitely not looking at the North Star.—T.G.

It's not bounty hunting, but it's close: The National Museum of Chinese Writing in Anyang, Henan Province is offering a large monetary reward to anyone who can decode a 3,000-year-old script. The writing, which dates to the ancient Shang dynasty, is one of the "earliest written records of Chin­ese civilization," according to the South China Morning Post.

So far, experts have decoded around 2,000 of the approximately 5,000 characters found on these oracle bones, which were carved into turtle shells and ox bones and report on everything from taxes to the climate. But the process has proved both costly and time-consuming, so the National Museum of Chinese Writing is crowdsourcing it.

They're offering 100,000 yuan (~$15,000) for each unknown character a person can translate (with evidence). A sum of 50,000 yuan (~$7,500) goes to anyone who is able to provide an explanation for a character whose meaning is in dispute. The reward is open globally, but it is only available to experts whose submissions have been approved by at least two language specialists. The museum is also encouraging the use of new technologies, like cloud computing, to decipher the texts.

The oracle bones largely come from an excavation near Anyang in the 1920s. Experts believe that most of the characters represent names of people and locations. So far, over 200,000 oracles have been recovered, roughly 50,000 of which bear text.

The ancient world offered up tons of unusual ways of telling the future and divining the will of the gods. These methods ranged from cleromancy (interpreting lots that were cast) to the Homeric practice of ornithomancy (interpreting the flight of birds). In second-millennium B.C. Mesopotamia, professional oracle-priests—a.k.a. barutu—would ritually sacrifice an animal—think oxen, goats, sheep, cattle—and read the entrails (a process called extispicy). In the process, they created models of the organs in question that served as tiny prophecy libraries.

Very often, the priests chose to inspect and evaluate a sacrificed animal’s liver, which was deemed the location of the soul and number-one site for all internal activity. Divining by inspecting the liver was called hepatomancy. On behalf of the person who brought the animal to the temple, the priests asked the gods a question; the gods inscribed the answer in the entrails. Thus, a liver’s shape, color, condition, and any evidence of disease could be used to divine the future and decipher the meaning of otherwise confusing symbols or events. Barutu then recorded these events for future reference by crafting miniature clay models of the livers they’d just analyzed.

Each liver model was uniquely shaped, with divinatory interpretations inscribed for future generations. Dozens of clay liver models have survived, some of the most remarkable hailing from the Syrian city of Mari, an important Levantine power, around 1875 B.C. They were found in the ruins of the palace of King Zimri-Lim, the last powerful monarch of Mari; Zimri-Lim kept a vast library of just such religious, legal, and administrative texts.

Both the divine inscription on the organs and the barutu writing them down represented a very early tradition of literacy. The liver models were divided into squares; each square was inscribed with any blemishes or marks that had appeared in those exact locations on the original liver. The appearance of parts of the liver affected the resulting prophecy. For example, Babylonian omen texts from the seventh century B.C. refer to “the Yoke,” a section near the dorsal edge of the liver. One inscription from the period reads, “If the Yoke has disappeared: The city and its inhabitants will perish.” Conversely, if “a piece of flesh [shaped] like a male doll” lies on top of the Yoke, “the army will rejoice”; presumably, that meant the king’s armies would triumph over enemies.

Barutu also held important roles at court; one named Asqudum was chiefbaru/royal counselor to Zimri-Lim and his predecessors. One such model from Mari was inscribed with “When my country rebelled against Ibbi-Sin…it is thus that the liver appeared.” Ibbi-Sin was king of the important city of Ur about 50 years before this Mari model was made; archives of past liver models had been kept in the intervening decades to allow the next generations to interpret a similar model, which seemingly contained warnings of rebellion.

Over the centuries, liver models became popular across the ancient Near East, from Assyria to Babylonia, Anatolia to Cyprus. For example, the seventh-century B.C. Assyrian monarch Sennacherib reportedly summoned his diviners to figure out why his father’s death in battle wasn’t foretold, in order that Sennacherib’s own heir wouldn’t suffer the same fate. Sennacherib concluded that his barutu had ignored some important omens, perhaps deliberately, so he split up his diviners into groups so they couldn’t conspire to lie to him. In fact, it wasn’t uncommon for kings (you had to be rich to be able to sacrifice multiple animals) to order omens to be taken multiple times until they got the answer they wanted. In Sennacherib’s case, the barutu eventually concluded that his father, Sargon II, was killed for ignoring a particular deity; Sennacherib was thrilled that he figured out what his dad had done wrong so his son wouldn’t make the same mistake.

By the first millennium B.C., haruspicy—and the Near Eastern symbolic names for parts of the liver—had spread to Italy and been picked up by the Etruscans. Some means of interpretation were transferred; for example, livers were positive omens, and blemishes were negative. The Etruscans interpreted the liver as a mirror of the cosmos, however, an organ not just written on, but also inhabited by, the gods. So the gods not only communicated through the liver, but embodied said organ.

Perhaps the most famous model is the Liver of Piacenza, a model divided into 40 sections, each of which was given the name of a divinity. In this case, the cosmological liver model might be a diviner-priest’s handbook to interpreting an organ. Presumably, the state of a liver would reflect the state of the cosmos at large and the gods’ wills; a mark in the part of the liver would be interpreted differently depending on its location and the god inhabiting that portion. The Romans took up Etruscan augury (indeed, Roman diviners were called haruspices). In Cicero’s On Divination, the orator questions the logistics of divination, asking, “How did the soothsayers manage to agree among themselves what part of the entrails was unfavorable, and what part favorable; or what cleft in the liver indicated danger and what promised some advantage?” By listening to their guts, that’s how.