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Francisco Hernandez: The Coolest Explorer You've Never Heard Of

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article-imageAn illustration of a dragon, from Francisco Hernandez, "Nova plantarum, animalium et mineralium Mexicanorum historia", Rome, 1651. (All Photos: Courtesy the History of Science Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries)

In the era right after Columbus, most people who traveled from Europe to the Americas had very specific agendas. They wanted money, or power, or land. And those are the names we know—Cortes, Pizarro, Cordoba; the ones who killed and stole and enslaved in order to bring their home countries a slice of that New World pie.

By contrast, Francisco Hernandez's name may not ring any bells—but his contributions were just as important, and a lot less bloody. Hernandez was the first European scientist to visit the Americas. With the help of the Aztecs, Hernandez traveled through Mexico in the 1570s, describing and illustrating thousands of species previously unknown to Europe.  Some credit him with introducing the continent to everything from corn to cocoa. He is, indisputably, one of the fathers of natural history. 

But Hernandez's extensive work was nearly lost to time. In a new exhibition, called "Galileo's World," the University of Oklahoma details how a bunch of intrepid scientists, including Galileo himself, rescued the seminal work from obscurity. 

article-imageFrancisco Hernandez's "Nova plantarum, animalium et mineralium Mexicanorum historia", Rome, 1651.

Francisco Hernandez was a doctor and botanist who worked in Spain in the middle of the 16th century. Ambitious by nature, he spent the early years of his career moving from city to city trying to make a name for himself. Eventually, his Spanish translation of Pliny’s classic Natural History gained him some renown, and he became the personal physician to King Philip II.

Philip II, also known as Philip the Prudent, ushered Spain into its Golden Age and was always trying to expand the country’s knowledge and power. In 1570, less than a century after Columbus first set foot in the Bahamas, Philip commissioned his trusted doctor to head over to the New World and put together a complete record of plants and animals.

This was to be the first time any European embarked on a scientific mission there, and Philip expected to find things that would awe his continent. He was heavily invested in the expedition—the level-headed king spent 60,000 ducats on the mission, enough, at the time, to send a thousand soldiers on a year-long campaign.

article-imageAn impressive New World bird.

Hernandez and his son Juan left Spain in August of 1571, and touched down in Veracruz the next February. The exploration team of translators, botanists, and geographers hiked through Mexico for three years, collecting specimens, interviewing Spanish colonists and native Nahua residents, and undertaking medical studies.

They hired three indigenous painters, named Antón, Baltazar Elías and Pedro Vázquez, who turned the team's collective findings into colorful illustrations that Fernandez could later use for reference.

The trip was a smashing success. Over three years of constant travel, and three more years working in a Mexican hospital, Hernandez found and recorded thousands of plants and animals previously unknown to European science. He discovered staples from peyote to pineapples, and shed new light on those that had been introduced but remained mysterious, like cocoa and corn. 

When he sailed back home to Spain in 1577, his ship was loaded with seeds, specimens, and a multivolume set of carefully illustrated notes. 

article-imageHernandez introduced all of Europe to corn.

When he arrived home, Fernandez set to work making sense of his manuscripts, with the goal of eventually publishing a Pliny-level magnum opus. But by his death in 1587, he hadn’t gotten very far at all. Philip II, who wanted maximum return on his investment, appointed another court doctor, Nardo Antonio Recchi, to finish the job.

But the papers were pretty confusing, especially for someone who hadn't been there during the research. When describing the array of new species, Fernandez had kept their original Nahuatl names—both out of respect for the people who had taught him about them and because, in many cases, they were different enough from anything he’d seen in Europe that he wouldn’t have known how to start fitting them into the pantheon.

Although he got a Spanish version of the text published in Mexico, Recchi also died without having made much headway. Soon Philip II died, too, and it looked like Hernandez’s manuscript, rather than open up a new frontier for European life sciences, might remain scattered among different collectors and scholars, lost to history.

article-imageThe xoloitzcvintli, or Mexican wolf.

Enter Federico Cesi. The eldest son of a high-class Italian family, Cesi should have spent his life schmoozing with nobility and tending to family affairs. But Cesi had a thirst for knowledge, and he spent his early years learning everything he could about science. When he ran out of books, he went looking for more.

In 1603, 18-year-old Cesi took a trip to Naples, where he stumbled upon a cabinet of curiosities operated by an collector named Ferrante Imperato. Imperato owned some of the pages of Hernandez’s lost manuscripts, and Cesi found them fascinating. Here was the key, not just to a few more facts, but to a whole unknown world.

Enthralled by all the new creatures that were suddenly at his fingertips, Cesi made a vow: he would find all of Hernandez’s scattered papers, and publish a definitive edition, establishing the foundation of New World Natural History.

article-imageThe intricate frontispiece, as befits a book that took 70 years to make.

Cesi couldn’t do it alone—he needed a dream team, bright minds ready to tackle the many tasks required to turn far-flung, disorganized, and hard-to-understand pages into a reliable reference book.

So he founded something he called the Academy of the Lynx: “Lynx” because the cat was said to have the kind of penetrating eyesight that helps with mystery-solving, and “Academy” because this was an exclusive society, open only to the smartest of the smart (which turned out to mean mostly people Cesi was friends with, or admired).

It was selective enough that in 1612, nine years into the Academy’s existence, it still only had nine members—Cesi, his three childhood tutors, a few assorted Renaissance men, and an up-and-comer named Galileo.

article-imageThe armadillo and the crocodile. Hernandez and other experts believed in things like dragons, despite never encountering them, largely because the animals they did discover were so surprising.

Cesi started spreading the word about his project, and naturalists across the continent began eagerly awaiting this "definitive edition," which promised to swell their collections and clear up some botanical mysteries. Meanwhile, the Academy got to work, each member playing to his strengths. Cesi dedicated some of his considerable funds to buying up manuscript bits from various collectors.

Johann Schreck, a multilingual doctor, edited the flora section, which was heavy on medicinal plants. Johann Faber, an artistically talented anatomist, took care of the fauna. And the group worked together to produce 800 woodcut illustrations, to help Europeans better visualize all the strange new creatures that Hernandez described.

The Lynxes had many successes. They published members’ works, including Galileo’s The Assayer, and they worked hard to foster scientific discourse. At the height of their powers, they had 32 members from across the continent.

article-imageA couple of unprecedented reptiles.

But it was hard and slow going. Cesi’s father tried to break the gang apart, accusing them of distracting his son from his familial responsibilities. As religious institutions grew suspicious of scientific practice, the climate for Academies like this soured. Galileo kept getting arrested by the Inquisition, and the Lynxes kept dropping everything to defend him.

By the time the book was finally put together, every member of what was once the Academy of Lynxes was dead, save for one—Francesco Stelluti, one of Cesi’s former tutors (and the first person to ever publish observations taken through a microscope). Stelluti shepherded the project through to the finish line, and in 1651—seventy years after Hernandez’s return, and nearly half a century after Cesi took up the mantle—the definitive edition was finally published.

Its publication, the University of Oklahoma exhibitors write, “symbolized the transformation of natural history into a global endeavor.” It also gained Hernandez a reputation as “the Pliny of the New World.” Scientists relied on Hernandez’s observations, and the Academy’s presentation of them, into the 18th century. The book even earned a mention in a poem by Erasmus Darwin, Charles's grandfather.

article-imageThe beginning of the arboreal section, complete with a tree-studded scene

The University of Oklahoma curators hope that highlighting this book will help return Hernandez and his champions to their rightful place in the naturalist pantheon. Hernandez's contributions, and his respect for indigenous knowledge, "show there was more to Spanish influence in the Americas than raw material exploitation," says James Burnes, an organizer of the exhibit. A book like the Novum has "broad geographical and chronological impacts."

As it jumps oceans and centuries, the knowledge it offers may change, but it does not diminish. Any lynx can see that. 

article-imageA flock of New World birds. 


How Ferris Wheels Escaped the Fair And Became High-End Urban Attractions

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article-imageThe Pacific Wheel in Santa Monica. (Photo: Gaston Hinostroza/Flickr)
The Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 captured the imagination of the country; a city within a city was constructed to contain the event, complete with a massive reflecting pool. Visitors were dazzled by electricity, and by exhibits sent from around the world, including a replica Viking ship that sailed from Norway. Fairgoers could take in musical performances and art exhibitions and then recharge with a dizzying choice of libations and food.

Towering above it all a ride intended to provide guests with a bird’s eye view of the proceedings: the Ferris Wheel.

Designed by engineer George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr., the ride carried guests 250 feet into the air on 36 rotating cars. It opened to the public on June 21, 1893, and according to a New York Times story published the following day, over 5,000 visitors waited “patiently” to take their turn on the “great circle of steel and iron”. “Nobody was afraid to get on board the thirty-six cars” but “some of the women, and men too, experience a disagreeable sensation in the motion of the wheel”. That sensation aside, at one point the wheel is estimated to have sold around 150,000 tickets a week and was so popular that fans once rioted upon hearing they would be denied entrance. 

It’s hard to imagine a shuttered Ferris wheel sparking a riot these days. Although Ferris wheels have become a staple at summer fairs, the advancement of thrilling roller coasters and other, flashier amusement park attractions, typically overshadow the nostalgic machines.

Not that people haven’t reinvented them in spectacular and unusual ways, and not that they don’t still have devoted fans.

article-imageThe view from London Eye. (Photo: Lauren Tucker/Flickr)

Like Nick Weisenberger. He’s the founder of the website Observation Wheel Directory, a website devoted to all things Ferris wheel, and author of the book, Observation Wheels: Guide to the World’s Largest Ferris Wheels. Weisenberger is a mechanical engineer and also a serious roller coaster enthusiast. (He also writes for a roller coaster site, written four books on coaster design, and estimates that he’s ridden about 160 roller coasters around the United States and Canada.)

He started the site because he saw a need for it—there wasn’t an online clearinghouse for Ferris wheel information. Weisenberger writes about Ferris wheel physics, technology and history. He maintains lists of manufacturers, books, and even Ferris wheel accidents. Fellow enthusiasts send him tips, photos and corrections. But Weisenberger’s main obsession is “observation wheels”; inventions that he defines as typically 400-feet-high or larger in diameter. These massive creations would dwarf the wheel that astounded visitors to the 1893 fair.

For a long time, Weisenberger says, Ferris wheels maintained the status quo. Then came the London Eye. At 443 feet, it was the tallest wheel in the world when it opened to the public in 2000. Located on the South Bank of the Thames, the wheel offers riders a staggering view of London from 32 enclosed capsules that can hold up to 25 passengers each. General admission tickets are $30. But guests willing to pay (a lot) more can book cocktail excursions and private capsules, among other offerings, including dinner for eight for $7,805. Lavish extras are nice, but there are other, simpler factors that make a wheel successful.

“Location is number one,” says Weisenberger. “You want to be somewhere where there’s already going to be a lot of foot traffic. Most people aren’t going to make a special trip just to go on a big Ferris wheel.”

article-imageFerris wheel at the Chicago World's Fair, 1893. (Photo: Library of Congress)

Once the London Eye after was built, says Weisenberger, the race was on. Cities swiftly undertook to outdo London and succeeded. The 520-foot Star of Nanchang was erected in 2006. The Singapore Flyer, which opened in 2008, unseated both by climbing to 541 feet. The Flyer was subsequently trumped by the High Roller in Las Vegas, by just nine feet, in 2014. The High Roller maintains its distinction as the world’s highest Ferris wheel; but there are other impressive wheels around the world. In addition to the Star of Nanchang, China also boasts the 394-foot-tall Suzhou Ferris Wheel and the Tianjin Eye (also 394-feet) which towers over a bridge. And plans to unseat the High Roller are afoot: construction has begun on the 630-foot New York Wheel in Staten Island and a 689-foot wheel in Dubai.

And, following the London Eye’s lead, these attractions offer their guests more than just a great view. The High Roller offers wedding packages and a happy hour. Visitors to the Singapore Flyer can buy a four-course meal and the services of a butler.

article-imageThe Tianjin Eye, constructed over the Hai River in Tianjin, China. (Photo: David Hulme/Flickr)

But size isn’t the only thing Ferris wheels designers have brought to the table in an effort to make their creations distinct. There are “centerless” or “hubless” wheels, which forgo the usual spokes that radiate out from the center of a Ferris wheel. The Big O, a centerless Ferris wheel in Tokyo, features a roller coaster running through the center. “Eccentric” Ferris wheels incorporate bowl-shaped tracks inside the wheel that allow some of the gondolas to race along the path, adding a bit of the speed and fright of a roller coaster. Mickey’s Fun Wheel at Disneyland is an eccentric wheel. The Uniroyal Tire Company constructed a Ferris wheel around the shape of a giant rubber car tire for the 1964/1965 New York World’s Fair. The tire (sans Ferris wheel elements) now sits beside the I-94 in Allen Park, Michigan. According to Uniroyal, at 80 feet high and 12 tons, it remains the “largest tire model ever built”. A casino in Macau is being constructed around what is being billed as the world’s first “figure eight” Ferris wheel, but Weisenberger is unconvinced. 

article-imageThe Big-O centerless ferris wheel in Tokyo. (Photo: Coby/Flickr)

“I’m not sure you could technically call it a Ferris wheel,” he says, “Because it looks more like a track that cars follow. It doesn’t rotate like a typical Ferris wheel, but they’re trying to claim it as one.”

Weisenberger predicts that the future of lavish wheels lies in interactivity. Representatives of the New York Wheel want to make sure that their ride is compatible with cameras and tablets so riders can easily share their experience over social media, and the designers of Japan’s proposed Nippon Moon Ferris wheel want to incorporate an app that allows visitors to “switch from reality to digitally altered views from the capsules”.

But the vast majority of Ferris wheels do not offer champagne toasts and augmented reality, and as such, they often take a backseat to noisier fair ground and amusement park offerings. Even Weisenberger says that if he’s at a carnival, he’ll often skip the dinkier wheels. His favorite amusement park ride is far afield from a leisurely turn on the wheel—he loves The Voyage at Holiday World in Santa Claus, Indiana. A wooden coaster that offers 24.3 seconds of zero gravity and steep drops, Weisenberger says that it’s a “crazy” ride that is almost too long.

article-imageDiamond and Flower Ferris Wheel in Tokyo. (Photo: kobakou/WikiCommons CC BY 2.0)
So with all the glitzier offerings, why do Ferris wheels remain fair and theme park perennials? 

For starters, brand recognition. “Ferris wheels have been around for over a hundred years and they've kept the same basic shape—everyone knows one when they see it,” Weisenberger wrote in an email to Atlas Obscura. Usually a sedate ride, Ferris wheels are perfect for families.

“There’s also the romantic angle,” continues Weisenberger. “Getting stopped at the very top while riding with your significant other is a special moment no doubt resulting in thousands of marriage proposals made on wheels.” He even occasionally gets emails from people who mistake his site for a wheel’s official site, asking him to stop the wheel at the top so they can pop the question.

article-imageAtop the Singapore Flyer. (Photo: Cheryl/Flickr)

And, of course, there is the same thing that attracted the amazed visitors of the Chicago World’s Fair and connects those people from the past to us.

“People generally like to be scared in a safe environment; we crave experiences that seem risky but really aren’t,” writes Weisenberger. “It seems humans have always been attracted to climbing to high places in order to view our world from above.”

See Ravishing Photographs of Cuba Taken By Cuban Greats and Magnum Pros

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article-imageGilda Perez, Untitled, from the series La Habana, 1988. (Photo: © Gilda Perez/Courtesy of Lehigh University Art Galleries - Museum Operation)

At a New Year’s Eve party in 1958, Magnum photographer Burt Glinn heard that rebel leader Fidel Castro had taken over Cuba. By the following morning he was on the ground in Cuba, documenting the events as they unfolded.

His shots of the freshly minted ruler giving speeches in front of buildings that had just been seized by the new government will be featured, along with many others, in the International Center of Photography’s upcoming exhibition “¡Cuba Cuba!: 65 Years of Photography.”

Coinciding with a new era in diplomatic relations between Cuba and the U.S., the exhibition offers an insight into Cuban culture, history and everyday life, from a period when travel between the two countries was largely prohibited.

It includes work not only from Magnum greats, but also major Cuban photographers such as Alberto Korda and Raúl Corrales. Here’s a preview of the exhibition, which runs from August 15 through September 7th at the Southampton Arts Center in New York.  

article-imageBurt Glinn, Castro speaks in Santa Clara, January 5, 1959. (Photo: © Burt Glinn / Magnum Photos)  

article-imageTony Mendoza, Cuban fishermen, from the series Cuba: Going Back, 1996. (Photo: © Tony Mendoza. Courtesy of Lehigh University Art Galleries - Museum Operation)

article-imageGory (Rogelio López Marin), from the series Es sólo agua en la lágrima de un extraño (It’s only water in the teardrop of a stranger), 1986. (Photo: © Gory/ Courtesy of Lehigh University Art Galleries - Museum Operation)

article-imageMaría Magdalena Campos-Pons, from the series Sagrada Familia (Holy Family), 2000. (Photo: © María Magdalena Campos-Pons/Courtesy of Lehigh University Art Galleries - Museum Operation.)

article-imageAndrew Moore, Santa Cruz del Norte, Cuba, 1999. (Photo: © Andrew Moore/Courtesy the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York)

article-imageUnidentified photographer, Hollywood actors Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor at the Sloppy Joe's bar, Havana, 1950's. (Photo: Courtesy of the International Center of Photography)

article-imageMario Díaz, La Novia (The Bride), 1991.(Photo: Courtesy of the International Center of Photography)

article-imageUnidentified photographer, Camilo Cienfuegos, Cuban Guerilla Commander, wearing a Cubanos baseball uniform, 1959. (Photo: Courtesy of the International Center of Photography)

How Book Designers Around the World Interpreted Philip K. Dick's 'The Man in the High Castle'

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Earlier this year, Amazon released the first episode of The Man In the High Castle, a series adapted from Philip K. Dick's classic 1962 novel of paranoia, espionage, and science fiction in a Nazi-controlled America, with the rest of the series set to debut in the fall.

It's not the first time that the book has struggled to be understood, as shown by its collection of wildly disparate covers from around the world.

The novel takes place in an alternate universe where the Nazis won World War II, and have now divided up America into regions controlled by the Germans and the Japanese. The story follows a diverse cast of characters as they explore the tense relations between the two nations and the history of the country they occupy, as well as the mysterious rebellion being fomented by a science fiction book called, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which tells the radical tale of a world where the Nazis lost. It's heady stuff, but the title has led many people to mistake it for a different novel entirely. This is never more apparent than on many of the book's old covers from around the world, the illustrations of which range from strangely accurate, to designs from people who don't seem to have read past the first page.

article-image(All images from Philip K. Dick.com)

This American edition is actually a pretty great representation of the themes of the book, save for the actual castle in the background which screams fairy tale.

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Okay, hands down, this cover from Finland is the best symbol of the book's world ever conceived, although to someone unfamiliar with the contents, it seems to say that it is an Iron Chef novel.

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Another awesome foreign cover, this time from Romania, which features a pretty loose set of objects and symbols from the book. Although the middle-school titillation of the geisha figure seems a bit out of step with the novel's pervasive anxiety and misery.

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This Chilean cover is pretty abstract, but it does have a grasshopper from the novel-within-the-novel, and a man (suggesting that there are male characters?) but it's pushing it.

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Similarly, this Polish edition seems to be communicating that Japanese culture has a role in the novel with a big piece of kanji slapped over what looks to be a reused fantasy illustration.

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Estonia's take on the book seems to have interpreted the title and not much else, since it looks like a cover to Lord of the Rings.

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One Portuguese edition split the book into two volumes, and went the technicolor route, getting the swastika and a castle on the first volume before this...

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...sure there is a castle, but there is also a rainbow, a green sun, and a swatch of cloth? Good luck identifying this as a book about oppression and Nazis.

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Speaking of weird celestial objects, many of the covers seem to have not even read the title and known only that Philip K. Dick wrote pulpy science fiction. This is from Turkey. 

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A castle, maybe?

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One of the Spanish versions seems to have decided on some sort of tornado golem.

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The Dutch offer up the novel as the story of an intergalactic disco star on the run.

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Then some of the covers are clearly just strange shots in the dark, such as this bizarre surrealist masterpiece.

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There is also this Greek cover that seemed to think the novel was a travel guide from the swinging '60s of some sort.

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Finally there is this Bulgarian cover which... well, we leave it to you to decide what is going on here.

FOUND: Mysterious Photos of Beautiful Women

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article-imageWho is this? (Photo: Meagan Abell/Facebook)

Who is the woman in this picture? Who took it? Where is she?

Meagan Abell, a photographer herself, found the negatives of these images at a thrift store. "From what I could tell," she writes on Facebook, "they had been taken sometime in the 50s." She bought them and, a few weeks later, once they'd been scanned, saw how incredible they were. And she wanted to know where they came from.

So far, the only question that has been answered is where these were taken. From the clues in the pictures, it seems they were shot around Los Angeles, at Dockweiler State Beach. The rest of the story, though—the who, the why—is still a mystery.

Abell's trying to find out the answers by sending the pictures out into the wilds of internet, with the hashtag ‎#FindTheGirlsOnTheNegatives‬ —any leads should go to heyhihello@meaganabellphotography.com.

article-image(Photo: Meagan Abell/Facebook)

article-image(Photo: Meagan Abell/Facebook)

Bonus finds: A set of rocks with crocheted jacketsa new F. Scott Fitzgerald story

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. 

The History of Vending Machines Goes Back to the 1st Century

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article-image(Image: Courtesy Tedium)

Vending machines are one of the few things keeping us away from the dream of a cashless society. The devices, which offer up an array of items for a little bit of pocket change, are silent but prevalent. They represent some of our most technologically advanced furniture, and they'll probably always be there for us in our time of need.

Turns out, vending machines also have a fascinating history. The first one was actually created to prevent holy water theft back in the 1st century.

That machine came about thanks to the handiwork of Heron of Alexandria. Now, Heron invented plenty of things that helped set the stage for our modern society. Steam engine? He was all over it. A wind-powered machine? That was him. The syringe? He got there first.

But many of these things pale in comparison to the machine he created that efficiently ensured that people weren't taking too much holy water at the temples where they went to worship. It was an annoying, frustrating problem, but Heron came up with a solution that was immensely clever.

Basically, people would drop tokens inside of the holy water dispenser, and the weight of the token would push against a lever that opened a small door. While the door was open, the holy water would fall out. Eventually, however, the coin would fall and the door would close—ensuring that people never took more than their fair share of holy water.

The craziest part? Modern society didn't really embrace his invention for about 1,800 years. Heron died around 70 A.D.; it wasn't until 1883, when inventor Percival Everett created a vending machine for postcards and note paper, that Heron's idea proved to have a lasting impact.

Granted, we use it to buy Cool Ranch Doritos these days rather than holy water, but the mechanisms are fairly similar—money goes in, gears turn, stuff comes out.

article-imageA vending machine for stamps and postcards from Japan, c. 1904. (Photo: Momotarou2012/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Today, the vending machine industry earns nearly $20 billion in revenue each year in the U.S. A standard vending machine costs around $3,400 on Amazon, and there are an estimated eight million vending machines in America, according to Vending Market Watch.

But the Achilles Heel of vending machines has always been their ability–or inability–to validate the money that is put into them. Surprisingly, it is much harder for the machines to authenticate paper money than it is for them to take coins.

Much like old 8-tracks, early vending machines that took dollars relied on a magnetic tape-head-style mechanism to detect whether a dollar had the correct amount of iron content. This eventually proved easy to defeat, because laser printers created output with similar amounts of iron-laced ink.

Starting in the early 1990s, vending machines switched to using what could best be described as low-resolution digital cameras to verify a dollar bill's validity. The device would look for specific patterns in the dollar, and if they didn't work, they didn't accept your dollar. That's why your crumpled-up bill never works. 

article-imageA man with a stamp vending machine, c. 1907. (Photo: Library of Congress

Often, counterfeiters will take lower-denomination bills, turn them into $20s or $100s, and pass those off as the real deal. Unfortunately for them, the infrared strip that is baked into most modern dollar bills doesn't lie. This strip can be detected by vending machines too, making it easy to figure out whether a bill is real or fake.

Another verification method for larger-denomination bills: All bills above $2 have a tiny string of mylar woven through it that can only be seen with an ultraviolet light—something else that mechanized dollar scanners look for.

Of course, this is all fairly complicated stuff for your average $3,400 vending machine. But the reason we use coins in many of the machines is because it is much easier for the machines to identify counterfeit quarters, dimes, and nickels.

An American quarter, for instance, has 119 ridges. Dimes have 118 ridges. Those ridges came about as a fraud-prevention device, and most vending machines can recognize them. The coin-operated mechanisms in vending machines are also common in other products, such as laundry machines, arcade games, and jukeboxes.

For the most part, all this technology—and the years of research that probably came with it—is worth it, since the National Automatic Merchandising Association suggests that the industry is worth a cool $42 billion

article-imageA vending machine from 1952. (Photo: Minnesota Historical Society/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 2.0)

While the industry has managed to maintain strength over the years due to your desire to eat Sun Chips at 2 a.m., it is not immune to short-term trends—something that can be highlighted by the rise (and fall) of the coin-operated television.

The devices—which first came about in the 1960s and 1970s—allowed people to pay a quarter to watch half an hour of local television, a respite that certainly came in handy during periods where you were basically stuck somewhere for a long time—think bus stations, airports, and laundromats.

The most well-known brand for coin-op televisions was the Tel-A-Chair, which was prominent at LAX. A 1970 Parade magazine article, recently resurfaced by Retrospace, highlights the fact that the chairs were moneymakers for both the company and the airport.

"It costs us $350 to manufacture a chair," creator John W. Rich noted. "And we give the airports and bus stations 35 percent of the revenue for the location. We've had requests from dozens of airports, rail-roads, bus stations, and beauty parlors. Wherever people wait, the Tel-A-Chair is a natural." 

It was a good idea, though one with a limited time frame. Within two decades of the Tel-A-Chair’s heyday, laptops and Game Boys became popular time-wasters. Today, we largely use smartphones, WiFi, and Netflix to kill our captive time. Who needs a coin-operated TV when you have Siri in your pocket?

article-imageA live bait vending machine in Michigan. (Photo: Dwight Burdette/WikiCommons CC BY 3.0)

Experiences were never the end goal of vending machines. When it comes down to it, Heron of Alexandria invented a device focused on giving you stuff on demand.

We’re in an age where ideas and content are easier than ever to acquire using the little devices in our pockets, instead of coin-operated machines that offer a cheap couple of minutes of fun. Beyond people clearly into it for the nostalgia, who needs to spend a quarter to play Donkey Kong when you can get in a game of 2048 for free?

Perhaps that’s why you’re way more likely to run into a vending machine for expensive electronics at the airport than a personalized television set or an arcade machine these days.

Experiences are less tangible than ever, and way harder to vend as a result; stuff, on the other hand, is still worth something. When you put a quarter into a vending machine, nine times out of ten, you’re in the market for more stuff.

A person willing to go out of his way to straighten out a dollar bill? That’s what they call a captive audience.

article-imageA version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail

Object of Intrigue: A Passport for Falcons

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article-imageA blindfolded falcon ready to rack up some sweet frequent flier points. (Photo: yeowatzup on Flickr/Creative Commons)
If you're boarding a flight to or from the United Arab Emirates and spot a blindfolded falcon hanging out in first class, do not be alarmed. The bird of prey is allowed to travel in the cabin and has been subjected to the same stringent security checks as you have—including passport control.

In the Emirates, falcons get issued their very own forest green passports. The unusual documentation scheme is due to the fact that, in the U.A.E, falcons are highly prized and therefore attractive to smugglers. Falconry, in which the birds of prey are trained to hunt, is a significant part of the region's Bedouin heritage.

Though the U.A.E.'s desert dwellers no longer rely on falcons for food delivery, falconry continues as a sport and source of national pride. An annual falconry festival in Abu Dhabi lures hawks and their trainers from around the world. Falconers from the region travel the Persian Gulf and beyond with their birds to engage in festivals, competitions, and displays. Hence the need for passports and first-class accommodation. 

A top falcon can sell for up to $1 million, writes Ali Al Saloom in The National. The high value of well-bred birds has led to an illegal trade—which is why, in 2002, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Flora and Fauna (CITES) moved to crack down on falcon smuggling by introducing a mandatory falcon passport for jetsetting birds of prey.

article-imageAbu Dhabi Falcon Hospital director Dr. Margit Muller displays the relevant falcon documentation. (Photo: Eric Elder)

Each passport corresponds to a particular falcon. That falcon must also be fitted with a leg ring inscribed with an identity number that ends up on the passport. This guards against one bird impersonating another. Sadly, the passports do not require photos, but falcons, you'll find, are somewhat hard to tell apart based on their head shots alone. They also travel with tiny, eye-covering leather helmets on their heads in order to stay calm, making face-based identification even more difficult.

CITES stipulates that, when flying with an avian companion, a falconer must present the bird's passport to a border control officer, who, as with human passports, "should validate it with an ink stamp, signature and date to show the history of movement from State to State." Passports are issued by the UAE's Ministry of Environment and Water for a fee of 500 U.A.E. dirhams—around $136 USD—and remain valid for three years.

The passport "certifies the legal origin of the falcons used for falconry and ensures smooth and easy documentation for falcon travels," says Maribel Broso of the Abu Dhabi Falcon Hospital. After being issued a passport, the birds may fly accompanied by their falconers to eight countries: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Morocco, and Syria. 

In September 2013, Gulf News reported that over 28,000 falcons had been issued with passports since 2002. The UAE's scheme—the first falcon passport in the world—has also influenced other countries in the Gulf. Last year, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia all agreed to issue their own CITES-approved passports for falcon travel.

article-imageFly, my pretty! But get the required documentation first. (Photo: cloudzilla on Flickr/Creative Commons)

The Bizarre Tale of 'ISIS Book Club'

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article-imageA museum in Aleppo, Syria. (Photo: © UNESCO/ Prof. Abdul Karim

The stash of books about ancient coins and Egyptian pyramids seemed to belong more in a 1950s library in Germany than on the back of a truck filled with shoulder-fired missiles. Then again, if you’re an Islamic State fighter with plans to loot and sell antiquities to the West in order to fund your cause, it helps to know which objects to look for.

How ISIS fighters came into possession of the books was anybody’s guess. But amid a stream of reports that the group is looting and destroying precious cultural heritage in Syria and Iraq, the news of the volumes sparked a miniature flurry of detective work on Twitter.

The library’s appearance in a photograph on the Conflict Antiquities blog, alongside a post about a cache of hundreds of antiquities and receipts that were seized by U.S. Special Forces members, was reportedly “the first material proof” that the Islamic State was trafficking antiquities.

Driven largely by archaeologists and numismatists, the stream of retweets and pleas for help–“it’s a super-long shot, but does anyone recognize this book?” one tweet read–quickly yielded fruit. Recognizing the ancient Phoenician coins that appear one of the pages, the numismatist Ute Wartenberg correctly identified it as a scholarly tome that isn’t easy to come by: La Syrie Sous la Domination Achéménide by Maurice Sartre. 

“It’s not a book that you look up. It’s not even one that you can find in a bookstore. It would be one that you would find in an academic library,” says Sam Hardy, the author of Conflict Antiquities and a specialist in illicit antiquities. “It suggests that they’re making educated choices.” The other titles were identified as German-language books on the pyramids of Egypt.

As for the seized receipts, they dated back to the 1980s, prompting a slew of other questions. Where were the objects headed? Who was buying them? What would an ISIS book club look like and was it an accurate predictor of where its readers might strike next (for instance, the pyramids of Egypt)? Was this really “the first material proof” that the Islamic State has been trafficking antiquities?

According to Hardy, not exactly. “In terms of evidence, this is not significant in any new way. It just confirms what we already know, that items have been strategically trafficked in and out of Syria and the region, by various actors inside and outside the state, long before ISIS was ever around,” Hardy says.

Yet his posts can provide a glimpse into how archaeologists and other antiquity experts are documenting the extent to which antiquities are being traded and destroyed by the Islamic State. Like Hardy, many such experts are not on the ground in Syria, but are working from other countries. So instead of using shovels and picks, they are relying on digital tools like satellite imagery, Twitter, and open source sites like Bellingcat to excavate information and bring it to the public.

article-imageA lamassu at the North West Palace of Ashurnasirpal II, in Nimrud, Iraq. It was reported that the site was destroyed by ISIS in 2015. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

And by crowd sourcing their knowledge, such experts are fleshing out details and context in ways that mainstream news outlets cannot. A recent post by the Association for the Protection of Syrian Archaeology showing an image of the license that the Islamic State granted to excavators, to curry funds and local favor, is a good example of academic investigators diving into the weeds. Other sites like this include Pocket Change, and the blog run by the British archaeologist Paul Bradford.

What’s more, these ad hoc digital efforts seem to mirror the ad hoc efforts of archaeologists that are working in conflict zones. Despite recent moves to stop the destruction and looting, the international community can only do so much. Demand for these objects is high (the U.S. is one of the largest importers). And major museums and institutions like UNESCO, which typically partner with local museums and organizations, are hamstrung in a place like Syria, where the regime is an international pariah and 70% of the country is controlled by rebels. As a result, most efforts to save a site from being looted or destroyed are being led by individual actors.

“Forging strategic partnerships with the Syrian state is nearly impossible, so the protection of the sites is often left to local activists, local NGOs, local archaeologists and museum curators, who are trying to do what they can, for the most part pretty much unsupported,” says Amr Al-Azm, a professor of Middle East history at Shawnee State University, and former head of the Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Damascus.

“Let me be clear, this is not a single network, this is a multiplicity of networks,” says Azm. “These partners are trying to find some sort of financial assistance to keep them going and get the information out.” Azm says that the archaeological networks are often fractured by competition. “You have a clique in Berlin, a clique in Paris, a clique in London, a clique in Italy, a clique in Spain, you have some mad Dutch antique books dealers. It’s very, very ad hoc.”

article-imageThe Lion of Al-lāt in Palmyra, Syria, from early 1st century AD. It was destroyed by ISIS on 27 June 2015. (Photo: Mappo/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 4.0)

Azm says he personally has about 20 to 30 people on the ground in Syria who are relaying information back to him and running missions to save precious sites. Mother Jones recently reported how Azm’s network saved one of the largest corpus of mosaics in Syria by packing it into sandbags three months before it was barrel bombed. Other groups are performing similar rescue missions across the country.

“Oftentimes ISIS is coming into one side of town while our trucks are rolling out of the other. It’s stuff that movies are made of,” Azm says.

At the same time, he is exasperated by the media’s obsession with ISIS and antiquities, especially when it obscures the complicity of the Syrian regime, international smuggling routes, and the market in the West. “I am sure there is some mongol warlord looting in outer Mongolia but no one cares. The minute ISIS raises the black flag, everyone wants to talk about it.”

Hardy agrees: “I just called it a book club because some Islamic State activists follow my blog, so I think it's good to make them sound ridiculous as well as repulsive. But it does show that they are very organized in their criminal activities.”


FOUND: A Giant Mass of Glowing Squid Eggs

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Off the coast of Turkey, divers found the ghost of a shape—translucent, dotted with spots of light. They were 22 feet deep, but the thing they had found was around 13 feet in diameter. It felt "very soft," one diver wrote to Deep Sea News.

The divers posted their video of the glowing sphere, and online, they found an answer about what they'd seen. It was probably, said Michael Vecchione, a cephalopod expert at the Smithsonian Institute, a mass of squid eggs—one of the largest ever recorded.

Squid usually lay their eggs deeper in the ocean than humans regularly venture. So there may be many more giant, shining masses of eggs out there in the ocean—It's just that we rarely see them.

article-imageAnother squid species' egg mass (Image: Escanez A, Riera R, González A, Sierra A/Wikimedia)

Bonus finds: Possible rocket fragmentcreepy fish corpsedisgusting crocodile head collection

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. 

Number One With A Bullet: The Rise of the Billboard Hot 100

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article-imageA 1947 Billboard Jukebox Chart—one step on the road to Hot 100 greatness. (Image: Billboard)

Say you want a three-minute break from work, something to help you kick back and forget about the world for two verses and three choruses. Alternatively, say you want a three-minute sum-up of the current zeitgeist, a way to figure out where our collective heads are at right now. Where do you go?

Why, the Billboard Hot 100, of course.

The Hot 100 serves many needs. Just as a Billboard-populated Top 40 is the easiest way to DJ a party with a variety of guests, a cheap jab at the moment's #1 is the best way to criticize the entire United States at once. But how did the Hot 100, which turned 57 years old today, become America's go-to weekly popularity contest?

article-imageTeen heartthrob Ricky Nelson, the first ever Hot 100 chart-topper. (Image: WikiCommons/Public Domain)

As it turns out, the chart is just the most enduring of Billboard's many attempts to bring information from one entertainment industry sector to the other. The magazine that now tells you that more people enjoyed Justin Bieber than Ed Sheeran that week started out as a circus trade rag in the 19th century, and spent the following decades undergoing more loop de loops and drops than a Skrillex song.

According to a history written by his grandson, Roger S. Littleford, Jr., the founder of Billboard, William H. “Bill” Donaldson, built the magazine to serve an entirely different need. Donaldson worked for the family business, a Newport, Kentucky-based lithography shop that churned out advertisements and posters for the circuses, fairs, and other traveling shows that criss-crossed the country. Donaldson realized that most of his clients—the managers and owners who ordered the posters, and, especially, the billstickers tasked with staying one step ahead of the shows and pasting the posters to every available surface—lacked permanent addresses, and thus were unable to communicate with each other.

article-imageA Donaldson Lithographing Co. circus advertisement, circa 1898. (Image: Library of Congress)

In 1894, Donaldson started to spend his nights and weekends putting together Billboard Advertising, a trade publication dedicated to gathering all the news that might be relevant to his more itinerant peers. The first issue, published that November, had eight pages of relevant tidbits, laid out in columns like “Bill Room Gossip” and “The Indefatigable And Tireless Industry of the Bill Poster.” Now the “advertisers, poster printers, bill posters, advertising agents, and secretaries of fairs,” as the issue categorized them, could pick up a magazine at a newsstand anywhere in the country and know what to expect on the opposite coast.

Soon, thanks to a feature called the “Letter List," readers could even use the magazine’s address as their own, and Billboard Advertising would forward them their mail or keep it for them at headquarters, free of charge, writes Ken Schlager in an official company history. Schlager describes the service as“a precursor of today’s E-mail,” and within 20 years, he says, “more than 42,000 performers, agents and other showmen” were taking advantage of the Letter List.

During this time, the magazine shortened its name to The Billboard, and lengthened itself to double its original eight pages. It now contained advertisements instead of advertising advice, and juicy show biz news instead of "poster-paste recipes," Schlager writes. Donaldson also used his platform to advocate against both “filth” and censorship, hoping, presumably, that the entertainers would clean up their own acts.

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The Billboard 1896 Christmas issue (left) and The Billboard's Tenth Anniversary issue, from 1904 (right). (Photos: WikiCommons/Public Domain)

When Donaldson died in 1925—after a long retirement in a Florida home flanked by both Ringling Brothers—the magazine continued expanding along with the entertainment scene. At this point, concerts, movies and stage shows had largely outstripped circuses and whale shows in popularity and influence, and more and more of the magazine was dedicated to the exploits of singers and actors.

In January 1936, The Billboard published its first “Chart Line,” a tally of the songs played most often on three major radio networks. The first #1 was the jaunty “Stop, Look and Listen,” by Joe Venuti, the father of the jazz violin, featuring the prophetic lyrics “There’s no danger like the danger of a song and dance,” sung by Ruth Lee. By 1961, Billboard had dropped its carnival coverage entirely, fully seduced by the music business.

In the meantime, it was churning out chart after chart. The radio play list was soon joined by "Most Played in Juke Boxes," "Harlem Hit Parade" (the first R&B chart), and "Hillbilly Records" (now called Country & Western). In July of 1940, Billboard added to their table stable with the intuitively named "List of Best Selling Retail Records," considered the most direct ancestor of the Hot 100. The first retail champ was “I’ll Never Smile Again,” by Tommy Dorsey & His Orchestra and featuring Frank Sinatra and the Pied Pipers—the midcentury equivalent of that Calvin Harris/Taylor Swift collaboration we’re all waiting for.

article-imageFrank Sinatra in 1947, gearing up for a string of chart-toppers. (Photo: William P. Gottlieb/Library of Congress)

After spending several decades compiling various one-variable charts, Billboard finally hit on their own #1 idea on August 4, 1958. They streamlined their most relevant lists—Best Sellers In Stores, Most Played By Jockeys, and Most Played In Jukeboxes—into one “main all-genre singles chart,” the Hot 100.

This was the “first true blend” of sales and plays, the secret sauce that reflected America’s actual favorites, says pop-chart columnist Chris Molanphy. The first song to be declared the official Hottest in the Nation was Ricky Nelson’s “Poor Little Fool,” the midtempo story of a heartbreaker who has the tables turned on him. (Crank that one up and imagine it wafting out of the open tops of countless Chevy Impalas.)

People loved having only one list to work with. Top 40 radio countdowns quickly aligned themselves with the first two-fifths of Billboard's list (although some veered away again just as fast—the Hot 100 draws from a broad set of sounds, and some narrower radio stations got flack from rockist listeners who hated disco, or adults who hated 2 Live Crew).

article-imageThe Hot 100 logo, blaring primary colors. (Image: WikiCommons/Public Domain)

The Hot 100's ubiquity, simplicity, and constant shifting meant that people could talk about it with the excitement and savvy usually reserved for things like sports. It developed its own rituals—Casey Kasem's smooth Sunday rundowns, the Year End charts and subcharts as the calendar turns. It has become immediate shorthand for success—no VH1 Behind the Music lacks a dramatic Hot 100 montage, and no diss track is complete without a swipe at the competition's failure to chart. 

It even launched a vocabulary: the phrase "number one with a bullet" refers to a Hot 100 innovation, a small symbol indicating that a song is on its way up. To be "number one with a bullet" means you’re at the top and still rising, thus not likely to vacate the penthouse anytime soon.

In the decades following its introduction, Billboard has tweaked the Hot 100's formula continuously to keep up with the times. In 1959, jukebox plays were removed from the equation; in 2005, iTunes downloads were added to the fray, and streaming came on board in 2012. The biggest changes, such as the replacement of self-reported sales with more objective SoundScan data in 1991, caused seismic chart restructuring, catapulting acts as different as NWA and Garth Brooks to the top. These days, to reach #1 status, you have to perform well in three areas: sales, radio airplay, and online streaming. In other words, people have to like your stuff enough to want to hear it at home, in the car, and on the computer.

article-imageThe once-mighty jukebox, no longer the arbiter of hotness. (Photo: Kenny Louie/Flickr)

The latest song to hit this trifecta—the era-definer for this week—is “Cheerleader,” which uses smooth vocals and bubbly horns to convey the happiness of a man who has finally found the right woman. The song has been kicking around in one form or another since 2012, when singer OMI released it in his home country, Jamaica. After an American producer discovered the song in 2014, he commissioned a remix by German producer Felix Jaehn. This radio edit, itself an internationally tweaked supersong, hit all the right buttons and has been at the top for three weeks. 

In the upcoming decades, when people look back and try to understand August 4, 2015, they'll have "Cheerleader" to guide them. And in this way, Billboard continues its original mission—helping people keep track of the evolving American circus.\

 

The Virgin Rainbow, The World's Finest Opal, Is About To Go On Display

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article-image(Photo: Courtesy of the South Australia Museum)

Put together a team of your best bag men and cat burglars, because the world’s finest opal, the “Virgin Rainbow,” is about to go on display at the South Australian Museum.

But just what makes the Virgin Rainbow, currently valued at around $1 million, so sought after?

The beauty of precious opals like the Virgin Rainbow is a product of the unique way they are formed. Opals are unique among gemstones in that they are not technically minerals, but “mineraloids,” meaning they don’t generally occur in a uniform crystalline structure. The blobby gems are formed out of a mix of water and silica which form a gel, that eventually hardens into the dancing, multi-colored jewels most people are familiar with.

Since opals are created by gel oozing into hollow space in the rock, they also have the awesome ability to form organic gem fossils. Opal often forms in and around the space left by organic matter. As the once-living matter decays, sometimes the water and silicate gel will creep into the impression left behind, and harden into organically shaped opal stones. This is best exemplified by the Addyman Plesiosaur (which is also held in the South Australia Museum).

The remarkably complete (given that it has mostly turned to precious stone) skeleton, once belonged to a long-necked aquatic lizard (dinosaurs are only on land, nerds), and was discovered in an opal mine in 1968. it is considered to be one of the finest mineralized skeletons in the world, although it is not the only one (see Eric the Pliosaur).

article-image(Photo: Bahudhara/Wikipedia)

Thanks to its prehistoric history of inland seas that disappeared millennia ago, over 95 percent of the world’s opals come from Australia, and in fact, opals are the country’s national gemstone. The landscape of southern Australia has been compared to that of Mars, where opals have also been found (subsequently proving that the red planet was once much more moist).

The largest precious (and most valuable) opal in the world is known as the “Olympic Australis Opal,” named after the Olympic games that were taking place in Australia the year the gem was found (1956). This irregular, monster jewel is 11 inches long and over 4 inches thick, containing just 1 percent, not opal stone clinging to the stone. The Olympic Australis has been said to be worth over $250 million. 

While the Olympic Australis may be the largest and most expensive for now, it is getting a run for its money in the Virgin Rainbow. The VR was discovered in 2003 by a pair of opal miners working their trade near the town of Coober Pedy, the “opal capital of the world.” Where the Olympic Australis is large and rocky, with a dull (if consistent) coloration, the Virgin Rainbow is a brightly blowing finger of stone that glistens with every color of the rainbow. The beautiful stone is only around two and a half inches long, but it essentially looks like a magic gem, shining reds, greens, blues, purples, and more depending on how it is viewed.

article-image(Photo: Courtesy of the South Australia Museum)

Like the Addyman Plesiosaur, the Virgin Rainbow is also thought to have formed from the impression of an extinct creature. ln this case, the fossil cavity would have been created by a belemnite, a type of cephalopod that lived during the Mesozoic era, when southern Australia was a giant inland sea, teeming with prehistoric creatures.

The Virgin Rainbow will be on display at the South Australian Museum from September 25, 2015 through February 14, 2016,  during their Opals exhibition, celebrating the centennial anniversary of gem mining in the region.

Beijing's Olympic Park is Now Full of Tiny, Technicolor Food Stalls

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article-image(All Photos: Anja Hitzenberger)

The sign reads, “Say Goodbye to Ordinary French Fries!” Amid garish greens and yellows, deep fryers and drawings of potato slices on sticks, a fast food worker looks at the floor. He wears a blue surgical mask over his mouth and stands in front of one of the food illustrations, which gives the impression of piles of potatoes on his head.

This is part of the series "Chinese Fast Food", photographed by Anja Hitzenberger during her two-month residency in Beijing in 2011. As a photographer who is interested in what people eat, Anja spent several weeks photographing the food stalls at the Olympic Stadium. While American fast food is only relatively new to China– the first and most popular brand, KFC, opened in Beijing in 1987—these stalls were meant to representative of traditional foods from different regions of China. The resulting photographs create a world of sensory overload: saturated color, bored workers and processed food. Atlas Obscura spoke with Hitzenberger about this project.

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Where did you get the inspiration for this series?

A lot of my work is about the relationship of the body to architecture and space, but I also work with themes that relate to food and what people eat. In 2011,  I was in Beijing for an artist residency and I went to the Olympic Park to look at the stadiums there—the park is very large and it’s mainly a tourist attraction now that the Olympics are over. In the park I discovered a temporary tent with a food court and I was really intrigued by these small, totally artificial confined spaces.

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How did you go about shooting it?

I photographed in the tent several times over a few weeks. I found the contrast of the bored workers to the busy and overloaded visuals that surrounded them fascinating and I tried to emphasize that in the pictures, which probably comes out best in the image “Chinese Fast Food 01 (aka Red)”. I photographed the series handheld, because I didn’t want to risk being thrown out for being too visible using a tripod.

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The food stalls were in Beijings Olympic Park how was the experience of shooting there after the Olympics had been and gone?

China hosted the Olympics in 2008, and the park with its stadiums was built especially for that. It’s a very large area and I’m not sure if they still have sport events there, but I think it’s mainly a tourist attraction now. To me it felt quite surreal to be there, so vast and so much empty space within this very crowded and dense city. The “Bird’s Nest” stadium is a fascinating structure, both inside and out, and I felt like a tiny little ant being in this gigantic building, almost completely alone.

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How willing were the people working to be photographed? Did you speak with any of them about their experiences?

Unfortunately, pretty much none of the people working at the stalls spoke English (and I don’t speak Chinese), so I photographed most of them without any interaction. Some of them didn’t even notice that they were being photographed, because they never looked up. Others just gave me a blank look or looked beyond the camera, but some smiled at me and wanted me to buy the food they were offering. But nobody complained or tried to stop me from taking the pictures.

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What differences and similarities did you notice about fast food in China and fast food in the US?

 It’s difficult for me to compare fast food in China and the U.S. because I try to avoid eating fast food anywhere. The meals I was eating in Beijing were generally very delicious, and so one reason I called this series "Chinese Fast Food" was because the food in the tent was not good at all! It was supposed to represent traditional specialties from different regions in China—which some of it was—but in reality most of it was simply badly prepared, processed food like one finds in the US. In China there have been many food-related scandals, including— if you can believe it—fake eggs (machine-made “eggs" sold as real eggs), or fake pork buns (buns filled with soaked pork-flavored cardboard).

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Were some of the food stalls more popular than others and if so, do you know why?

The Olympic park is frequented by Chinese tourists who come from far away provinces throughout China and I think some stalls were more popular than others, because the food there reminded people of their home region. But I think many people were also intrigued by less traditional dishes like “Twist Potato”.

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What do these photographs tell us about modern-day China?

Fast food has spread around the world very quickly, which is sad. I would love for people to rethink what they eat and I’m hoping that these artificial-looking images will be a bit off-putting for some people. But I feel the images also convey how so many things in China are simply overloaded: too much text, too much color, too much of everything. It all has to be fast, cheap and only temporary. These days, nothing in China is done to last or to stay for a long time.

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FOUND: Unusual Single-Litter California Mountain Lion Kittens

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article-imageMeet P-44 (Image: NPS)

Two spotted mountain lion kittens were found recently by the National Park Service, and these girls are fierce. Born in SoCal, a little bit north of Malibu about an hour apart, P-43, of the Santa Monica Mountains and P-44, of the Santa Susana Mountains, are less than a month old. 

article-imageP-43, hanging out at home (Image: NPS)

The NPS is tracking the cats to understand their habits and how urbanization is affecting them. These two, like their moms, will be part of the study. They're unusual in that they're both singletons, the first two single litters the NPS has documented since 2002. (And the paternity is an open question, as P-43's mother, P-23, last gave birth to a litter fathered by her own father. P-44's father is thought to be journeyman P-38, captured this past March.)

They also happen to be, for now, exceedingly cute. But check out these claws! They will definitely grow up to be strong lady cats, just like their moms.

article-imageP-44 is definitely thinking about deer for breakfast. (Image: NPS)

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. 

The Almost Perfect World War II Plot To Bomb Japan With Bats

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article-imageMexican Free-tailed bats spill out of Bracken Cave in Texas. (Photo: US Fish and Wildlife Service)

Imagine: a quiet, tense night in the middle of wartime. A plane rips through the air above your city, rupturing the stillness. The bay doors open, and out whistles a bomb. It drops and drops. Everyone braces. But when it explodes, the city is filled not with the flash of impact, but with hundreds and hundreds of tiny, whirling bats.

This ridiculous vision—in which Japanese cities were destroyed by a giant bomb full of bats that were themselves carrying tinier bombs—was called Project X-Ray, and it was but a claw's breadth from becoming a reality. 

It took a dentist to come up with such a nightmarish plan. Like many Americans, Dr. Lytle S. Adams was incensed by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, enough to turn his mind towards the war effort. Adams had just returned to his Pennsylvania home from a vacation in New Mexico, where, he remembered years later, he had been “tremendously impressed” by the Mexican Free-Tailed Bats that migrate through the state and roost by the millions in Carlsbad Caverns.

Adams read up on bats. He returned to Carlsbad Caverns and captured some of his own (it was a different time). Through study and observation, he realized that the little critters are war machines, perfectly calibrated for withstanding high altitudes, flying long distances, and carrying heavy loads—for example, timed bombs.

article-imagePresident Franklin Delano Roosevelt signs a declaration of war against Japan on December 7th, 1941. (Photo: National Archives and Records Administration)

At the time, “Americans’ image of Japan was of crowded cities filled with paper-and-wood houses and factories,” C.V. Glines writes in Air Force Magazine—in other words, the kind of metropolis that could be wiped out with a struck match. Enough bats, Adams thought, could incinerate such a city just by doing what bats do best—spreading out and hiding in eaves and attics. Of course, first the bats would have to be outfitted with tiny bombs and delivered to Japan. But, provided he figured this part out, “what could be more devastating than such a firebomb attack?”

Adams was convinced. So on January 12th, 1942, barely a month after the Pearl Harbor attack, he drew up a proposal and sent it to the White House.

Adams’s letter had all the hallmarks of a crackpot scheme. It was bombastic: it promised a plan that would “frighten, demoralize, and excite the prejudices of the Japanese Empire,” and ventured that “the millions of bats that have for ages inhabited our belfries, tunnels and caverns were placed there by God to await this hour.” It was paranoid, and warned that the plan “might easily be used against us if the secret is not carefully guarded.” Most of all, it was confident: “As fantastic as you may regard the idea,” Adams wrote, “I am convinced it will work.”

article-imageThe Mexican free-tailed bat, pictured on the right, is smaller and more common than other species such as the Western Mastiff, on the left. (Photo: Daniel Neal/Flickr)

Whether because of Adams’s rhetorical skills (or, more likely, because of his friendship with First Lady Eleanor), the proposal made it to President Roosevelt’s desk. Roosevelt sent Adams to see Colonel William J. Donovan, the head of wartime intelligence, along with a letter of his own. “This man is not a nut,” it read.“It sounds like a perfectly wild idea but is worth looking into.”

So Adams set about looking into it. He built up a coterie of supportive scientists, including Donald R. Griffin, the discoverer of echolocation, who called the plan“bizarre and visionary” and said that, if done correctly, it was “likely to cause severe damage to property and morale.” Adams took a team of University of California field naturalists on a bat-collecting trip (“we visited a thousand caves and three thousand mines,” he later recalled), and, after more testing and observation, settled on a species—the Mexican Free-Tailed bat, the very type that had originally inspired the plan. Free-tails are strong, hardy, and, most importantly, plentiful. Adams and his crew netted hundreds of them outside of one Texas cave, and sent them back to Washington in refrigerated trucks.

Two major tasks remained: designing the mini-bombs that each bat would carry, and the larger bomb that would house the whole shebang. The first problem was given to Dr. Louis Fieser, best known as the inventor of military napalm. It was a tricky project—the bombs had to be light enough for the bats to carry, and they couldn’t contain reagents, like phosphorus, that reacted with oxygen, because their bat carriers had to be able to breathe. Fieser settled on a light pill-shaped case made out of nitrocellulose, or guncotton, and filled with kerosene. A capsule on the side of the bomb held a firing pin, which was separated from the cartridge by a thin steel wire. The whole thing weighed seventeen grams (or about as much as three American quarters), and dangled from a string.

article-imageThe bomb canister, built to hold over a thousand bats. (Photo: United States Army Air Forces)

The larger, housing bomb was entrusted to the Crosby Research Foundation, a joint venture of famous crooner Bing Crosby and his brothers Bob and Larry. Based on a design by Adams, it looked, from the outside, like a normal bomb, a cigar of sheet metal with a tapered nose and fins. But on the inside, it was outfitted with a parachute and heating and cooling controls, and stacked with enough cardboard trays to hold one thousand and forty bats.

The whole thing was meant to work like this: To start the clock ticking, technicians would inject a corrosive solution, copper chloride, into the side cartridge, and then clip the bomb to the bat’s chest. They would then load the bats into the trays and the trays into the bomb, cool it down enough that the bats would think it was hibernation time, fly the whole thing to Japan in the belly of a plane, and release the bomb over the target city. In midair, the bomb would set free the trays, which would stay attached to the parachute. The bats would thaw out, wake up, and disperse, settling into nooks and crannies all over the city.

Then, each bat would gnaw through its string and take flight again, leaving the structures riddled with mini-bombs. When the copper chloride within each bomb finally dissolved the steel wire, the firing pin would snap, igniting the capsule and, soon after, the whole building. In this way, the industrial cities of Japan would be burned to the ground, bat by bat.

article-imageThe Carlsbad, New Mexico Army Air Base, post bat bomb test. (Photo: United States Army Air Forces)

The military renamed the idea “Project X-Ray,” and began tests. Some went well: a trial run at Utah’s Dugway Proving Grounds resulted in the partial destruction of the “Japanese Village,” a mockup settlement. “The regular bombs would give probably 167 to 400 fires per bomb load where X-Ray would give 3,625 to 4,748 fires,” concluded the Chief Chemist. Others were less successful: perhaps excited to be home, bats participating in a test at the Carlsbad Army Airfield escaped with their explosives and incinerated the whole test range before roosting calmly beneath a fuel tank.

More tests were scheduled, but they were pushed off. In 1944, Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King canceled Project X-Ray, not for ineffectiveness or sheer lunacy, but because all resources were being redirected to that great destroyer, the atomic bomb. For the remainder of his life, Dr. Adams dedicated his powers of invention and persistence to smaller ideas, including prairie seed bombs and a fried chicken vending machine. But he maintained the bat bomb’s legitimacy until his death. Unlike the atom bomb, he says, his method would have caused the devastation of Japan, “but with small loss of life.” We’ll never know.

article-imageA bat bomb recruit, holding a mini-bomb prototype. (Photo: United States Army Air Forces)

Naturecultures is a weekly column that explores the changing relationships between humanity and wilder things. Have something you want covered (or uncovered)? Send tips to cara@atlasobscura.com.

Netball: The Sport America Invented, Then Lost

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article-imageWhat is this not-quite-basketball sport they are playing? (Photo: VanninPhotos.com/Creative Commons)

On Friday August 7th, teams of women from 16 nations will gather in Sydney to contest the 2015 Netball World Cup.

It’s an exciting time for residents of the Commonwealth. But for Americans, it's a big pile of "meh." Because netball is a sport that most Americans have never heard of, let alone played. Which is ironic, considering it was invented in Massachusetts.

Netball first emerged way back in the 1890s, when it was known as women’s basketball—not the women's basketball you’ll find at a WNBA game, but a more dainty, restricted version of the basketball that was invented for men. 

The story begins in 1891, when Canadian doctor and physical education teacher James Naismith was working at the YMCA International Training College in Springfield, Massachusetts. Beset by harsh winters, Naismith was tasked with creating a sport that could be played indoors during the colder months. Making use of scant resources, Naismith came up with “basket ball,” a team game that employed 13 rules, nine players per side, a soccer ball, and two peach baskets nailed to the balcony of the YMCA gymnasium. 

article-imageDr. James Naismith displays the core constituents of his "basket ball." (Photo: Public domain)

In January 1892, Naismith published an introduction to this newfangled basketball business in The Triangle, the YMCA’s physical education magazine. He described it as “well suited for boys,” and a game that “may be played by gentlemen in a manly way.” Nevertheless, the article caught the attention of a woman named Senda Berenson, the gymnastics teacher at the all-female Smith College located a mere 20 miles from the Springfield YMCA.  

Berenson found the game appealing, but saw a need to modify the rules for women players so they would not degenerate into unseemly masculine brutishness on the court. In an essay titled “The Significance of Basket Ball for Women,” published in 1903, Berenson wrote that “unless a game as exciting as basketball is carefully guided by such rules as will eliminate roughness, the great desire to win and the excitement of the game will make our women do sadly unwomanly things.”

The major basketball modifications that Berenson enforced at Smith College were: no snatching or batting the ball from another player; a three-second time limit for holding the ball; a limit of three dribbles; and the division of the court into thirds. Each player was restricted to one of these thirds—a safety measure put in place because, according to Berenson’s essay, "a number of girls who play without division lines have developed hypertrophy of the heart." 

article-imageThe Smith College women's basketball team of 1902. (Photo: Public domain

Beyond preventing women’s hearts from exploding all over the gym, the division of the court had another effect: it guarded against the emergence of dominant "star player" individuals, and made it so that goals could only be scored when all team members, restrained to their sections, cooperated to advance the ball down their part of the court. 

Berenson was not the only American woman of the era who dedicated herself to turning the boisterous new game of basketball into something more restrained and ladylike. In New Orleans in 1895, Newcomb College physical education teacher Clara Baer introduced a modified version of the game with the dainty name of “basquette.” This six-per-side variant had seven court zones, no dribbling or guarding, and, in the words of Tracy Taylor in "Gendering Sport: The Development of Netball In Australia," a set of rules "that ensured players' posture remained graceful."

Another significant contributor to the early lady-fication of basketball was Martina Bergman-Österberg, a Swedish phys ed teacher who established her own women’s physical training school in London. After encountering basketball on a visit to the United States, Bergman-Österberg brought the game to her students at Hampstead Physical Training College and Gymnasium.

article-imageA Normal School netball team in New Zealand, 1916. (Photo: Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, 31-WP8110)

Taylor writes that Bergman-Österberg, a robust gymnastics enthusiast and suffragette, "promoted sport as training for motherhood and for the delivery of healthy children." In this context, women's basketball was ideal. Not only was it played "in a manner that retained femininity and decorum," says Taylor, but, because it restricted the players to their third of the court and involved no body contact, it was "not perceived as a threat to a woman's reproductive function."

It was in England that women’s basketball became “netball,” via a new name and a set of codified rules released by the phys-ed-focused Ling Association in 1901. (Confusingly, however, netball was still referred to as "women's basketball" outside Britain until around 1970.) From England, the sport spread to far-flung parts of the British Empire—for a handy glimpse into the extent of British colonization, just look at the list of countries that play netball. From St. Lucia to South Africa to Singapore to Samoa, the geographic reach of the sport is astounding.

For may decades, the game was played with local variations—Australia fielded seven players per side, for instance, while New Zealand fielded nine. Countries played by "varied sets of rules up until the 1960s," writes Taylor. During that decade, netball acquired global standards. The current version of the sport is played seven-a-side, with each player wearing a bib denoting their position in letters—"WD" for wing defense, "GA" for goal attack, and so forth. There is no dribbling, no taking more than two steps with the ball, and players have to remain within their positions' designated zones and stay three feet from whoever is holding the ball. 

article-imageNetballers in Tonga. (Photo: Netina Latu/Australian Sports Commission)

As netball flourished in the Commonwealth, its Massachusetts prototype, women's basketball, began to peter out in the United States. During the 1960s, right when netball was getting serious by aligning to international standards and having a world championship competition, American women’s basketball took its last gasping breaths, died, and, with a boost from the introduction of Title IX in 1972, was reborn with reverted rules that aligned with men's basketball—the basketball we know today.

Netball in America was lost. But it's not gone forever—there's now a movement afoot to bring it back.

Raised in netball-loving Australia, Ros Day is the VP of Education at Netball America, an association that aims to show the United States the many benefits of the game it ceded to the British Empire. One of Day's goals is to reintroduce the sport to America by bringing it into schools across the nation. In pursuing this with the help of fellow Australian expats, however, there are some unexpected challenges to overcome. "It’s quite interesting getting past our accent,” she says, “because whenever we say 'netball,' they hear 'nipple.'"

Language barriers aside, Day says that once American kids get the lowdown on what netball is, they react with curiosity and enthusiasm. Part of the appeal for them is an approach to athletics that is not often seen in the States. “The concept of playing sport socially, or for fun, in the American psyche, isn’t really there," says Day. For young people in the United States, says Day, sports are “very competitive, it’s very specialized, and it’s with the end result of the scholarship. And if you’re not that good, then you give up and you don’t play sports anymore." 

article-imageA young Goal Defense faces up to a Goal Shooter at All Hallows School in England. (Photo: Owen Lucas/Public domain)

Netball, by contrast, is not about creating LeBron-style stars. With its fair division of player positions allowing for differing strengths, the game is "fully inclusive," says Day—"no one person can dominate the game, so everyone has a role to play."

And that includes people of all genders. Despite netball's history as a game made for women, the staff of Netball America teach it to everyone. This approach reflects changing attitudes within the netball world—in recent decades, the sport has come to incorporate men and boys, either as part of mixed teams or in all-male sides. In countries like Australia, however, where netball has long been the most popular team sport for women, the image of it as a "girl's game" is hard to shake. Even in the 21st century, articles about men's growing participation in the sport still come with cutesy-bordering-on-patronizing headlines like "Netball: It's not (just) for girls!and "There is no skirting it, men love netball."

article-imageMixed netball teams fighting it out on a court in Tonga. (Photo: U.S. Navy/Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Tim D. Godbee)

For Americans, there is no such history to contend with: netball is a "blank slate," says Day. And she likes to teach it to Americans as though she is re-introducing them to a once-beloved, now-forgotten friend. “America can claim it as their own," she says. It's "the sport that they lost and are now finding again." 


FOUND: The Gates of Gath, Home of Goliath

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article-imageThe dig site (Image: Bar-Ilan University Expedition to Gath)

At an archaeological site in Tel Tzafit National Park, archaeologists have uncovered a large gate that, they say, adds evidence that this site is the biblical city of Gath, one of the largest cities built by the Philistines and the home of giant Goliath.

The location of the city has been subject to debate over decades, but currently, this site is the best bet. For 20 years, archaeologists from Bar-Ilan University have been working in the national park, and have found temples, evidence of an earthquake, and objects connected to Philistine culture.

This new find indicates that this was an important city—the kind that would need significant fortifications. "So far, only the top surface of the structures are visible, but based on the size and shape of the stones used to make them, the city walls must have been quite large," LiveScience reports

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. 

Places You Can No Longer Go: The Love Shack

Investigation: Do Bears Get Drunk Off Rotting Fruit?

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article-imageA black bear in Minnsota. (Photo: Critterbiz/shutterstock.com)

We humans never seem to tire of stories about drunk animals—horses that topple into pools, birds that fly erratically, moose that get stuck in trees. One of the most commonly cited examples is that of the drunk black bear, stumbling around after indulging in too many apples. “A 500-pound black bear reportedly drunk on fermented apples rampaged through Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, this week,” reads one example of the form. There are many videos purporting to show apple-drunk bears. Here’s another: “This bear got drunk by eating fermented apples and was found intoxicated, wobbling around a neighborhood in Lyons, Colorado,” reads the caption.

It makes sense, sort of: this bear is acting weird, bears love apples, and apples can ferment, right? Why wouldn’t alcohol impair mammals in similar ways? 

On the other hand, stories of bears drunk on fermented apples is anecdotal. Nobody has ever measured the blood alcohol level of one of these supposedly-wasted bears. So how do we crack the case of the drunk-seeming bear?

For starters, alcoholic animal research does exist. Some animal species can get drunk; there are plenty of studies in which scientists get rats drunk to test out various theories. (Here’s a good one: nicotine sobers you up, apparently, if you’re a rat.)

Others seem unable to, or at least have a wicked tolerance for alcohol. 

The pen-tailed treeshrew, a small mammal native to southeast Asia, is noted for consuming copious amounts of the nectar of the bertram palm. This nectar, when tested, proved to have an alcohol level of 3.8 percent by volume, the same as a Beck’s Light beer. Yet the treeshrews exhibited absolutely no signs of drunkenness. Same with Asian elephants known to eat the fermented fruit of the marula tree.

That palm nectar is unusual in that it is a naturally occurring alcohol that’s readily available and of a decently high alcohol by volume percentage. Alcohols themselves are extremely common; alcohol is caused when various microorganisms, especially yeasts, ingest sugars and excrete alcohol. This can happen in either an aerobic (“with oxygen”) or anaerobic (“without oxygen”) environment, but all manmade alcohols are created in anaerobic environments for efficiency’s sake. When exposed to oxygen, yeasts tend to reproduce rather than focusing on eating sugar and farting out alcohol, which means aerobic fermentation produces very low-ABV alcohol at best. In addition, the presence of oxygen triggers various other small critters to break down the alcohol into acid, which is why if you leave red wine out in the open for a few weeks, you’ll end up with red wine vinegar.

article-imageFermenting apple juice. (Photo: Nikki Tysoe/flickr)

The method proposed by those who think black bears get drunk on fermented apples is this: Apples fall off the tree, begin to rot and ferment, and bears eat them. The apples continue to ferment in the bear’s stomach, releasing alcohol, which gets the bear drunk.

In an ode to making hard apple cider, Willy Blackmore at The Awl wrote:

This is how you make hard apple cider: simply put, do nothing. Apples are sweet, and their skins are covered with wild yeasts, giving you the only two ingredients needed to make alcohol. Yeast devours sugar and booze is born.

This is true, but if you want hard apple cider, you have to separate the non-alcoholic cider from oxygen by putting it in a sealed container where no oxygen can enter. Leaving an apple to rot on the ground is extremely inefficient. “Availability of ethanol at concentrations higher than those attainable by yeast fermentation alone (i.e., 10– 12%) is a very recent event in human history,” writes Robert Dudley in a study entitled “Ethanol, Fruit Ripening, and the Historical Origins of Human Alcoholism in Primate Frugivory” in the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology. Of the fruits Dudley tested, only palm fruits ever broke the 1 percent alcohol by volume barrier. A 1982 study of various Finnish fruits found that fruits like rosehips, rowan berries, and hawthorn fruits (the latter is closely related to the apple) could only attain an ABV of between 0.05 and 0.3 percent.

“One of the issues with fermented fruit is that it would take a lot to get a bear drunk. You know, people don't get drunk from fermented apples either,” says Darrell Smith, a wildlife biologist at Western Wildlife Outreach, a scientific outreach program dedicated to educating the people of Washington and the northwest about large mammals, including several varieties of bear. Black bears can eat a lot, easily consuming 20 pounds of food in a sitting, but that’s still an extremely minimal amount of alcohol, and given the fact that a mature male black bear can weigh up to around 600 pounds—well, it’s just very unlikely to cause intoxication. “I've heard of that, but it's very anecdotal, I think,” says Smith.

Size would play a large role in an animal’s ability to become intoxicated. “It probably wouldn't take as much to intoxicate, say, a 75-pound bear, a young bear,” says Dave Garshelis, a wildlife research scientist with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources who’s led the department’s bear research project for over 30 years. But it’s still unlikely; even a 75-pound bear would have to suck down hundreds of apples at their peak level of fermentation to even feel a buzz. Go further, though, and you might have something. Birds, especially the bohemian waxwing, have been reported to become drunk from fermented berries. The low alcohol percentage would still be enough to have an effect, given a small bird’s size. “Birds, small birds, with a body weight of a couple grams? Sure,” says Smith. “But bears eating fermented apples? I don't think so.”

article-imageA sloth bear. (Photo: Nagel Photography/shutterstock.com)

An element of the “bears get drunk on fermenting apples” theory is that, well, sure, apples may not be highly alcoholic on the ground, but within the bear’s stomach, they continue to ferment and spit out alcohol. There are some problems with that notion. As omnivores, a black bear’s digestive system is not that dissimilar from our own. The ph content of a human stomach is between 1 and 3, and a bear’s is around a 3.5. Those are both extremely acidic environments; yeasts prefer a much less acidic environment, with a ph between 4 and 4.5. Neither our stomachs nor a bear’s stomach is a friendly place for yeast that wants to chew up sugar and spew out alcohol.

Even worse (for the yeasts, that is) a black bear’s digestive time is quite short, typically less than 48 hours. Even under optimal conditions, that’s not very much time for yeasts to go to town on the sugar in apples; think about how long it takes to brew beer or make wine, and those are under ideal circumstances.

There are likely to be other explanations for assumptions about an animal’s drunkenness on fallen, fermented fruit. Sloth bears in India, for example, are regularly accused of getting drunk on fruit from the mahua tree before attacking villagers. Or you could note that sloth bears are, arguably, the most violent and aggressive species of bear on the planet, well-known for attacking humans (and even tigers!) just because they feel like it.

Another example: back in 2008, a pony in Cornwall, presumed drunk, after definitively gorging on apples, fell into a pool and had to be elaborately rescued. The more likely explanation is that the pony’s digestive system is not set up to devour huge quantities of sugar-rich foods like apples; equines are better suited for grasses. It’s well-known that feeding equines fruits and vegetables can cause gases to build up in the animal’s stomach, and as horses are incapable of burping, the gas can be painful and even incapacitating. The Cornish pony probably was just in pain and not totally aware of its surroundings—but not because of alcohol.

The same is true of bears. Some might be sick, or obese, or sleepy, or otherwise acting strange. That’s not to discount the accounts of bears actually drinking alcohol, which is not common but not unheard of. “I've heard of them biting into a beer can,” says Garshelis. “They wouldn't know what was in it, though. You know, they can't read. But they could be biting into everything, and probably end up liking the taste of it.”

Bears: just like us. In that they are technically unable to become drunk from eating fallen apples.

 

FOUND: A Plant that Can Make You Blind

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article-imageIf you see this plant, stay away. (Photo: Rüdiger Wölk/Creative Commons)

A giant hogweed—a white-flowered plant that has the power to cause blindness in humans—has been found growing beside a road in Calhoun County, southwest Michigan.

The Battle Creek Enquirerreports that the Calhoun County Public Health Department is "asking county residents to be cautious" after removing a giant hogweed discovered just outside the town of Battle Creek. Uncommon in the United States, giant hogweed is "a public health hazard that ranks up there higher than poison ivy, poison oak and poison sumac," according to Michigan's Department of Agriculture and Rural Development. A member of the Federal Noxious Weeds list, giant hogweed produces a toxic sap that can cause severe skin irritation—including blistering that leads to permanent scarring—and even blindness if the sap comes into contact with your eyes.  

The plant, which resembles parsley, Queen Anne's lace, or cow parsnip, can grow to 14 feet tall. Native to central Asia, it was introduced to the United States around 1917 as an ornamental garden plant. It has since been spotted in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, Oregon, Washington, Michigan, Virginia, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, but reports of unpleasant encounters are rare. Though no other giant hogweeds were found in Battle Creek, Michigan, more may be growing in the wild, says the Enquirer

Though much rarer in the U.S. than classic summer spoilers like poison ivy, giant hogweed has been causing a lot of trouble in the U.K. this summer, where several people have treated in hospitals severe skin reactions and blistering after coming into contact with the plant. (For the record, if you discover you have touched a giant hogweed, the best approach to minimize harm is to wash the area with soap and water and stay out of the sun for 48 hours.) 

Giant hogweed is one of a range of toxic, dangerous, and even potentially lethal plants kept behind a gate marked "These Plants Can Kill" at Alnwick Poison Gardens in England. 

Bonus finds: A stolen Stradivarius, recovered after 35 years; the largest feature in the universe; footage of Chris Farley as Shrek.

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. 

100 Wonders: The Middle Finger of Modernity

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Once you are dead you have very little say about what happens to you next. 

When Lenin died he expected to be buried in a cemetery next to his mother, but mother Russia had other plans. Lenin's 145-year-old corpse is still on display some 85 years later. According to his embalmers, the corpse is, surprisingly, only improving with age. Lenin with his careful team of biochemists, anatomists, and surgeons represents one of the lucky stiffs. More often than not, someone just comes in the night and grabs your skull.

Last month the skull of Nosferatu director F.W. Murnau went missing near Berlin. Its whereabouts are currently still unknown. Einstein's brain spent twenty years in a pair of mason jars in a cider box in the basement of a Princeton pathologist. Recently the brain was divvied up and sent to the National Museum of Health and Medicine and the Mütter Museum. Einstein's eyes are in believed to be in a New York safe deposit box, and were owned by his ophthalmologist until his death in 2009. In a 1994 article Einstein's eye doctor Henry Abrahams said: "Having his eyes means the professor’s life has not ended. A part of him is still with me.“ (The current ownership of Einstein's eyes is unclear, though presumably they passed to whoever received Abrahams' estate after his death.)

Napoleon's penis is in New Jersey, Rasputin's member is possibly in Russia, Geronimo's skull is believed to be in the back room of the Yale Skull & Bones Society in Connecticut, Eva Peron's body took a 20-year posthumous trip around the world, and Lincoln's coffin has been opened five times and moved 17. 

The list goes on and on. Mussolini, Beethoven, Mozart, Chaplin, Elvis, Ann Boleyn, Thomas Paine, Oliver Cromwell, even Saint Nick's bones were stolen by a professional group of relic thieves in 1087. Santa's bones are said to "weep mana" and Bari, the Italian town that stole the bones, still throws a party to celebrate the bone theft every year.

The more famous you were the more likely it is that some piece of your body will end up stolen, mummified, or in a jar somewhere. So let's give this rule a name. Let's call it "The Galileo Principle" in honor of the man and the middle finger that proudly greets visitors to this day. 

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