All images courtesy of BOND/360

The Kathputli colony, located on the outskirts of New Delhi, is where families of magicians, puppeteers, acrobats, and artists converge. Hand-built by the residents over decades, the colony is an outward expression of the performers' unique culture, with practice spaces that allow them to perfect their craft. 

For filmmakers Jimmy Goldblum and Adam Webber, the Kathputli colony is one of India's most intriguing yet imperiled places. Since the 1950s, when roaming families of performers first settled in the area, the colony has become one of the country's last bastions of magic and puppetry.

But as modernization arrives on Kathputli's doorstep in the form of a luxury development proposal, the community's entire way of life is threatened. Its culture is baked into the very structure of the colony, and, as the new documentary Tomorrow We Disappear shows, for them, adapting to a hyper-modern lifestyle is akin to fitting a square peg in a round hole. 

At its core, Tomorrow We Disappear is a film about change. And it evokes the fear, resentment, and powerlessness the Kathputli residents feel when confronted with development schemes and inefficient governance. 

We talked to Jimmy and Adam about the process of making Tomorrow We Disappear, which was released today on iTunes and TWDfilm.com.

Besides this particular colony [Kathputli], are there still other places in India where these traditions survive, or is this sort of the last holdout?

Adam: What makes Kathputli unique is that they were all these separate itinerate groups of performers that would travel around for hundreds and hundreds of years. In the 1950s, they started using Kathputli as like a stopover tent camp outside of Delhi. But then Delhi started doubling, tripling, and quadrupling in size, so they started to hang around a little bit more, and they [the performers] stayed permanently.

So [Kathputli] is the first place that has this concentration and variety of different artists from so many places.

How did you get involved with this particular community? Where did the idea come from?

Adam: Jimmy and I were college roommates together, English majors actually. We read Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, and it’s this crazy, magical novel. At the end of the book, the main character hides in a "magician’s ghetto"—that’s the actual quote from the book, what the place was called. When Jimmy read it, he Googled “India Magician’s Ghetto” thinking, “what if this place actually did exist?”

Because so much of Midnight’s Children is fantasy.

Adam: Right. So he found this little blurb in the Times of India, and he emailed to me, and we both got really excited about it. But we searched, and still couldn’t find that much information about it.

At the moment, it was kind of "well, we have two options–we could just quit our jobs, and fly there. Or leave it be."

So we quit our jobs and flew there. It was a crazy, impulsive time. The book [Midnight’s Children] was really close to both of us, so we decided to go in search of it. 

And it’s such a fascinating story. Beyond what’s going on politically, just watching the acrobats and magicians do their thing is pretty crazy. How was it to film some of the scenes–where you saw teenage girls bending metal rods with their neck?

Jimmy: To step outside of the film for a second, the way that worked is: we went and met with Maya, and she’s a very pretty 19-year-old girl. And we heard rumors that she was the most talented acrobat in the colony, and we walked in and she’s just this very petite girl, and we were like, “What is this?”

Her English was choppy, so she ended up just handing Adam that piece of metal rebar you saw in the film. And she asked him in sort of broken English to bend it. Because she’s pretty, he obviously wanted to impress her, and he just tried with all his might to make a dent in this thing. He turned bright, bright red, he couldn't do anything.

And then the cameras turn on, and that’s when she puts it down, and puts it against her neck. And using her chest, she’s just able to lean forward and bend it into a perfect U.

So you could imagine from our perspective, we're like, "This girl is a superhero."

Some of the things they do are pretty unbelievable. So you have to think that these men and women spend a huge chunk of their lives learning how to do their tricks safely.

Jimmy: Well, no, actually. Maya [the girl who bent the rebar] has broken something like 12 bones.

Adam: And she punctured her neck.

Jimmy: In the movie, you see her scar. Look, we’re not saying that this place is a child safety hazard by any means. What it is, is that kids are just trusted to be really brave, and encouraged to brave–and that obviously causes a lot of injuries early on, so later in life they know exactly what they’re doing, and are skilled at a level that you probably couldn’t reach in the West, because our safety precautions would never allow it.

One of the scenes I wanted to discuss was when the community members go to the courthouse [to file an anti-development petition], and they all cram into the elevator and the door keeps opening. I thought that was a cool metaphor for how their lifestyle isn’t made for that hyper-modern existence. 

Jimmy: It’s like any sort of redevelopment scheme. Like, okay, we’re going to take this slum and redevelop it into luxury skyscrapers, and we’re also going to create housing for the people we’re displacing, but that housing is going to be very different.

If you grow up making traditional wood fires, moving into a modern development is not going to work for you. People obviously adapt, but within reason. I mean, they go to the courthouse to petition against the developers, and they can’t even get upstairs because the elevator won’t work.

It’s a perfect encapsulation of the problem. The culture is really entrenched in the architecture of this colony. It was hand-built by the artists to create and preserve their traditional art forms. And so to take them out of that context, and put them into something that’s four walls, 10-by-10, the culture won’t naturally move with it.

We take modern conveniences for granted–they make our lives easier. But when you don’t grow up with them, it’s just so foreign, right?

Jimmy: A lot of our characters would say to us, "you have to give up something, to get something." And you can’t just put people in a new development, and not expect that to take away something. If the Indian government is trying to eradicate slums, and construct modern cities, then things will be inevitably lost in that process.

A lot of the film is about trying to showcase what’s at stake–what will be lost.

Jimmy: We really didn’t want to create some expert, ‘talking-heads contextualizing modern Indian development.’ We really wanted to create an intimate portrait of artists in India who represent a traditional culture that’s losing their way of life. And to establish that intimacy, you really have to earn people’s trust, and spend the time.

Adam: That’s actually a really important point. Just to get at the approach for the movie, we wrestled with it a lot. The film you saw came out of a lot of intense discussion. After interviews and research and all this groundwork we put into it, we didn’t think in these people’s cases they didn’t need another top-down telling you about development statistics. It was really important for us to have a bottom up view of what this displacement process was actually like, because a lot of it gets lost in the news headlines.

For us, the purpose of the film is to show what is the experience like when this is happening to you. What does it feel like? It’s really confusing, and it’s scary. The questions are more intimidating than the actual thing.

Photo: G.G. Bain News Service/Wikipedia

The first daredevil to ride over Niagara Falls in a barrel wasn’t some brash young man looking to make headlines. It was a 63-year-old school teacher who just wanted to drum up some retirement money by becoming the Queen of the Mist.

Annie Edson Taylor, the first person to make it over Niagara Falls in a barrel, just needed to garner some fame to pay the bills, but it wasn’t always this way. She was born in Auburn, New York in 1838, and lived a very well-to-do upbringing. Sherman Zavitz, the Official Historian of Niagara Falls, Ontario describes Taylor as being “very prim and proper,” relating as evidence a first-hand story he was told, from Edson’s later life, where she berated a child for “eating peanuts in front of a lady.”  

Taylor began a career as a teacher after taking a four-year training course, during which she met her husband-to-be, David Taylor, at the age of 18. The couple went on to have a son who perished just days after his birth. Then the family was struck by yet another tragedy when David was killed during the Civil War.

After her husband’s death, Taylor moved around the country taking different teaching jobs. She began living a movable life that left her nearly destitute by her 60s. Not a total nomad, Taylor briefly settled in Bay City, Michigan, opening the first dance studio in the city, before heading back on the road to places like Texas and Mexico City.

Staring down a future in the poorhouse by the turn of the 19th century, Taylor began to dream up ways that she could shore up her bank account for her later years. As Zavitz tells it, Edson was reading a magazine article about daredevils who had ridden out the whirlpool rapids at the bottom of the falls. This gave her the idea to do them all one better and actually go over the falls in a barrel. It would make her famous if she survived. “She never seemed to have any doubt that she would survive.” Zavitz says, “She was a very determined lady. A very upbeat sort of person. A very positive person. So she was quite certain she could do this stuff, and would survive it, and would make a fair bit of money from it.”

Photo: Francis J. Petrie Photograph Collection/Wikipedia

The Pan-American Exhibition, a World’s Fair that was headquartered in the area was scheduled to take place from May to November in 1901, so Taylor planned her stunt for October 24th, the date of her 63rd birthday (although she advertised her age as 43). She was confident that her death-defying stunt would turn heads and garner crowds from the massive gathering.

The vessel Taylor chose to ride over the raging falls in was a custom-made pickle barrel of her own design that stood around five feet tall, and a little over three feet wide, weighing only 160 pounds. It was a simple construction that was made of white oak slats held together with iron rings. Inside the thing was a mattress for cushioning, and a leather harness to keep Taylor from bouncing around too much. A 200-pound anvil was also placed in the bottom of the container as a ballast to keep it as upright as possible while it bobbed its way over the falls.

She did not go over the falls without testing out her device either. Two days before taking the plunge herself, Taylor sent her housecat over the falls in her barrel. The cat survived the fall, with nothing but some cuts on the head, and Taylor took possibly her most famous photo with the feline sitting atop the barrel, looking surprisingly calm for a test animal that was almost drowned and/or smashed.

Despite Taylor’s successful test, many of the people she had enlisted to help with the stunt were skeptical. Her manager, Frank M. "Tussy" Russell, was warned that if took part in the spectacle, and Taylor died, he could be prosecuted for manslaughter in both America and Canada. Even on the day of the event, the actual barrel float was delayed a number of times due to fears from the crew that they were assisting in Taylor’s suicide.

Nonetheless, just after 4:00 pm on October 24th, Taylor climbed into her barrel with the help of handlers, and was sealed in with a bicycle pump. A few thousand onlookers watched as she was let off into the current.

The barrel seemed to bob harmlessly as it was pulled towards Horseshoe Falls, on the Canadian side of the raging rapids. Then the strong pull of the falls took hold of the barrel and accelerated it towards its fateful drop. The barrel was lost from view in the mists of the falls, falling over at some point. Within minutes, the barrel was spit back out, wholly intact, and began drifting further downstream at the bottom of the falls. The barrel finally came to rest against a rock in the river and Taylor’s handlers rushed out to the barrel. After a bit of difficulty, they were able to remove Taylor, whose first words out of the barrel were, “I prayed every second I was in the barrel except for a few seconds after the fall when I went unconscious."

Taylor is helped from the barrel after the fall. (Photo: M. H. Zahner/Wikipedia)

Taylor had survived the ordeal a little sore, reeling from shock, but otherwise unhurt save for a cut on her head, which may have happened as she was being pulled out of the barrel. She’d pulled off her daring stunt, and paved the way for over a dozen imitators recreating stunts in barrels of their own. Taylor was ready to sit back and let the riches from her crazy stunt pour in. She had become the Queen of the Mist.

Unfortunately it was only the falls that continued to flow.

After the event, Taylor’s manager ran away with the famous barrel which would presumably have been a key prop to the speaking engagements from which she was making money after the act.  “Her stage appearances did not work out that well," Zavitz notes, "She just didn’t seem to have the kind of charisma or personality or whatever to carry off that kind of thing very well.” While Taylor did garner a small level of fame after the stunt, it did not amount to the windfall she had hoped for. What money she did make was thrown into private investigators tasked with tracking down her purloined barrel. Despite placing herself once again in spitting distance of the poorhouse, the barrel was never definitively recovered.

Photo: Knightflyte/Wikipedia

Taylor continued to make some small money posing for pictures at her souvenir stand, and selling 10 cent booklets telling the story of her life, but would never again attain the wealth of her youth. She died in 1921 at the age of 82, and was buried in a section of a Niagara Falls (New York) cemetery alongside a small group of fellow “stunters.” According to Zavitz, the only reason she didn’t end up in an unmarked pauper grave is thanks to a group of friends and acquaintances in Niagara Falls who took up a collection for her plot and headstone. “She was totally broke at the time of her passing," he says.

While her bombastic stunt did not garner the fame and fortune of her dreams, Annie Edson Taylor’s adventurous life is not forgotten. “In many ways, I admire the lady," sayd Zavitz, “Her guts, her courage. I think she’s, in a way, a champion of women’s rights, because in 1901, women did not normally get mixed up in things like that."

In a park on the edge of Melbourne, a cyclist was going for a perfectly normal bike ride when he started seeing kangaroos. First just one appeared:

A few second later, he saw more in the distance. And then:

But there is a perfectly rational explanation for the "unnerving experience" similar to a "zombie apocalypse" that the cyclist describes in his video, according to the Sydney Morning Herald:

"Lorraine Jolly, Australian bush manager at Melbourne Zoo, said the large number of kangaroos was probably due to an abundance of grass in the clearing."

And, because the park is relatively close to the city, they're used to seeing people. For animals, the decision to flee involves balancing competing interests (food, danger, how much energy they have to expend), and previous exposure to humans can make animals less likely to run away when a person approaches.

The cyclist, Ben Vezina, apparently didn't seem like much of a threat to the kangaroos silently watching him on either side of the road.

Plus, the creepy kangaroos had strength in numbers. If anyone was going to get roughed up in this situation, it was the lone human. 

Bonus finds: An ancient Greek palace from 1600 B.C., an 1890s time capsule containing whisky (and not much else), 

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. 

Everyone should read on the bus! (Photo: Cogiati/Wikipedia)

If you've been lamenting the large amount of people who sit on the bus and subway with their faces buried in a Kindle or studiously focused on an iPhone screen, it’s time to move to Romania.

In June, the Romanian city of Cluj-Napoca ran a public promotion allowing anyone who read a book on the bus to ride for free. The idea was proposed by city resident, and now biblioactivist, Victor Miron. As Miron told Bored Panda, it took around a year of campaigning to the city’s mayor, Emil Boc, to bring the idea to fruition. Boc took to Facebook to see what kind of support there would be for such an initiative, and after receiving what The Independent says was an “overwhelmingly warm response,” he put the free-ride plan into action.  

The books-on-buses scheme launched as part of the celebration that took place in Cluj-Napoca after the city was named the 2015 European Youth Capital. From June 4 to 7, anyone who “traveled by book” did so free of charge. Other pro-book events also took place, such as a weekly book club that was held in the city’s botanical gardens, and a campaign to hand out free bookmarks to the public. (What better symbol for printed-book advocacy than a bookmark?)

As for Miron, he has already moved on to other forms of biblioactivism. He is currently spearheading a social media trend he is calling “Bookface.” Much like countless other outward-facing forms of solidarity, Miron's campaign encourages people to change their profile picture on Facebook—in this case, to a picture of you reading a book. People with Bookface photos can then receive discounts at city bookstores, and as he told Bored Panda, even at the dentist.

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

Restoring a painting at the  FAIC Cultural Recovery Center in Brooklyn. (Photo: Courtesy Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works)

You’ve got a muddy 18th century chest of drawers. Who you gonna call?

The American Institute for Conservation Collections Emergency Response Team, also known as AIC-CERT.

Okay, it’s not quite as catchy as Ghostbusters. But for workers at cultural institutions, the AIC-CERT is a disaster relief A-Team, solving problems ranging from a a burst pipe to a tsunami. They can be the difference between saving a collection or losing millions of dollars and priceless cultural history.

The AIC-CERT team was born out of an informal effort organized to help museums, libraries, archives and historic sites on the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, whose 10th anniversary is this year. Teams of volunteers were spending weeks at a time helping organizations assess damage and salvage collections. Afterwards, the Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation (FAIC), a national organization devoted to the preservation of cultural materials based in Washington D.C., decided to convene an official emergency response unit. In 2007 they trained an initial team of 63 people, adding another 42 members in 2011. There are conservators, archivists, curators and architects among their ranks with specialties ranging from care of furniture to paintings. The teams are distributed throughout the country, and can be reached by a 24-hour hotline. They often work in a supervisory role, providing advice over the phone or by email, but also respond on the ground. Funded through donations and grants, their services are free. AIC-CERT crews have assisted in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake, Hurricane Ike, and the Minot, ND floods.

One of the major issues faced by the FAIC Cultural Recovery Center is paintings with mold. (Photo: Susan Duhl/Courtesy Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works)

After Superstorm Sandy swept through New York, they established a temporary cultural recovery center in Brooklyn where teams of volunteers cared for over 3,000 works of art, many from individual artists whose studios and storage areas were flooded.

“Whatever happened to your building probably happened to your home,” says Eric Pourchot, who is director of institutional advancement for the FAIC and managed the Sandy response. “So it’s affecting your workers, your family. The grocery store might not have power, you’re looking for what you can eat that night. 

“It’s really helpful to have outside eyes come in and say everything is going to be OK.”

The Wake-Up Call

The AIC-CERT is part of a revitalized effort to get cultural institutions to prepare for the worst. There are catastrophic scenarios: hurricanes, earthquakes, building collapse, chemical spills. But much more common are a laundry list of mundane—but also potentially cataclysmic—cases that include burst pipes, broken windows, pest infestations, and faulty heating and air conditioning systems. But widely reported and devastating natural disasters have helped spur organizations to plan in advance for emergencies.

Katrina was a “wake up call” says Barbara Moore, a 3D object conservator and AIC-CERT member and trainer who advises institutions on how to plan for disasters and teaches disaster response workshops.

“I think it’s become much more real,” says Moore, who has taught workshops at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The National Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian.

While the general public may be drawn to dramatic tales of rescue, Moore and others interviewed for this story stressed that preparedness is key. Getting organizations to assess risk and create a comprehensive disaster plan is the most important step to emerging from a crisis with a collection intact. Taking steps as simple as compiling contact numbers and making connections with state and local officials is just as important as the actual response and recovery . The Ohr O’keefe Museum in Mississippi in Biloxi, MS is often cited as a success story—they transported many holdings to safe ground before Katrina’s flood waters arrived.

Paintings with mold damage being worked on at the FAIC Cultural Recovery Center, which involves removing the painting from the stretchers, cleaning with an alcohol solution, and re-stretching. (Photo: Susan Duhl/Courtesy Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works)

“A lot of disaster planning has more to do with how you would save something after something happens to it, as opposed to imagining yourself running into a building as its filling with water to save the one amazing thing,” says Rebecca Hatcher, preservation coordination librarian for Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Among the amazing things at the library are a Gutenberg bible, medieval and early modern materials, courtroom sketches of the 1971 trial of Black Panthers Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins, and “Sesame Street” video cassettes.

The Beinecke’s disaster plan provides for a myriad of scenarios, including gunmen and bomb threats. (In the case of all disasters, Hatcher said, the priority is human safety first, “no matter how amazing the collection is.”) The library is prepared to stop water from creeping under doors with small inflatable barriers (“We love them but they’re not actually that exciting”) and sandbags. Because, she says, a disaster of a large scale could quickly overrun the capabilities of the staff, the building is equipped with freezers.

Freezing is a well-loved tactic for those dealing with damaged collections. Particularly for paper materials, freezing can halt damage from advancing, allowing caretakers to deal with it at a later time when more help has been called in. The library also has a contract with a vendor that delivers mobile freezers. In case of fire, the Beinecke is equipped with a gaseous fire suppression system that snuffs them out by lowering the building’s oxygen content, but not so low that humans can’t survive. There is even a popular rumor that the imposing marble and granite building can retract into the ground in the event of, say, an alien attack or apocalypse. (It can’t.)

Disposing of water damaged items at the Conservation Center for Art & Historic Artifacts. (Photo: Conservation Center for Art & Historic Artifacts and New Jersey State Archives/Department of State)

But high-tech systems aren’t the norm; experts recommend simple steps, such as housing collections in protective cases or even cardboard boxes and keeping them away from windows or sprinkler systems. Dyani Feige, director of preservation services for The Conservation Center for Art & Historic Artifacts, one of the largest nonprofit conservation facilities in the world, says she takes a granular approach, “looking at anything and everything that could impact collections.” She helps organizations assess their risk—is there evidence of past water damage or a tree placed perilously close to a building?—evaluate what items are most vulnerable, and set salvage priorities if disaster strikes, which can be one of the toughest tasks.

People develop such a specific relationship with their holdings that “the idea of choosing among these collections that they are so familiar with and have such connection with can be really, really painful,” she says.

Some prioritize based on which materials will suffer the most if unattended (the oldest, say), are the most expensive or are display anchors, if the institution has exhibits.

We've Met the Enemy and It is Water

Here are some things that can happen to collections when they get wet: veneer will lift off the joints of the furniture, books grow mold, iron rusts. Art books, whose shiny pages are coated in clay, will turn into bricks. Ink runs. The skin on taxidermy specimens shrink and their stuffing gets soggy.

Across the board, water and mold were labeled enemy number one. Even when there’s a fire, there’s water. Moore says she doubts there is a “museum on the planet” that hasn’t had to deal with a pipe leak on inventory.

“Most at risk would tend to be organic objects,” says Moore. “Things made out of wood or textile or paper because they respond physically to the water and deteriorate quickest.” Leather, furniture and paintings are also a high priority when water has damaged a collection. Glass and ceramics are less at risk because they are more easily dried out.

A Gutenberg bible on display at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons) 

Renée Wolcott is a book conservator at CCAHA and has seen books so soaked with water that they swell and, unable to sit in a straight line any longer, form a soggy arch above the shelf. She has seen a rainbow of mold. In a damp environment, mold can set in with 48 hours and it is one problem that some collections simply can’t recover from; it can devour objects. 

Wolcott typically works at the CCAHA tending to rare books and manuscripts—the center is focused on paper objects, including wallpaper, globes and Japanese lanterns—but has occasionally been dispatched to assist in emergency situations. One organization she tended to was located next door to a building that suddenly collapsed. Workman repairing the roof of the cultural institution had to clear out, and no one was allowed back for a couple days.

“And during that time, it poured rain,” says Wolcott. “It bucketed rain.”

The drains clogged, the roof leaked, and water poured onto a collection of historic books. They were deformed and grew mold, they were “really fuzzy.”

Laying out water damaged items to dry at the Conservation Center for Art & Historic Artifacts. (Photo: Conservation Center for Art & Historic Artifacts and New Jersey State Archives/Department of State)

Mold is bad for books, but it’s also bad for people. Wolcott wore a dust mask and gloves when tending to the fuzzy library. Exposure to mold can cause an allergic reaction and the longer people are exposed to it the more likely it is that people will get sick, experiencing things like sneezing and nausea.

“It’s not pleasant,” says Wolcott.

For that reason, depending on the severity of the outbreak, responders typically wear a range of safety gear, such as masks, plastic suits and booties. Full body suits are popular for cases where there may be rodents, and thus a risk of hantavirus. There are less intuitive risks, too—taxidermy was once treated with arsenic and other poisons to discourage bugs, so unless responders know how a specimen was prepared, a stuffed badger could potentially be toxic and has to be handled as such. Building safety and health risks are all things that have to be evaluated before the mess can be cleaned up.

Once it’s been determined that a structure is safe to enter, responders begin triage.

“Controlling the environment is really crucial,” says Feige, whether it’s re-sealing windows or repairing an HVAC system.

Then caretakers can begin carrying out preliminary conservation measures before more detailed work takes place. Pourchot described books left fanned out on tables and photographs clipped to clotheslines to dry after flooding. If a piece of furniture is wet, you might pull the drawers open to make sure they don’t swell up and break. At the recovery center in Brooklyn, experts removed paintings from their wooden stretchers to check for mold. They cleaned artworks with an arsenal of alcohol, blotting paper and sponges. In many cases, the tools being deployed are simple—it’s just a case of knowing how and when to use them. Don’t freeze an acrylic painting—it will grow brittle and break. Do freeze a book. Teaching workers who aren’t conservators how to do their own cleanup is one of the goals of disaster preparedness champions.

Moore teaches a wet recovery class for organizations in which she fills a kiddy pool with water and submerges items like sweaters, books, photos and artwork that she picks up from thrift shops and yard sales.

“When I’m at a yard sale I buy amateur paintings,” she says, “Which are remarkably resistant to damage. We have a saying, ‘You can’t kill bad art.’”

Participants practice rescuing these cast-offs from the water and learn ways to dry and care for them. (CCAHA offers a similar workshop.)

When confronted with a mangled artifact, an untrained person can grow overwhelmed. “What we find is that people in the midst of disaster will look at something like that and think, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s toast,” she says, “What can I do?’ and even throw things away because they think there’s nothing to be done.”

Moore suggests those individuals take a step back and reevaluate the situation. Because with proper training—and maybe a freezer—not all has to be lost. “It’s quite amazing what can be done to restore things,” Moore says.

The city of Reims, c. 1916. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons) 

In the ancient French city of Reims there is a magnificent turreted town house that dates from the 13th century. It is surrounded by a light-colored wall with a large plaque commemorating the time when 17-year-old Joan of Arc brought Charles VII to be crowned in 1429.

But hidden behind the wall is something extraordinary: a rarely visited garden filled with architectural ruins and flowerbeds of wild roses. Collected by one man following the armistice of 1918, this haunting graveyard of forgotten doorways, columns, and archways tells the story of one France’s most historic cities, and its almost complete destruction during World War I. 

Located in the bucolic Champagne-Ardennes region of northeastern France, Reims has been the traditional crowning site of the kings of France since the 11^th century. The old city is dominated by the 800-year-old cathedral of Notre-Dame de Reims and the Romanesque Saint Remi Basilica, while the countryside is dotted with the vineyards of prestigious champagne houses, like Veuve Clicquot, that go back hundreds of years.

The restored Hotel le Vergeur and the ruined le Pavillon Coquebert. (Photo: Luke Spencer)

As the German army poured through Belgium and into France in the autumn of 1914, Reims became a key strategic target–both tactically, as it was a gateway to Paris, about 80 miles away, and in terms of French morale. The city was swiftly captured just a month after war had been declared, although the Germans only occupied the city for eight days, until the Allied victory at the Marne forced them to withdraw.

The massed German army promptly took up a new position on the ridges of the champagne vineyards a few miles to the north east of the city, where as part of their giant western front trench system, they would stay until near the end of the war. 

Unable to recapture Reims, the Germans decided to reduce it to ruins. For four years, the German artillery pulverized the ancient city, all but obliterating it. High explosives and incendiary shells rained upon the city almost continually, as fires engulfed the city. On April 1st, 1917 alone, over 2,800 shells exploded on Reims. The next night, a further 2,100 shells fell on the city.

Reims had once been the traditional crowning site of French Kings. (Photo: Luke Spencer)

Incredibly, the citizens of Reims largely refused to leave their besieged home. Most sought safety in the caves buried hundreds of feet deep underneath the Pommery champagne house.

By the end of the war, 80 percent of the city where French kings had been crowned for nearly a thousand years had disappeared. Of the city’s 14,000 buildings, only about 5,000 remained, including large parts of the Cathedral, which the Germans purposely spared. Reims was the hardest-hit large city in France. In 1919, the President of the French Republic conferred the Legion of Honor upon the whole town, dedicated to the “martyred city, destroyed by an infuriated enemy, powerless to hold it.” 

Faced with the giant task of rebuilding the city virtually from scratch, hundreds of architects were invited to Reims, and given nearly free reign to redesign the ruined city. Some 6,500 new buildings were constructed during the 1920s, mostly in the Art Deco style. Visitors walking along the boulevards today will see important civic buildings in a diverse array of modernist styles. 

But centuries of French building history would have been all but lost in the rubble, but for the efforts of one man. 

Hugues Krafft in 1882. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Hugues Krafft was born in Paris to a German father in 1853, but moved to Reims in the late 19th century to work in the lucrative champagne trade. Looking to buy a suitably grand home, he purchased an old town house, called the Hotel le Vergeur, which overlooked the old market square, where linens, wheat and champagne had been traded for centuries.

The turreted home was severely damaged in World War I. In the 1920s, Krafft restored most of the townhouse to its original beauty, but left one wrecked section standing. That is the Pavilion Coquebert. The crumbling masonry and blasted architecture of the Pavilion, which dates to the 17^th century, gives a poignant glimpse into how the rest of the devastated city would have looked in 1918. 

The Hotel le Vergeur where Hugues Krafft built his garden of rescued ruins. (Photo: Luke Spencer)

As the ruins of Reims were torn down to make way for new construction, Krafft searched through the rubble for the remnants of the city’s historic past. He saved doorways, lintels, whole facades, columns, archways and tombs and brought them to the garden of the Hotel le Vergeur, where he created his garden of ruins. For the interior of the hotel, he salvaged fireplaces, libraries and artwork. 

Following his death in 1935, he left the collection to the Societe des Amis du Vieux Reims, where it still rests today. 

Preserved ruins of Le Pavillon Coquebert, destroyed during World War I. (Photo: Luke Spencer)

Ancien Hotel Lagoille de Courtagnon

Dating from the end of the 17th century, Krafft rescued part of a wall from this old hotel, along with a remaining archway. According to a plaque at the site, it was from this wrought iron balcony that Marie Antoinette watched her husband Louis XVI leave Notre Dame cathedral to go to the Abbey Saint-Remi to touch sufferers from tuberculosis. 

Balcony from l'ancien Hotel Lagoille de Courtagnon. (Photo: Luke Spencer) 

Facade du 5 rue de Sedan

This entire facade had came from a majestic town house, built just behind the city hall. 

Facade du 5 rue de Sedan. (Photo: Luke Spencer) 

Portail de l’Ancienne Abbaye de Saint-Pierre-les-Dames

This beautiful entrance Krafft saved from an old Benedictine monastery that dated from the 6th century, which was all but completely destroyed by German artillery. 

Portail de l’Ancienne Abbaye de Saint-Pierre-les-Dames. (Photo: Luke Spencer)

Portail de l’Ancien Hopital Saint-Marcoul

Dating from around 1650, this hospital was the domain of a monk called Saint Marcoul, who it was said could cure scrofula, or tuberculosis of the neck with his touch. When the Kings of France were crowned at the cathedral, the tradition became that they would visit Saint Marcoul to lay hands on the afflicted. Krafft rescued the entire giant entrance, including a doorway still inscribed Hopital de Saint Marcoul.  

Portail de l’Ancien Hopital Saint-Marcoul. (Photo: Luke Spencer)

Portail du Cloitre de l’Ancienne Eglise de Saint Pierre le Vieil 

Once one of the largest churches in Reims, the structure was originally demolished during the French Revolution. According to a plaque at the site, the door was uncovered during the digging of the front line trenches at Reims, and eventually saved by Krafft. 

Portail du Cloitre de l’Ancienne Eglise de Saint Pierre le Vieil. (Photo: Luke Spencer) 

16th century tomb of a Knight of Malta

This tombstone marked the burial place of a Knight of Malta, also known as the Knights Hospitaller, of the Order of Saint John. The legendary military order was charged with the defense of the Holy Lands and the Crusades, and is one of the last Orders from the Middle Ages which is still active today. 

16th century tomb of a Knight of Malta. (Photo: Luke Spencer) 

Arcaded Romanes de l’Ancienne Commanderie du Temple

This giant stone archway in the Romanesque style originally adorned a commandery of the Knights Templar. It had been given to the legendary order by Archbishop Henry of France. For nearly two centuries, the Knights Templar grew in power and stature, until on  Friday, October 13th, 1307, all the Knights Templars were rounded up by Philip IV, and their property seized, including this building.

The order was disbanded by the Pope five years later, whereupon the building became the property of the Hospitaller Order of St. John, who held it until the days of the French revolution. According to a plaque, the once beautiful building was eventually purchased by Madame Clicquot Ponsardin, of the Veuve Clicquot champagne family, in 1831. The archway was found during the excavations following the end of the war by Krafft and brought to his garden. 

Arcaded Romanes de l’Ancienne Commanderie du Temple. (Photo: Luke Spencer) 

Walking through the beautiful, and often deserted gardens of the Hotel le Vergeur is a similar experience to visiting an empty historic cemetery. Covered in ivy and still bearing the scars of endless shrapnel and artillery fire, the carefully collected architectural ruins speak to the four years of horror as the German shelling gradually destroyed the ancient city. 

Today Reims, with its historic cathedral surrounded by luxurious champagne houses and vineyards, is once again a bustling tourist destination. Walking through the city it is hard to imagine that nearly everything you see is not even a century old. That is, unless you venture into the walled garden of the Hotel le Vergeur, and stroll through the scattered ruins of the lost city.  

Rural Free Delivery, 1914. (Photo: Library of Congress)

These days, with maps that tell you exactly when a bus is coming and weather apps that notify you exactly 12 minutes before it will start raining, the package delivery industry would seemingly have figured out how to pinpoint when your Amazon order will arrive.

And yet, no. The delivery window is still between 8 a.m.- 8 p.m., sometime the middle of Monday and Friday. And if you should happen to miss that, well, there’s always the orange note stuck to your neighbor’s mailbox.

For the past 40 years, the package delivery system has seemingly not changed; we’re still dominated by a few huge companies (some private, some public) which have storefronts and deliver products by air, land, and sea. But new advances and ideas are beginning to transform the way items are moved between consumer and producer: drones, automation, the sharing economy, megamerchants. Amazon wants you, in the near future, to hammer on a dedicated button next to your toilet that will send a humanoid or robotic courier to your bathroom with a new roll of toilet paper.

One thing that never seems to change is that Americans want stuff shipped. And shipped fast.

An 1860 advertisement for the Pony Express. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Prior to the mid-1800s, package (or parcel) services were ad-hoc and unorganized both in the U.S. and in Europe. If you wanted to ship something, you’d pay a courier to do it, and the courier would, typically, drop off the package at some kind of central ground, like a coffee shop or a tavern, according to a U.S. Treasury paper on the subject from 2003.

Organization in the U.S. came with the California Gold Rush in the 1860s. All of a sudden, large numbers of Americans began to settle in California, far from most established population centers. The immense distances separating the Pacific coast from the rest of the country made the ad-hoc courier system wholly inadequate; only at scale would delivery of mail and packages make any kind of economic sense.

Thus sprang up the Pony Express, which primarily dealt with letters, and Wells Fargo, which specialized in packages.

Wells Fargo was not a bank, but a concerted effort by a bunch of New Yorkers to corner the market on all shipping, coast to coast. In the early decades of the 1800s, there were quite a few East Coast shipping proto-magnates who saw the need, in an enormous country, to move goods back and forth reliably. One of those was Henry Wells. Another was William G. Fargo. And one final one was John Butterfield. Each had their own small package delivery company, making up three of the biggest of what was at the time called the “express industry.” The three joined forces in 1850 and formed...haha, you thought I was going to say Wells Fargo, didn’t you? Nope. They created American Express.

In 1852, the American Express guys finally decided to act on the need for a West Coast operation, delivering from East Coast hubs to the new city of San Francisco and thereabouts. American Express’s board wasn’t too enthusiastic about jumping into the California game, so Wells and Fargo decided to start, basically, a moonlighting company to service the west. Wells Fargo was born, launching with 12 offices in California.

An 1857 illustration of the Overland Pony Express. (Photo: Library of Congress)

This new delivery concern very cleverly started including newspapers, for free, along with their packages. This endeared them to the news media, for one, but also to anyone who used the service. Everyone loves a freebie, and apparently people at the time also loved the news. The company also delivered gold as well, turning the company into not just a delivery service but something closer to finance and business. (At this time, it took five days for news of Lincoln’s election to reach California (and even that fast was considered an impressive achievement), which really puts in perspective the frustration of having to spend a whole day at home waiting for an Amazon delivery.)

Wells Fargo very quickly became an indispensable element of life in the West. When gold was found in a new area and a town was quickly erected, the first shops to open were a saloon, a gambling table, and a Wells Fargo outpost. It was, famously, immortalized in song in the musical “The Music Man”:

O-ho the Wells Fargo Wagon is a-comin' down the street, Oh please let it be for me! O-ho the Wells Fargo Wagon is a-comin' down the street, I wish, I wish I knew what it could be!

Advertising Poster for Butterfield Overland Mail route, 1865. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

The early days of Wells Fargo were still run by the old systems: steamships down to Panama, horses over the Isthmus of Panama (a horrible trip), then ships again up the Pacific coast. It took until 1858 for the first over-land delivery service to be accomplished, which was when Congress authorized a bidding for the rights to create a mail route from St. Louis to San Francisco. The bidding was won by the not very creatively named Overland Mail Company, which was headed by John Butterfield and consisted of a partnership between American Express, Wells Fargo, and a couple other express companies.

It took 24 days to hammer out a trail from St. Louis to San Francisco, a 2,800-mile journey. Overland Mail Company secured a contract from the government to carry all official mail. The contract stated that mail would take no longer than 25 days to be delivered, but the specifics could (and did) vary; you never really knew when the mail would arrive. It was rugged country in the West, with plenty of ways to die.

Wells Fargo & Co. Express, Alaska, 1900. (Photo: Library of Congress)

Wells Fargo, thanks to the resignation of Butterfield, took over control of Overland Mail’s board in 1860 and formally acquired the company in 1866. Also in 1866, Wells Fargo bought its biggest rival, Russell, Majors & Waddell. In between, it also acquired Pony Express and the government contract previously awarded to Overland.

But in 1869, everything changed: the country had several disparate railroad systems, controlled by private companies, and that year they were finally joined, forming the first transcontinental railroad system. All of Wells Fargo’s carefully constructed monopolies became, instantly, outdated. The owners of the Central Pacific railroad created an express company solely for the purpose of screwing with Wells Fargo, which bit, and bought the express company for the purposes of being able to use the Central Pacific railroad. Suddenly, packages would arrive in mere days, not weeks, and the company could ship much more cheaply and reliably.

A parcel post delivery man, 1914. (Photo: Library of Congress)

Wells Fargo continued dominating the package delivery industry until World War I, when the railroads (and the express services which used them) were nationalized. The federal government forced all existing express companies to combine into one monopoly, called the Railway Express Agency, to make it easier for the government to ship weapons, people, and goods during the war efforts. The Railway Express Agency eventually crumbled due to the next technological advance (the dominance of trucks over trains), and folded in 1975. But by that point Wells Fargo had long since split its delivery business from its new and more profitable banking business.

The beginning of the 20th century brought huge changes to the package delivery system. It’s important to remember that the federal post office was kind of an upstart, more of a regulatory agency than an actual shipping company. Companies like Wells Fargo were much more popular in the West in the late 19th century. The first big change was the establishment of Rural Free Delivery in 1896, which ensured that mail would be delivered directly to Americans in rural areas (then comprising 54% of the population) for free, instead of forcing them to head to often faraway post offices. In 1913 came the second big change: Parcel Post, which allowed packages of up to 11 pounds (at first) to be shipped for very, very cheap. In fact it was so cheap that college students from the 1910s to the 1960s literally mailed their dirty laundry home to have it cleaned, because it was less expensive than having a professional clean it nearby. They had special metal laundry boxes for that. Along with laundry, an entire bank was broken down into bricks and mailed.

Parcel post area of mail room showing trucks and tables stacked with packages, U.S. Post Office, Washington, D.C, c. 1920. (Photo: Library of Congress)

A small child was mailed, too. Charlotte May Pierstorff fit under the then-active weight limit of 50 pounds (today it’s 70) and was mailed from Grangeville to Lewiston, Idaho for 53 cpents. Her trip took only a few hours. (It’s no longer legal to do that.)

A new company, initially known as the American Messenger Company, sprung up in Seattle in 1907, just before Parcel Post debuted, founded by a teenager who wanted to use his bicycle, then motorcycle, then his Model T to deliver packages locally. It was, basically, a lemonade stand model—a bunch of kids doing odd jobs for not very much money. Those odd jobs just happened to include package delivery services.

James Casey, at 19 years old, quickly expanded the company, merging with other like-minded small courier services and moving quickly beyond the borders of Seattle. In 1919, the company changed its name, becoming the United Parcel Service, or UPS. The brown color was there from 1916, when the company started using cars—and very cleverly arranging packages and delivery routes so as to maximize efficiency.

The car and truck boom was the catalyst for UPS’s explosion, but UPS also became a direct competitor to the Parcel Post system by securing “common carrier” rights throughout the country. Common carrier rights means that UPS has some of the rights and responsibilities of a public company, though it’s private: it is explicitly working for the common good, and is subject to regulation by the government. Having those common carrier rights allowed UPS to become the largest package shipper in the world. UPS, reliant on land travel, wasn’t the first to attempt airmail; the Post Office Department, the predecessor to the USPS, took over a few planes from the Army and began delivering mail by air in 1918. But package delivery was not done in these early years and it took until the late 1920s for the first attempt, by UPS. The company promptly gave up, finding that it wasn’t cost-effective, until the 1950s, when it was resurrected thanks to cheaper flights.

In 1970, President Nixon abolished the Post Office Department and created the United States Postal Service. The USPS was designated the only carrier of official mail in the country, which restricted the private companies like UPS to either package delivery or courier-type deliveries. Regular mail was cheap and efficient done by the USPS, so UPS couldn’t really compete. But packages were something different. Enter Federal Express. Fred Smith, the company’s founder believed that the USPS’s package delivery service through the airlines was wildly inefficient, relying on governmental pressure on airlines to deliver packages, as well as communication between several different entities (a local post office, the USPS, however many airlines it took to ship a single package). His idea was to streamline the process so that only Federal Express handled everything, from receiving to delivering. After initial financial woes (the company was literally bailed out on Smith’s blackjack winnings one time), FedEx became a huge success.

The present-day hasn’t much changed from the 1970s: packages are delivered by either the USPS, UPS, FedEx, or (more rarely) any of a few regional companies. But that’s soon to change, becoming much more chaotic. Amazon, the largest shipper in the country, is experimenting with using its own private courier service for its same-day Prime Now program, as well as playing around with the idea of using drones for (very) small deliveries.

Loading air mail in Detroit in the 1930s. (Photo: Bill Whittaker/CC BY-SA 3.0 WikiCommons)

One element that deserves changing is the cursed delivery window requiring customers to be at home for an entire day, having no idea when the package will actually be delivered. UPS, FedEx, and the USPS have all been very slow to adopt smaller delivery windows. “What makes it complex is the sheer number of deliveries we make each day – we deliver about 18 million packages every day,” says Dan McMackin of UPS. Implementing tracking in each package and algorithmically figuring out when a package is likely to arrive is tricky, and these companies haven’t quite figured out how to adjust those algorithms on the fly so that shippings are grouped depending on a customer’s preference for delivery. In other words, it’s hard for the delivery service to tell you when the package will arrive, and also hard on the service if you want to tell the service when to deliver the package. Of course, money can change all of that; UPS, FedEx, and the USPS all have programs, usually crafted as a subscription, which allows the consumer to pick a delivery window. But it’s not universally free, not yet.

The sharing economy is destroying the hegemony of the UPS/USPS/FedEx system by allowing customers to hire couriers independently through services like TaskRabbit. Instead of booking through a courier service, TaskRabbit allows anyone to become a courier, instantly—without training, maybe, and without necessarily offering much protection either to the user or to the newly minted courier, but circumventing larger companies does come with a reduced price tag. This kind of thing, weirdly, works not just for local deliveries but also for giant companies like Amazon, who have “fulfillment centers” (read: giant warehouses) all over the country. A customer in Seattle and a customer in New York can both order a 48-pack of Diet Pepsi from Amazon and have it delivered the same day, because both Seattle and New York have nearby warehouses that stock Diet Pepsi. Smaller retailers can’t compete, but that system also boxes out the delivery services. Who needs ‘em?

The future of package delivery, at least in the near term, is chaotic: amateurs, machines, who knows what else. But, then, package delivery has always been chaotic.

One of three newly found paintings (Photo: Chicago Park District)

In 1892, Japanese workers began building a pavilion on the Wooded Island of Chicago's Jackson Park. The next year, as part of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, the Phoenix Pavilion opened to the public. Its design was based on one of the most famous temples in Japan, and inside the rooms were stocked with Japanese furniture, objects and art. After the exposition was over, Japan left some of those treasures to Chicago — including a set of sliding door paintings that were soon lost 

This week, the Chicago Mayor's office announced that those paintings had been found, in a storage facility of the Park districts. The three paintings were in "moderately stable condition," although darkened by age. But it should still be possible to restore the paintings and maybe even display them.

The Phoenix Pavilion (Photo: Public domain)

The paintings were attributed to the artist Hashimoto Gaho. The doors were made of an inner wooden skeleton, a layer of paper, and then the painting, all set in a frame that could fit into the sliders of a house. 

As NBC Chicago reports, this is "not the first time officials found precious works of art in the Phoenix Pavilion." A few decades back, they found carved transom panels that were later displayed at a Chicago art museum. 

Cities often have a difficult time keeping track of the art that they own: Chicago is lucky that someone found these works of art before they had deteriorated so much they couldn't be restored. 

Bonus finds: An ancient iguana, a 2,000-year-old egg

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. 

 Clocking in 4,750 miles long and 9 miles wide, the Great Green Wall of Africa is as ambitious as it is necessary.

While only 330 miles of greenery have currently been planted in northern Senegal, international organizations have pledged over $3 billion towards the completion of this massive environmental project, designed to help stop land degredation. But the Great Green Wall is about more than just protection from desertification. Thousands of jobs, increased environmental diversity, land management research, and tourists drawn to visit the planned forest are all additional benefits. 

The successful growth of the Great Green Wall won't just benefit the local region, it will have an impact on the entire African continent and beyond, stabilizing an unstable region, and helping fight the effects of climate change on a global scale. 

German wasps on their way to the bar, or in this case, a rotting apple. (Photo: Bernie/Public Domain)

"Drunk" and "angry" are just about the last two words you'd want to associate with a swarm of giant wasps. But if you're in the United Kingdom, take cover: this summer, German wasps (Vespula Germanica) have been getting drunk and crashing parties. 

Over the last few months higher than average temperatures in the region have brought the wasps out in full force. And these wasps are bigger and angrier than your standard variety. Experts say that German wasps are over twice the size of regular wasps, and pack a noticeably more painful sting. One poor sap, stung on the chest, was convinced that he was having a heart attack. 

Not only that, the wasps are on summer break and looking to make mischief. According to Paul Bates, a manager of a local pest-control company in Essex, England, "these worker wasps have finished their life's work as queen wasps have finished laying eggs, and don't need food brought to them. This means that they are free to go out and enjoy themselves."

As with many a human, summer unemployment for wasps means it's time to gorge on alcohol—in the form of rotting fruit. Unfortunately, German wasps have quite a low tolerance for booze. And drunk, bored wasps are "likely to sting for no apparent reason," says Bates.

One outdoor cafe owner in East Sussex summed up the problem: "This summer has been a great year for wasps but a dreadful one for picnics. It's a big problem for us because they come after our jam and our marmalade."

Bates duly cautions any brave wasp killers: "One unfortunate victim told us how her brother had used a stick to smash a wasp’s nest but, since she was eating sherbet, the wasps attacked her." 

Better to leave the hordes of venomous insects to the trained professionals. 

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

'Modern Venus of 1947, Coney Island'. (Photo: Courtesy Brooklyn Museum Collection)

Coney Island has long been an accessible, one-day vacation for New Yorkers wanting to escape the heat. The first amusement ride was built in 1876 and from that time until World War II, Coney Island was the largest amusement area in the United States. It evokes long days at the beach, gaudy fun fairs and nostalgia.

Coney Island has been enshrined in literature, film, television and music. Its strange history is the focus of an upcoming exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, called Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008, which opens on November 20th. Covering a 150-year period, the exhibition includes artwork, objects and photographs of the iconic amusement park.  

On this last Friday in August, reminisce with this selection of summertime images from the exhibition.    

'Beach Scene' c. 1879 by Samuel S. Carr. (Photo: Smith College Museum of Art/Courtesy Brooklyn Museum)

'Bathers, Steel Pier, Coney Island' c.1880 by George Bradford Brainerd. (Photo: Courtesy Brooklyn Museum Collection) 

Steeplechase Funny Face. (Photo: Collection of Ken Harck/Courtesy Brooklyn Museum)

Post for the 'The Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show on Earth ' 1898 by Strobridge Lithographing Company. (Photo: Cincinnati Art Museum/Courtesy Brooklyn Museum)

Luna Park and Surf Avenue, Coney Island 1912 by Irving Underhill. (Photo: Courtesy Brooklyn Museum Collection)

'Pip and Flip', 1932. (Photo: Daniel J. Terra Collection/Courtesy Brooklyn Museum)

'Coney Island Embrace, New York City' 1938 by Morris Engel. (Photo:© Morris Engel/ Orkin/Engel Film and Photo Archive/Courtesy Brooklyn Museum)

'Coney Island, July 30, 1949' by Homer Page. (Photo: © Homer Page/The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art/Courtesy Brooklyn Museum)

'Little Fugitive' 1953 (Photo: © Morris Engel/Courtesy Brooklyn Museum)

'Untitled (Buried Alive) ' c.1960s-1970s by Harry Lapow. (Photo: Courtesy Brooklyn Museum Collection)

'Coney Island' 1971 by Stephen Salmieri. (Photo: © Stephen Salmieri/Courtesy Brooklyn Museum Collection)

'The Hug: Closed Eyes and Smile' 1982 by Harvey Stein. (Photo:  © Harvey Stein/Courtesy Brooklyn Museum)

'Coney Island Pier' 1995 by Daze. (Photo: Collection of the artist/Courtesy Brooklyn Museum)

'Fortune Teller, Jones Walk, Coney Island'  2008 by Frederick Brosen. (Photo: Courtesy of Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York/© 2013 Frederick Brosen/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Courtesy Brooklyn Museum)

Arches National Park, one of the many itinerary options for teen tours. (Photo: Jean-Christophe Benoist/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

For the youth of America, camp has an undeniable allure (the lack of parental supervision looming large). But why spend your whole summer in one bunk when you can stay at four hotels in California, three campsites in Montana and Utah, and a cruise ship in Alaska?

This is the lure of teen tours—the 4-to-6-week luxury trips out West taken every summer by hundreds of kids around the country.

A photograph from 1861 of Gunnery Camp, the first organized American summer camp. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

While nowhere nearly as popular as summer camps, these kinds of teen trips have been around since the mid-1960s. Early teen-tour operators out of Long Island and New Jersey first conceived of these trips as an alternative to sleep-away camps, marketed toward kids who had a thirst for adventure but a distaste for bunk life and athletic activity. American Trails West and Musiker Teen Tours, the first two companies to offer these tours, sent out supervised groups of three-dozen 14-year-olds on coach buses across the country, stopping at the major national parks—from Yellowstone to Arches—and the major resort destinations—from Las Vegas to Palm Springs. 

This was not your family’s rustic road trip. Equal in price to the most exclusive sleep-away camps, the tours provided only the best amenities. The trips that did offer camping stays showcased the “five-star” camping experience: giant, 12-person tents filled with double-decker cots. With this set-up, no camper would ever actually have to touch the ground. Accompanying the coach bus with the kids was a food truck, driven and serviced by a cook who prepared all the meals at the campsites. 

Compared to today’s cell phone-connected world, these trips operated with a huge amount of freedom. “They gave me a dozen maps of the West and $40,000 worth of Traveler’s Cheques that I carried in a back-pack my father carried in World War II,” says Faith Baron, who guided tours in the 1970s with American Trails West. “The bus rides were fun but endless. Whenever any of the kids asked us how much longer until we got to the next place, we had the same answer: 1,000 miles. No one actually knew. Then we’d stop the bus at a highway stop and buy them ice cream. It was all chaos and we had a blast,” she says.

One of the hotel options from American Trails West, the Hyatt Regency in Waikiki, Hawaii. (Photo: Prayitno/flickr)

Forty years later, a small handful of teen-tour operators continue to run annual summer trips out of the New York tri-state area. While Musiker Teen Tours has re-invented itself as Summer Discovery, offering pre-college study abroad programs instead of cross-country trips, originator American Trails West, and a few other almost-as-oldcompanies are still in the teen tour business. They’ve expanded their offerings to now include month-long tours around Europe and combination Alaska-Hawaii trips, but the formula remains the same: take 40 kids to as many places as they can stand in 42 days.

Although variations on the teen tour arose throughout the country in the 1980s and 1990s—shorter, less extravagant trips run by religious and service-oriented organizations—the teen tour, in its original, outsized and deluxe form has remained a tiny industry, with fewer than six or seven operators running trips at a time.

For this reason, the story of the American teen tour is a well-kept secret limited to only the circles of the lucky kids—like myself—who have experienced them. Images and representations of sleep-away camp abound in the collective imagination, a cultural lexicon that includes everything from Meatballs to Salute Your Shorts to an entire genre of 80s slasher films. Where is the Wet Hot American Summer of teen tours? It’s a myth fifty years in the making, waiting to be told.

Lake Tahoe, another tour offering for teens. (Photo: Lara Farhadi/WikiCommons CC BY 2.0)

 Just as sleep-away camps don’t seem to change much over the years, neither do teen tour buses. Listening to Baron recount her trips from the 1970s felt a lot like re-living my own summers as a teen-tour traveler in the early 2000s. She described the same food trucks, the same double-decker cots, the same amusement-park buddy system, the same all-quiet-in-the-morning bus policy I remembered from my trips. On the open road, few things change.

The cast of characters, too, is nearly identical. “We had the kids who wanted to shop and the kids who wanted to hike,” Baron says. The same divide marked all three of my teen tours. With the National Park Passport Book I made sure I had stamped at every park we visited, I was one of the kids who wanted to hike.

Yellowstone National Park. (Photo: Karthikc123/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0) 

“On every trip I went on, we had to send at least one kid home,” Baron says. I remember vividly the delinquents from my own trips. On my first trip, it was the boy who threw water balloons off a hotel balcony in Seattle. On my second trip, it was the girl who got caught smoking something you can’t buy at a road-stop convenience store. Maybe the author of the 1988 guide, Summer Camps and Teen Tours: Everything Parents and Kids Should Know,was onto something: “If your child has difficulty following instructions, if he has a long history of spending his school days in the principal’s office, if you know that he has been abusing drugs, a teen tour is not the place for him.”

What would the Meatballs of teen tours look like? Take all those uncomfortable, charming, weird mid-adolescents of Wet Hot American Summer and put them on an air-conditioned bus to a rodeo in Cody, Wyoming or a ski resort in Whistler. It’s not so much a camp experience as it as a family vacation with no one you’re actually related to. There are all the emotional milestones of sleep-away camp—it’s fun when you’re there, sad when it’s over, melancholy and strange when you think about it years later—but there’s something else, too. It’s that combination of wanderlust and boredom you can only find on a teen tour bus.

Whoa, double black hole! (Image:  Space Telescope Science Institute)

Quasars are unbelievably bright. When astronomers first found them, they thought they might be really, really luminous stars—they can be brighter than entire galaxies—but, in fact, their brilliance comes from a different source, the black hole at the center. As black holes suck matter in, that friction and heat blooms into a massive outpouring of energy.

The closest quasar to us is Markarian 231, and two Chinese scientists just found not one but two black holes at its center. As Popular Science reports, they most likely came together when two galaxies merged. But one is smaller than the other, and over time, they should meld together into an even more massive black hole. 

Scientists still aren't sure exactly what black holes are, though. This week Stephen Hawking put forward a new theory about the black hole paradox. Even as a black hole sucks material in, it emits particles, so that over time it will evaporate. The question is: what happens to all the stuff that went into it to begin with? 

Hawking's idea that the material is stored on the event horizon, rather than in the black hole in two dimensions—it never disappears entirely. It's an intriguing (if mind-bending) idea, but not necessarily the answer to how black holes work. (Scientific American's whole run-down is helpful for anyone interested in the dark details here.) No matter what, though, the main advice about black holes still stands: Don't go anywhere near them unless you want to be pounded into a pulp.

Bonus finds: A fake Goldman Sachs, a tiny crocodile being smuggled in a boot

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. 

News of sinkholes hits the headlines on a surprisingly consistent basis. So much so that sometimes it feels as though we are all just walking around on the thin crust of a hollow Earth, waiting to take that one false step that will send us plummeting toward its core.

Over the weekend, this nightmare became a reality once more—and the moment was captured on video. As ABC News reports that this past Saturday, in the city of Harbin, China, a group of pedestrians and commuters waiting at a bus stop learned about sinkholes the hard way, when one suddenly opened up beneath their feet, swallowing five unsuspecting victims, and the bus stop sign.

As the video, which was captured by a noodle restaurant’s surveillance camera, shows, no one appeared to suspect that the ground was unsound. When the collapse occurred, there was no time to jump out of the way.

Fortunately, the hole that opened up was a relatively shallow 10 feet deep, allowing everyone who fell in to be pulled out with only minor cuts and bruises. A small number of bystanders were scraped up when the sinkhole sunk, but they, too, were alright. 

The cause of the collapse has been attributed to heavy rain seeping into a drain pipe under the street which weakened the walkway above. The hole at the bus stop has been repaired, but as the video shows, the ground beneath our feet may not be as stable as it seems, and holes can happen just about anywhere, any time. Happy travels!

A Peabody Essex Museum volunteer coaxes a Strandbeest forward. (Photo: Atlas Obscura)

Strandbeest Handler #4 was having some trouble. It was time to promenade, and her charge—a ten-foot-long scaffold of tan PVC pipes, flanked by two outstretched sails—had stage fright. Its 12 legs, normally eager to show off their perfectly calibrated stride, were frozen in place. As she tugged on one of its extremities, the scratchy sounds of plastic feet dragging on cement cut through Boston’s City Hall Plaza, and an onlooker cried out: “The Beest is resisting!” 

Resistance was futile—the Strandbeests, artist Theo Jansen’s herd of self-propelled, autonomous-seeming mechanical “animals,” are on their first ever U.S. tour, and the humans in charge are making the most of it. This Beest soon fell into step behind its brother, who sported sharp-edged plastic wings instead of sails, and they did round after round of the small corral, posing for pictures like huge, skeletal show ponies. 

Animaris Ordis parades through City Hall Plaza. (Video: Atlas Obscura)

Some animals fit well in the city: Pigeons, for example, treat skyscrapers like smoother cliffs. But Strandbeests are made for the beach. When loosed on a seashore, where they can catch the wind, their leggy frames, all concatenated triangles, are light enough to traipse along and sturdy enough not to topple.

At a good clip, they look like the offspring of giant crabs and organized haystacks. In fact, they were originally made to save the beach—Jansen, who is from the Netherlands, first envisioned them as machines that could fight rising sea levels by tossing sand onto the dunes, a new entry in the rich Dutch tradition of windmills and brave boys with their fingers in dikes. “Strandbeest” means “beach animal” in Dutch.

Animaris Percipiere in 2005, in its natural habitat. (Photo: Loek van der Klis/Theo Jansen)

Instead, the Strandbeests became their own tradition—one that took over Jansen’s life. For 24 years, he has done nothing but create them. Since the beginning, they’ve been made only of plastic, with PVC pipes serving as the main building block (what Jansen calls the “protein”). Newer versions have nerves (dangling surgical tubes) that can tell when the Beest has hit the water, and muscles (pistons) that respond by steering it the other way. They have body fat—plastic bottles that take in, compress, and store air, so it can be used during windless times. Jansen dreams of creating a reproductive system—whereby when two Beests meet, whichever one has been more successful transmits its design to the other, who then reconfigures itself to match. In 2001, he told the New Yorker he is sure he could make perfect beach animals, if only he had the millions of years natural selection has enjoyed. 

Animaris Umerus on Scheveningen Beach in the Netherlands in 2009. (Photo: Loek van der Klis/Theo Jansen)

Since he doesn’t, he relies on a different sort of reproduction—the cultural kind, whereby when a person sees a Beest, she is captivated, and tells everyone she knows. That strategy has allowed the animals to colonize habitats as diverse as art museums (after this jaunt about town, they are headed to the Peabody-Essex through the winter), BMW commercials and, today, a certain City Hall Plaza. The volunteers that aren’t parading the Beests around are showing off miniature toy versions and giving out temporary tattoos labeled “#strandbeest.” Audience members lean into their cameras, enraptured, citing Da Vinci and sci-fi movies ("Don't post any pictures of me," one says to her companion, "just in case I end up calling in sick!"). Critics, too, tend towards rapture, seeing in the Beests souls, and even post-human potential. Someday, if things continue apace, they may be the most alive things left on Earth.

Leashed to the volunteers, and confined by a plastic barrier that looks suspiciously like PVC, the Strandbeests seem less like the future and more reminiscent of previous human efforts to contain what lies outside our control. Until they build their own cities, the Beests are reluctant to parade around ours.

A close up of a YKK zipper. (Photo: Chris 73/ WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

There is not a groin in the world that the city of Kurobe has not touched. 

It has done so through the auspices of YKK, the world’s largest manufacturer of zippers, producing roughly half the world’s supply—some 7 billion a year. Yet to understand how Kurobe became the zipper capital of the world, one must travel back to the very birth of the zipper, to a time when the zipper wasn’t even the zipper at all. 

It was in the midst of the Victorian age that mankind suddenly grew disquieted with the button. Along with brooches, buckles and pins, the button had ruled supreme as a clothes-fastening device since ancient times. Yet now it would face its stiffest competition to date. Elias Howe, the magnificently coiffed inventor of the sewing machine, sounded the first warning shot to the button’s dominance when he patented an “automatic continuous clothing closure” in 1851. His invention was forgotten amidst all the hemming and darning, but ripples were already spreading out into the placid pond of fastener innovation.

Elias Howe, c. 1850. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

They reached the obsessive Chicago inventor, Whitcomb Judson, towards the end of the 19th century. Judson abruptly felt the need to free people from the tyranny of high-button shoes. He intended to do so through the creation of what he termed were “clasp lockers”. But his invention was too bulky, and his fanatical redesigns grew ever more complex and impractical. Abetted by his financial backer, Colonel Lewis Walker, Judson founded the Universal Fastener Company even while the device had a fatal flaw—a propensity to burst open at inopportune moments.The pair’s most high profile sale was to the US Postal Service who tried them on their mail sacks. However they bought only twenty.

Perhaps Judson’s alarmingly wide array of interests—he designed both street railways and nose rings for hogs—prevented him from perfecting the device. It was left to Gideon Sundback, a Swedish inventor working for the Universal Fastener Company, to finalize the design with his own "separable fastener" in 1914, and at long last it seemed as if the world was ready to embrace the device. It was, after all, the era of the motor car, the tank, and the airplane. The natural was rapidly being supplanted by the manmade. So too in the world of fasteners. Out went the old organic forms—discoidal (circular) buttons and hook-and-eye fastenings—and in came a clothes conjoiner for a new mechanical age in which two rows of protruding metal teeth clamped together like some fearsome haberdasher dentata. 

A close-up of Whitcomb Judson's 1893 patent for "clasp locker or unlocker for shoes". (Photo: Google Patents  US504038 A)

The separable fastener was something out of a Futurist’s utopia. All it needed was a suitably modern name. 

That would eventually come thanks to the B.F. Goodrich rubber company, who installed Sundback’s fastener on their boots in 1923. As recounted in Robert Friedel’s essential zipper tome, the boot was originally called the Mystik but it sold terribly. The inspiration for the new name came from the company president:

“What we need is an action word…something that will dramatize the way the thing zips…Why not call it a Zipper?” 

It was a moment akin to Lennon meeting McCartney, Jobs meeting Wozniack, Kanye meeting Kim. The device’s onomatopoeic name sang of the modern, of speed and frivolity. Ziiiiip! The world of pants would never be the same again.

Patent for Gideon Sundback's "separable fastener". (Photo: Google Patents US1219881 A)

The Universal Fastener Company, now named Talon, set up home in Meadville, Pennsylvania, and began mass-producing its zippers. By 1930, 20 million Talon-made zippers were being sold a year, but mainly for unglamorous functions such as pencil cases, bun-huts and engine covers. However when the fashion designer Elsa Schiaperelli used them in her 1935 spring collection (which the New Yorker described as “dripping with zippers”), the humble zip entered the world of high fashion. Menswear followed. In 1937 Esquire magazine announced that the zipper had beaten the button in the "Battle of the Fly." By the end of World War II, Meadville was selling some 500 million zippers a year and was renowned as the zipper capital of the world. Even its radio station was named WZPR. 

So how did a small rural town in Japan, half a world away, come to dethrone this zippering behemoth? Through the single-minded visionary purpose of Tadao Yoshida, the founder of Yoshida Kōgyō Kabushikigaisha (Yoshida Manufacturing Shareholding Company) from which YKK is necessarily abbreviated.

Yoshida had grown up in Kurobe the son of an itinerant bird collector. After a slew of business failures he moved to Tokyo and, seeing the growth of the zipper market, opened his own zipper firm in 1934. The success of Talon was known around the world and Yoshida shamelessly copied its products and machines, while adding some distinctive touches—like using aluminum instead of copper. When World War II began, he kept in business by supplying the Japanese Imperial Navy with zippers, and when his factory was burned to the ground during the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945 he relocated to his hometown of Kurobe and began all over again.

Yoshida’s remarkable stick–to–itiveness had been spurred on by reading Andrew Carnegie’s The Gospel of Wealth. Now, as if infused with the reciprocal force of the zipper, he too created a quasi-philosophy that he termed the Cycle of Goodness™. This stated that “no one prospers without rendering benefit to others.” It was a simple but enlightened creed that suggested that well-treated workers would create a better product, a better product would benefit customers, and satisfied customers would, in turn, benefit YKK. In short, Yoshida wanted to use his zippers to bind together not only clothes but also the very fabric of society. 

A YKK zipper. (Photo: JD Hancock/flickr)

YKK was unusual in that it produced everything used to make its zippers in-house. Brass, aluminum, polyester, yarn, were smelted and woven in Kurobe. Workers lived in dormitories opposite the factory and a leadership cult quickly grew up around Yoshida and his Cycle of Goodness^TM. Gripped by zippering inspiration, YKK’s designers began churning thousands of different types of zippers aimed at specific industries and individual customers. It made the world’s smallest zipper, the concealed zipper, the first nylon and polyester zippers and the world’s thinnest zipper. A pantheon of patented fastenings rolled off the factory line—Beulon! Eflon! Zaglan! Ziplon! Minifa! Kensin! Natulon! Excella!—each one seeking to create a more perfect union. Soon YKK was opening factories across the world the better to offer their services to local manufacturers and by 1974, YKK was making one quarter of the world’s zippers, enough in one year to stretch from the earth to the moon and back again. 

By contrast Talon, which in the late 1960s was producing 70 percent of the United States’ zippers, was now barely producing half that. Its decline was rapid. By 1993 Meadville no longer had any zipper factories within its town limits at all. 

(Photo: cursedthing/flickr)

Meanwhile Kurobe and YKK goes from strength to strength. It now makes silent zippers for soldiers on the battlefield, fire-retardant zippers for firemen, airtight zippers for astronauts. It makes zips for drainage ditches, zips for rockets, and zips for fishing nets. Occasionally there are snags, such as when an exporter in the Deep South of the United States began importing zips with KKK on them to appeal to local markets, or when YKK was accused of operating a zippering cartel. Similarly market share is constantly being eroded by thousands of tiny Chinese zipper concerns that have managed to reverse-engineer YKK’s closely guarded zipper-making machines, as YKK once did itself. 

Nevertheless YKK remains a universal brand. Its zippers sit like tiny symbiotic aphids on our clothes, offering immediate access or exclusion to our bodies. From its headquarters in Kurobe, YKK has become the gatekeeper to the world.

The Shigir Idol (Photo: Владислав Фальшивомонетчик/Wikimedia)

The Shigir idol was found in 1894, in a bog in western Siberia. Bogs are unusually effective at slowing the decay of organic matter: the microbes that speed rot don't like living there. So it was likely that the Shigir idol, a long wooden statue with strange markings on its torso and a head on top, was very, very old. 

When scientists dated it in the late 1990s, they found that it was 9,500 years old. But a new analysis of samples from the statue has found that it may be even older than that, and was first created 11,000 years ago.

The statue is covered in geometric-looking designs. No one know what they mean: there's speculation that they designate ideas of earth, sky, and danger. Besides the three-dimensional face atop the statute, there are faces etched into the wood lower down, too, and the new analysis puts the total number at 8, one more than previously detected. 

The idol would have stood about 17 feet tall and was made from a larch, cut down by stone tools. (It's not clear how it was made to stand.) It was originally found in pieces—some of which have since been lost. A drawing of the complete set was made about a century ago, by the Russian archaeologist who proposed the configuration of the piece.

Vladimir Tolmachev's drawings (Image: Vladimir Tolmachev/public domain)

In more than a hundred years, it's become clear that this is the oldest wooden statue currently known—but we still have no idea what it was intended for.

Bonus finds: Two-headed pig, a giant sheet of ice on Mars

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. 

Warren G. Harding campaigns for the presidency in 1919. (Photo: Library of Congress)

Nearly a century after his death, Warren G. Harding is having a moment in the limelight.

Thanks to timeless curiosity and modern genetic testing, the New York Times recently broke the very old news that Harding fathered a love child with Nan Britton while in the Senate. (This comes on the heels of the Library of Congress’s release of sheafs of salacious letters between Harding and Carrie Phillips, another woman with whom he had an extra-marital relationship.)

Meanwhile, President Obama’s environmentally-minded trip to Alaska this week has stirred up memories of Harding’s own northern tour, during which the Navy shelled the Taku Glacier to make an avalanche for Harding’s amusement. 

Some, such as Harding biography authors Ronald and Allis Radosh, are taking this opportunity to try to resuscitate Harding’s less-than-stellar reputation, which has left him languishing at the bottom of most ranked presidential lists, fighting James Buchanan for the next-to-worst spot. They point out that Harding, despite the scandals that rocked his presidency, was ahead of his time on social issues, and even managed to balance the budget.

But there is another good reason to revisit Harding. As the 2016 presidential race creeps up, and celebrities begin throwing their megaphoned voices behind various candidates, it’s worth remembering that Warren G. Harding didn’t just fill a chair for four years—he invented what has become a national specialty: the presidential celebrity endorsement.  

Sheet music for stage and screen star Al Jolson's pro-Harding campaign song. (Image: Library of Congress)

In the runup to the 1920 Presidential election, Harding was a three-term Republican senator from Ohio with a decent reputation and without much to set him apart. The New York Timescalled him“a very respectable Ohio politician of the second class,” and referred to his Senate record as “faint and colorless”. Harding likely would have stayed that way but for the unexpected death of Teddy Roosevelt at the beginning of 1919. Roosevelt was a shoo-in for his party’s presidential nomination, and with the heavyweight out of the picture, dozens of greener Republicans, Harding among them, found themselves with a fighting chance at the presidency.

Harding didn’t do much to distinguish himself during the primary, content to toe the party line and make long speeches about nothing—a tactic he called “bloviation.” In the meantime, the frontrunners slowly reduced their own chances until, late in the last night of the Republican Convention, the delegates started looking into the pack of dark horses for a more suitable candidate. According to historian Wesley M. Bagby, Harding “was more acceptable than the others because he had not spent large sums,” and after over a dozen rounds of ballot-casting, all of which ended in deadlock, “a kind of weary understanding was reached… that support in the morning would be thrown to Harding.” And so the bloviating, colorless Senator found himself gunning for the presidency. 

 Harding accepts the Republican nomination from his front porch. (Photo: Underwood & Underwood/Public Domain)

Harding had a particular strategy in mind for the real race. While the Democratic ticket, made up of James M. Cox and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, hit the campaign trail, Harding decided to run a “front porch campaign”—rather than heading out to win over the world, he’d bring the world to his own front door in Marion, Ohio, where he could better control the message. Several past presidents, including James A. Garfield and Benjamin Harrison, had tried this technique, but William McKinley had perfected it, winning the 1896 election by bringing nearly a million supporters to his house over the course of the campaign and greeting them with carefully constructed media events. 

Harding's front porch. When he was campaigning in 1920, the whole place would be mobbed. (Photo: Library of Congress)

Fortunately, Harding had recently remodeled his front porch to look almost exactly like McKinley’s, with stately columns and a rotunda that looked almost like a stage. To complete the transformation, the GOP Executive Committee moved McKinley’s flagpole to Harding’s lawn. The infrastructure in place, Harding, his wife Florence Kling, and his savviest adviser, advertising veteran Albert Lasker, quickly built a public relations machine to match. Soon every day was a carefully organized parade of photo ops, carefully calibrated speeches, and press conferences, all packaged perfectly and sent to the papers and newsreels. Those who couldn't come to Ohio to meet Harding got to know him on the page and on the screen.

Florence was instrumental in getting Harding to the White House—legend has it that when he tried to call in his resignation during the Republican primary, she grabbed the phone out of his hand. She had her ear to the ground in Marion, and whenever a luminary (or someone who knew someone who knew a luminary) was coming through, she grabbed them and brought them to the porch. 

Florence Kling Harding, a shrewd campaigner. (Photo: Library of Congress)

Her biggest coup was Al Jolson. Jolson, who would later become famous as the first person to ever speak in a movie, was the biggest star in America in the 1920s, all over Broadway and creeping into movies. A critic at the time called him“the concentration of our national health and gaiety,” and some consider him the first rock star—onstage, he was charismatic and melodramatic, with a tendency to run all over the stage singing directly to audience members, sweat pouring off his face. Offstage, he happened to be a staunch Republican, and on August 24th, 1920, Jolson, his charisma, and 70 of his fellow actors got on trains and rode from Chicago and New York to Ohio. With the help of a jazzy marching band, they paraded down the street from the station to Harding’s house (the campaign had renamed it Victory Way, and decked it with cardboard arches), singing, chanting, and leading a growing trail of “Harding supporters, visitors, Marionites, and starstruck movie fans.”

Jolson climbed onto the porch and declared himself the president of the “Harding-Coolidge Theatrical League,” and Florence pinned a flower to Jolson’s lapel. Harding then stepped forward for his speech, during which he waxed political about actors and plays that he loved, including Shakespeare’s Charles the Fifth, in which the king walks among his soldiers to learn their concerns—just as he, Harding, had learned the concerns of U.S. citizens by standing on his porch. The whole contingent capped things off by singing “Harding You’re The Man For Us,” which Jolson had written quickly for the occasion, possibly while on the train, and which called Harding “a man who’ll make the White House/Shine out just like a lighthouse” rather than citing any concrete political positions or relevant issues. (Jolson’s song for the 1924 campaign, “Keep Cool and Keep Coolidge,” was slightly better.) 

Harding, Lasker and Florence got 600,000 people to the porch over the course of the campaign, and a decent number of them were famous—the Chicago Cubs came, as did actors Douglas Fairbanks, Lillian Gish, Pearl White, and Mary Pickford. Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Harvey Firestone were too busy to make the trek, but lent their support from afar. Lillian Russell, an opera-turned-screen-star and a self-described “born Republican” who recruited for the Marine Corps during the war, lent her stumping skills to Harding during his campaign. “The booking agent who arranged the tour of three-and-one-half weeks gave me a grasshopper’s life, jumping from city to city” she wrote later in Cosmopolitan. “I made three or four speeches a day in 15 states.” Meanwhile, if Harding needed to, he’d do it right from Marion—like the time he threw the first pitch out at a local baseball game, then turned to the cameras, still suited up in a Cubs uniform, and talked about how the Democrats weren’t good team players. 

Today, all of these events are considered “advertising triumphs,” presaging the endless parade of endorsements we can now expect during American elections at pretty much every level, from high school cabinet races to years-long Presidential ones. At the time, they were, above all, effective. Harding went from being the least-bad nominee, wearily chosen after a night full of deadlocks, to grabbing the largest slice of the popular vote in history: 60.3 percent to James Cox’s 34.1 percent. His popularity remained sky-high throughout his time in office. And if today we don’t remember anything he did there—if, indeed, it might not fill out a Jolson-length campaign song—all the more reason to remember how he got there in the first place. 

Harding's tomb, also in Marion, Ohio, looks suspiciously like his front porch. (Image: Library of Congress)

Surface evidence of the massive ice sheet found on Mars. (Photo: NASA)

As NASA's Curiosity rover makes its way across the Red Planet, the images coming back have been breathtaking. And thanks to the internet, the public has a front seat view of an an entirely ground-breaking expedition. 

Curiosity is our best shot at locating extra-terrestrial life, so perhaps that's why we've expected a lot out of the Mars mission lately. With images of the planet's surface available online to analyze, hawk-eyed conspiracy theorists have spotted everything from a tiny lady, an iguana, and even a downed Star Wars space ship in the dry Martian sands. 

According to NASA, these finds are highly improbable–and likely chalked up to a phenomenon called pareidolia, in which your brain recognizes patterns that aren't actually there when confronted with a strange object.

That's what makes Ali Bramson's Martian discovery so notable. A graduate student at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, Ali spotted something she'd never expected to see when combing through Curiosity's images: "a crazy looking crater," in her words. 

As CBS reports, this particular crater is huge, and terraced, rather than the more common bowl-shaped craters created by asteroid impacts. Terraced craters, while common in this section of Mars (known as Arcadia Planitia), don't exactly match up with the established physical models of the planet.

Trying to figure out what may have caused the terraces to form, Bramson and her colleagues posited that there must be some sub-surface process going on. After modeling the crater in three dimensions, the researchers made a shocking discovery: there was ice under the crater, and there was a ton of it.

Measuring up to 130 feet thick, and covering an area larger than the states of Texas and California combined, the subsurface ice sheet was formed as a result of continuous snowfall millions of years ago. 

But the location of the ice is what most surprised the researchers. Scientists are aware of ice sheets on Mars' poles, but have never found any evidence of it at mid-latitudes. The ice Bramson found should be unstable in current climactic conditions, meaning, it should have melted millions of years ago. The persistence of the ice sheet gives researchers a fascinating window into Mars' climactic history. 

So how has the ice remained underneath the hot, dry Martian surface for eons? "That's what we need to investigate," said Shane Byrne, an associate professor at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory said in a press release. "There's no climate model that we have now that explains this."

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.