A convict love token from the collection at the National Museum of Australia. (Photos: Katie Shanahan/National Museum of Australia)

In 1818, a teenage boy in London gave a memento to his parents. The sentiments expressed on each side of the copper token are impassioned, and with good reason: the gifter, 15-year-old John Camplin, had just been caught stealing a watch and sentenced to "transportation for life." He would never see his parents again.

The token read:
Dear Father Mother
A gift to you ~
From me a friend
Whose love for you
Shall never end
when this you
See Rembr me when
In som Foreign
Country

Transportation sentences were fixed at a duration of seven years, 14 years, or life. That said, even a seven-year sentence usually meant a one-way ticket to the United States, or later, Australia—convicts rarely had the means to return to Britain after serving their time.

After a convict had been found guilty and sentenced to transport, he or she would be kept in prison until a ship was ready to depart from the south coast of England. These last few days, weeks, or months in Britain were the final chance for convicts to see their loved ones before being separated forever. 

Some convicts went beyond hugs, kisses, and words of farewell and created custom mementos to leave with a family member, wife, or lover. A cheap and readily available way to make one of these personalized gifts was to take a 1797 "Cartwheel" penny or twopence, scratch off the head of King George III, and stipple or engrave initials, words, dates, or pictures. These mementos, often created in prison, are known as "convict love tokens," or, in the poetic phrasing of Newgate Prison history chronicler Arthur Griffiths, "leaden hearts."

The American Revolution had a big impact not just on the inhabitants of the Thirteen Colonies, but on the lives of convicts in London. Prior to 1776, a convict sentenced to seven years' transportation for stealing silk handkerchiefs or pickpocketing a watch would be bundled onto a ship with hundreds of other criminals and sent to one of the British Empire's American colonies to serve time.

With the signing of the Declaration of Independence, that all changed. Instead of being dispatched across the Atlantic, British convicts were packed into the overcrowded cells of Newgate Prison in London or crammed by the hundreds onto typhoid-riddled ships moored in the Thames. It was an untenable situation.

However, the government had another, newly charted option on the horizon: Australia, where the first colony was established in 1787. They wanted their convicts to provide free labor to develop the country. The voyage was significantly more harrowing than crossing the Atlantic: Australia was over 11,000 nautical miles from England, literally on the other side of the world. 

Ships from the First Fleet arriving at Port Jackson in Sydney in January 1788. (Image: State Library of New South Wales/Public domain)

The first convict voyage to Australia took place in 1787. Eleven ships, collectively known as the First Fleet, brought more than 700 convicts to Sydney, accompanied by several hundred other passengers such as marines, government officials, and crew members. The ships departed from Portsmouth, England on May 13, 1787, and arrived in Australia between the 18th and 20th of January, 1788—a journey of over 250 days. Conditions were trying: aboard the Alexander, for example, 15 of the 195 convicts died of illness along the way. In a journal entry dated July 18, 1787, John White, Surgeon-General to the First Fleet, wrote about the poor conditions on the Alexander:

“[I]llness complained of was wholly occasioned by the bilge water, which had by some means or other risen to so great a height that the pannels of the cabin, and the buttons on the clothes of the officers, were turned nearly black by the noxious effluvia. When the hatches were taken off, the stench was so powerful that it was scarcely possible to stand over them.”

 
A "Cartwheel" tuppence. (Photo: Detecting on Wikipedia)

The world's largest collection of convict love tokens is held by the National Museum of Australia, located in Canberra. It consists of 314 tokens, 307 of which were acquired in 2008 from British antique dealer Tim Millett.

Millett first stumbled upon convict love tokens while working at his family's coin dealing business, AH Baldwin & Sons, in the early 1980s. 

“I started [the collection] with about 10 that I found, bits of pieces here and there," he says. “I thought, this is much more interesting than mint-state gold coins.”

Among numismatists, convict love tokens don't hold much appeal. When Millett began to be known for collecting them, dealers would send tokens his way, but didn't understand his interest in a bunch of scratched-up, low-value coins.

“It was rather along the lines of, ‘Oh God, there’s that nutcase Tim Millett who’ll pay good money for these things.’” Millett says. "The trade always regarded them as a bit of a nonsense.”

Love tokens given between members of a couple have long been a phenomenon. "Convict love tokens are an off-shoot of a much earlier tradition of exchanging tokens between lovers or family members who must part, which became increasingly popular from the 17th to the 19th century," writes Rebecca Nason in a 2009 article on the tokens for the Journal of the Numismatic Association of Australia.

 
A 1789 illustration of First Fleet prisoners arriving in Sydney. (Image: Public domain/Wikipedia)

For Millett, however, the convict versions held a particular intrigue. Tokens made by prisoners can be difficult to track down. One reason is that, due to a lack of identifying information, they are often not recognizable as artifacts of the convict transportation era. Though some prisoners used their full names and referred to their sentences explicitly in the messages they engraved on their coins, many used only initials—to give a paramour a keepsake that linked them with a convict was to invite shame.

Over the years, Millett began to scrutinize what looked like run-of-the-mill love tokens more closely, checking for convict clues. “What might appear to be just a couple of love tokens—which is really, even now, not worth very much—you’d just get a sense that there might be something more to it than that,” he says.

Millett did conduct research into the identities of the convicts whose tokens he amassed, but with information scant, and records not available online, it was difficult to track down the details. Over 160,000 convicts were transported to Australia between 1787 and 1868, and with so many Johns, Williams, Jameses and Henrys in the mix, matching a coin to the right person was a daunting task. 

The details that Millett was able to find, however, stuck in his mind. Asked about which of the tokens in the collection is his favorite, Millett is instantly able to recite the lines of verse engraved on the reverse side of convict Thomas Alsop's love token:

The rose
soon drupes
& dies. the brier
fades away. but
my fond heart
for you I love
shall never
go astray.

Alsop was convicted in July 1833 at Staffordshire for stealing a sheep, the 21-year-old was sentenced to transportation for life. In January 1834, he arrived at Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) on a ship that held 400 convicts. According to the National Museum of Australia, Alsop attempted to abscond from his chain gang in July 1835, an offense for which he received 36 lashes. The misbehavior continued: "between 1836 and 1847 he committed numerous offenses including refusing to work, stealing cattle, representing himself as a constable, absconding and being found in bed with a female prisoner," the museum says. 

Thomas Alsop's love token, engraved in 1833. (Photos: Katie Shanahan/National Museum of Australia)

Despite all the mischief, Alsop was granted a full pardon in February 1850. Then aged 36, he married 21-year-old Irish-born Sarah Eliza Kirk and had two children. Alsop died in 1891.

Alsop's story, while fascinating, is not unusual. Below is a love token created by 19-year-old David Freeman in 1818, after he was sentenced to transportation for life for stealing a handkerchief:

David Freeman's love token, front and back. (Photos: Katie Shanahan/National Museum of Australia)

The London Criminal Court proceedings of June 17, 1818 show that Freeman and his co-accused, John Clark, professed their innocence when hauled into the Old Bailey on the charge of theft. The court's summary offers a stark look at the moment their lives changed:

CLARK'S Defence. I never touched it.
FREEMAN's Defence. It was thrown into my hand.
CLARKE - GUILTY . Aged 27.
FREEMAN - GUILTY . Aged 19.
Transported for Life .

Freeman was transported to New South Wales in September 1818 on the Lord Sidmouth. The ship, packed with 160 convicts, reached its destination in March 1819. The only other piece of information available is that he was pardoned on January 1, 1841. There are no known records of Sarah, the girl or woman for whom he carved his love token.

Though the digitization of records, such as the Old Bailey proceedings, has made researching the provenance of convict love tokens a little easier, numismatists still aren't that interested in them. Individual tokens do sometimes sell for high prices, which can be baffling even to the coin dealers who put them up for sale. In November 2014, Australian coin dealer Noble sold an intricately engraved token made in 1844 at auction for $17,000. That price was $14,250 above the estimate.

"We do not know why it sold for so much," says Nikki Kouis at Noble, while acknowledging that "it is an attractive piece." 

John Wheatley's 1844 love token, which sold for $17,000. (Photo: Noble Numismatics)

 Regardless of their monetary value, convict love tokens are valuable due to the clues they offer into what prisoners' lives were like prior to their transportation. 

"We know much about convict’s physical lives from documents such as prison records, ship’s logs, indents and tickets of leave," says Dr. Sophie Jensen, Senior Curator of Australian Society and History at the National Museum of Australia. "However, we know so little about their actual lives – about their emotional lives." The love tokens are uniquely intimate artifacts—evidence of the emotional upheaval convicts faced when sentenced to transportation.

At the National Museum of Australia, the process of matching convicts with their love tokens is ongoing. "Thanks to the efforts of Timothy Millett and other researchers, we know the identity of convicts associated with approximately 80 of the tokens in the collection," says Jensen. When a new match is made, it is cause for celebration.

"There is the constant excitement and satisfaction obtained whenever a single convict can be confidently linked to a particular token," says Jensen. "When that link is made each particular token takes on a new significance—it becomes a tiny window into shattered or dislocated lives and the human side of the transportation story."

1950's poster commissioned by the Government of Alberta to drive public support for a War on Rats. (Photo: Provincial Archives of Alberta)

The Canadian province of Alberta makes a claim that is so sweeping, so mind-bending that it basically redefines "big, if true."

According to the Alberta Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, the province has been free of rats for more than 60 years. But how is it that an entire Canadian province, of over 250,000 square miles and more than four million citizens, could have absolutely no rats?

“Alberta’s rat free designation means that we have zero tolerance for rats–there is no permanent population,” says Bruce Hamblin, a rat inspector there. “We haven’t allowed them to establish themselves.” Translation: the rat free status does not actually mean that there are no rats in the province, it just means they've been given notice. 

The Alberta government officially declared a “War on Rats” in 1950, and has been fighting a protracted battle ever since. The province has a dedicated team of “Rat Patrollers” who are sent out to deal with rodent problems, and just this year a rat hotline was set up for citizens to report potential infestations. The hotline, which is reached by dialing 310-(RATS), is manned seven days a week by Mr. Hamblin, a former Mountie, and his associates.

Integral to the rat free mission is a 373-mile-long “Rat Control Zone” on the eastern border of Alberta with Saskatchewan. The rat patrollers check residences in this zone, which is over 18 miles wide, at least twice a year, along with granaries, feed stacks, and abandoned barns–any place rats can be found.  

A Norway Rat. It may look cute, but to Albertans, it's a sign of a pending infestation. (Photo: Reg Mckenna/Flickr)

Ignorant of political borders, rats generally gain access to the province as hitchhikers. Most of the rats come from the east, on farm equipment or in camper vans coming in from Saskatchewan and British Columbia, which have less strict rules around pest management.

Due to a recent incursion in Medicine Hat, a city in southern Alberta, the Ministry of Agriculture set up the rat hotline in January. The callers are asked to provide a picture of the suspect rodent. Experts in the office identify whether or not it is a problem rat by telltale visual cues, like the ears, tail, feet, or face. 

Then, either the rat patrol is dispatched, or the municipal government's local pest control officer is notified. The workers don’t only arrive with bags and chemicals; sometimes there are tricks involved, too. For a plan called “Operation Haystack,” the rat patrollers dropped poisoned hay bales around fledging colonies.

As for what constitutes an infestation, Mr. Hamblin laughs. “Generally, anywhere there’s two or more rats is considered an infestation. But we’ve had one that was a whole family–a dad, mom and all the babies.” 

The Rat Control Zone patrolled at least twice a year. (Photo: Alberta Ministry of Agriculture)

One of the major challenges with the hotline is misidentification. “It’s funny,” says Mr. Hamblin, “most Albertans have never even seen a rat, and that’s a good thing. We mostly have cases of people reporting gophers, or muskrats, who are native to Alberta and not much of a problem.”

The province’s staunch refusal to be overrun by rogue rodents was inspired by one particularly threatening rat, back in 1950. Albertans were afraid of the Norway rat, a remarkably resilient pest that is thought to have spread the bubonic plague throughout Europe. Efficient reproducers, Norway rats have established themselves throughout the world, piggy-backing off of humans, eating garbage, and making nests in the darker corners of homes.

Out of the 300 sightings reported to the rat patrol in a year, Mr. Hamblin admits, “we only get about 16 confirmed rat sightings per year, and about two or three infestations. But 98 percent of the time we get calls, it’s not actually a rat.”

“We even had one lady earlier this year who called to tell us that she had found an extremely large rat in her basement. It turned out to be a small beaver.”

 
The global distribution of the Norway Rat. Notice Alberta - the rat free province. (Photo: WikiCommons CC BY SA 3.0)

Kenneth Rodman (Photo: Queensland Police)

Usually, when a person goes missing, they are found within 48 hours. To stay missing, it helps to want to stay missing. 

In 2010, Kenneth Rodman was touring Australia in a green kayak. One day, he headed out towards a beach on the northeast coast of Australia…and disappeared. The next month, his kayak was found sunken in the water. It looked like someone had sunk it on purpose: the plugs were missing.

For the next four and a half years, Rodman was listed as a missing person. The Australian Federal police described him as "an American citizen visiting Australia on holiday visa." People reported that they'd sighted him in places from Sydney to Western Australia, but the police were never able to confirm those tips.  "We believe he is avoiding contact and has managed to reinvent himself somehow, in order to remain in Australia," a police officer told the Brisbane News in 2012. 

But then, over the weekend, something strange happened. Not far from where Rodman disappeared, police were investigating a burglary—nothing out of the ordinary. A man rode by on a bike, and began to panic when he spotted the officers.

“He went off into the bush ... the dog found him hiding in the grass,” a police officer told the Courier Mail.

It was Rodman. Police think that he was hiding from the authorities in order to stay in Australia illegally; he'll be flown back to the US just as soon as they can get his papers in order. 

The aurora, from space (Image: NASA)

Last week was filled heavy with news; it seemed like America was about to explode with grief and joy. So you'd be forgiven for not noticing that the sun couldn't keep its own flare-ups in check—it was a huge week for star-gazers and NASA satellites, who captured some awe-inspiring images of solar activity.

Early in the week, the star started gushing high-energy particles and sending them towards the Earth. Here's what that looked like:

 June 25, 2015, the sun flared (Image: NASA/SDO)

And, as a result, on Earth, both in the northern and southern hemisphere, anyone who craned their neck upwards was treated to a show of solar effusion. Solar storms stir up the aurora borealis in the north and the aurora australis in the south. And last week's storms were strong enough that the borealis' special effects spread to latitudes far beyond their usual stomping grounds. 

Aurora (Photo: Stephanie Payne/Flickr)

In the southern hemisphere the sky glowed green:

Aurora australis, in New Zealand (Photo: Ben/Flickr)

 And in the north, the light show extended south into Washington, New York, even as far as Texas:

The aurora in Washington State (Photo: Rocky Raybell/Flickr)

Unusually, we were also able to capture the storm's more beautiful effects from space. Astronauts had something to do with that:

I've never seen this before- red #aurora. Spectacular! #YearInSpacepic.twitter.com/j2DVejt974

— Scott Kelly (@StationCDRKelly) June 22, 2015

But technology helped, too. Just a few years ago, NASA put a satellite in orbit that was equipped with a sort of night vision—a "unique ability to image cloud and surface features by way of reflected airglow, starlight, and zodiacal light illumination," as one group of researchers put it. In practice, that means that a suite of imaging sensors excels at capturing faint lights, like auroras and, NASA says, reflected moonlight—and producing images like this ghostly picture, published yesterday, of the the aurora australis:

 Aurora australis (Image: NASA)

The satellite's sensors can't capture the vivid colors we see with our human eyes here on Earth. But they can capture the aurora's otherworldliness as its moves over the planet.

Aurora over Antarctica, in 2012 (Image: NASA)

Aurora over Canada, 2012 (Image: NASA)

That's what happens, when the sun gets worked up.

Spain. (Photo: Paul Bourke/Google Earth fractals)

What is this picture? Would you believe us if we told you that it's a European country?

While it resembles the crystalline edges of an AI dreamscape, the image above is actually Spain, massively zoomed out. It's also a fractal, a set of geometric structures that replicate themselves across infinite scales. If you've ever fallen down a YouTube rabbit hole, you've probably seen many fractal videos of constant zooming into mathematically perfected shapes—along with the requisite psychedelic colors and trippy music. 

The fractals in this collection all come from one source, namely Google Earth. Paul Bourke, a computer scientist at the University of Western Australia has painstakingly assembled a collection of 45 maps with help from online contributors on his website. Using Google Earth, Bourke looked at different areas across the globe: mountain ranges, river basins, sand dunes, grasslands, and forests. He found that, when zoomed out, these landscapes formed replicating patterns. If you think of a plant, with the veins within a leaf form the same dendritic shape as the stem and the branches, the same principle can be found in rivers. Tributaries branch off of the main stream, and so forth, following a similar pattern until you get down to the smallest springs. While not infinitely uniform, these natural fractals do replicate themselves across a smaller range of scales. 

The most poignant aspect of these images is the scale. Using Google Earth, we can see what the surface of the planet looks like from a satellite's perspective. The zoomed out images of mountain tops and river basins have remarkably similar shapes to the circulatory systems of mammals. Far beyond the scope of human eyesight—the natural world is filled with these replicating patterns. It's a fractal world, and we're all just living in it. 

USA. (Photo: Paul Bourke/Google Earth fractals)

Laos. (Photo: Paul Bourke/Google Earth fractals)

Namibia. (Photo: Paul Bourke/Google Earth fractals)

California. (Photo: Paul Bourke/Google Earth fractals)

Greenland. (Photo: Paul Bourke/Google Earth fractals)

Myanmar. (Photo: Paul Bourke/Google Earth fractals)

Australia. (Photo: Paul Bourke/Google Earth fractals)

Algeria. (Photo: Paul Bourke/Google Earth fractals)

Alaska. (Photo: Paul Bourke/Google Earth fractals)

Myanmar. (Photo: Paul Bourke/Google Earth fractals)

Lavinia Warren. (Photo: Matthew Brady via Wikimedia Commons)

When Lavinia Warren, a glamorous little person who was almost incomprehensibly famous in the 1860s, married fellow circus performer Tom Thumb, their lavish wedding at Manhattan was attended by nearly 10,000 guests, some paying up to $50 for the privilege. The circus impresario P.T. Barnum had successfully turned the couple’s 1863 nuptials into the social event of the season.

“No one need be surprised that two little matters should create such a tremendous hullabaloo, such a furore of excitement, such an intensity of interest,” wrote the New York Times in a breathless 5,200-word cover story about the union of “our Lilliputians.”

In the midst of the Civil War, President Lincoln even invited the pair to a White House reception during their honeymoon. Although they are little-known today, Lavinia Warren and Tom Thumb were the reality television stars of their day.  “Next to Louis Napoleon,” wrote the Times, “there is no one person better known by reputation to high and low, rich and poor, than [Tom Thumb].”

It is hard to overstate the fascination that the public had with Thumb's petite new bride, Lavinia. At one point later that year, P.T. Barnum offered her $5,000 to appear for six weeks in his museum, an amount equal to about $116,000 today. The 26-pound performer rejected his overture right away: "As I do not intend giving a public exhibition until I have appeared before the Courts of Europe, and perhaps not even then, I must respectfully decline your offer." 

One of a pair of gloves designed for Lavinia, which she never wore since they were too big. (Photo: Sharon Bartholomew)

Options were slim for little people in the 19th century. Either they took low-paying work that kept them out of the public eye, or they subjected themselves to exploitation in sideshows. But Lavinia Warren, a fashion plate who ordered jewels from London and wore ermine capes to the theater, went from being a school teacher in Massachusetts to socializing with presidents and queens. 

Lavinia Warren was born to a genteel New England family in 1841. She was a big baby, weighing in at nine pounds, and it wasn’t until she seemed to stop growing as a toddler that her parents suspected something was wrong. Lavinia was healthy and well-proportioned, but very, very tiny. After she was diagnosed with dwarfism, her parents didn’t treat her any differently; she was still expected to do chores. The only concession they made to her height was to build a stepstool for her so she could reach the kitchen table when cooking. Lavinia was encouraged to find a trade to support herself, and at sixteen she began to teach. 

Program from Lavinia's steamship career. (Courtesy: Kimberly Wadsworth)

After a couple years, fame came calling. A cousin owned a showboat in Mississippi and persuaded Lavinia to spend one of her summer breaks on his boat, as part of a program he called “The Museum of Living Wonders.” Billed as “The Lilliputian Queen,” Lavinia would dance and sing show tunes and chat with the public. Sometimes she did a double act with Silvia Hardy–a giantess from Maine. They bunked together on the boat and became fast, if unlikely, friends. But the public was struck by Lavinia’s charisma and made her the real star. At the end of the summer, Lavinia asked to stay on.

Within a few years, in 1862, the impresario P.T. Barnum came to meet her. Lavinia seemed an ideal addition to his museum–she could sing and dance, she spoke graciously and charmingly with her fans, and–she was single. And at the time, all the other little people Barnum employed were also eligible bachelors.   

Portrait of P.T. Barnum. (Courtesy: Kimberly Wadsworth)

The first to meet Lavinia was “Commodore” George Nutt, another little person who fell for Lavinia at first sight. However, he was still a teenager, seven years her junior, and she wasn’t interested. But Charles Stratton was another story. Stratton, better known as “General Tom Thumb,” was one of Barnum’s most famous colleagues. The day Thumb met Lavinia, he took Barnum aside and asked him to help encourage their match, promising that Barnum could publicize their wedding if Lavinia became his. It was exactly what Barnum was hoping for, and he was all too happy to play matchmaker, giving Lavinia “fatherly advice” about Thumb's wealth, fame, and good character.  

Nutt didn’t take the snubbing well–he once once got into a fist fight with Thumb backstage, and on another night he decided to crash one of the couple's dates. Unfortunately for Nutt, when he arrived, he learned that Thumb had just proposed–and Lavinia had said yes.

Charles Stratton & Lavinia Warren's marriage license. (Photo: Sharon Bartholomew)

The wedding ceremony took place in New York’s Grace Church, a fashionable church on Broadway, and the reception was held at the equally stylish Metropolitan Hotel. Lavinia’s diminutive wedding dress was designed by Madame Demorest (the 19^th-century Vera Wang) and was on display in her shop window for weeks before. Barnum even tried to set up Lavinia’s sister and maid of honor Minnie–also a little person–with Commodore Nutt, and even went so far as to pose them in a publicity shot depicting a “proposal” (alas, Minnie wasn’t interested in Nutt either). 

Staged publicity photo of "Commodore" George Nutt and Minnie Warren. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

The thousands of people that attended the reception arrived to find the happy couple standing on top of a grand piano to receive them. Barnum also invited a few reporters; the Saturday Evening Post devoted a full column to the event, and the New York Times enumerated the wedding gifts in its aforementioned cover story: jewelry from Tiffany’s, a miniature billiards table, a carriage from Queen Victoria, and other delights. The Times also noted that during the service, Commodore Nutt looked a bit “ill,” but yet "the absurd reports concerning his jealousy and all that are grounded upon an exceedingly ill-bred habit of jesting at the expense of others, in which some people delight to indulge."

Wedding photo with (left to right) Commodore Nutt, Tom Thumb, Rev. Wiley, Lavinia Warren, Minnie Warren. (Photo: Matthew Brady Studio, via Wikimedia Commons)

The public ate up the story–not only out of fascination with the couple, but because it proved a welcome distraction from the ongoing Civil War.  The New York Times story was actually the first time in three years the war hadn’t been on the front page. When President Lincoln received the couple at the White House during their honeymoon, he kissed Lavinia on the cheek, an act which she later told friends she thought was quite rude. Later Lincoln joked about the great difference between their heights and his own–“sometimes God likes to do funny things; and here you have the long and the short of it.”

1860s theater card depicting Charles and Lavinia in their carriage from Queen Victoria.  (Image: Boston Public Library via Flickr)

A year after the wedding, Barnum quietly released press photos of Stratton and Lavinia–and a baby, nestled in Lavinia’s arms. Lavinia also cuddled a baby during her public appearances. The public once again went wild–so wild, in fact, that most didn’t notice that Lavinia never said the baby she held was hers. Instead, Barnum had borrowed the baby from a local orphanage. 

For a while, Barnum kept using the same child during their appearances, but after a few months Lavinia pointed out that the baby was getting too big to be credibly passed off as theirs. She had a idea, though. She and Thumb were about to embark on a nationwide tour, along with Minnie and Commodore Nutt. Instead of dragging one child along with them everywhere, Lavinia suggested sending someone ahead to each town to secretly select a baby from the local orphanage, returning it after its day in the spotlight.  

Not only would they make sure the babies were always small enough, she pointed out, but the tour wouldn’t have to worry about the expense of child care. Barnum agreed, and so a series of orphan babies all had their cameos with Lavinia during the tour.  

Staged publicity photo with Stratton, Lavinia, and a baby borrowed from an orphanage.  (Courtesy: Kimberly Wadsworth)

Lavinia and Tom never had their own children, as she always felt too uneasy about whether her size would cause complications during pregnancy or childbirth. Her sister Minnie did try to have children, and sadly, she proved Lavinia’s fears true. She carried her baby to term, but trying to deliver a six-pound baby proved too much for her. The baby died, and a few hours later Minnie did too, in her sister’s arms.

Lavinia and Minnie Warren, with Charles Stratton and their other brothers and sister. (Courtesy: Kimberly Wadsworth)

Tom and Lavinia lived comfortably and lavishly for the next 20 years, sometimes appearing at Barnum’s American Museum in New York or going on tours. But the high life of designer clothes and socializing with presidents had left Lavinia with expensive tastse. When Thumb died of a stroke in 1883, Lavinia found she did not have enough savings to retire. So in 1885, when she met another pair of performing little people from Italy–“Count” Primo Magri and his brother "Baron" Giuseppe–she married the Count, formed a tiny opera company and hit the road again, this time appearing with a roster of other performers.  

Lavinia with her second husband, Count Primo Magri, and brother-in-law Giuseppe. (Photo: Swords Bros. via Wikimedia Commons)

They also made a silent film, The Lilliputians’ Courtship, in 1915. The public’s tastes had changed, though, and Lavinia was also not quite the attraction she’d once been. The couple found themselves gradually performing in seedier venues, including a guest appearance at Coney Island’s “Lilliputia Midget Village” in the early 1900s. Finally they gave up and returned to Lavinia’s hometown of Middleboro, Massachusetts, where they opened an ice cream shop, occasionally doing shows on the weekends.

Stratton Grave marker. (Photo: Staib via Wikimedia Commons)

Lavinia died in 1919, and in her will asked to be buried alongside her first husband, Charles Stratton, in Bridgeport, Connecticut. His gravestone is an obelisk bearing his name, topped with a life-size statue of himself; her marker is a simple headstone reading, “His Wife”.

 
 A vision of the holy grail (Image: Maître des cleres femme/Wikimedia)

Last summer, the Nanteos Cup disappeared. This broken wooden cup is said to have first come to Britain with Joseph of Arimathea, not long after the death of Jesus Christ. It had since developed a reputation as a very special cup, the Holy Grail.

The cup is now owned by a family that loans it out to very ill people, as it's said to have healing powers. In July of 2014, the cup was in the home of a sick elderly woman in Herefordshire, right near the border between England and Wales. While the women was in the hospital, her house was broken into, and the cup was stolen.

Since then, police have been trying to track down the Holy Grail. There have been some clues: "They heard at one point that it was being passed around the bar of a set country pub, but by the time they arrived it had been spirited away," the Guardian reports. But ultimately they were able to recover it after a person contacted them saying he was not the thief, but that he could get the cup back for them. The hand-off occurred near a shadowy highway shoulder in southern Wales.

Bonus finds: a spiky fossil worm, a mummy in Indiana

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

 I try to blend in. (All photos by Jon Natchez and used by written permission from Vent Haven Museum, Inc.)

For the next few weeks, The War on Drugs' Jon Natchez is going to be sharing his adventures on a current tour. Like any touring musician, Natchez experiences a very specific form of travel, the kind where you usually have 24 hours, tops, to explore a new city. This is the third installment in his Atlas Obscura tour diary; read the first one here, second here. 

10:30 a.m., Covington, Kentucky: I get on my bike and bike through sleepy Covington, Kentucky, past old German neighborhoods and goetta factories, heading towards an expedition I’m doubly excited for. I’m eager to see both the place itself—The Vent Haven Museum, the world’s only ventriloquism museum—and the local whom I’ve roped into coming with me: my buddy Bryan Devendorf. Bryan is best known as the drummer of The National. (Side note: Bryan is the kind of non-self-promoting musician who doesn’t have the big-name fame of some other drummers, but whom I’ve found is universally and deservedly worshipped by other musicians. The way his drum parts work within songs are just brilliant and central to the band’s sound. He also has an excellent new project called Pfarmers that you should check out.) Bryan and I both lived in New York City for a long time and while we’ve only played a very little bit of music together. we’ve known each other for awhile and I’ve always really enjoyed hanging with him.

But between tours and now living in separate cities, opportunities to do so are few and far between. One of the upsides of touring, however, is that I often find myself in cities that I otherwise probably wouldn’t visit where friends live. And sometimes those friends are excited to go to a ventriloquism museum with me.

Two of the many heads on display. I feel a certain affinity for Old Man Grump.

At this point, I should answer the obvious question: a ventriloquism museum?! Seriously?! That was the question that my bandmates were asking, accompanied by a lot of eye-rolling. Granted, it does sound like a) the ultimate hipster/ironic excursion; b) a potentially very creepy place. And I’ll admit, the first time I went—yes, I’ve visited before—part of the appeal was its strangeness/novelty. I’d be lying if I said a part of me hadn’t been giving a self-satisfied chuckle at the whole idea.

Bryan tries to blend in.   

But once there, anyone would be captivated by the intrinsically engrossing nature of the place. The history of show business is just generally fascinating, particularly the unusual, less famous niches within that history. And this museum is like a phenomenal chapter in a Ricky Jay book: a thorough and loving catalog of an entertainment tradition that has persisted for decades, even centuries, passed along from one generation of practitioners to another largely outside of any mainstream popularity. It’s totally absorbing. And, I’m not gonna lie, also a little creepy. But that’s fun too. Definitely worthy of a return visit.

The museum grew out of the collection of W.S. Berger, an amateur ventriloquist and devoted fan of the genre (The “W.S.” stands for “William Shakespeare,” which is immaterial but great). Born in 1878, he amassed a huge collection of ventriloquist dummies and ventriloquism memorabilia over the course of the 20^th century. Towards the end of his life (he died in 1973)he set up the collection as a charitable foundation/museum, and today it exists in three outbuildings behind what was his house, in suburban Kentucky outside Cincinnati. He established an interesting system to ensure that his vision for the museum would endure after his death. The curator, in exchange for taking care of the collection and giving tours, gets to live in his beautiful Victorian house for free, with one condition: the curator could not be a ventriloquist him/herself. Berger didn’t want the curator to simply perform an act for visitors with other ventriloquist’s dummies, and as a result the curator talks about the history and culture without descending into shtick.

The tour itself goes through all three small buildings, each with its own perspective on the history and craft of ventriloquism. Lisa, the current (and wonderful) curator told dozens of fascinating stories—about Johnny Carson’s beginnings as a ventriloquist; about Lydia Dreams, a British cross-dressing ventriloquist from the vaudeville era; about Monsieur Brunard, whose Andy Kaufman-esque act consisted of endless soliloquizing in a pretentious French accent while his dummy sat mute beside him until the act was nearly over, at which point the dummy would interrupt and curse him out in Brooklynese. As the tour goes on, you realize that behind every one of the hundreds of dummies was a devoted performer, committed to this peculiar and arcane form of entertainment, trying to carve out his or her own career in this tiny nook of show business.

Bryan attempts to strike a casual pose upon entering Vent Haven for the first time.

Bryan is a fantastic asker of questions, and through some of the things he noticed and asked about, we got to hear about aspects of the collection that might not have made it into the tour. For example, he saw that, among all the photos of ventriloquists in the first building, there was one section consisting of pictures of dozens of female—and only female—ventriloquists. He asked why all the women were grouped together, and Lisa pointed out that it’s a vestige of the way W.S. Berger first organized the collection in the 1930s. As a man who grew up in the South in the late 19^th and early 20^th century, he thought it was appropriate to segregate the entire collection: white dummies on one side of the room, non-white dummies on the other, male and female figures also kept apart. Lisa showed us a picture of the collection from its early days, and it’s a striking reminder how pervasive and ingrained (and casual) that racist and sexist ordering of the world was. (To Berger’s credit, at least in Lisa’s telling, in the late 1940s, John W. Cooper, an African-American ventriloquist and friend of Berger’s, had a series of conversations about how offensive that arrangement was, and Berger came around and desegregated his collection long before desegregation came to the South.)

Wall of female ventriloquists.

When you walk into a room and find hundreds of lifeless, unblinking eyes staring at you, you feel something shift in your gut. It’s a visceral feeling, and it’s not as simple as “ooooo creepy!” Lisa mentioned that, curating the museum, she has thought a lot about the idea of staring and has come to the conclusion that, in human interaction, staring only occurs in three situations: as an act of intimacy, as an act of aggression, or as the behavior of a crazy person. She’s on to something; having all those motionless eyes bore into you reflexively quickens your pulse and heightens your awareness, an almost biological reaction to a situation where the stakes have been raised.

(Lisa was also adamant that, until a handful of movies and TVshows cast the ventriloquist dummy as a sinister evil-doer, no one ever thought of dummies as creepy. I got the sense that this is the party line among ventriloquists and ventriloquism fans. But I call bullshit. There is something undeniably, fundamentally unsettling about the dead-eyed stare of a dummy. Even Lisa conceded that there’s an uncanny valley thing going on.)

 
An old chart of pronunciation and breathing exercises for ventriloquists.

12:30 p.m.: Bryan gives me a ride back to the venue, which is the Madison Theater, a former movie theater that has been repurposed as a music venue. There’s a lot of teal paint and chrome and Plexiglas. Our (brilliant) front-of-house engineer Steve Revitte nails the vibe: “It feels like an ‘80s Miami strip club”. After a quick set-up, I venture out with Bryan for some lunch. He takes me across the Ohio River over the John Roebling Bridge, a gorgeous suspension bridge that was a forerunner to the Brooklyn Bridge Roebling designed 30 years after building this one.

We eat in Over-the-Rhine, a beautiful historical neighborhood of the city. Bryan, a Cincinnati native, gives me a quick drive-thru tour—the area is the historic center of Cincinnati’s German-American community and contains the largest amount of intact Italianate architecture in the country. Over a lunch of some excellent pho—for some reason, I always crave broth-y things on tour—we talk about how touring has changed over the years. We come to the (fairly obvious) conclusion that modern musicians are pretty damn prissy. Bryan has been doing a bunch of playing with Bob Weir, guitarist from the Grateful Dead, and we talk about how those guys and that generation used to tour: the Dead’s rider in the 70s was handwritten and consisted of “12 pack of beer, 12 pack of Coke, sandwiches.” Modern band riders are legendary for their length and specificity (though I don’t fault anyone for trying to maintain some degree of comfort and sanity while on the road, and a satisfying rider goes a long way towards that.) 

In general, the culture of touring is completely different than it once was. Bryan mentions a line in Phil Lesh’s autobiography that has always stuck with him, in which Lesh mentions that he was “drunk in 1978.” Like, for the whole year. Though I’ve been in bands with people who had substance abuse problems, drugs and booze are not the central part of the touring experience that they once were. Diversions tend to be much more bourgie. These days, for example, coffee obsession is the fad running rampant through the touring world. There was a time when, upon arriving in a new town, everyone would scramble to find the drugs they needed; now, folks will sprint off the bus to find a cup of single-origin pourover. This trend is obviously for the better—touring professionals are undoubtedly healthier and happier today—but I wonder what it would have been like to tour during a wilder, more unbridled era. My tour stories would undoubtedly be crazier.

 
Band regulations require me to photograph anything guitar-related. This is Branson ventriloquist Jim Barber’s talking guitar named Strum. Also pictured: Wayland Flowers’ famously campy dummy Madame, a mainstay of 70s and 80s Hollywood Squares; and Walter Ego, a dummy that absurdist/queer theater pioneer Charles Ludlam used in his play The Ventriloquist’s Wife.

But who am I to talk. I just spent the morning at a ventriloquism museum. Not exactly Chateau Marmont in the 70s.

Over 1,500 children were transferred to the Presidio, a former army base in San Francisco, before being placed with families during Operation babylift. This image depicts a baby being tended to at Harmon Hall in the Presidio, San Francisco. (Photo: National Park Service, Golden Gate National Recreation Area)

In the early days of April 1975, just weeks before the Fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War, a campaign was launched to evacuate thousands of children from Vietnam and place them with families in the United States and its allies. War had devastated the country, tearing families asunder. But “Operation Babylift” was controversial; not all of the children adopted were orphans. And spotty record keeping has made it difficult or impossible for many adoptees to locate their Vietnamese families.

 Operation Babylift has been memorialized in museums and examined from many angles, but until now, no museum existed to document if from perhaps its most personally affecting and lasting legacy: adoption. Now, thanks to the efforts of one Bay Area women, the U.S. has its first adoption museum.

Beds line Harmon Hall, which was transformed into a makeshift nursery. (Photo: National Park Service, Golden Gate National Recreation Area)

The project began in 2011 after Laura Callen had just had her second child and was feeling reflective. She wondered, “What’s next?” And her thoughts turned to adoption. 

Callen is adopted, and while she knew she was an adoptee, it wasn’t something that was openly discussed in her family.

And that’s when she first began to plot an adoption museum. 

While there are archives and history projects that document parts of adoption, Callen saw a need for an organization dedicated entirely to collecting an experience historically shrouded in secrecy, stigma and shame. 

A marketing and communications professional, the Berkeley-based Callen spent the next year and a half refining the concept and bouncing the idea off adoption professionals, entrepreneurs and museum experts. In 2013 she founded the Museum Adoption Project, began fundraising, and pulled together a leadership team whose credentials include the Guggenheim and J. Paul Getty Museum.

“People really don’t know how to talk about adoption,” says Callen.

A birth mother’s hospital bracelet bares a false name. The objects were displayed around a table. (Photo Indira Urrutia and Marc Hors. Courtesy the Adoption Museum Project.)

Callen says a key element of the museum’s mission is social change, and that the museum will address difficult issues such as coerced adoption and the roles race and money play in the adoption system.

“We as human beings created this practice of adoption, and the way it’s practiced in the United States is a particular kind of practice,” says Callen. “We decided how that was going to work, we created the laws and policy and I think we have a responsibility to understand it so we can look at it and say, ‘This part of it really works and this part over here is really a problem, let’s fix it.’”

The Adoption Museum does not have a physical presence yet. And while Callen says it is important to have one at some point, right now the project is taking advantage of the shifting definition of what a museum is and producing pop-up events. A dream project would encompass a diverse offering including archives, historical and personal artifacts, performance and partnerships.

Many of the 18 objects, which included a birth mother’s journal for her daughter, could be touched. (Photo: Indira Urrutia and Marc Hors. Courtesy the Adoption Museum Project.)

In 2013 the museum put on an event called “Our Place At the Table: Honoring Birth Mother Stories”. Eighteen women whose children had been adopted shared their stories through personal artifacts, such as a journal and a hospital bracelet. A one-night event, about 180 people visited the exhibit in three hours. Next, the museum partnered with the Presidio Trust, a San Francisco-based federal agency, to co-curate an exhibit on Operation Babylift. The exhibit, which opened in April and runs through December, includes artifacts, photographs, oral histories and a roster of speakers. The museum’s on-going multimedia efforts include mapping adoption and a children’s book project.

 “I think there's a way that adoption seems to sit below our consciousness,” says Callen.”But in fact it really is quite a pervasive experience.”

(All images used with permission of Flowingdata)

Data nerds, reporters and concerned citizens all love the firehose of data that is the U.S. Census, begun in 1790. But while current Census sites have all kinds of interactive maps, it turns out that data visualization was perhaps even more beautiful in the old days.

Thankfully Nathan Yau, author of the statistics blog Flowingdata, has set to fixing this clear-and-awesome-maps-and-graphs-shaped hole in the culture.

After the Census of 1870, a volume was published by the Census Bureau called the Statistical Atlas of the United States. The thin, 56-page pamphlet was a gold mine of tightly-packed statistical goodness, covering topics including race distribution, political borders, gold mines, forests, and even the life expectancy of the average American. The blocks of dry, but informative text were even spruced up with inset graphs and tables to help readers better understand the expansive data sets.

Yet the finest aspect of the Atlas was the old maps that were densely covered in lines and colors of information. The small selection of maps showed everything from how rainfall was distributed across the nation to how much woodland remained in the country, all described in the elegant language of vintage maps.

Following the publication of the initial Statistical Atlas, a new edition was published every ten years following the census. That is until the Census of 1930. Interest in its publication had been declining, as flourishes that had made the first few so engaging and artful (color maps, contextual introductions) and the Atlases were slowly abandoned. The Census Bureau officially discontinued the production of the Atlas following the 1930s Census.

Finally in 2000 the Census Bureau produced the Census Atlas of the United States, an informative atlas containing maps and all the domestic numbers you could ever want. But come 2010, no new Atlas was produced.

Flowingdata is there to save us from this analytical desert. Yau has taken it upon himself to recreate a version of the Statistical Atlas of the United States that has all the charm of the 1800s editions, but all the hard data of 2010. Like the Atlas's predecessors Yau's maps cover population density, weather, the distribution of natural features, death, money, and more with easy to understand visualizations. He even put together some lovely charts for fans of data set art. Gone are the thick blocks of text; Yau's project focuses on the beautiful maps. Take a look below at some of his amazing retro-modern analytics.

A less secret tunnel in a different fort on the Sino-Russian border (Photo: Lzy881114/Wikimedia)

Early in the 1930s, when Japan had invaded Manchuria and the Second Sino-Japanese War was on the verge of breaking out, a secret tunnel was created under the Chinese-Russian border. The tunnel was used to pass information between the two allies through World II. 

The tunnel was recently re-discovered, reports Russian media, citing a Chinese-language story from Xinhau Far Eastern news agency. An employee of China's Dongning Fortress, which is right on the border, heard about the tunnel on a visit to North Korea, where he met a man who said he'd helped construct it. 

The tunnel is not far from a Russian city named Ussuriysk. It was first located on the Russian side of the border. It's not quite clear how long, how safe, and how passable it is. But forget all that, and just think: secret tunnel!

Bonus finds: Giant dolphin statue, a mysterious mason jar, a 4-inch centipede that had been hiding in a teenager's ear, a centipede that had been hiding 3,600 feet underground

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

Even the Seven Dwarfs can be explosive (Image: Epic Fireworks/Flickr)

Firecrackers are designed to be set off. But before they're lit up, they need to find a buyer. In order to distinguish one bundle of flammable material from another, fireworks manufacturers have produced a riot of labels and characters meant to appeal to explosion-loving fans.

Fireworks can only do so much. They go upwards into the sky, and they explode, in a limited palate of colors and shapes. Fireworks art knows no such limits. Over the decades, manufacturers, almost always based in Asia, have labeled their products with zebras, bears, alligators, peacocks, hawks, pigeons, giant squid, buffalo, Father Christmas, fox hunters, Batman, voodoo witches, werewolves, racecars, Tarzan, Samson, and, of course, rockets—so, so many rockets. There were pictures of childhood and spirits and pop culture icons, pictures of the Wild West and images of outer space. They used whatever it took to convince the buyer (most likely a young man) that this was the firework that he wanted to light up.

These labels were never meant to be saved. They were generally drawn by Chinese artists who received no credit, and intended to be burnt up or thrown away. But across this country and in China and Macau, there are people who make it their business to collect these mini-pieces of pop art.

A rarity. (Image: Epic Fireworks/Flickr)

"I collected firecrackers, and I never really cared to light them off," says Bruce Dillin, a collector based in northern New Jersey. "But the labels always meant a lot to me."

Firework art contains "delights not found on government-issued collectables such as currency or stamps," including little jokes and funny misspellings, writes Hal Kantrud, a collector in South Dakota. "Add to these features the childhood memories of fun on 4ths of July long past, and you have nostalgia personified."

Fireworks and their labels are organized into classes. Class 1, for examples, contains fireworks and labels made in China or Hong Kong before 1950—before Mao created the People's Republic of China. Back in the early part of the century, according to Kantrud, there were only a few, relatively simple brands, including Eagle, Dragon and Uncle Sam, but after WWI, the labels became more artistic, featuring "modest maidens, bouquets of flowers, high deities, and gentle animals." By the 1940s, the firecracker business in America was booming, and brands with names like Duck, Camel, Lion, and Zebra were cornering the market, until the political upheaval in China moved the production center for firecrackers to Macau, then a colony of Portugal.

A more recent label (Image: Epic Fireworks/Flickr)

China eventually tried to rekindle its firework industry, but it's these older labels, made without warnings or even cautions, that are most desirable. In Firecrackers: the Art and History, the authors index labels according to rarity: Skipper, Father Christmas, Tarzan, Thunder Cloud and Pioneer are classified as "very rare." Eventually, American regulators starting putting restrictions on fireworks, and manufacturers starting adding cautions that warned users: "Do not hold in the hand after lighting." (On one such label, the illustration shows a knight holding a bolt of lightning in his hand.)

There are enough brands and variation to keep a collector busy for decades, though. "My collection of labels from 500-600 brands of firecrackers is little more than a representative sample," writes Kantrud. "I have seen labels from hundreds of other brands and there likely are hundreds more that have been lost forever."

Perhaps the largest trove of labels once belonged to George Moyer, a collector based in Pennsylvania. But in 2012, he auctioned off his collection, of more than 1,300 items. Some lots—usually containing actual vintage fireworks, not just the labels, went for upwards of $3,000.  (A single label, according to CBS, can go for $1,000.) All in all, Moyer made more than $438,000, the Washington Times reports.

"Is it valuable? Somewhat," says Dillin, the New Jersey collector. "To us." Anybody else, he says, would have a different reaction, particularly to the vintage fireworks that sometimes are still attached to the labels: "Just light 'em."

China didn't entirely corner the market. (Image: Epic Fireworks/Flickr) 

Make like Janet and Cliff and head to Coryell Court. (Photo: Screenshot from Singles.)

Fans of the '90s Seattle slacker-grunge scene are in for a treat this Sunday, when Singles, a cinema hallmark of the era, will be screened at the very location where it was shot.

Attendees should know, though, that they might get arrested.

Seattle artist Derek Erdman has arranged a less-than-authorized viewing of the film, which stars Bridget Fonda, Matt Dillon, Kyra Sedgwick, and Campbell Scott, in the courtyard of Coryell Court Apartments in Capitol Hill. The impetus for this ambitious yet logical undertaking was quite simple, according to the Facebook event created by Erdman:

OPPORTUNITY OF A LIFETIME: I've recently come across a TV with a built in VCR and a VHS copy of SINGLES and asked a person who lives in the building where SINGLES was filmed if we could watch SINGLES in the courtyard of the SINGLES building. This is quite possibly the only chance you'll ever have to watch this 1992 "classic" grunge rom-com at the place where this 1992 "classic" grunge rom-com was filmed.

So far, over 1,300 Facebook users have RSVP'd to say they will attend the event. You might wonder if such a large crowd will be able to fully appreciate the film on a standard-sized, '90s era CRT TV with built-in speakers and an extension cable running from the apartment of a kind resident. But in an interview with the Seattle Times, Erdman said that such concerns missed the point:

The point of this event isn’t to comfortably enjoy the cinematic masterpiece that is Singles or to witness Matt Dillon’s role of a lifetime. I can’t even imagine that it will last longer than 15 minutes, you know?

Imagine 1,300 people, a TV with built-in VCR, and a really long cord here on Sunday. (Photo: Ciar on Wikipedia/Public domain)

Attendees, who may make popcorn with whomever they want to, are in for a lively and unpredictable experience, possibly with a special guest or two. Or not. Erdman broke it down for the Times:

Nothing guaranteed, but I’ve received messages from people who are close to James Le Gros and Tom Skerritt and have suggested they might stop by. A friend of mine’s father was an extra in the Alice in Chains scene; he might attend. Somebody who claims to own Janet’s car said they’d bring it by. There will also be some commemorative buttons and T-shirts given away. It’s going to rule so hard. If Tad and Xavier McDaniel dropped in, it would rule slightly harder.

There is also the possibility of being booked for trespassing, but Erdman reasons that "[t]he landlord of the Singles apartment can’t have 1,200 people arrested at once."

If you can't make it to the screening this Sunday, you can still live the 20-something slacker dream at Coryell Court. An apartment in the building is available for rent on Airbnb, as long as you abide by the following rules set by the owner: "Don't steal or break my beautiful things, don't smoke, PLEASE TAKE OFF YOUR SHOES WHEN YOU COME IN. Live your life to the fullest."

Don't fall. (All images property of Boda Borg. Used with Permission)

Escape-the-Room-style reality games, where attendees are locked in a room and given a certain amount of time to figure out how to escape, seem to be popping up all over the place lately. It's a trend that has already make its mark all across America, and is now taking Canada by storm.

But it turns out Sweden is way ahead of all of us. For the past 20 years, Sweden has been hiding elaborate reality gaming compounds, called Boda Borgs, in remote regions of their country (and one in Ireland). These grown up playgrounds let people climb around dozens of linked rooms, solving puzzles and completing “quests.” And they’re finally coming to America.

Boda Borg began simply enough when three Swedish engineers set out to make a real life video game they could play with their kids. They designed a series of puzzle rooms that mixed mental dexterity challenges with physical obstacles where the player was simply dropped into the room and had to figure out the solution themselves, without even a clue to guide them. From this idea came Boda Borg, which has since grown into a multi-franchise reality gaming company.

The first location was in the small Swedish town of Torpshammar, which was chosen because there was an large, abandoned insane asylum that the company’s founders were able to take over for a song, thanks to program focused on bringing new business to rural parts of Northern Sweden. They remodeled the entire building turning almost all of the available rooms into puzzle rooms, also adding a cafe and even a hostel for guests to stay in since Torpshammar isn’t exactly convenient to get to.

Only trial and error light the way through a quest.

The quests in a Boda Borg are split up into three difficulty levels, with green quests requiring little to no physical challenge (but possibly a more oblique mental one), red quests demanding a bit of physical interaction along with some brainy puzzles, and black quests consisting of minor feats of strength. Some of the quests are heavily themed, such as a prison escape designed to recreate a funner version of busting out of jail, complete with prison bars, faux stone walls, and hidden escape tunnels. Other quests, usually the more challenging ones, are less thematic and are simply puzzling, with the most challenging puzzle among the Borgs looking like a stark obstacle course out of a mini version of American Gladiators.

The rooms have evolved from their first incarnations as technology like motion and pressure sensors were added to make the puzzles both more accurate and more intricate.

When you enter a Boda Borg quest (in a team of three to five people), you are given no indication of how to complete the puzzles in a given room, nor how many rooms might be contained in a chosen quest chain. There is also a time limit, although the duration of this is also kept hidden from the team. Using basic deduction and trial and error, questors must unravel the solution to each room. Success is indicated by a green light that lets people know they can move on to the next room, while failure is indicated by a red light that means they have to leave the quest and start again. No information is given regarding by they failed. When players reach the last room in a quest, there is a magnetically sealed box that unlocks after the final solution is complete. Inside is a stamp that can mark a progress card.

The puzzles themselves vary widely. One room might ask the team to push a series of buttons in sequence while standing in certain spots, while another might task players to make it across a room without touching the floor, using nothing but a thin strip of molding to cling to. Motion and pressure sensors hidden throughout the rooms, monitor the progress and essentially “watch” the players, letting them know if they have succeeded or failed.

This would likely be considered a black level challenge.

From that first complex, the company grew slowly, but in similar fashion to the first location, with would-be franchisees locating cheap-to-free real estate, often in remote locations, and remodelling the sites into gaming complexes featuring up to a hundred different rooms, and following the same quest structure as the first. Today, the company has grown to eight locations, seven in Sweden, and one in Ireland. And now, after 20 years of unabashedly geeky gaming, they are finally coming to America with Boda Borg Boston.

America's Boda Borg is being built in the former Sparks Department Store in the Boston suburb of Malden, that had sat vacant prior to Boda Borg moving in. The two-story brick edifice is not much to look at from the exterior, but the interior seems like it may have been a bit grander at one time, with tall, wide columns.

The site was still mainly under construction when we visited, but Chad Ellis, co-founder of Your Move Games and the American entrepreneur behind Boda Borg Boston, walked us through a number of the half-finished rooms. Ellis got into Boda Borg when he was blindly contacted through his college alumni network. After being convinced to visit Boda Borg in Sweden, he fell in love with the concept, and fought to get the first American facility opened in Boston.

Ellis took us through the bare puzzle rooms, pointing out tunnels through floors and ceiling where they would connect and through which visitors would one day pass. He explained that when it’s complete, Boda Borg Boston will have a full lounge, and dozens of challenge rooms on multiple floors. Boda Borg shares their puzzles between sites and the Boston location is going to feature a mix of heavily themed quests and more challenge-based ones. Among the coming quests include an Alcatraz escape, a jungle-themed adventure, rooms full of oversize objects where you become a human rat, a physical course (the toughest quest Boda Borg has to offer, which Ellis claims to personally be strength training for so that he can complete it), and a quest that is simply themed, “The Bathroom.” The hidden sensor tech could also be seen in some of the in-process rooms, giving a glimpse at the surprisingly comprehensive array of gizmos imbedded into the rooms themselves. But unfortunately, none of the rooms were complete enough to run.

Green level pirates.

What was clear from our visit is that this facility is going to have an impressive variety of quests and puzzles. Ellis manifested great enthusiasm for Boda Borg and its potential in Malden, although the facility’s appeal to adults and college kids, which it is banking on, is a bit murkier. The quests at a Boda Borg are largely designed to appeal to a wide age range, but it also seems to carry the geekier-than-thou air of other live-action entertainments like laser tag.

It remains to be seen if Boda Borg Boston’s quest to bring their decades-tested brand of reality gaming to American shores will be successful. But let’s face it, the geeks have won. With the rise of the Escape the Room trend, and a growing cultural acceptance of role playing in general, it might be time for Boda Borg to explode. It’s been working for decades in Sweden, hopefully Americans are ready to just let go and have a fun adventure in a fake Mayan temple.

Don't be too cool. Enter the tomb.

Nineteenth-century bindings from the RBS teaching collection displayed for a session of “Introduction to the History of Bookbinding." (All photos: Rare Book School)

When summer rolls around, thoughts turn to how to spend the limpid months: Umbrella drinks by the pool? Backpacking through pristine wilderness? A digital detox?

But if you’re a certain kind of person, your dream destination might be Rare Book School in Charlottesville for a week of courses that include “Book Illustration Processes to 1900” or “The Handwriting & Culture of Early Modern English Manuscripts.” Rare book fanatics study not only the words on the page but also the way books were made in order to unlock a deeper cultural understanding of text. And while there are similar programs around the world, Rare Book School offers something they do not: A permanent space and a teaching collection of 80,000 items from books bound in supple goat leather to old Macintosh computers.

A student in “Introduction to the History of Bookbinding” makes a rubbing of a nineteenth-century binding design.     

Rare Book School was started at Columbia University in 1983 by Terry Belanger, who also created a groundbreaking master’s program for rare book and special collections librarians. In 1992, he accepted a position at the University of Virginia and the Rare Book School went with him. Several five-day sessions are held in Charlottesville in June and July, and a few during the spring and fall. Each session typically offers a different roster of five to six courses. Acceptance is competitive—the school has proved so popular that it now offers satellite sessions around the country. In 2015, there were over 800 applicants for about 425 spots in the spring and summer sessions.

A student in “Teaching the History of the Book” explores the RBS teaching collections.   

At Rare Book School students learn about the history of rare books and research techniques, but they also get their hands dirty. They write with quill pens, set type and make etchings and relief cuts. (One course description assures nervous students that “No artistic talent is assumed or expected.”) They are often librarians, academics, antiquarian book dealers or otherwise hail from the book world, but the school has also accepted lawyers, a Facebook employee and a high school student.

RBS Director of Programs & Education Amanda Nelsen demonstrates binding technique for the students in “The Printed Book in the West to 1800”.     

“Rare books can be any number of things,” says Jeremy Dibbell, a librarian, Rare Book School student, and director of communications and outreach for the school. “Sometimes it’s old, but not all old books are rare.”

 
Just two of several hundred copies of various editions of Jane Eyre in the RBS teaching collections.   

By definition rare books are scarce—sometimes there are lots and lots of copies of an old book. And not all rare books are necessarily valuable; factors such as condition play into their monetary worth. Provenance matters, too. An otherwise unremarkable book with George Washington’s signature in it suddenly becomes desirable.

“We are interested in all of those and we are also interested in how physical books come to be,” says Dibbell.

The school’s wide-ranging collection includes a book made of straw from 1800 and a copy of the Nuremburg Chronicle, a world history published in 1493. They’ve collected hundreds of different copies of Jane Eyre, first published in 1847. Through the different covers, Jane evolves with the times. On one pulp paperback, she passionately embraces her suitor, eyes closed tight and lips painted a sultry red. The school has also amassed “lots” of copies of “The Tent on the Beach,” a “terrible” 19th century poem, according to Dibbell.

 A cover of one of the copies of Jane Eyre in the RBS teaching collections.    

So why collect it?

Because bookmaking was once an incredibly physical process that involved everything from binders to “vatmen” who dipped paper molds into vats of slurry. And the binders who sewed "The Tent on the Beach" often left notations in the bindings, which leaves clues for researchers not just about how the books were made but even how authors and publishers interacted.

 
RBS instructor John Kristensen (at left) and students set typographical ornaments as part of Ornament Night, organized by John Kristensen and Katherine Ruffin for their course “The History of 19^th-& 20^th-Century Typography & Printing”.   

Which is not to say that Rare Books School hasn’t evolved past paper slurry and quill pens. In 1984 the school offered its first tech course, “Microcomputers For Rare Book Libraries.” Now the school has dived headlong into the effort to get their students thinking about how to deal with born-digital archives. And that’s why old computers live alongside delicate books in the collection. 

“We turn them on and see what happens,” says Dibbell. “Sometimes smoke comes out the back and that’s a bad thing. But sometimes they boot up and you’re able to take a look at what’s on there and what that tells you.”

Students in “Born-Digital Materials: Theory & Practice” explore vintage e-readers from the RBS collections. 

Among the school’s instructors is Naomi Nelson, who was the interim director of the Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University when Salman Rushdie’s archives were acquired. They arrived largely in the form of Apple computers. While it’s possible to see the physical changes an author such as Jane Austen made to a paper manuscript, modern authors can erase at will and save multiple drafts.

 Oversized wood type from the RBS teaching collections.

Digital technology has also opened up another, less appealing, conundrum for the rare book community: Forgery. Once considered a problem mostly for the art world, it seemed unlikely forgers would go through the trouble of constructing entire books.

 
A watermark in handmade paper; as an exercise in “The History of European & American Papermaking,” students use reference works to identify and date such watermarks.    

“Now it’s the case that you don’t have to actually set type to make a forgery,” says Dibell. “You can take a really good picture of a book and make a plate with it—a photopolymer plate—and then print from that.” 

In 2005, an antiquarian book dealer purchased a copy of astronomer Galileo Galilei’s “Sidereus Nuncius” (or “Starry Messenger”) for half a million dollars. But the book wasn’t antique at all; it was fake. The book has since become an object of fascination for the rare book world. In 2014, two academics key to uncovering the fraud presented a talk to the school on what could be learned from the strange text.

RBS instructor Consuelo Dutschke (at right) and students in “Introduction to Paleography, 800–1500” examine a manuscript from the collections of the Albert & Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia.

But book nerds take note: Even as the school marches into the digital era, physical books still remain its core obsession.

“We have lots of people say at the end of every week, ‘I’m never going to look at books the same way again,’” says Dibbell. “Because you see what’s happened on the inside and what has gone into making that book. And you begin to see things in a totally different way.”

Early botanical prints are used to demonstrate illustration techniques in “The History of the Book, 200­–2000”. 

Spoiler warning on, bud. (Photo: Saffron Blaze on Wikipedia)

In advance of Independence Day festivities, here is a strange-but-true American fact: It is a crime to be in possession of eagles and eagle parts other than for the purposes of Native American tribal ritual, down to a feather.

But, you may be asking, what if I just happen to come across a dead eagle in the wild?

Good question! This is where the National Eagle Repository, the federal government’s official dead eagle processing center, comes in.

Part of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge near Denver, Colorado, the National Eagle Repository is the one place in the nation where deceased symbols of American freedom are sent, as well as the place you can look to for all your legal eagle part needs.

First created in the 1970s, the office as it exists today was established in 1995 as a result of a presidential mandate designed to create a legally regulated method for Native American tribes to obtain eagle parts for use in various cultural pastimes. The fierce protection of bald eagles in America made the procurement of eagle parts a thorny issue for many Native American tribes who them, especially the feathers, as components of their legally protected cultural rites. With the repository in place, obtaining eagle parts is now a perfectly legal process that both helps to protect the animal and the rights of the people who use them.

That's some good wing. (Photo: FWS on Wikipedia)

The late eagles themselves can flow to the Repository from a number of avenues. According to Coleen Schaefer, the Supervisory Wildlife Repository Specialist, eagle corpses usually come from state and federal wildlife officers who find the dead birds in the wild, as well as eagle rehabilitators who end up with birds that just couldn’t pull through. However zoos and even private citizens could (and, technically, are legally obligated to) send eagles to the facility. While the website calls for all eagle parts, regardless of condition to be sent to the repository, Schaefer says they mainly get whole eagles. The Repository is refreshingly non-discriminatory in its desire for dead eagle parts, although as their website also makes very clear, they should not be sent eagles who have died from the West Nile Virus. Which, surprisingly and tragically, is a real problem.

Birds who have been poisoned are also problematic as the Repository will only accept them after an necropsy has been performed, just like if it was a human murder victim.

Schaefer says that in addition to the more standard cases where the bird died of disease or some other natural cause, they also get birds that were killed in illegal shootings. Once the investigation is over, the “victim” is shipped out to the Repository to be used for parts, then necropsied. Sometimes they even come in still carrying their last meal. “We have received eagles where prey are still gripped in their talons, e.g. fish, ducks, etc., and that's always interesting,” says Schaefer.

 In eagle poker, this is a winning hand. (Photo: FWS on Wikipedia)

The National Eagle Repository may not be picky about what birds come to them, they are incredibly fastidious about the parts they send out to others. When the eagles come to the Repository, they are assessed for their usability to the Native American population, as damaged parts are not acceptable for many of their uses. Schaefer estimates that 30-40 eagles a day are evaluated. “If the bird is best suited to be used for feathers, we hand pluck the feathers from the wings and tail to provide to the applicant,” she says. (Usable or no, that is a staggering amount of dead eagles and there are only three staff members working on the eagles full-time.)

If you happen to come across a dead eagle, you should contact a wildlife officer. But in case you decide to take care of that national treasure corpse yourself, the Repository suggests that you wear gloves to protect yourself from disease, place the bird in a sturdy plastic bag to prevent “leakage,” and get it into a freezer as soon as possible. All good rules for handling any dead thing, really.

They also suggest that you transport the carcass in a separate area from yourself in a vehicle. Specifically, the back of a pick-up. During both handling and packaging the eagle, it’s important to remember to be extra careful with the feathers, because if they are damaged, turning in your grimly-patriotic find will all have been for naught.

Satellite dishes in New York City. (Photo: Alexis Lê-Quôc/Flickr)

Right now, two major satellite television providers in the U.S., DirecTV and Dish, are both embroiled in merger talks with telecommunications giants. The former is nearly finished with an elaborate merger with AT&T, and earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal reported that Dish TV is in talks with T-Mobile. While both DirecTV and Dish are very successful companies, it will come as no surprise that the days of mounting a satellite dish on your house are waning.

But tell that to the thousands of satellite dishes hanging around on the rooftops of America’s houses. Installed and now abandoned, they spring from the sides of buildings like oyster mushrooms. It turns out that the responsibility for removing these eyesores doesn’t land on DirecTV and Dish—it’s up to individual renters and homeowners. Which might be news to satellite TV subscribers.

There’s a name for this growing eyesore: dish blight.

Satellite dishes, of course, are a global phenomenon. Dish blight, as it’s been called since around 2010, is a focus mostly in American cities, but it’s an issue that will hit every country that goes through the same pattern of cable/internet replacing satellite TV that we have now. For the time being, it’s American cities that have begun to take note of the phenomenon. DirecTV alone has over 20 million subscribers in the United States and nearly that many in Latin America, and given the rapid turnover of satellite TV, that leaves thousands abandoned in any given city.  

“We understand there are upwards of 5,000 that are not in service, just sitting on the facades of properties,” Philadelphia councilman Darrell Clarke told Newsworks. Clarke, who represents a large stretch of Philadelphia’s many historic districts, pushed a bill through the city council in 2011 that’s designed to reduce the eyesore of satellite dishes in his district through efforts like repainting them to blend in with the building itself.

In turn, organizations ranging from the satellite companies to affordable housing advocates have protested the new bills, which they see as removing a low-cost connection option in favor of more expensive solutions like cable—in other words, some advocates see the fight against dish blight as a proxy war against the poor.

But how did we even get here? What is the deal with satellite dishes littering America’s urban homes?

A more colorful installation. (Photo: David Ryo/shutterstock.com)

Satellite TV's popularity represents a short-lived time of American telecommunications—both DirecTV and Dish launched within two years of each other (DirecTV in 1994 and Dish in 1996) and were immediately successful. The technology works like this: At a big facility somewhere down here on Earth, a giant satellite dish (like, 30 or 40 feet across) beams the signal (basically, all of the television streams) up to a satellite that’s orbiting the planet. That’s called the uplink. The satellite then beams the signal back down to Earth, where a smaller satellite dish, typically mounted on the outside of your home and pointed toward the heavens to receive its heavenly signal, captures said signal, called the downlink. Your personal dish is wired into (usually) a receiver, just like a cable box, which is attached to your TV.

In the 1980s, the airwaves were free, just like radio. You paid to construct your downlink satellite dish, which could cost a few thousand dollars, but after that, television didn’t cost anything. Anyone with one of these expensive satellite setups could watch pretty much anything. It still works that way elsewhere in the world; Iran, for example, routinely tries to crack down on satellites because they allow citizens to pick up non-state television.

DirecTV and Dish, though, started a new era of satellite TV wherein you had to pay to use the service, rather than the hardware. In fact, the companies would flat-out give the hardware away, which is what leads us to the problem of big ugly galvanized steel dishes jutting out of historic brownstones.

Satellite TV, like compact discs, was a blip, the last gasp of an old technology before the internet came in and disrupted everything. It also was a comparatively low-cost investment for the provider; they have to launch a satellite, sure, but compared to setting up high-speed cables throughout the entire world, or building wireless towers every quarter-mile, a single satellite costs pennies.

Dishes in California. (Photo: Rafael Castillo/flickr)

But as cable and internet infrastructure became more and more competitive, the (literally) down-to-earth nature of connecting your TV via a cable started to pay dividends. Cable TV is more reliable, can offer upgrades in quality with more ease, and, perhaps most importantly, is often bundled with internet service. (Satellite services can technically offer internet, but it’s notoriously slow and unreliable.)

Satellite’s brief but extremely popular period of glory left a physical mark on the places it touched. In Philadelphia, Boston, Brooklyn, and Chicago, among other cities, satellite dishes were installed by hundreds of thousands of renters. And here’s the weird thing: those dishes actually belong to that tenant, no matter where they are now or what sort of system (if any!) they use to get their TV. “Once installed, the dish, mount and associated cabling are contractually the property of the customer. Other than the receiver(s) DIRECTV does not collect the remainder of the system once the account is disconnected,” said a DirecTV representative in an emailed statement. Both DirecTV and Dish try to do the installation for free, or as cheap as possible—a major reason to choose satellite TV is its low cost, and the companies don’t want to scare away customers with hefty installation fees. So they’re free to install, but what about when the customer switches to cable, or cuts the cord, or simply moves away from the building? The dish stays.

A satellite dish for nearly every balcony of this apartment block in Jordaan, Holland. (Photo: Karl Baron/flickr)

While a personal satellite dish is pretty small, typically somewhere between 19 and 24 inches in diameter, a standard dish weighs around 25-40 pounds. In apartment buildings with a lot of units, the installer has to navigate cabling as well, figuring out a way to run cables from the dish into the apartment of the customer. That leads to a lot of dishes being mounted right on the exterior of building.

Old and new: dishes in Kazakhstan. (Photo: kzww/flickr)

"I can see how it would really take away from the character of a neighborhood," says Alison Frazee, director of advocacy for the Boston Preservation Alliance. She hasn’t seen much in terms of complaints about dish blight, but there’s been chatter about unused satellite dishes in Boston. Like in Philadelphia, Boston passed a city ordinance (theirs in 2012) seeking to limit the proliferation of satellite dishes that are in public view. In both cities, the satellite TV companies have challenged the ruling, saying it violates an earlier FCC law that places some very minimal limits on where a satellite may be mounted. But really, the goal is to keep it cheap and easy to install satellites, and who cares about the consequences?

Galvanized steel, a zinc-coated steel meant to resist rust, is a fairly easy material to recycle. But when a tenant moves, what are the chances he or she will head up to the roof or hang out of windows to uninstall a 25-pound dish, only to take it to an approved steel-recycling facility?

In Berlin. (Photo: Bjørn Giesenbauer/flickr)

And there’s no really easy way to reuse dishes, except for their original use of receiving satellite signals. (DirecTV says that when installing a new service, they first try out any old dishes on that property before installing a new one.) These aren’t like wooden pallets, the shipping crates that are easy to disassemble and have been a boon for DIYers and urban “makers.” You can’t really take a steel dish apart in a way that makes it useful for anything else; even using it to capture another signal, like WiFi, requires some pretty elaborate hacking. At best, maybe you can tilt it upwards and turn it into a pretty ugly bird bath.

Dish blight isn’t a big deal, not in terms of actually hurting or helping people; galvanized steel, though heavy and annoying, isn’t very toxic, and certainly an abandoned satellite dish won’t stop anyone from finding their next meal or medical service. But for some advocates, getting rid of dish blight is a first step towards changing the entire tenor of a neighborhood, in the same way that aggressive cleaning of subway car graffiti in New York City eventually led, indirectly and confusedly, to a safer subway system. Dish blight isn’t the worst problem faced by Councilman Clarke in Philadelphia. But those little eyesores won’t be walking themselves off the ledge.

An example of an 18th century Qing dynasty coin (Photo: Jean-Michel Moullec/Flickr)

In Seattle, archaeologists working under a bridge have found 2,600 or so artifacts from Seattle history—everything from depression-era shoes and dolls to a Chinese coin that was minted in the 1700s, during the Qing Dynasty, KOMO News reports.

The site, where construction workers were installing a water tank, was once called Finntown. The community was most active during Prohibition and the Great Depression, but the archaeologists have also found artifacts dating back further, like a chisel made from the femur of (most likely) an elk.

Other finds include:

• eyeglasses
• a toy fork
• a 1921 Nippon beer bottle
• suspenders
• a Seattle Municipal Railway Token.

The mysterious 18th century Chinese coin, researchers say, was most likely brought by an immigrant: the site's right by Smith Cove, where ships carrying Asian immigrants landed on the American coast.

Bonus finds: "Strange things...we don’t fully understand" on Comet 67P, toilet snake (ack!)

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

Newspaper publisher James Gordon Bennett Jr. was obsessed with owls. Sculptor Greg Lefevre created a bronze owl sculpture for him in Herald Square. (Photo: Laura/flickr)

In 1906, one of New York’s premier architects, Stanford White, received an unusual commission. The request came from his friend James Gordon Bennett Jr., the publisher of one of America’s most circulated daily newspapers, the New York Herald.

The media tycoon asked White to design and build his tomb. But this was to be no ordinary mausoleum. Bennett Jr. had something fantastic in mind for his final resting place: a sarcophagus soaring 200 feet into the New York skyline in the form of an owl. Furthermore, Bennett wanted the owl to be hollow, and for his coffin to be suspended midway inside the owl’s body by iron chains.

This enormous owl mausoleum was to be situated in Washington Heights, on a plot of land owned by the Bennett family. Still there today on 183^rd Street, the area now known as Bennett Park comprises the highest point of land in Manhattan, 265 feet above sea level.

Bennett’s instructions for White specifically called for a 75-foot pedestal, where an 125-foot owl would rest. This was no sealed-off gravesite, though. The monument was intended to be open to the public. The New York Times reported on the proposed design: “Through the interior of the tomb, a circular staircase was to ascend from the bottom of the pedestal, around the coffin and the great iron chains, up to the eyes of the owl, which were to be windows looking over New York City.”

The top of the owl would have been 465 feet above sea level. To put that size in perspective, the Statue of Liberty is 305 feet tall. For Stanford White, and his illustrious architecture firm of McKim, Mead & White, it was a far cry from previous projects like Columbia University, the Brooklyn Museum, and the second Madison Square Garden (and later ones like Pennsylvania Station and the New York Public Library).

An illustration of the plans. 

It all begs the question: What sort of man would chose to immortalize himself with a 200-foot owl?

James Gordon Bennett Jr. was widely known in New York society as an eccentric playboy. He inherited the New York Herald from his father, James Gordon Bennett Sr., in 1867. The Scotland-born elder Bennett had emigrated to North America at the age of 24. After working as a school teacher and freelance reporter, he founded his own newspaper in 1835. The sensationalistic New York Herald would go on to become one of the most successful “penny papers” in America.

Operating under the ethos that the function of a newspaper “is not to instruct but to startle,” the Heraldspecialized in crime, scandal, and political attacks. The more salacious the better; the year after debuting, the paper hit the sales jackpot thanks to its obsessive coverage of the murder of a high-class prostitute. By the time Bennett Sr. handed over control of the newspaper to his son, it reportedly had the highest circulation of any newspaper in America. 

At the time, Gordon Jr. was one of the richest bachelors in the city. He led a life of excess, eccentricity and general caddishness. Known in Manhattan clubland as the Commodore, he scandalized New York society with his erratic behavior. He was known for spending late nights racing his horse drawn carriage in the nude. Engaged to socialite Caroline May, the arrangement was said to have been broken off after he arrived at the May family mansion, wildly intoxicated, and urinated into the grand fireplace. 

Fleeing to France, he lived for a time on Louis XIV’s estate at Versailles. From here he built a 301-foot yacht called the Lysistrata. With a permanent crew of 100 ready to sail at the owner’s instant whim, the yacht came complete with it’s own padded stall and a cow to deliver fresh cream to the captain’s table. It also carried a French sports car.

James Gordon Bennett Jr. in 1901. (Photo: Wikipedia Commons)

Overseeing the running of the Herald from France, Bennett Jr. brought the same largesse to the paper. He sponsored a reporting trip to Africa to track down the missing missionary David Livingstone. While it was the journalist Henry Morton Stanley who uttered the famous line, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume,” it was Bennett and the Herald that paid the bills. 

In the 1890s Bennett decided to leave “Newspaper Row” in lower Manhattan, and head uptown. His paper would no longer be next door to fierce competitors like Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal, and Henry Jarvis Raymond’s New York Daily Times. Bennett asked Stanford White to design the new home of the New York Herald, on a large plot in Midtown now called Herald Square.

Naturally, Bennett Jr. gave White specific instructions on how his sumptuous new headquarters was to be decorated, with a theme that reflected his unwavering obsession with owls.

White’s Herald building had an exquisite design, based upon the Italian renaissance-era Palazzo del Consiglio in Verona—but with a twist. The roofline of the building was festooned with bronze owls, no less than 22 of them. The owls positioned on the corner of the Herald had bright green glass eyes lit up by incandescent bulbs. 

Minerva, the typesetters, and a trusty owl atop the bell. (Photo: Luke J. Spencer)

A large bronze statue of Minerva dominated the front of the building, alongside a pair of bronze typesetters, who mechanically rang a bell with heavy mallets. The Roman goddess was shown with an attendant owl, perched atop the bell. Bennett also took to keeping live owls in the office, wearing owls on his cufflinks, and painting owls’ eyes on the prow of his beloved Lysistrata yacht. Soon, the masthead of the Herald itself featured an owl.

What lay behind Bennett’s obsession with owls? The owl has traditionally been a symbol of wisdom and intelligence, dating back to the Greek goddess Athena, whose temple in Athens, the Acropolis, was home to a protected group of owls. The creature has also had a long association with secret societies. The Order of the Illuminati’s Minerval Academy is said to have used an owl perched upon an open book as its seal. 

During Bennett's time, Manhattan was home to a mysterious member’s club for journalists called the Bohemian Club. Its symbol depicted an owl and the words “Weaving Spiders Come Not Here.” The association, whose members included powerful figures like William Randolph Hearst, owned 2,700 acres of land in the California Redwoods, where a 40-foot stone owl statue stood sentry over the main gathering area. Annual two-week retreats there began in 1878, and still continue today. Bennett was possibly a member of this club, but evidence is scant.

Perhaps he just really loved hoot owls, plain and simple. Indeed, he ran numerous editorials in his paper fighting for the preservation of the species. 

Stanford White. (Photo: Everett Historical/shutterstock.com)

Bennett’s grandiose plan for a 200-foot-tall owl tomb in Washington Heights came to an abrupt end on the night of June 25th, 1906. Architect Stanford White was murdered while attending a performance of “Mam’zelle Champagne” on the rooftop theatre of the old Madison Square Garden.

White’s philandering and sexual assaults had finally caught up with him: During the show’s musical finale, a song called, “I Could Love a Million Girls,” the husband of one of his most infamous lovers gunned the architect down, and reportedly shouted either “you’ve ruined my wife” or “life.”

Before White was shot in the head, plans for Bennett’s giant owl tomb had been moving right along. White had already hired a sculptor in Paxton, Massachusetts to work on the designs. Artist Andrew O’Connor had gotten as far as pencil sketches and clay models of the outlandish tomb. But the plans were permanently shelved once Bennett heard of White’s murder, sadly depriving New York City of the chance to host an enormous owl-shaped mausoleum with a coffin swinging from chains inside it. 

The New York Herald building, circa 1895. (Photo: Library of Congress)

James Gordon Bennett Jr died in 1918, and three years later his owl-themed Herald Building was demolished. Despite the expense put into the building, Bennett had only signed a thirty-year lease. Asked once why the lease was so short, he reportedly said, “Thirty years from now the Herald will be in Harlem, and I’ll be in hell!” 

The New York Herald ceased publication in 1924. Yet remnants of what had been America’s most widely read newspaper can still be found: its former Parisian edition lives on today as the International New York Times, and the statue of Minerva and her bell-ringing typesetters, which decorated the façade of the lost Herald Building, was preserved and turned into the clock tower seen in today’s Herald Square. Behind the clock tower is a door, featuring an owl perched upon a crescent moon, and a phrase in French, la nuit porte conseil, which translates to “sleep on it.”

Atop the monument are two of the original 22 owls that adorned the roof of James Gordon Bennett Jr.’s newspaper building. Their eyes silently flicker on and off with a mysterious green light, going all but unnoticed by the thousands of passersby below. 

The James Gordon Bennett Memorial, in Herald Square. (Photo: Luke J. Spencer)

The memorial at night. (Photo: Luke J. Spencer)