A food bank in Wales recently received an unusual donation that might end up being more of a gift than anyone could have guessed.
It's a record!! Never had a donation with 10d on before! Please could we remind everyone that food donated needs to be in date! Thank you :) pic.twitter.com/EVf5qMulA6
On October 5, the Cardiff Foodbank tweeted out the above photo, of a rusting can of Heinz Kidney Soup someone had donated, still bearing the original price sticker that read, “10d.” The can is believed to be about 46 years old, dating to at least before Britain adopted a decimal system for their currency in 1971. Heinz hasn’t even made kidney soup in about 35 years. It is easily the oldest donation they’ve ever received. But maybe not the strangest.
“We have had both snails and caviar donated to us before. I guess it may be that people have had them in Christmas hampers and don't like them, so rather than waste them have donated to us,” says Helen Bull of the Cardiff Foodbank. “When people are in food crisis it may not be their first choice of food, but I am sure somebody appreciated them when we put them out as a separate 'help yourself' item.” According to Bull, the food bank received 132 tons of food donations in 2016 alone, so it’s little wonder that some strange vittles make it into the mix.
The can of kidney soup is no longer edible, but it might end up being a boon for the charity, which receives no public funding. “We are currently following up a lead from someone who is willing to give us £500 for the soup,” says Bull. At the very least, the attention that the soup has brought to the food bank has raised its profile, which will hopefully lead to more donations. Ideally, they won’t be 50 years old.
Antonio's Real New York Pizza in Estes Park, Colorado wants to confuse your senses. As its name indicates, it strives to bring about a New York taste experience, but the sights are straight Colorado. As the business's Facebook page points out, the restaurant is right on the edge of Rocky Mountain National Park, and the views are all conifers and mountains.
This past weekend, these worlds collided at last. Just after midnight on Sunday, October 8, three black bears broke into the pizzeria and chowed down on some salami and dough.
The shop's surveillance cameras recorded the invasion, and an employee posted the footage on Facebook. In the video, two cubs sniff around the kitchen, pull a tray of dough balls out of a fridge, and start chewing, while their mom methodically locates the salami on an upper shelf.
The post's author took the opportunity to comment on the community's bear management practices, which include mandatory wildlife-resistant dumpsters. "Every dumpster in town is now bear proof which leaves only our homes, cars and businesses," they write. "I believe it would have been much better to have left the old dumpster tops in place because they wouldn’t become desperate... we've forced the bears' paws."
The bears escaped unnoticed. Co-owner Tony Francher told CBS Denver that employees cleaned the place up, moved the food to a more secure room, bent some dough trays back into shape, and opened on schedule. If any bears want to come buy some pizza in an honest manner, the shop is currently keeping its regular hours.
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.
If you're a small, brown, marsh-dwelling amphipod, it's in your best interest to stay hidden among the marsh grasses to avoid being snatched up by a bird. But for some less fortunate amphipods, which can be described as "small, hopping shrimp" and are sometimes called marsh hoppers, a parasite has other ideas. Amphipods infected by a tiny, flatworm-like parasite turn a bright orange and rather than take cover in grass, they lounge out in the open at low tide. Researchers have been tracking these pumpkin-colored amphipods in a salt marsh in Massachusetts, and found that nutrient pollution, from excess nitrogen, can cause a boom in parasite populations.
The parasite, Levinseniella byrdi, has a lifecycle that relies on multiple hosts, including birds and amphipods. And its effects on amphipods aren't accidental. "To reproduce, it needs to get into the gut of a bird," explained David Johnson, coauthor of a study on the amphipods, in a statement. "To get into the gut of the bird, it turns the amphipod into a suicidal neon sign that screams 'Eat me!'" These lazy, bright orange amphipods then become easy targets for predatory birds.
The salt marsh where scientists tracked the orange amphipods is home to a long-running experiment on nutrient pollution. Scientists have been applying nitrogen to patches of the marsh since 2004, mimicking the excess nitrogen that ends up in waterways polluted by agricultural runoff. That excess nitrogen can cause algae blooms and, based on this study, also lead to a rise in parasite populations. In plots with extra nitrogen, the parasite population was 13 times the size of control plot populations. The researcher say this is evidence that what happens at the bottom of the food chain can affect species further up, including humans. This parasite affects little shrimp, but nutrient pollution could also boost the populations of parasites that prefer humans as hosts.
Trying to get an elusive species of cave bug to come out of hiding? Well apparently the answer is pungent, rotting food. In the case of one recent research team, that specifically meant a supremely stinky cheese.
According to a delightful story over at Live Science, a group of scientists from Spain’s University of Alcalá recently discovered a new species of eyeless bug living in the darkness of a cave in Turkmenistan. The eyeless creature, now named Turkmenocampa mirabilis, is a narrow multi-legged insect with pale, nearly translucent skin, and long feeler antennae protruding from either end of its body, not unlike an earwig. While the little bug is remarkable for being “the first known underground land animal in Turkmenistan,” possibly more remarkable was the way the researchers managed to locate it.
Since the bug lived in tiny cracks and crevices in the cave, they were initially hard to locate. So the researchers put out traps near guano piles in the cave, which were likely the bugs’ primary source of nutrition. They baited the traps with smelly cheese in order to lure the bugs, and lo and behold, it worked.
Sometimes a simple, blunt solution is the best way to science. Even if that means catching bugs with cheese.
Today, oceanographers mostly rely on the latest GPS technology to study how large masses of water travel around the world's oceans. But it wasn't so long ago that they relied on a decidedly less efficient, though certainly more romantic, strategy: drift bottles.
In a famous experiment run in June 1914, Captain C. Hunter Brown of the Glasgow School of Navigation set adrift nearly 2,000 numbered bottles. Whoever found the bottle was asked to drop a note at the nearest post office stating its whereabouts. "Our object is to find out the direction of the deep currents of the North Sea," the instructions explained. One of them was found in 2012, making it the world's oldest message-in-a-bottle.
A science teacher in North Carolina, Susan Schambach, is the latest person to adopt Brown's technique. As part of a lesson to teach her students about the Gulf Stream, Schambach has her students fill empty wine bottles containing a short explanation of their drift bottle experiment, a postcard, and Schambach’s email address. They then have the bottles dropped into the Gulf Stream about 40 miles off the coast, and wait. Over the past five years, three out of Ms. Schambach's 53 drift bottles have been found stranded on European beaches, and the most recent one washed up in Normandy last month.
“I was excited, but more surprised,” 10-year-old Ben Geren told the Winstom-Salem Journal. It was Ben's seaweed-covered bottle that Jean Pierre Enguehard, a retired grandfather, found while he was taking a walk on the beach. “I knew there was a chance in a million that it would be me, but millions happen.”
Drift bottles have a long history. It's said that back in 310 B.C., the Greek philosopher Theophrastus tried to prove that the Mediterranean was formed by inflowing Atlantic currents by setting some bottles adrift and waiting for their return—they never did. During the 16th century, the British navy would communicate with Queen Elizabeth I by sending encrypted messages-in-bottles. Such was the strategic importance of these drifting codes that the Queen appointed an official "Uncorker of Ocean Bottles"—anyone else who dared to open them would face capital punishment.
Back in 2000, Eddy Carmack, a climate researcher at Canada's Institute of Ocean Science, was so inspired by some of the amazing journeys drift bottles had made through history that he launched the Drift Bottle Project. Participants throw bottles over the side of ocean-going ships and mark the 'drop' location—when someone retrieves them, a 'found' location is added. Approximately one in every 25 bottles is found. The rest sink, wash up in uninhabited locations, or end up buried in sand. Carmack originally intended to use the lost and found bottles database to study ocean currents close to North America, but later extended its scope to the entire planet.
"There have been some amazing paths followed by these bottles," he told National Geographic in 2012. Some were dropped off in Alaska's Beaufort Sea, got frozen, and showed up five years later on the coasts of Northern Europe as a result of melting Arctic ice. Some made it from Mexico to the Philippines, while others proved that oil spills and debris from one part of the world can clearly affect far-reaching locations. It's these deeply interconnected journeys that make the project so special to Carmack: "The main thing about this study is that it connects people with the currents of the ocean," he told National Geographic. "We find that we are only a bottle drop away from our neighbors around the world."
Last year, Saturday Night Live introduced us to David S. Pumpkins, a dancing man in a jack-o-lantern suit who, along with two skeletons, inexplicably shows up on floor after floor of a haunted elevator. He is, he tells the bemused couple seeking Halloween frights, his own thing. “And the skeletons?” they ask in reply. “Part of it!” shout the skeletons. David S. Pumpkins might indeed be his own thing, but whether they knew it or not, the Saturday Night Live writers who came up with those dancing skeletons were tapping into an image with a very long history: the Danse Macabre, a medieval allegory about the inevitability of death.
In the Danse Macabre, or Dance of Death, skeletons escort living humans to their graves in a lively waltz. Kings, knights, and commoners alike join in, conveying that regardless of status, wealth, or accomplishments in life, death comes for everyone. At a time when outbreaks of the Black Death and seemingly endless battles between France and England in the Hundred Years’ War left thousands of people dead, macabre images like the Dance of Death were a way to confront the ever-present prospect of mortality.
Though a few earlier examples exist in literature, the first known visual Dance of Death comes from around 1424. It was a large fresco painted in the open arcade of the charnel house in Paris’s Cemetery of the Holy Innocents. Stretched across a long section of wall and visible from the open courtyard of the cemetery, the fresco depicted human figures (all male) accompanied by cavorting skeletons in a long procession. A verse inscribed on the wall below each of the living figures explained the person’s station in life, arranged in order of social status from pope and emperor to shepherd and farmer. Clothing and accessories, like the pope’s cross-shaped staff and robes, or the farmer’s hoe and simple tunic, also helped identify each person.
Located in a busy part of Paris near the main markets, the cemetery wouldn’t have been a quiet, peaceful place of repose like the burial grounds we’re used to today, nor would it have been frequented only by members of the clergy. Instead, it was a public space used for gatherings and celebrations attended by all sorts of different people. These cemetery visitors, on seeing the Dance of Death, would certainly have been reminded of their own impending doom, but would also have likely appreciated the image for its humorous and satirical aspects as well. The grinning, dancing skeletons mocked the living by poking fun at their dismay and, for those in positions of power, by making light of their high status. Enjoy it now, the skeletons implied, because it’s not going to last.
Inspired by the fresco in Paris, more depictions of the Dance of Death popped up over the course of the 1400s. According to the art historian Elina Gertsman, the imagery first spread throughout France and then to England, Germany, Switzerland, and parts of Italy and eastern Europe. Though some of these frescos, murals, and mosaics survive to the present day, many others have been lost and are now only known through archival references.
In Paris, neither the charnel house nor the cemetery still exists. (The charnel house was demolished in 1669 to widen a nearby street and the cemetery was closed in the 1780s due to overcrowding.) But the fresco lives on as a set of woodcuts created by printer Guyot Marchant in 1485. Marchant’s manuscript replicates each figure in the procession as well as the accompanying verses. After the prints proved popular he went on to make several more editions, including the Danse Macabre des Femmes, a version including women, and an expanded version with ten new characters not found in the original fresco.
As the subject’s popularity continued into the early 1500s, other artists and printers made their own versions of the Dance of Death. The best known of these is a series created by artist Hans Holbein the Younger from 1523 to 1526, first sold as individual woodcuts and then published in book form in 1538. Holbein’s series begins with the very first appearance of Death, after Eve ate the apple and humanity got kicked out of the Garden of Eden, and ends with Death’s final bow at the Last Judgment, when everyone who has ever died reappears again to be sentenced to eternity in heaven or hell.
In between, Holbein shows how Death can strike at any moment, regardless of social status or earthly power. His depictions of the different characters meeting their doom are more pointed than Marchant’s versions. Instead of dancing, the skeletons in this Dance of Death mete out justice, going after their victims in situations that highlight suggested hypocrisies and immorality. A nun, for example, kneels in prayer but looks over her shoulder at her lover while Death snuffs out the candle behind her. And in many of the scenes, peasants and beggars are ignored by the bishops, judges, or kings who are supposed to protect and care for them. Holbein explicitly addresses the peasant’s dismal treatment at the hands of his social superiors in the image of his final character, an elderly farmer kindly helped along by a skeleton. Unlike the rich and powerful, for whom Death represents a loss of status and wealth, the peasant finds relief in dying after a life of hard labor and exploitation.
Holbein’s version of the Dance of Death proved so popular that by the time he died in 1543, dozens of pirated editions were circulating in addition to the official printings. Although the large, public murals, carvings, and frescos which originally depicted the Dance of Death went mostly out of fashion after the 1500s, Holbein’s prints have remained well-known until the present day. Artists continued to find inspiration in the Dance of Death theme over the next few centuries, changing styles and formats to suit their times.
From 1814 to 1816, the English artist Thomas Rowlandson published The English Dance of Death, a series of satirical cartoons in which stereotypical caricatures of English men and women are teased by skeletons with fittingly satirical and cruel fates. A character labeled "The Glutton" dies of overeating, an apothecary is poisoned with his own medicine, and reckless young men driving too fast overturn their carriages. Like the fresco and Marchant’s versions, the cartoons were accompanied by verses, written by the comic poet William Combe under the pen name “Doctor Syntax.”
In 1861, French artist James Tissot explored the subject in a painting exhibited at the Salon in Paris, depicting a line of human dancers with skeletons at the head and tail end of the procession. At the front, two musicians flank the cadaver, who looks directly out of the painting towards us, the viewers. At the end, a shrouded skeleton carries a coffin, hourglass, and scythe. The dancers, oblivious both to the specters around them and the open graves in the rocks near their feet, frolic merrily through the landscape.
Almost seven decades later, in 1929, even Walt Disney crafted his own adaptation of the allegory with “The Skeleton Dance,” an animated short in which skeletons rise from their graves and dance to a lively foxtrot. At times, the music is played on instruments made from their own bones. Though no humans are danced to their graves in this cartoon, the expressive skeletons wouldn’t look out of place in earlier Dances of Death. Other Halloween staples—black cats, owls, tombstones, and bats—add to the spooky mood.
Though the Dance of Death isn’t, strictly speaking, associated with Halloween, the macabre imagery resonates with the holiday’s connections between life and death. Skeletons, skulls, and corpses reminiscent of those grim medieval dancers often show up in haunted houses, as yard decorations, and as costumes. Sometimes grisly, sometimes cartoonish, today’s dancing skeletons are far removed from their predecessors in the Danse Macabre. But, as sanitized and commercialized as Halloween can be, it’s still a holiday that brings a greater awareness of death and forces us to confront our own mortality, even if the frights all vanish when November 1st rolls around.
At the end of the Saturday Night Live sketch, David S. Pumpkins’ skeletons appear by themselves, still dancing even without their main character. When they finish, Pumpkins himself, from behind the perplexed couple asks, “Any questions?” They scream, finally getting the scare they wanted when they got on the haunted elevator. Once the terror subsides and their hearts stop racing, they’ll go about their day, able to ignore the realities of death far more easily than the citizens of Paris could back in the 1400s.
But even after David S. Pumpkins and his skeletons are long gone, there will be another Halloween, reminding us year after year that no matter what, death’s still waiting.
Switzerland has so much gold that the country is flushing it down the drain. According to a new analysis by Eawag, the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, every year 95 pounds of gold, worth nearly $2 million, passes through Swiss wastewater treatment plants.
The gold, the researchers believe, comes from “tiny flecks of gold”—residue from the country’s watchmaking industry and gold refineries. As Bloomberg points out, refineries in this small European country deal with 70 percent of the world’s gold.
In most of the 64 wastewater treatment plants studied—and let’s take a moment to recognize the work of the researchers who had the job of studying “elements discharged in effluents or disposed of in sewage sludge”—the concentrations of gold were small enough that it’s not economically worthwhile to extract it from the rest of the waste. In southern Switzerland, though, where gold refineries are concentrated, enough gold is being wasted that it could be worth recovering from the sewage stream.
The researchers also found that gold isn’t the only precious metal in Switzerland’s wastewater. The sewage plants were also streaming with rare earth elements used in high-tech and medical industries and with silver—6,600 pounds per year, in total, worth $1.7 million. It must be good to be a country so rich that your garbage is gold and silver.
If you were trying to flag down an empty-looking taxi outside of Birmingham, England, earlier this week, and it didn't stop for you, let go of your anger. The cab had a greater mission: it was carrying a bullied pigeon.
Bird-lover Jeanette Bowron of Erdington spent £45, or about $60, to send her avian neighbor to safety, the Coventry Telegraph reports. It all started on Sunday, October 8, while she was out shopping.
"I was driving along and I saw a pigeon on the dual carriageway," Bowron told the outlet. "It was being pecked by two crows." Bowron figured she'd give the drama some time to play out, but on her way home again, the pigeon was still there taking abuse. "I drove home and got a cat basket and took it home and let it free in my garage," she says.
The next morning, she took the injured bird to a nearby vet's office, which gave her a choice: they could put the pigeon to sleep, or she could send it to Nuneaton and Warwickshire Wildlife Sanctuary, about 25 miles away.
This was a no-brainer for Bowron, who quickly figured out the necessary logistics. "I'm not familiar with roads around Nuneaton, so I decided to call a taxi to send it," she said. "They asked 'how many passengers,' and I said 'none, just one pigeon.'" (This was likely a great help to the pigeon. Even Harvey the hawk—the raptor that gained fame by seeking refuge in a Houston taxi during Hurricane Harvey—had to flag down his rescue cab himself.)
The pigeon was accompanied by a £20 donation, meant to provide food for the patient. Both the bird and the money made it to the sanctuary just fine, and were greeted by the owner, Geoff Grewcock, pictured above. Grewcock put a splint on the pigeon's injured leg and named him Lucky. He expects a near-complete recovery.
"It was strange knowing a taxi was coming with a pigeon in the back," Grewcock told the Birmingham Mail. "But it goes to show what loving, caring people are out there."
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.
Barely four miles off the Swedish coast, in the indigo Baltic Sea, the rocky island of Öland was once witness to a gruesome mass murder. In 2010, archaeologists uncovered skeleton after skeleton there—bodies that had initially been left unburied. In some cases, the bones had been splintered by impacts. In others, sheep or goat teeth were crammed into their open mouths. But the case couldn't be colder: Archaeologists estimate that this mysterious massacre at Sandby borg, one of the island's 15 ancient forts, took place in the 5th century. The fort's 15-foot-tall ramparts, which once protected 53 houses and their inhabitants, were no match for whichever assailants stormed the settlement. Now, a discovery of two gold rings and a coin at the site may hint at the motive behind what appears to have been a particularly bloody, personal attack.
Last week, The Local reported, archaeologists Clara Alfsdotter and Sophie Vallulv uncovered the gold items, which give credence to a theory that the island may have had significant ties to the Roman Empire. Nearby, at the site of a important house, the team had uncovered pieces of Roman glass. The coins roughly date to the time of the massacre. The face of the coin depicts Western Roman Emperor Valentinian III, who ruled between 425 and 455, with his foot crushing the head of a barbarian. Another coin found three years ago also commemorates the leader.
The rings, the archaeologists said, seem too small to have belonged to a man—but none of the many skeletons found so far are recognizably female, which raises new questions about the fort. "We now know a lot more about the house where they were found," project leader Helena Victor told The Local. "It seems to have had a special purpose, and it may have been the house of a chieftain or a minor king."
Perhaps, she said, the people living in the fort had too much gold and jewelry—suggesting that the attackers saw their wealth or influence as a threat of some sort. Curiously, however, the site was not looted. Since 2010, professional metal detectorists have uncovered silver brooches and bells, gold rings, and beads made of amber, glass, and cowrie shells. Even the murdered inhabitants' valuable horses were tied up and left to starve. This grim Swedish murder mystery looks to remain unsolved.
n 1957, playwright Tennessee Williams received an offer he couldn't refuse. Recommend Studio Duplicating Service to your friends, said its founder, Jean Shepard, and we'll print your scripts for free.
So begins the story of a copy shop that opened on 9th Street in New York’s East Village that year, and for the next four decades printed the lion's share of scripts for the city’s entertainers in film, television, and the theater.
The story of the shop and the paper it churned out is the secret history of the printed archive of the New York entertainment industry for almost half of the 20th century, sitting squarely at the intersection of the history of drama, printing, and labor. It’s also the story of a woman entrepreneur whose working life was designed to maintain her life as a creative person, and how the business helped her employees do the same along the way.
Everybody from Edward Albee to Spike Lee went to Studio Duplicating. From 1975 to 1997, NBC’s Saturday Night Live was one of Shepard's biggest and most demanding customers. A first draft of an episode’s script came into the shop on Friday evening, and Studio staff worked through the night to get it printed by Saturday morning. A round of revisions came back Saturday afternoon, and new pages were delivered to NBC Studios in time for evening rehearsals after a frenzied round of proofing, typing, and printing. ABC was another major client, hiring Studio Duplicating for soap operas like All My Children and Dark Shadows. Typists got hooked on the stories and fought to type the soaps to get a sneak-peek at new episodes before they aired.
These three shows were a few of many loyal clients that helped the business grow. Scripts for movies shot in New York were constantly coming in, and a lot of play- and screenwriters were repeat customers. Woody Allen was a major client, and Jean’s son Grey Shepard, who I interviewed for this article, recalls reading his newest scripts over the dinner table with Jean.
Allen often edited his work in person at a desk reserved for writers in the shop. Elaine May, Terry Southern, William Goldman, and Spike Lee were just a few of the screenwriters whose scripts were printed there. One of Grey's summers off from school was spent mimeographing, collating, and binding shooting scripts for Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather.
Major work for television signaled the height of the Studio Duplicating Service, which was by then an all-night operation that employed around 30 people in a brownstone on 44th Street between 9th and 10th Avenues. Studio Duplicating took up the ground floor, and the Shepards’ home—which featured an indoor badminton court and art studio—was on the upper floors. The shop’s beginnings, however, were humbler. Shepard and her founding business partner, Patricia Scott, rented a tiny office in the back of a dry cleaner’s shop on East 9th.
In those early years, most of the work they printed was for theatrical productions on and off Broadway. Among the nearly 600 scripts printed by Studio Duplicating in the New York Public Library are scripts by Tennessee Williams, Aldus Huxley, Irving Berlin, Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, and Truman Capote. Scott sold her share in the business in 1961, and that year Studio Duplicating relocated to larger quarters on West 43rd Street. Six years later, Shepard purchased the 44th Street brownstone. Grey remembers how rough the block was in those days. His mother, however, loved dogs and they always kept two German shepherds that went with them almost everywhere. Nobody messed with the Shepards because nobody wanted to mess with their dogs.
Grey also recalls that most of Studio Duplicating’s employees were men—he remembers only five women who worked there—and that they were working actors. There were a handful of writers, too, and anyone who wasn't working yet was trying to make it. One employee to go onto a successful acting career was Marcia Wallace (1942-2013), who played receptionist Carol Kester on The Bob Newhart Show and voiced Edna Krabappel on The Simpsons. Joel Parsons, an actor traceable to productions of Shakespeare's As You Like It and Henry IV, worked as a mimeographer at Studio when the business opened, and stayed on for 30 years.
Working at Studio Duplicating was a great gig for actors because their boss understood the ebb and flow of the profession. Shepard readily gave time off for performances and auditions, and if someone got a part in a touring company, he could hop on the bus for three months and his job would be waiting when he returned. Shepard gave herself the same flexibility. She hated mornings and refused to take calls before noon, and also spent part of each day writing, painting, or at her pottery wheel. She devoted time in the afternoon and late at night to the business, keeping up with orders, billing, and bookkeeping in the wee hours.
Shepard was well connected to the theater world partly because she trained as a lighting designer at Northwestern University in Illinois, where she met her actor-husband, Richard Shepard. (They divorced in the early sixties but remained close friends.) Co-founder Patricia Scott was a singer and actress, and her actor-husband was George C. Scott, a.k.a. General Patton and General Buck Turgidson. Their social and professional network was the New York theater world, and they ran a business that never advertised to attract new clients or staff. Hiring actors to work at Studio Duplicating made sense because it was the first print shop in New York to specialize exclusively in scripts. Having a great American playwright vouch for your services is a pretty good way to get started in business, but Studio Duplicating lasted because they got scripts right, at least in part because everybody who worked there knew from experience what right looked like.
Studio Duplicating’s employees were proofreaders, typists, mimeographers, or binders, and scripts passed through their hands in that order. Proofreaders never interfered with the text, but read things through to regularize spelling and punctuation and make sure the script was complete. Some writers' manuscripts always went straight to the only proofreader who could read their uniquely indecipherable handwriting. Corrected manuscripts next went to typists, who typed up one mimeograph stencil for each page of text.
The mimeographer would then affix the stencil to the cylindrical drum of the motorized machine, and power it on to turn the drum and stencil across an inked pad. Typed holes in the waxy surface coating on the blue mimeostencil absorbed the ink, and transferred it to blank sheets of paper. Scripts were printed and collated sheet-by-sheet, then hole-punched and bound in colored vinyl stamped with the title and the Studio Duplicating Service logo. In the early 1990s the shop bought a Xerox machine and word processor—mimeograph supplies were difficult to obtain, and by then the business served only a handful longtime, major clients—but their archive of mimeostencils stayed in storage in the shop basement until the doors closed for good in 1997.
Mimeo was a great technology for a small printing business. The machines required a relatively small investment, were easy to maintain and operate, and supplies were inexpensive. It worked really well for scripts because the typed stencils were easy to file and store. This meant that a writer, agent, producer, or director could order new copies of a script and expect a quick turnaround—no retyping required. It was also easy to keep scripts up to date with the latest revisions, and print either a full revised script or just revised pages. This was crucial, because in both the pre-production and production phases, screenplays and stageplays often went through multiple rounds of revisions. Many scripts also spent months or even years in development. An order might come in for just a few copies, and work on revisions and a larger print run would follow if and when production started. The stencils stayed in the Studio Duplicating archive for years, and even after they stopped printing new jobs with the mimeo machine they could still run off copies from a mimeostencil long after it was first created.
In the author bio in Nobody Home, the novel she published in 1977, Shepard alluded to her work with Studio Duplicating Service last, saying "Jennifer Lloyd Paul is the pseudonym of a writer, artist, and businesswoman." Before publishing Nobody Home, which was warmly reviewed by the New York Times, her clay work stocked New York City's first Pottery Barn when it opened in 1963. A play based on her novel called A Firehouse Bride opened Off Broadway in 1985.
Today we remember Shepard first as the brains behind the small yet significant printing operation that manufactured the printed matter essential to New York's entertainment industry, much of which still survives in public and private collections across the country. But Shepard's life and her business were supportive of one of the creative worlds she loved in more ways than one. Shepard's understanding of her own need to make a living without sacrificing her life as a creative person gave her the perspective to make the same thing possible for the people who worked for her. The plays, TV shows, and movies that Studio Duplicating staff wrote or acted in may have never brought them fame and fortune, but they considered themselves actors first and their work in the shop made it possible for them to do what they loved when they could and still make rent.
Movies, television, and the theater need scripts and actors. Studio Duplicating gave them both.
For some, high-altitude glass walkways and bridges are terrifying enough on their own. One glass bridge in China is getting a lot of attention right now after ratcheting up the terror by adding the illusion that the glass floor is cracking underneath people's feet. Depending on your perspective, it's either a hilarious prank or a cruel joke.
The bridge, on Taihang Mountain near Handan city in China’s Hebei Province, hangs over 3,800 feet in the air, affixed to the mountainside. While the path provides an incredible view of the mountainous scenery, it’s also not for the faint of heart. In a recent video that's been making the rounds, the span’s newest feature, which creates the illusion that the bridge is going to shatter under the weight of those walking on it, can be seen striking crippling fear into a series of hikers.
To create the effect, bits of actual broken glass were placed under the sturdy glass floor, as well as video screens that display fake cracks in the glass as people pass over it. The sound of cracking glass is also piped in, to complete the terrifying effect. In one of the most popular segments of the video, a tour guide appears to collapse to his feet in fear as he walks over the illusion (although this may have been part of the promotion effort).
After receiving some negative response on social media accusing the trick of being cruel and even dangerous, with the possibility that it might give someone a heart attack, the East Taihang administration has apologized, but said that it doesn’t plan on removing the screens.
What do you think? Is the East Taihang Glasswalk's controversial stunt an adventurous gag, or a cruel prank?
Cornell University's McGraw Tower is 137 feet tall. It's visible for miles, and most days, its 21 chimes ring out morning, afternoon, and evening. It's a campus touchstone, one that community members use to meet up with friends, give people directions, and generally anchor themselves.
So on October 8, 1997, as students walked to their Wednesday morning classes, it's fair to say they were surprised to discover that their beloved landmark had grown an appendage. "One day, there was this thing at the top of the tower," remembers Oliver Habicht, at the time a recent graduate working for the university IT department. It was way up at the top, impaled on the spire. It was round, and about the size of a beach ball. Was it… was it a pumpkin?
It was. Someone, somehow, had apparently carried the gourd up hundreds of steps. They had snuck it silently through the tower's bell cage—a structure criss-crossed with cables that, if tripped, would have let out an immediate BONG—and gotten it up to the top of the very steep roof, all without being noticed. Not only that, but they had affixed it well enough that it stayed put until springtime, enmeshing itself in campus culture and becoming its own type of steady, albeit slowly rotting, beacon.
Twenty years later, the prank "continues to generate interest at Cornell and [in] the community," says the university archivist, Evan Fay Earle. All of this even though—or perhaps because—no one is quite sure who did it.
Like most storied institutions, Cornell has seen its fair share of pranks. One legendary 1920s student, Hugh Troy, pulled off a whole series: once, he apparently stole a taxidermied rhinoceros foot, made fake tracks in the snow, and convinced everyone that the animal had gotten loose on campus. There's also Narby Krimsnatch, an entirely fake alumnus who nonetheless keeps appearing at reunions and in yearbooks.
Even in such company, the pumpkin was an immediate classic. "It became a part of conversation on campus, in the community, and with alumni from far away," Earle says. "It was creative, it was not easily accomplished, it wasn't crude or vandalistic." It was just a pumpkin in an extremely improbable place.
The administration decided not to touch it, figuring it would come down on its own. For months, though, it just didn't. "All the [pumpkins] we had in town had all rotted away," says Habicht, but this one held fast. Perched high atop its tower, the pumpkin gathered devotees. "This is first-rate stuff, the best I've ever seen," Gould Colman, who had recently retired from his longtime position as the university's archivist, told the New York Times. Campus newspaper the Cornell Daily Sun published a Pumpkin Watch on the front page for three straight weeks.
Other students joined in the fun. "One group parked a whole bunch of pumpkins at the bottom of the tower, sort of cheering on the one at the top," says Habicht. One student wrote a pumpkin version of the Cornell song (sample lyric: "Who can tell from whence it came there, silent and alone? / See the guardian of the harvest, nobly thus enthroned"). Campus security blocked off the area around the bottom of the tower, lest someone walk by at the wrong moment—or gaze up at the interloper too long—and get beaned.
Habicht, too, found himself inspired. He had been dabbling in online video—at the time, a much less common genre—and decided to set up a webcam on the seventh floor of nearby Olin Library. He then cooked up a website that allowed people to check in on the pumpkin anytime, from anywhere. "My running joke has been, this is like watching paint dry," he says. "It does not move. But for whatever reason, it became extremely popular."
The Pumpkin Cam was soon getting clicks from far-flung alumni, along with current staff and students who wanted to be the first to see it fall. (The site has been partially resuscitated in honor of the 20th anniversary, and Habicht is working on getting it fully functional again.)
It also spawned at least one sub-mystery: was it really a pumpkin at all? After a number of people expressed doubts—including an assistant professor of horticultural sciences, who told the Ithaca Journal that the object was too hardy to be biotic—the university sponsored a contest to find out. The winners, a team from the undergraduate physics department, flew a remote-controlled weather balloon up to the pumpkin with an electric drill attached, and got a tissue sample. "You and I would call it a drone," Habicht says. "But this was before the word 'drone' was out there."
Eventually, curiosity won out. On March 14, 1998—a full 158 days after it first appeared—university provost Don Randel ascended to the top of the spire in a crane bucket and grabbed the pumpkin, now more frozen gloop than gourd. He then spirited it away in an ambulance. After two weeks of analysis via "microscopic slides, videotapes and photographs," a special panel of plant biology professors announced that it was, indeed, a pumpkin.
Its remains were freeze-dried and kept in a glass case in the visitor's center, then added to a display of brains in the psychology department, and finally found a permanent perch in the office of professor Barbara Finlay. Eventually, the infamous vegetable decayed completely.
Still, the original whodunit remained intact, along with the equally important howdunit. Over the years, at least two purported tell-alls have appeared. The first, published in the May 2000 Graduation Issue of the Cornell Daily Sun and readable in part online, attributes the prank to three friends: one student ringleader, alias "Kennedy," and two Ithacan accomplices, "Reagan" and "Nixon."
The second version appeared a few months later, in the Cornell Chimes Newsletter, and tells of a confession former Head Chimesmaster Courtney Kimball got from "Rob," a student from the University of Montana. (Rob's account is full of derring-do, and can be read in its entirety at the link above.)
Cornell historian Corey Ryan Earle—Evan Earle's brother—called Kimball's account "the best source for how it happened." But if anyone knows for sure, it's probably Evan: Another rumor holds that the identity of the prankster is passed down from archivist to archivist. Evan would neither confirm nor deny this, saying merely that "for a prank like this to remain mysterious is part of what makes it such a good prank."
And so 20 years have passed with no real answers. Video streaming technology has improved immensely (Cornell's website offers 24/7 live views of various campus landmarks). Drones survey crops on the regular. Students continue to find ways to mess with their institutions. And the pumpkin prankster remains anonymous and at large, free to stick gourds wherever he or she pleases.
The humble honey bee has just 250 million base pairs in its genome. Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that carries yellow fever and dengue fever, has so many more—1.3 billion base pairs, about as many as the eastern spot-billed duck. Cows have more still, about 2.7 billion base pairs, while we have about 3.2 billion. And then there's the migratory locust, which beats out every other species (at least among the ones whose genomes we've sequenced) with a whopping 5.8 billion base pairs. If you were to rank these animals on how complex they are, you wouldn't base your list on the size of their genomes—a cow or a human is arguably more complex than a locust, and ducks are clearly more complex than mosquitos.
"If you look at an earthworm and compare it to a human, you look more complex, you have different organs, you have different cell types," says Colin Sharpe, a genetics researcher at the University of Portsmouth, and the coauthor of a recent study that examines the connection between genes and complexity. The commonly accepted way to measure complexity, says Sharpe, is to count the number of different cells types in an animal—muscle cells, skin cells, neurons, and so on. Caenorhabditis elegans, a nematode worm frequently used in biology labs, has just 29 different cell types in its small body, while humans have about 170. What Sharpe and a graduate research partner, Daniela Lopes Cardoso, wanted to know is what it is about our genes that give us so many different kinds of cells.
To do that, Cardoso and Sharpe used genome databases for organisms, including C. elegans and humans, to look for genes that are responsible for translating the genome into proteins. In more complex organisms, certain genes get repeated or translated a little differently, leading to more possible proteins encoded by a single gene, something called functional diversity. The scientists based their study on 2,000 human genes, and their equivalent genes in other organisms, to see how such functional diversity varies from species to species, and then looked at whether that change correlates with the number of cell types.
Certain genes tend to encode for more proteins in the more complex animals, and what those genes had in common was surprising. "What we thought we might find were the [genes for] proteins which directly regulate how genes are expressed," says Sharpe. "Instead, it was the ones that regulate the structure and architecture of the chromatin and how it changes." Chromatin is everything that forms the chromosomes in our cells—DNA and proteins—which means that the way our genetic material is packaged is what makes us more complex than worms.
Understanding what drives complexity may one day help biologists pick the optimal organism to use in their labs to model human diseases. "We were a bit concerned that if you take a very simple organism, and use it as a model system, it may not be a true reflection because it's a much more simple organism," says Sharpe. "If [a biological] process is much more complicated in humans, it wouldn't be worth using a fruit fly as a model, you'd have to look at something more complicated, something like a mouse or a frog." More research, he hopes, could lead to a system for picking the most appropriate model organism, with the right level of complexity. Thanks to better computing power, he plans to look at far more than 2,000 genes in the next iteration of the study. "Now we want to look at everything."
There are signs of it all over Oregon and Washington: the dramatic cliffs of the Columbia River Gorge, the layered rock along the Palouse River, the ash deposits around the Zumwalt Prairie. A series of volcanic eruptions, starting 17.5 million years ago, formed the Columbia River Basalt Group, a complex of rock formations that was created over a few million years as lava erupted from fissures in the ground and seeped over the landscape. Among them, for example, is the Wapshilla Ridge formation, the product of about half a million years of eruptions that were, at most, thousands of years apart. The eruptions deposited about 10,000 cubic miles of rock and, according to new research, probably released enough sulfur gas to cool the whole planet down.
"The climate was already warming up rapidly before the whole eruption period started," says John Wolff, a geologist at Washington State University and coauthor of the study. "Right at the peak of the [Miocene] Climatic Optimum, when these eruptions happened, there's a little downturn in temperature. It's actually two peaks of warming, separated by this cooling period." Wolff and his coauthors argue there could be a link between the Wapshilla Ridge eruptions and that cooling—and that all that sulfur could be responsible.
If the eruptions were frequent enough and strong enough to push sulfur gas all the way to the upper atmosphere, says Wolff, "it can stay in the stratosphere for several years, blocking sunlight." But if the eruptions aren't strong enough, the sulfur stays local, forming acid rain. Based on the study of the ash in the Zumwalt Prairie, where Wolff and his colleagues collected samples, "the eruptions would have been quite explosive," he says.
In order to determine just how much sulfur gas the eruptions released, Wolff's team collected tiny bits of glass from ash and analyzed their chemical composition. He compares it to a bottle of carbonated soda. Small blobs of gas trapped in crystals are a bit like an unopened bottle that can keep the gas contained indefinitely. The concentrations of sulfur suggest that the eruptions released as much as 305 billion tons of sulfur. The 1815 Mount Tambora eruption that disrupted the global climate for three years released a tiny fraction of that. In fact, the Wapshilla Ridge eruptions released as much sulfur as a Mount Tambora eruption every single day for up to sixteen years. More research is needed to make a definitive link between the eruptions and the period of global cooling, but it's clear that the period of volcanic activity in the Pacific Northwest is among the largest the world has ever known.
Very few people get to bring their childhood fantasies to life. If those fantasies involve unique, monstrous creatures that earn national recognition while staying your friend forever, you might as well forget about it. That is, unless you're Adrian Mann, creator of one of the world's largest pianos. After adventures all across New Zealand, the Alexander Piano—an nearly 19-foot behemoth Mann started building at age 15—has recently returned to its creator's workshop.
It all began in 2004, when Mann stumped his piano teacher with a question. In pianos, the bass strings are wrapped with copper wire in order to deepen the sound without requiring extreme length. He wanted to know: without the copper, how long would the bass strings have to be in order to sound the right notes?
"She didn't know the answer," he says, and Mann—who, as a child, built a treehouse with running water and a working phone system—was used to figuring things out on his own. "So I thought, 'Well, I'll find out.'" He bought some piano wire, strung it up in his backyard in Timaru, New Zealand, and started plucking. "The length was so long—22 feet or something—but the sound was so amazing," he says. Right then, he knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to build an enormous piano.
Like all dreams, Mann's required a lot of help. A neighbor lent him her garage for building space. ("I had been wanting to build a small clavichord," he says. "[But] she said go for gold.") Others donated tools, timber, cash, and—when it became necessary—more building space.
The project also required a fair amount of luck. "I was building something I had no idea how to build," he says. For instance, he made the case early on, before taking some measurements he now knows to be crucial. The fact that it ended up the right size was "really a fluke."
When he finished the piano, in 2009, he was twenty years old. His creation measured 18 3/4 feet, more than double the size of an ordinary nine-foot concert grand. He invited his piano teacher over to see it, and he named it the Alexander Piano, after his great-great-grandfather. Then he started holding concerts.
Over the years, the piano has bopped around a lot, enjoying the hands of a number of notable local musicians, who generally admire its flexibility and rich tone. It's done stints at a shipping terminal, in a number of schools and performance spaces, and in a church in Timaru.
At one point in 2011, Mann struck a deal and had it installed in the foyer of the Otaga Museum in Dunedin, hoping Elton John would play it when he came through on a tour. They were stymied by an endorsement deal: "[Sir Elton] is contracted to Yamaha," Mann says. "So he can't play in public on anything else."
Mann is now 28, and restores pianos for a living. About two years ago, he set up his own workshop in Dunedin. More recently, he decided it was time to bring the piano there. "I just wanted to have it here with me," he says. So on September 21—late at night, with a fire department escort—Alexander came home.
Mann plans to keep holding concerts, and he hopes people will come and see the piano. He also loves to play it himself, when he has a free minute. But he's got something else in mind, too. He's learned so much about the instrument in the interim years, he says, that he's come up with a lot of new ideas: "I really want to build another one."
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.
In a remote part of Russia, near the border with Mongolia, an archaeological investigation has been excavating the graves of Xiongnu people, a nomadic group who lived in what’s now the Tuva Republic from about the 3rd century B.C. to the 1st century A.D. Some of the most striking finds have been in the graves of Xiongnu women, who were buried with fantastic belt buckles made of coal, jewels, and bronze, The Siberian Times reports.
The belt buckles are decorated with depictions of animals from fictional dragons to panthers, yaks, camels, and snakes.
The coal buckles in particular are very rare. Marina Kilunovskaya, the archaeologist leading the project for the of theRussian Academy of Sciences' Institute for the History of Material Culture, told The Siberian Times that there are only 10 known examples of these types of belt buckles. Kilunovskaya worked with the archaeologist Pavel Leus, a specialist of the Xiongnu period.
Xiongnu is a Chinese term from that period for nomadic, invading groups seen as a threat to China. In the period that these burials date to, a coalition of nomadic tribes from Central Asia were encroaching on Chinese territory. Chinese sources note that Xiongnu women fought alongside men, and the archaeological evidence backs that up. As Foreign Affairs reports, in at least 300 burials found across Asia, the remains of women show signs that they fought in battle. At least a quarter of the women found buried with weapons were active warriors. Both men and women wore elaborate belt buckles, decorated with animals both imaginary and real.
Excavations at this site, supported by The Society for the Exploration of Eurasia, began in 2015 and are still ongoing. The same area has many burials from the Scythian era, starting in the 2nd century B.C., through the Middle Ages.
Often enough, inspiration comes from unlikely sources. Sure, it might be an unforgettable event or a true eureka moment, but it could just as easily be something much simpler. In the case of the indelible fictional character of Dr. Jekyll and/or Mr. Hyde, it all started with a simple piece of furniture that sat in author Robert Louis Stevenson’s childhood home.
With all of the countless variations and retellings of the Jekyll and Hyde story over the past century and a half, it’s easy to forget that it originated from a novella by the same author who wrote Treasure Island. Stevenson first published TheStrange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1886. Genial professor Henry Jekyll begins acting suspiciously, while at the same time, brutal crimes begin being committed by the mysterious Edward Hyde. It turns out they are one and the same, transformed by an experimental serum. Eventually, their warring personalities lead to the downfall of both men. It’s a classic story of the conflicting impulses inside us all, but Stevenson is believed to have based his story on some very real people, including the cabinet-maker-by-day-criminal-by-night known as Deacon Brodie.
Deacon Brodie (real name, William Brodie) is today recognizable mainly as the namesake of a handful of pubs in Scotland and the U.S., but in his day, he was a well-respected socialite. Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1741, Brodie made a name for himself as a master cabinet maker. He was such a respectable tradesman that he was made Deacon (hence the name) of the Incorporation of Wrights, essentially president of the woodworking guild. This position not only gave him a seat on the city council, but an air of being morally beyond reproach. As it turned out though, well-made cabinets were not the only things going on in his workshop.
Brodie was also a trusted locksmith, and was given keys to the homes of many members of Edinburgh society, so that he could work while they weren’t around. This gave him access to a number of wealthy homes, which for Brodie was just too good an opportunity to pass up. He would make wax impressions of his clients’ keys, and then create replica keys so that he could sneak back in the night and rob them. He would dress in black clothing and sneak in under cover of darkness, leaving no trace of his entry, and baffling his victims.
His crime spree was just the beginning of his secret double life. Brodie, who was known for being prim and well-kept in appearance, also maintained a healthy gambling habit involving cock-fighting and trick dice, which he financed with stolen goods. In addition, he also kept two mistresses, neither aware of the other, with whom he fathered five children. In many ways, he was, well, a classic Jekyll and Hyde type.
Brodie’s double life came to an end in 1788, after he attempted to orchestrate an armed robbery of Edinburgh’s Excise Office. After the failed attempt, two of his accomplices got pinched, and quickly gave him up as the mastermind. Shortly thereafter, he was arrested in Amsterdam and returned to Edinburgh for trial. Brodie was found guilty of the attempted robbery, and on October 1, 1788, he was hanged on a gibbet that some believe he’d actually built during his time as a respectable craftsman. As evidenced by the 40,000 people who were witness to his execution (and the pubs that still bear his name), Brodie became a legend in and around Edinburgh, which brings us back to Stevenson, who seemed to be affected by the duplicitous carpenter’s legacy more than most.
Stevenson grew up in the New Town area of Edinburgh, his childhood bedroom on the second floor of the family home. His room was also home to a large double-doored, mahogany veneer cabinet that stood at the foot of his bed, which had been made by none other than Deacon Brodie.
In Rick Wilson’s book, The Man Who Was Jekyll and Hyde: The Lives and Crimes of Deacon Brodie, the author shares an interview with Stevenson in which he discussed how the origins of Jekyll and Hyde came to him in a dream, and how Brodie’s cabinet might have affected the story’s genesis. “For instance, all I dreamed about Jekyll was that one man was being pressed into a cabinet when he swallowed a drug and changed into another being,” Stevenson said. When pressed by the reporter as to whether the dream was inspired by Brodie, Stevenson admitted the connection, but was somewhat vague about any direct inspiration, saying, “I certainly didn’t dream that but in the room in which I slept as a child in Edinburgh there was a cabinet—and a very pretty piece of work it was too—from the hands of the original Deacon Brodie.” While he never directly attributes the story of Jekyll and Hyde to Brodie, certainly the looming cabinet in Stevenson’s room, and the legacy of its maker, left a mark on the young author.
The interview also mentions a play about Brodie’s life that Stevenson (with his colleague W.E. Henley) authored years before the release of the Jekyll and Hyde novella, called Deacon Brodie, or The Double Life. This version of Brodie’s story was performed, but was unsuccessful, and largely forgotten, yet it lends further credence to the idea that Brodie’s life shaped the author’s thinking.
Today, the Brodie cabinet that once sat in Stevenson’s bedroom is kept in the Edinburgh Writer’s Museum, one of only two remaining pieces thought to have been built by Brodie. It's a fairly simple piece of furniture, lacking any ostentatious or ominous ornamentation. And it managed to help birth one of the most unforgettable horror characters of all time.
There are treasures to be found inside many medieval manuscripts, from pointing hands to menageries of misshapen animalsand sword-wielding rabbits. But in rare instances, there is actual treasure as well. Pearls, diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, and precious metals adorn the covers of a few luxurious texts, some of which are are currently on display at New York’s Morgan Library and Museum.
One particularly notable example on display is the Lindau Gospels, dating to ninth-century France. The intricate metalwork on the back cover only hints at the extravagance of the front cover, which was made nearly a century later. Jewels line the edges and sit on raised clawed legs around a repoussé (metal worked on the reverse side to create an image in relief) figure of Christ. The elevation of the jewel clusters has a practical purpose as well as an aesthetic one; it protects the rest of the cover when the book is open.
In the medieval period, monks usually produced books, but with treasure binding—as this practice is known—metalworkers were employed to emboss patterns of silver and gold and set precious stones. Either the very wealthy or the very pious (or both) commissioned the books, but in the case of the Lindau Gospels, it’s unclear who requested the lavish tome.
A handful of libraries around the world hold such books, but not many treasure-bound manuscripts have survived the centuries. The exhibition brings together the Morgan’s collection, and includes illustrations of jewels and gemstones from inside the manuscripts.
Wagyu beef is considered by many to be the paragon of meat. The beef from four breeds of Japanese cattle is famous for its beautifully marbled fat, soft texture, and sweet aroma, which some say is reminiscent of coconut or fruit. But what makes it smell that way? A recent study, published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, found that a cocktail of molecules is responsible, including one that recalls the scent of egg whites.
Scientists have tried to determine the chemical composition of the wagyu beef odor before, but their "sample preparation did not use the optimal cooking temperature," write the study authors—which seems like a painful disservice to the notoriously expensive steaks. The authors, scientists at Ogawa and Company, a Japanese flavor and fragrance chemical firm, were meticulous in their preparation of three kinds of beef in the study—wagyu from Matsusuka, alongside grass-fed from Australia and a sirloin from the United States, for comparison. They used sous vide, which cooks the steaks in temperature-controlled water bath. The cooked meat was then blended and subjected to a solvent that helped separate out the volatile molecules responsible for the aroma.
Out of those slurries, the researchers found about 20 different odor-related molecules, including 10 compounds that hadn't been associated with the smell of beef before. Eight of those are molecules that "have fatty, green, juicy odors," write the authors. Another compound, which "had a unique egg-white note" that's also found in chicken, is likely a big contributor to the wagyu bouquet. It is the relative proportions of these aromatic compounds that make the Japanese variety so distinctive. "The many kinds of potent odorants in each beef aroma are common," the food scientists write, "however, the balance of their contributions is different from each other."
There’s plenty to do at the Jelly Belly factory, located at 1 Jelly Belly Lane in Fairfield, California. After donning a mandatory paper hat, you can take a tour, peering over a guardrail at the factory floor as machines crank out endless flats of colorful jelly beans. Afterwards, line up for your free sample of one of their dozens of flavors—you can even try the weird ones, like earwax and vomit. Peckish? Don’t miss the cafe, where you can enjoy a bean-shaped pizza or burger. But whatever you do at the factory, you’ll be watched over by the presence of former President Ronald Reagan. He’s everywhere. The line for the tour meets in front of a cabinet filled with Reagan memorabilia. He’s smiling down from a portrait of him made from jelly beans. During the tour, guests stop in front of a wall covered with a dozen photos of him.
The company, and the family that owns it, are obviously fans of the Gipper. But when Reagan first encountered Jelly Belly, he was the fan.
Reagan appeared in ads for Chesterfield cigarettes in the ‘40s and ‘50s, but his vice of choice was pipe smoking. He quit sometime before the late 1960s, when he started running for governor of California. By then, he had settled on a stand-in: jelly beans. At a 1966 campaign event, a man named Russ Albers struck up a conversation. Had Reagan tried a new, more gourmet type of jelly bean from an Oakland company, a brand that Albers happened to carry in his stores? Reagan tried one, and soon, he was hooked.
That’s because those beans—from the Goelitz Candy Company, now renamed Jelly Belly—were different than others on the market. At the time, the flavoring in standard jelly beans was limited to their outer shells. The inside was just a mass of chewy sugar. The Goelitz company changed that, shrinking their beans and adding flavor to the interior.
Soon, Reagan started getting these smaller, more flavorful jelly beans shipped to his Sacramento governor's office. He kept a jar on his desk, sometimes filled with licorice beans, his favorite flavor. In a letter to the company, he wrote that “They have become such a tradition of this administration that it has gotten to the point where we can hardly start a meeting or make a decision without passing around a jar of jelly beans."
In the ‘70s, California Assemblyman Willie Brown got into a screaming match with Reagan. “In anger, Brown thrust his hand into Reagan's legendary jelly bean jar and then declared that he knew that neither Reagan nor his staff would eat the jelly beans because his black hand had been inside,” wrote James Richardson in Willie Brown: A Biography.
The company didn’t publicize the connection, and quietly supplied Reagan with beans throughout his gubernatorial career. In 1980, a journalist from Time snapped a photo of Reagan eating the beans in his hotel during a presidential campaign stop. The Jelly Belly logo was clearly visible in the picture. “It ended up in a newspaper article, and we were like, oh no,” Jelly Belly president and CEO Lisa Rowland Brasher says. “Our phone started ringing off the hook with people wanting to talk with us and know about [our] relationship with Reagan.” The small, family-owned company was quickly overwhelmed with orders, receiving so many that at one point they were 77 weeks behind in production. Reagan’s influence was so great that the company’s profits doubled the year after it was discovered he ate Jelly Bellys. Eventually, they built a new facility to keep up with demand.
Next year, the company received a call. Could they supply jelly beans for Reagan’s presidential inauguration? Of course, they said. The inauguration planners wanted patriotic beans, which the company was able to provide with a mix of red (Very Cherry) white (coconut) and blueberry beans. They ended up sending three-and-a-half tons of beans to the inauguration.
Jelly beans became an integral part of Reagan’s public image. He placed a standing order for 720 bags of beans per month to distribute throughout government buildings, and ate them in the Oval Office, on Air Force One, and with heads of state. He allowed the company to start producing jars of jelly beans with the presidential seal, and gave them out to dignitaries, later bestowing one on Bill Clinton during the latter’s inauguration. In cabinet meetings, they served as a test of character: “You can tell a lot about a fella's character by whether he picks out all of one color or just grabs a handful,” he told interviewers. He even sent some up with the astronauts on the Challenger space shuttle.
Towards the end of his presidency, Reagan switched allegiance to M&Ms, which became the official candy of the White House. (“Absolutely not,” Brasher says with a laugh, when asked if Jelly Belly bears any ill will toward Mars for poaching their most famous customer. “I love M&Ms.”) And after he left office, the Jelly Belly company stopped supplying the White House with beans.
Over the years Jelly Belly expanded from the small company that Reagan helped popularize. Now, they produce around 15 billion beans a year. But every once in awhile, their connection to Ronnie resurfaces. After Reagan’s death, the company placed black ribbons over jelly bean portraits of him hanging in the factory, and journalists asked Jelly Belly executives for their thoughts. In 2011, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum did a stump speech at the factory in an unsuccessful attempt to evoke some of Reagan’s popularity. These days, most of the children visiting the factory, eyes wide at the prospect of free candy, don’t know or care who the portrait of the man in the cowboy hat is. But their parents usually recall the former president’s candy addiction.
“The older generations that come through, they definitely remember, ‘Oh yeah, that was President Reagan’s favorite candy,’” Brasher says. “I think it’s just something fun and lighthearted. It doesn’t have to be political. Isn’t that nice nowadays?”
