An artist's depiction of the battle that sunk the San Jose (Image: Samuel Scott/Wikimedia)

More than 300 years after British war ships sunk the San Jose galleon—a majestic Spanish ship packed with treasure from American colonies—its wreck has been found.

Late in November, the Colombian navy, along with a scientific agency of anthropology and history, located the ship 16 miles off the coast of Cartagena, a port city on the country's northern coast. The ship is said to have millions of gold coins and jewels inside, worth as much as $14 billion in total. It may be, the Associated Press says, "the world's largest sunken treasure."

The San Jose sank in the summer of 1708, on what was then May 28 on the British calendar and June 8 on the Spanish. (At the time, the Brits were still a few decades away from embracing the now-ubiquitous Gregorian calendar.) The ship was trying to outrun British war vessels, which were determined to capture, or at least block, the San Jose. It was a substantial ship, with three decks and 600 people abroad. Its cargo—gold, silver, emeralds, pearls, diamonds, and amethysts—was intended to help finance Spain's war against Britain and its allies, fought over the succession to the Spanish throne.

Ever since the ship sank, its treasure has been legendary. Now that it's been found, there's a fight over who will get it. Colombia wants it, of course, but an American salvage company that provided a location for the ship in the 1980s claims a large portion of its worth. (This claim has been fought over in court for years.) Spain is also considering trying to obtain part of the treasure.

No one has actually been down to the wreckage yet; the Colombian government found it using sonar and underwater robots. But the images they capture included "dolphin-stamped bronze cannons," the AP reports, which proves it: there's treasure here.

Bonus find: The faintest galaxy in the universe

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

The Out Skerries post office is facing some busy days. (Photo: Dr. Julian Paren/Geograph CC BY-SA 2.0)

Aron Anderson has been called "Britain's Loneliest Schoolboy." The only adolescent on the tiny Scottish island of Out Skerries, 10-year-old Anderson spends his days as the sole pupil in a two-room schoolhouse, and his free time biking, swimming, and hanging out with local ducks.

But soon, Anderson can look forward to another hobby–opening sacks full of holiday cards, now en route to him from strangers around the globe.

This postal present is the brainchild of Reddit moderator BesottedScot, who, after reading about Anderson, organized the card drive in order to put a “big massive smile on his face.” He recommends interested parties send their cards today to ensure timeliness, and has compiled a list of guidelines. (He has also called Anderson's school to warn them of the upcoming onslaught.)

Hopefully some of this good cheer will rub off on the adults of Out Skerries, who have had their share of troubles of late. The salmon fishing contract that kept many of them employed expired this year, and air operators recently announced they will no longer send planes to the island. The local secondary school, where Anderson’s brothers and friends once studied, was shuttered in 2013 for budgetary reasons.

After he graduates from his solo schoolhouse, Anderson will rejoin his former classmates in the (relatively) nearby town of Lerwick, which is two and a half hours away by boat.

For now, Anderson enjoys private-island life, though he says the solitude "is quite weird sometimes.” If you’d like to help introduce him to the larger, weirder island that is the Internet, send a card to:

Mr Aron Anderson
c/o Skerries School
Skerries
Shetland
United Kingdom
ZE21 9AR

This Out Skerries postbox is ready for some holiday spirit. (Photo: Chris Downer/Geograph CC BY-SA 2.0)

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 edit@atlasobscura.com.

Interstate 180 in Pennsylvania, in winter. (Photo: Nicholas A. Tonelli)

A version of this post originally appeared on the Tedium newsletter. 

If you've had a chance to ride on Interstate 180 in Cheyenne, Wyoming, you might have noticed something strange about the road. At roughly a mile long and with four stoplights, I-180 doesn't look anything like a freeway. And it doesn't seem like an "interstate," a word that implies a certain set of rules about what the road should look like.

I-180 is one of only many unusual points in the Interstate Highway System, the network of controlled-access roads which, when completed in its initial form in 1991 after 35 years of work, cost a total of $128.9 billion. (Sound like a lot? When you add in inflation over the period, the total balloons to over $500 billion.)

Introduced by Eisenhower in the 1950s, the freeway system—90 percent of which was paid for by federal funding—may be the country's greatest-ever gift to itself. While it generally follows standard procedures in terms of signage, routing, and numbering, there are points in the system where things get a little weird.

Take Baltimore's Interstate 170, or the "highway to nowhere," as local residents call it, which is the result of numerous fights that took place over where the freeway was supposed to go. The auxiliary road was initially intended to hook up with I-70, which runs from just west of Baltimore to near Cove Fort in Utah. But because of community protests, that hook-up never happened. 

"Highway to nowhere": the western end of the freeway stub in Baltimore City intended for use by the terminated I-170. (Photo: Adam Moss/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 2.0)

Despite being just 1.4 miles long, the road ended up going through numerous residential neighborhoods, displacing people and breaking up the character of the areas in the process. "If the highway actually did go somewhere, the situation would be even worse," Reason scribe Jesse Walker noted earlier this year.

The road still exists, despite a partial demolition of an unused section a few years ago, but it's pretty much a waste of space.

In nearby Washington, D.C., talk of turning the region into a similarly interstate-driven metropolis nearly threatened the character of the community's many neighborhoods. Fortunately for the city, community campaigns stepped in to stop the city from being taken over by freeways.

Reginald H. Booker, the chairman of the Emergency Committee on the Transportation Crisis, was among the leading voices in fighting the earmarked interstates during the 1960s and 1970s. "The whole theory was to appeal to homeowners, no matter what race they were," Booker recalled in a 2000 Washington Post article. "Our movement was unique. It was blacks and whites in a common effort, an integrated group, working in their own interests. That was the significant thing. It was an issue that united people."

The resulting advocacy efforts led much of the money intended for the interstate to instead go towards the creation of the city's Metro system, which—complaints notwithstanding—is still one of the best examples of a mass transit system in the United States. Campaigning also saved a lot of neighborhoods throughout the District.

Nearly as unloved as Baltimore's "highway to nowhere" is an auxiliary road in Illinois that leads to a tiny town.

Interstate 180, Near Hennepin, Illinois. (Photo: Ken Lund/flickr)

Hennepin, population 722, is perhaps the smallest town in the country with its own freeway—a 10-mile spur of interstate highway called I-180. Why were the residents of Hennepin considered so deserving? At the time the highway was built in the 1960s, it led to a steel mill. Steel is an important material in building defense materials—and defense is why the interstate highway system exists.

While companies have played up the role of the interstate in the past, low traffic on the spur road has led to recent talk of downgrading the highway to something a little less inviting than an interstate.

There are a lot of dull highways, but you probably won't find one much duller than the 37-mile stretch of I-80 in Utah. The area around the Bonneville Salt Flats is the longest stretch of straight Interstate in the entire country, with only a rest stop about eight miles in offering your eyes a break from the flat straightness of the highway. Tthere are longer straight highways in the U.S.—among them Highway 46 in North Dakota, which goes for 123 miles with only a handful of slight turns—but what really sets I-80 apart is the flatness of the land and the lack of exits. No trees, no curves, nothing.

Nothing for miles: Interstate 80 in Utah. (Photo: Garrett/flickr)

Basically, there are only three things to do in this general area:

1. Get off at exit 4—but be sure to travel from the west, so you don't have to drive 37 miles with nary an exit in sight—so you can see land-speed record attempts at the Bonneville Speedway.

2. Drive past mile-marker 26, after committing to driving this God-forsaken stretch of land, so you can see Metaphor, the Tree of Utah, a man-made art structure in the middle of nowhere. (Swedish artist Karl Momen built it in the 1980s.) Since you'll be driving by at 80 miles an hour, it won't exactly feel worth it, so the full-color photo book about it might be a better way to appreciate it.

The Tree of Utah, one of the few sights along I-80. (Photo: Ken Lund/flickr)

3. Get out of your vehicle and, uh, appreciate the salt. The reason it's there is because it once existed as part of an ancient lake that dried up.

If you don't want to find yourself on this desolate highway, you're in luck—Kyle Motch, a YouTuber who has made a name for himself by driving down unusual roads, has made the trek, which you can watch right here. It's an easier drive when you can skip back and forth in a video on the internet.

The rest stop along I-80 in Utah—a respite in the middle of nowhere—follows a general rule for rest areas on the interstate. You need a place for people to get off the highway every once in awhile, for safety reasons. Eventually, people need to have a spot to go to the restroom or to take a load off.

"Rest areas are to be provided on Interstate highways as a safety measure," an American Association of State Highway Officials policy stated in 1958. "Safety rest areas are off-road spaces with provisions for emergency stopping and resting by motorists for short periods."

Generally, this has translated to rest areas showing up once every half-hour on the interstate. But during an era of budget cuts, a lot of rest areas have been decommissioned in recent years, particularly in Virginia. (Though the state brought many of them back by popular demand.)

Part of the problem may be their image. "People don't see it as an academic thing because it's a bathroom," historian Joanna Dowling, the creator of Rest Area History, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009.

The interstate highway system may have been finished in 1991, but it's far from done. Expansion is still taking place around the country.

One such road that's currently in the works is Interstate 99, a Pennsylvania highway that breaks the rules. The defiance comes down to the initial interstate grid. The intended layout of the U.S. interstate system would require an interstate with a number that high to be pretty much on the edge of the Eastern seaboard due to the Interstate's grid setup. That’s why I-95 is in the Northeast Corridor and I-5 is on the West Coast.

But I-99? It runs through State College, right in the middle of Pennsylvania. You can thank former Rep. Bud Shuster, who represented a district that I-99 travels through, for that—he had its unusual designation written into law in 1995.

Northbound I-99 near Bald Eagle, Pennsylvania. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

There are other "rule-breakers" out there as well. Some of them are due to historic precedent. In Texas and Minnesota, for example, Interstate 35 splits off into I-35E and I-35W. No other interstate in the country splits off in this way, instead breaking off into three-number auxiliary routes such as I-295 or I-480. The only reason I-35 is allowed to break convention like this is because American Association of State Highway Officials let them. (They must've nudged the right people.)

Other rule-breakers are a bit more understandable. For example, it's not possible for Alaska, Hawaii, or Puerto Rico to have "interstate" highways in their respective regions, due to the fact that they're not near another state.

Their highways, however, still get the designation due to the way "interstate" is defined: It's a reference to how the road is paid for—that is, with federal funds—rather than where it connects.

Hawaii has traditional interstates as a result. Alaska and Puerto Rico, however, are allowed another exception by law—their roads don't have to meet federal Interstate standards, and as a result, don't have signage up reflecting the fact that they're funded like interstate highways. (In fact, much of Alaska's "interstate" system is made up of two-lane roads.)

In a lot of ways, the future of the interstate highway rests with Interstate 69, a once-regional road that's now part of an ambitious plan to improve North American trade between Canada and Mexico.

Construction of the I-69 in Indiana. (Photo: ITB495/flickr) 

Initially, the road only extended to Indianapolis; now, it's intended to extend from Port Huron, Michigan to Laredo, Texas when complete.

The result has been controversial over the years—concerns about splitting up small towns, who wins and who loses, environmental impact, stuff like that. The end result may never connect into a single whole, perhaps because we're not crazy about interstates like we used to be.

The drama around I-69 eventually became worthy of a full book. Matt Dellinger, a onetime writer for the New Yorker, attempted to split the controversy about the highway down the middle.

"Everyone was always asking me, 'Is your book for or against I-69?' And I had the hardest time explaining to them that it was neither," Dellinger said in an interview. "In fact, there was a publisher who I think turned down the book because they wanted it to be a polemic one way or another. I guess they thought that might have sold better."

The fight over I-69 has a lot in common with the battle over high-speed rail. People hate the money that has to be set aside and the messy work of getting the actual routes built, but once they are, they'll never really complain again.

But unlike high-speed rail, the federal government loves building freeways—even if they don't go anywhere or they destroy neighborhoods in the process.

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

Astronauts Neil Armstrong and David Scott. (Photo: SDASM Archives/flickr)

If you ask kids “what do you want to do when you grow up?” many of them will answer “an astronaut!” The dreamy wonder of exploring outer space, floating in zero gravity, and eating freeze-dried ice cream is tempting–even more so now, thanks to NASA’s highly-publicized ambitious goal of sending astronauts to Mars by the 2030s.

Now, for a very select group of people, that dream can be real. For the first time in three years, beginning on December 14, NASA will be accepting applications for entrance into its Astronaut Candidate Program. While the standards will be high and the competition fierce, candidacy will be open to all, setting the stage for perhaps the biggest astronaut class NASA has ever seen.

But what exactly does it take to have the “right stuff” in today’s era of space exploration? How does one become a 21st century astronaut?

The "vomit comet": astronauts in simulated weightless flight in C-131 aircraft flying "zero-g" trajectory at Wright Air Development Center, 1959.  (Photo: NASA on The Commons/flickr)

The basic qualifications to be an 21st century astronaut are actually quite democratic. You need a bachelor’s degree from an accredited institution (which covers about 2,500 American universities) in engineering, biological science, physical science, or mathematics. You must be between five feet, two inches and six feet, three inches tall, which includes about 95% of American men and 75% of American women.

Experience is required, but that qualification also leaves the door open for many; NASA defines “experience” as either a thousand hours of pilot-in-command time, or (more relevant for most) three years of professional experience–which ranges from getting a Ph.D. to being a K–12 teacher (of which there are over three million in the country).

Candidates also need to be able to pass NASA’s astronaut physical, which is similar to a military flight physical. This includes having correctable 20/20 vision (LASIK or PRK surgery are allowed, provided at least one year has passed since the procedure) and blood pressure that does not exceed 140/90 (which is the mark for high blood pressure). Finally, you must be a United States citizen.

Astronaut John H. Glenn Jr., NASA flight surgeon William Douglas and equipment specialist Joseph W. Schmidt leave crew quarters prior to the Mercury-Atlas 6 mission, 1962. (Photo: NASA on The Commons/flickr)

These basic qualifications are not particularly stringent, which is why 2013’s candidate search (the last time NASA put a call out for astronauts) brought in over 6,000 applications, three times the previous average.

Johnson Space Center public affairs officer Nicole Cloutier-Lemasters told Atlas Obscura that she believes that there may even be more applicants this time around. Her prediction is based on the agency’s aggressive social media campaign, a flood of recent space-related movies, and NASA’s Mars goal.

“Just speaking anecdotally, I’ve gotten a lot more queries this time around from both media and public about the candidate program,” says Cloutier-Lemasters. “In general, I think there is an enormous excitement about traveling to a new destination... Mars.”

Astronauts Kathryn D. Sullivan, left, and Sally K. Ride display a"bag of worms", a sleep restraint consisting of clamps, a bungee cord and velcro strips, 1984. (Photo: NASA on The Commons/flickr)

That’s what makes this astronaut candidate selection different than the ones that took place during the Space Shuttle program. The missions will go beyond the moon to explore asteroids, deep space, and Mars. As it was for the first space-age explorers, this is uncharted territory for humans. Despite images and rovers, there are still many unknowns about what astronauts will face on Mars when they get there.

In a recent press release, NASA administrator Charles Bolden said: “This next group of American space explorers will inspire the Mars generation to reach for new heights, and help us realize the goal of putting boot prints on the Red Planet.”

What we do know about Mars is that the atmosphere is 100 times thinner than Earth’s, it has intense continent-sized dust storms that can last for weeks, it's about 200 times further from Earth than the Moon, and the average temperature is 80 degrees below zero. In addition, thanks to NASA’s recent announcement, we also know there’s water on the Red Planet.

Astronaut Mae Jemison onboard the Space Shuttle Endeavourm 1992. (Photo: NASA on The Commons/flickr)

All of this makes Mars a scientifically thrilling, unpredictable, and extremely dangerous place. The new astronauts may be must be prepared for extreme conditions, long travel times, and pressure-packed situations. Luckily, many on NASA’s selection committee, like Rex Walheim, know what it takes.

During his 20 years as a NASA astronaut, Walheim has gone to space three times and performed five spacewalks at the International Space Station. As a veteran astronaut, he’s had a hand in picking the last two classes of space explorers, including interviewing candidates in 2009. He says that beyond the basic qualifications, the selection committee looks to see how candidates can deal with a fast-paced environment, pressure-packed situations, and making quick decisions.

While they obviously look at on-the-job performance, they also like to know what candidates do in their spare time. “Maybe it’s some extra-curricular hobby they do that demonstrate that they can handle adversity or difficult situations... like perhaps being a mountain guide or world-class athlete,” says Walheim.  

In this underwater group portrait, eleven SCUBA-equipped divers pose with the three astronauts, 1992. (Photo: NASA on The Commons/flickr)

One of the biggest differences between being an astronaut 50 years ago and today is that the missions are now substantially longer. While Space Shuttle missions were about two weeks, missions to the ISS and, eventually, Mars could take up to a year. Therefore, it is crucial not only to find candidates who can work in the isolation of space for a long periods of time, but to select for people who are good teammates. “Problems that may be an annoyance on a two-week mission, could be a real big problem on a six month or year mission,” says Walheim.

In addition, the further a space vehicle gets from Earth, the harder it gets to communicate with mission control. With previous Mars rovers, it took on average 20 minutes for a signal to get back to Earth (compared to the Moon’s average of about two seconds).

But like astronauts of yesteryear–Buzz Aldrin, John Glenn, and Sally Ride–this next class has the potential to make history. After all, these people may be the ones that will take that one small step onto Mars. Walheim notes that this puts a lot of importance on what the selection committee is doing: “I mean, we could be picking the next Neil Armstrong here.”

Backdropped against clouds 130 nautical miles below, astronaut Mark C. Lee floats freely, 1994. (Photo: NASA on The Commons/flickr)

Overall, the astronaut selection process takes about 18 months, with the 2015 class scheduled to be announced in June 2017. It is a long and arduous process, punctuated by medical exams, interviews, and lots of waiting.

However, Walheim says it’s well worth it for experiences like his last spacewalk:

It is a beautiful day and here comes the coast of California. We are flying right over San Francisco and the shape of the Bay is unmistakable. And you can see up and down the coast for hundreds and hundreds of miles... Just for a second, I watched as the coast came underneath me at 17,500 miles an hour, but 200 miles up it was a graceful transition.... it was truly spectacular.”  

Soon, a new class of 21st century astronauts will be given the chance to see such sights. Perhaps they will even make history and become the first humans ever to put their boot prints on Mars.  

Bob Allphin's DXpedition's Main Operating tent on Peter I Island, Antarctica, with six 1 kilowatt stations. (Photo: Peter I DXpedition Archives)

In 1993, Bob Allphin and a team of 11 other men took a boat to remote Howland Island, an uninhabited slip of coral that is officially part of a group called United States Minor Outlying Islands located in the Pacific Ocean.

It’s not a place where tourists tend to gather, save a very specific breed. “If that rings a bell,” says Allphin, “It’s because that’s the island Amelia Earhart was looking for when she ran out of gas and disappeared.” 

The trip was going according to plan, but as the week progressed, the waves offshore grew larger and larger. 

Powerless, the small gathering could only watch as the whitecapped water separated them from their main vessel. With ample supplies visible off shore, they ran out of water.

“And there’s no worse feeling because you’re on an island where the temperature is 120 and you’re thirsty as hell,” says Allphin.

The dozen tourists combed the beach for upturned seashells filled with rainwater and strained that through a t-shirt into a bucket, adding iodine pills. This was the stew they planned to subsist on when they had a breakthrough—the crew was able to get water ashore. Still, they wound up stranded on the island an extra seven days.

Antennas set up on Niue, a tiny island in the South Pacific Ocean, and location of one of Don Beattie's DXpeditions (Photo: Hilary Claytonsmith)

Perhaps the most shocking thing is that this group risked their lives for a passion that is esoteric even by esoteric tourism standards—they weren't out at the remote island for Amelia Earhart. They were there to make contact with as many amateur radio operators from all over the world as possible.

According to the American Radio Relay League, which is the national membership association for amateur radio operators in the U.S., there are around 3 million operators worldwide. Amateur radio (which is also known as ham radio, and its users as hams) is, simply put, non-commercial use of radio frequencies to communicate. Amateur radio operators typically apply for a license from their country’s governing body—in the U.S. there are three levels of licenses with ascending privileges, which are earned by taking written tests. Operators assemble their own small stations, including transceivers and antenna. Once setup, some are content just to talk with fellow Hams, reveling in the thrill of chatting with a stranger several states or oceans away. There are some who like to bounce radio waves off the moon. There is “contesting”, where operators compete to contact the most people within a short amount of time. There’s DXing, an obsession with contacting those stations farthest away from the operator. And there’s DXpeditions, where intrepid hams travel to far flung places with little to no operators and set up stations so their global community can knock a new location off their list.

DXpeditioning has existed in some form since the early 20th century. Today, such trips take various shapes. There are small ones where operators fly in and out; some even stay in hotels or at spots maintained by fellow hams where equipment is at the ready. Then there are the big operations—treks to often uninhabited, remote outposts that take months of planning, teams of up to twenty people, and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Multiple flights are taken, boats chartered, shipping containers filled with tons of equipment, tents erected. Many of these trips are determined by Club Log, an online application that allows operators to upload confirmed radio contacts and pinpoint the least contacted places in the world, which make up the  “Most Wanted”. 

Operating one of the radio stations on Rodrigues in Mauritius. (Photo: Hilary Claytonsmith) 

The top ten locations on that list are the Holy Grail of DXpedition sites. Journeying to those spots is what 71-year-old Georgia-based Allphin—who is retired from his job at a mutual fund—specializes in. Allphin has been on about 40 DXpeditions, 11 of them to Most Wanted locales. (DXpeditions reshuffle the top ten list, accounting for Allphin’s unintuitive count.)

There are a few reasons places land on the Most Wanted list.

“It’s either political, or it’s a government agency that’s trying to protect the wildlife, or it’s so doggone hard to get there you can’t afford it,” says Allphin.

North Korea, which hasn’t been worked in over a decade, is number one on the Most Wanted list. (Polish radio amateur Dom Grzyb recently announced that he was inching closer to gaining approval to operate in the country.)

DXpeditioning does involve some of the romantic trappings of exploration—desolate snowscapes, tropical beaches, rough sea journeys, and wild animals. It also involves a lot of red tape, physical labor, and planning—and all for the love of racking up amateur radio contacts. If this sounds like fun, you might be a DXpeditioner.

Here are some things to consider: Negotiating access to hotspots like Bhutan, which restricts tourism, or Navassa Island in the Caribbean, which is overseen by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, can take years. It took Allphin’s team over a decade to get permission to set foot on Navassa, which they visited in January. Because you often pack in all your supplies, including radio equipment, there are customs authorities to grapple with and taxes (or trying to avoid taxes). There are other expenses to consider, from helicopter rides to paying for the oversight of Fish and Wildlife employees. 

Bob Allphin's DXpedition group to Antarctica. (Photo: Peter I DXpedition Archives)

Allphin has embarked on trips with price tags surpassing half a million dollars. In order to defray costs, many expeditions set up donation pages and organizations such as the Northern California DXpedition Foundation and the Yasme Foundation mete out grants.

Now that you’ve planned and executed your often many legged journey, the sweating begins.

Upon arrival, you must erect your “radio city”, as Allphin calls it, where you will live for several weeks, sleeping and working in 24-hour shifts in order to make as many contacts as possible. 

It can take two to three days to set up all the antennas and other equipment, according to Don Beattie, an amateur radio operator in the UK who has been on about 20 DXpeditions. 

“And for many people, they come from halfway around the world so they’re jetlagged and in some cases they’ve had a particularly rough sea passage in the last couple of days,” says Beattie. “They arrive in less than tip top shape, so you have to be a little careful on how hard you drive the team to set up.”

And then of course, there are the vagaries of your destination.Salt air can be tough on equipment and Beattie has heard stories of operators showering with their antenna every 24 hours to scrub away salt. Allphin packed a cattle prod for his trip to Heard Island in the Antarctic, which he shared with elephant seals that can reach 16 feet and weigh over two tons. (He didn’t have to use it.)

A QSL card from Bob Allphin's DXpedition to Lakshadweep Islands in India. (Photo: Bob Allphin) 

Once the radio city has risen, it’s time to start making contacts. DXpedtioners get the word out ahead of time via amateur radio organizations, expedition websites, and by taking out ads in niche magazines. The number of people trying to make contact with, say, Lakshadweep, an island in the Laccadive Sea off the coast of India, is not small. Such trips can result in well over 100,000 contacts. Allphin participated in a trip where 195,000 contacts were made. The result of thousands of people calling at the same time is a “pileup”—something DXpeditioners speak about with awe.

“When you tune across it, it just sounds like white noise,” says Beattie. “You can’t hear any speech, all you can hear is this incredible buzz as you tune across the frequencies. And knowing how to distill that down to the one call sign quickly and get a contact confirmed and then move on to the next one—that is one of the big skills.”

There’s no chitchat on a DXpedition—hams call the expedition and state their call sign, a series of letters and numbers that is essentially their radio name. (“Some of it is Morse [code], it’s not all talky talky,” says Beattie.) The team member that answers repeats this back to them, along with a “signal report”—usually the number “59”—meaning everything has come in loud and clear, and the transaction ends.

“That’s a big thrill, and frankly, I think it’s one of the motivations that a lot of DXers would say is primary,” says Allphin. “They are tested to the limit in those pileups.”

Once contact is made, it is commemorated with a “QSL card”, a postcard made specially for the trip and sent via post. (Coordinating the sending of the postcards represents yet another logistical project.)

Bob Allphin on St George Island. (Photo: Peter I DXpedition Archives)

DXpeditioning is not without its risks. In 1982, two German hams on a trip to Amboyna Cay in the South China Sea were killed when occupying forces attacked their ship.

DXpeditioner Charles “Rusty” Epps had his own brush with death in 1974 on a trek to the Palmyra Atoll in the Pacific Ocean.

“All that is, is a pile of busted coral and seashells that the tides and waves have stacked up on a reef,” recalls Epps. 

While they were there another boat, carrying a man and woman, lodged itself on the reef. Epps and his team paddled out in dinghies and helped pull them ashore. 

“We knew they were strange and would not have wanted to stay with them,” says Epps. “But we were leaving the next morning anyway.”

Not long after the DXpeditioners took off, a yacht arrived bearing an adventurous and wealthy couple from San Diego, Malcolm and Eleanor Graham.  subsequently vanished. The couple that Epps helped rescue, Buck Duane Wlkaer and his girlfriend Stephanie Stearns. later surfaced on the stolen yacht. Eleanor’s bones were discovered in 1981; Malcolm’s was never found. Walker was convicted of killing Eleanor; Stearns, who was represented by Vincent Bugliosi, the attorney that prosecuted serial killer Charles Manson, was acquitted. The saga was turned into a TV movie and chronicled in a book by Bugliosi.

A QSL card from a trip to an uninhabited reef in the Pacific, Kingman Reef. (Photo: Bob Allphin)

“It became so clear that had we stayed, we could have been the ones murdered,” says Epps.

Most risks run by DXpeditioners are not so dramatic—in addition to the time he had to hunt and gather water on Howland Island, Allphin recalled his second sketchiest moment as that of being forced to leap from the shore of an Antarctic island into a Zodiac boat.

“It was an ugly, ugly place,” says Allphin. “There were about five million penguins there and the penguin poo was very deep. It was raining and we were stuck in that stuff.”

As he prepared to jump, his mind was on a nearby leopard seal, a predator that looks a little bit like Voldemort.

“The worst case scenario that was going through everybody’s mind was, ‘I miss the boat, I end up in the water and I have to contend with this leopard seal,’” says Allphin. (He made it.)

Leopard seals, arduous journeys, bureaucracy and occasional mayhem have hardly deterred hardcore hams from their quests.

“It’s a cocktail of things, I think, really,” says Beattie. “First of all, it’s the challenge of doing it. Why do you climb Everest? Because it’s there. Why do we do this? Because it’s fun doing all the planning, it’s a hell of a lot of fun getting there, and it’s a hell of lot of fun when you get there.”

Penguin poo nonwithstanding, Allphin, who earned his amateur radio license when he was 14, says he will next turn his attention to destinations in the Pacific.  “Amateur radio is pretty much the greatest hobby in the entire world,” he says.

The Cyrillic alphabet, dot matrix-style. (Photo: Albo003/shutterstock.com)

In 1990, as computers started to become a common sight in homes around the United States, a particular problem developed. Call it the QWERTY challenge: What if the keys on your keyboard that you're familiar with—and have been familiar with for decades—were just gone, and you had no choice but to communicate in another language just to complete basic tasks?

During the early days of computing, this is what the experience was like for a lot of computer users outside of the United States, specifically those that didn't rely on a romanized alphabet. Certainly, there were a lot of attempts to localize the computing experience and build unique offerings of their own—particularly in Japan, where NEC’s PC-98 platform and Fujitsu’s FM Towns line of PCs were hugely successful during the ‘80s and ‘90s, and in Finland, where Nokia built a line of personal computers before jumping into mobile devices—but these attempts ultimately ran head-first into the idea of globalization. Microsoft and Apple, in the end, were simply too hard to ignore.

Technology firms weren't always thinking in terms of the rest of the planet as they designed computers, operating systems, and applications that soon became the lingua franca of business and entertainment everywhere. Nowhere, perhaps, was this dichotomy between technology and culture felt more distinctly than in the Soviet Union, where not only was the language a factor, but so was the Cold War.

And as the Cold War thawed, Microsoft was there with a chisel to break the ice.

It was a tiny German offshoot of Microsoft that spearheaded something that would revolutionize the relationship between the U.S. computer industry and the Soviet Union: A plan to fully localize MS-DOS and Microsoft Works for the Russian markets. This was a big deal, as the operating system and application suite, respectively, played key roles in Microsoft's initial takeover of the world of computers.

The potential upside to doing business inside the Iron Curtain was huge. This was a fairly untapped market that made up a sixth of the world's land mass at the time, and had a population that nearly matched that of the United States. Soviet computer users of the era, from the top on down, were pirating just about everything. And Microsoft’s did not hide its desire to make nice with America’s Cold War enemy. Bill Gates himself made a visit to Moscow in April of 1990 in an effort to rally the troops.

Children playing Amstrad CPC464 computer in 988. Data and programs were input with the built-in tape reader on the right of the keyboard. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

The troops that he rallied worked for the Soviet-American joint venture Dialogue (JV Dialogue), an organization set up essentially to connect the U.S. computer industry with Russia's. The project was daunting. According to Yuri Starikov, who helped manage the JV Dialogue projects, localization was more than just changing a few words here and there.

"This is much more than just a translation of documentations and error messages," says Starikov, "Localization created new standards and terminology." 

In some ways, this project clashed with Microsoft’s global approach at the time. While the software giant had completed localization projects in the past, the company's developers of the era—specifically, the ones in Redmond, Washington—freely admit that localization was sort of an afterthought during the '90s, especially when it came to Windows. 

"While the code that was written for the English version was careful to put localizable content in resources, there were often English-specific assumptions hard-coded into the source code," Microsoft developer Raymond Chen once wrote of the Windows 3.1 era of development. "For example, it may have assumed that the text reading direction was left-to-right or assumed that a single character fit in a single byte." (The company itself did not wish to comment for this story.)

Problem was, this was easier said than done. There was no standard way of making a computer work in another language at the time. If you wanted to move beyond the standard 26 letters of the Romanic alphabet—as is required when writing in Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Inuit, or Russian—you basically had to build it from scratch. The Unicode Consortium, which has since sorted all this stuff out, didn't come along until a few years later.

Manufacturers and developers around the world were essentially creating the script, and the Soviet Union was no exception.

"The Soviet applications software industry is and has always been a shambles. Indeed, it does not deserve to be called an 'industry.' This sorry state of affairs is entirely obvious to both users and industry leaders but, to date, Soviet policy makers have been unable to deal effectively with it."

That line, from a 1989 Hudson Institute report about state of Soviet computing, is a pretty blunt but accurate take on the industry, highlighting the challenges that faced both the country and outside companies who wanted in.

Piracy was perhaps most famous issue. "Copying is so pervasive that the people over there think that Maxell and Verbatim, the floppy disk makers, are actually the software publishers," Larry Heimendinger, then the president of the Nantucket Corporation, quipped in comments to The New York Times in 1991.

But the real problem for Russian computer users was the hardware. There were a lot of reasons for this, some of them diplomatic in nature. The Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls, a coalition of 17 Western countries, greatly limited the number of computers that could be sold in the Eastern Bloc. Until the early '90s, the coalition limited access to Intel's most popular processors, along with networking equipment and some of the manufacturing tools needed to build computers. That made entering the market a no-go for many of the world's biggest tech players.

The limited access to hardware mostly kept Russia out of the PC revolution until the late '80s, Starikov noted, until the creation of the ES-1840, an IBM clone released by the Minsk Computer Technology Production Association (MPOVT) in 1986. These cloned computers were common then, but are obscure now, and faded out of view by the early '90s.

A view of word processors on display at one of the pavilions at the Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy, Moscow, 1985. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

"However, none of the components were manufactured in the Soviet Union: no floppies, no hard drives, no monitors and printers—nothing!" he said.

Had Microsoft chosen not to step in with its own attempts to give Russian consumers legal versions of its operating systems, the Russian computing industry may have been forced to create its own path onto the information superhighway.

There had been numerous attempts to localize DOS in the 1980s, such as АДОС. That software, also known as Alpha-DOS, was a government-built clone that was written to be compatible with MS-DOS 3.2. But these localized versions of DOS represented something of a half-solution, with commands entered in a mishmash of English and Russian. 

On top of that, Starikov noted, the underlying source code was clearly ripped off from MS-DOS.

"I met the chief engineer of the Minsk Computer plant who showed me Alpha-DOS—the Russian operating system. He said it is compatible with MS-DOS," he explained, "I immediately showed him the line 'Copyright Microsoft Corporation,' which was placed inside of the one of the most important components of 'Alpha DOS,' proving that the 'Alpha DOS' is a pirated program."

The term "mishmash" was also an accurate descriptor for the Russian software industry as a whole. 

"Little effort is made toward standardization, and software support and development is done only at the behest of the individual user. There are no Digital Research or Microsoft equivalents in the Soviet computer world," the Hudson Institute report noted.

The influence Microsoft had on the computer industry in Russia can best be highlighted by the key layout found on most Russian keyboards today—and how much that layout differs from what you can find on mechanical typewriters from decades before.

These keyboards were adapted to Microsoft's needs—not the other way around. For example, the “Ц” character, once next to the numbers on the right side of the keyboard, was sharing the W key in Microsoft’s layout. And since Russian has so many more letters (33) than English (26), that meant a lot cramming characters any-which-way. As a result, keys generally relegated to punctuation characters such as brackets now have to do triple-duty, sharing the space with “Ъ” and “Ю.”   

Perhaps the most frustrating change is the necessity to hit the shift button to make a comma on a Russian keyboard, something that would probably drive this writer crazy.

Beyond this, there were many technical issues that needed to be dealt with. The Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, now known as the Republic of Belarus, required a keyboard layout of its own. And Ukraine wasn't able to type the letter "Ґ" (called "Ghe with upturn" in the Unicode spec) until Microsoft stepped in to help. 

Bill Gates in 1993. (Photo: Rob Crandall/shutterstock.com) 

In building the translation of DOS, the team based its work on a Russian-built variation of the IBM PC's keyboard scan code table. The translation was built by a team at the USSR Academy of Science's Computer Center. The code table, basically a table of contents for characters that appear on-screen, was built to be largely compatible with most Western software—a key issue for JV Dialogue team.

The resulting character codes JV Dialogue used, and while not exactly the same as what the academy came up with, were more visually appealing than an existing setup created by IBM.

The process of displaying these keys on a computer screen required the creation of new drivers for various monitor resolutions—not an easy task in the early 1990s, when "plug and play" was a mere aspiration, rather than a standard feature. On top of this, the team at times struggled to explain the necessity of certain changes to the bosses in Redmond.

But the localization work Starikov and others went beyond Russia and influenced Microsoft's product line; for example, code from a display driver from one of the team's developers wrote made its way into the American version of MS-DOS 5.0, and Windows 3.1 had better support for extended characters partly because of Starikov's work. 

It was an impressive amount of technical work lot of work for an untested product made for a barely open market. It’s a sign of Microsoft’s commitment to the project that they sent the CEO to personally appeal to the Soviet people.

Gates has made a handful of visits to Mother Russia, most recently in 2007, but his 1990 visit was perhaps his most influential and least-heralded. Few stories about the trip exist, but his work helped to set the stage for Microsoft's long-lasting takeover of the Russian market, and built relationships with Russian developers.

An undercurrent of Gates’ visit was an effort to legitimize the company in the eyes of Russian computer users at a time when piracy controlled the market—which is to say that the only real competition that Microsoft had on the operating system front was from pirated copies of its own software. Esther Dyson, one of the few Western journalists to cover Gates' first visit to Eastern Europe, suggested that Microsoft's decision to introduce DOS to the market represented an effort to simply give users a legitimate option.

Cold War-era home computing: a running workplace for the East German home computer Robotron KC 85/1, with cassette deck Geracord 6020 Portable, dot matrix printer Robotron K 6313 and Russian Junost-402B television set. (Photo: Hans Wollny/WikiCommons)

"PCs imported from Western firms tend to include legitimate OEM copies of DOS, but those built by government organizations or imported from non-CoCom countries tend not to," Dyson wrote in May 1990 in a now-defunct magazine called Release 1.0, "Marketing is a question of persuading people who are already using your product to pay for it."

(She added that, when Gates was asked how he intended people to actually pay for the software, considering it wasn't being sold in local currency, he struggled with an answer.) 

Microsoft attempted to take on the rise of piracy through the use of a warning screen embedded into every copy of the localized version of MS-DOS 4.01. Unfortunately, their attempt to curb the behavior had its own issues. 

"For this screen, we needed to add a specific driver for loading [the font onto the] video card, otherwise the text was unreadable," Starikov explained, "This screen required [the] pressing of any key to continue the boot of MS-DOS. This created some problems for automation using Russian MS-DOS 4.01."

The blunt warning was ultimately short-lived, as it proved ineffective. A technically inclined user found a way around it, a muted warning was included in the Russian version of Works, and the translated version of MS-DOS 5.0 ultimately did away with it.

So where was Apple during all of this? While Microsoft was attempting to convince people that its software was worth paying for, longtime competitor Apple stayed away. Even that ultimate act of love, the creation of clones by Soviet users in the 1980s, failed to move the company.

The Agat, an Apple II-compatible machine complete with Cyrillic keyboard, was one such clone. Bright orange in color and featuring custom-built keyboard, the machine was such a direct riff that it contained Steve Wozniak's name inside of its read-only memory. The prominent American magazine BYTE dismissed it as a "bad copy," but like the Apple II in the U.S., it became a staple in Russian schools.

A Soviet Delta-C personal computer, ZX Spectrum+ clone. (Photo: Vitaly/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0) 

John Sculley, who served as Apple's CEO for nearly a decade, visited Moscow in 1988 with a number of Apple executives, but at the time demurred from pushing the Macintosh into the market, instead pushing the lower-powered Apple IIgs. 

"I think they are very interested in buying Macintoshes. The problem is they don't have any hard currency to buy them with. And they'd like to manufacture them there as well, and there's no infrastructure to manufacture them," Sculley said in a San Jose Mercury News interview that year. 

For years, the company circled the market, only taking baby steps. At one point, Sculley gave Mikhail Gorbachev a Mac, but was also quoted in The New York Times in 1990 as saying that the country's infrastructure wasn't up to snuff.

"Basic services that business people need—telephones, hotels, and airline service—are still very poor," Sculley said. "Without telephones and fax machines, we can't do business."

By waiting, Apple missed an opportunity to take advantage of an early advantage it had on the localization front: The Unicode Consortium, which officially started in 1991, came about as a result of early collaborations between Apple and Xerox employees. Essentially, had Apple figured out how to sell the thing, it likely could have entered the Russian market with a technology advantage. Alas, it didn't.

When Apple finally did enter the Russian market in 1993, it used the marketing-heavy strategy that served as its American calling card. In particular, Apple's iconic "1984" ad, directed by Ridley Scott, aired for just the second time ever on Russian television screens.

The strategy was effectively the same as the United States—show off an awesome product, market effectively, and the sales will start pouring in.

A Russian keyboard from 2009. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Much like in the U.S., this strategy created partisans—for example, there's an elaborate Apple Computer museum in Moscow containing fairly obscure Apple products like the Apple G4 Cube, the Apple QuickTake 200 digital camera, and the Macintosh XL. Current Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev is said to be Apple's biggest Russian fan, to the point where he left condolences for Steve Jobs after the former Apple CEO died in 2011.

But the company remains something of a bit player on the broader scale. According to statistics from StatCounter, OS X currently represents 4 percent of Russian desktop web usage, a percentage dwarfed by every recent version of Windows and far below the 18 percent market share the operating system claims in the United States. Five years ago, OS X represented slightly more than 1 percent of the Russian market.

While iOS does better than OS X in Russia, things have been shaky on that front, too, due in part to recent economic sanctions put in place by the U.S. government, in response to the country's recent actions in Ukraine, and Apple's own decision to stop selling its products to Russian consumers online thanks to the ruble's shakiness. StatCounter notes that iOS' share of browser usage among smartphone owners fell significantly with Russian users this year, from 45 percent of usage to 34 percent.

These days, computing in Russian is a lot easier. Unicode sussed out the standards, and while Russian computer users have differing preferences from the Western world, it's largely painless to use a computer in Russia to communicate. Paul Gorodyansky, the creator of the Russian-language Windows resource WinRus and an expert in software localization, notes that with early versions of Windows, reading Russian type was often a problem, especially for people with Western versions of the operating system. Back then, users often needed to download dedicated fonts just to read text in Russian.

The problem at this juncture is less about reading and more about writing, especially when using a Western keyboard.

A typewriter with Russian language layout. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

"Many people still don't know how to type Russian letters—in MS Word, text editor, in e-mail, on a Web site," Gorodyansky told me. 

As a result, one of Gorodyansky's most popular online offerings is a software keyboard built for typing in Russian. The website offers a variety of Cyrillic layouts in Russian and Ukrainian, as well as phonetic layouts which tend to be popular with users who don't hail from Russia.

He says that many of the users of his resources are often Russian expats using the Westernized version of Windows, or linguists looking to better understand the Russian language—people who give his offering good reviews. 

It also helped set the stage for Yuri Starikov's career. After finishing his work on localizing Microsoft Works, he was offered a job by Microsoft, where he spent nearly two decades on the payroll, assisting with—among other things—the Russian translation of Windows 3.1. These days, Starikov works with the security firm Spyrus. 

Tanks in Moscow's Red Square during the 1991 coup e'tat. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Differences linger between cultures, but for the most part, the building blocks of connectivity between East and West may have been forged with the help of a crack programming team that, through the process of building drivers and mashing together code, brought the world a little bit closer. One of the side effects, for instance, of Microsoft forcing its way into the Russian market was that the KGB began to lose its grip on communications. According to Starikov, products like typewriters and printers used on devices like mainframes and mini-computers were very easy to monitor. Computers with connected printers en masse—not so much. 

The building blocks are often where revolutions get started.

People celebrating the 65th anniversary of the Red Army's victory over Germany at the Soviet War Memorial in Berlin. The Mielec monument was a smaller version of this one. (Photo: Bernd Brincken/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Red Army soldiers still survey much of Eastern Europe, staring out from the tops of monuments in Estonia, Latvia, Poland, and many other former territories.

But history buffs hoping to check these monuments off of their bucket lists may want to do so ASAP, since–as the Polish Ambassador to Russia stated last week–most of them can be taken down at any time.

This reminder comes soon after the county council in Mielec, Poland voted unanimously to take down their town's Memorial of Gratitude to the Red Army. Authorities say the monument, which featured an obelisk topped with a two-ton statue of a "Liberator Soldier" holding a sword and carrying a small child, posed a safety risk. The Russian foreign ministry decried the removal, calling it and similar dismantlings throughout Poland an "orgy" of vandalism and a breach of accords. 

This Red Army Memorial, in Skaryszewski Park in Warsaw, was removed by Polish officials this past July. (Photo: masti/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Poland disagrees. While cemeteries and burial sites are indeed protected by an international agreement, "so-called symbolic monuments, where no one is buried... can be dismantled in accordance with certain procedures," ambassador Katarzyna Pelczynska-Nalecz said last week.

Red Army monuments are scattered throughout the former Eastern Bloc. Like most large commemorative objects, they mean different things to different people. While some consider them fitting memorials for soldiers killed during "the struggle to free Europe from fascism," others see them and remember that that they were, in many cases, built and funded by a populace that suffered as much (or more) under their so-called liberators as they had under the previous regime.

The Monument to the Soviet Army in Sofia, Bulgaria, reinterpreted by art group Destructive Creation. According to Wikipedia, Bulgarian teens want to keep the memorial intact because of its "surrealistic, unreal atmosphere." (Photo: Ignat Ignev/WikiCommons CC BY 3.0)

As a result, although the monuments still serve as gathering sites for vigils and memorial celebrations, they are also used as beacons for public protest, or even canvasses for artistic reinterpretation. In 2011, a group of artists in Sofia, Bulgaria "updated" their local Monument to the Soviet Army by refashioning the soldiers as Superman, Ronald McDonald, and other American pop culture mainstays.

According to Polish Radio, the dismantled Mielec monument will be transferred to a history museum–a better fate than the one that befell the many pre-Soviet monuments destroyed by the Red Army.

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.

Luna 9, an unmanned Soviet spacecraft from 1966. (Photo: NASA/Wikimedia)

The Canopus ST, a Russian satellite, had a lot going for it. It had been 10 years in development, Al-Jazeera reports, and was fitted with expensive cameras powerful enough to detect underwater submarines. 

But the Canopus ST will never have the chance to live up to its full potential: after its launch into space on December 4, its booster rocket did not detach according to plan. Now, the satellite's trajectory is off and, Al-Jazeera says, soon it will be dragged back into the Earth's atmosphere and explode.

The Canopus ST is not the only recent loss in the space industry; private U.S. space companies have had their share of mishaps, too. Every explosion or failed delivery to the International Space Station is a reminder that it's really hard to put anything in space and to know what will happen once these giant, expensive spacecraft are up there.

We're also still looking for stuff we left lying around decades ago. In 1966, for instance, the Soviet Union successfully landed on the Moon for the first time—a triumph of science and exploration. For the first time, we on Earth had pictures taken from the Moon's surface. The probe that sent them was never intended to come back to Earth. But we don't even know where it is. As Space.com reports, researchers are trying to use a different satellite to locate it on the Moon—even though it's "small, barely two pixels across in the best images."

It's there somewhere, though. We have to stop losing these things.

Bonus finds: A Mona Lisa under the Mona Lisa, possibly

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. 

Allen Funt pulls his infamous reading-over-the-shoulder gag on a Muscovite in 1961. (Photo: Candid Camera/Youtube)

In 1961, Candid Camera ruled American television.

The proto-reality show, in which everyday people were faced with ridiculous situations under the gaze of a hidden camera, was a massive hit, reaching millions across the country every week. Allen Funt, the show's creator and punchy host, had criss-crossed thousands of miles of the United States with his film crew, then tried out his gags in Italy, France, Britain, and Germany. But he knew the same tricks don't work forever, and he was, as always, looking for a new twist.  

Meanwhile, the tensions of the Cold War ruled just about everything else outside the realm of television gags played on an unsuspecting public. The Americans and the Soviets were tussling in the air, in the papers, in outer space—everywhere but on the ground. The U.S. was backing counterrevolutionary coups in Cuba, and the U.S.S.R was testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. The general sense of alarm was keen enough "that most Americans were led to believe that there were daily military parades through Red Square with Communists waving rifles," wrote Funt in his memoir, Candidly, Allen Funt. 

Allen Funt, host and creator of Candid Camera and unlikely infiltrator of everyday Soviet Russia. (Photo: ABC Television/WikiCommons Public Domain)

Funt, himself the son of a Russian immigrant, didn't buy into the antagonism and distrust. Everyday Soviet citizens, he figured, were more than likely filled not with militant hatred, but with "amusing and identifiable foibles that Americans could relate to." They, too, would surely react with chagrin to someone reading a newspaper over their shoulder, or gallantly try to help a woman carry a suitcase full of concrete. So why not film those reactions and broadcast them to Americans, to show them that Soviet had a vulnerable and hilarious human side? 

Without telling his bosses at CBS, not to mention the authorities of either the United States or Russia, Funt took it upon himself to pull back the Iron Curtain and shoot a special Moscow episode of Candid Camera.

The process had its challenges. Because press passes for photographers were virtually nonexistent, he and his team used their considerable experience as everyday subterfugers to "pose as tourists." Then, visas in hand, they packed as lightly as they could, taking small 16mm cameras that wouldn't look out of place in the hands of so-called amateurs. Funt had nightmares about what would happen if customs opened one of the wrong bags ("how could we explain carrying 90,000 feet of film?") but they got lucky and were waved right through.

From there, it was pretty easy for Funt and his crew to ditch their guide and start spying on people around the Kremlin, avoiding the "sensitive areas." Calming their own nerves was a different matter. "Tension was always high when we shot Candid Camera scenes because of the unpredictability of human nature," Funt wrote. "But now we were playing for much higher stakes. For all we knew, the KGB might throw us in a Siberian prison camp, and we'd never be heard from again." But the team persevered, shooting film from their hotel balcony and from cars and hauling out their practiced bag of tricks (not to mention the concrete suitcase).

They soon found that their regular observations—of tourists, policemen, pedestrians, and families—were more revealing and interesting than the gags. As the above video shows, the footage they shot of people just going about their lives is intimate and, despite the narrator's talk of "different customs," familiar. Teenagers slow-dance awkwardly, and spectators eat ice cream at a track meet. A man spends too much on a fur hat. A pinhole camera, hidden in a cardboard box and positioned in front of a popular monument, shows how Russians pose for their own non-candid shots, arranging their families, fixing their clothes, shooing away photobombers—and, in a true twist for Candid Camera, purposefully not smiling. 

In the end, the hardest part was going back home. First, Funt had to smuggle the film back through customs–something he thought he had done successfully, right up until he screened it back in New York. "Apparently, the Russian officials, knowing full well of our activities, had attempted to destroy all the film, perhaps as it was passed through the baggage service," he wrote. They had largely succeeded, and what was left was "fogged"–not broadcast quality. Funt hadn't been as sneaky as he thought.

The whole enterprise—secret trip, politically-fraught subject, spotty film—made for some rough conversations with the network. Newspaper articles leading up to the special Moscow episode of the show spoke soberly of CBS giving "special study and consideration" to the film, and "taking more than the usual precautions." 

The suitcase gag, Moscow-style. (Image: Candid Camera/Youtube)

When the show finally aired, in October of 1961, most of Funt's intuitions turned out to be correct. Critics and fans alike appreciated a glimpse into Soviet life that was very different from what they were usually offered—an interview in the Milwaukee Journalteasing the episode, in which Funt says "the average Russian is pretty much like everyone else," is bookended by other articles about films “heavily larded with Soviet propaganda,” and a new effort by the Veterans of Foreign Wars to “alert the American public to the dangers of world communism” (not to mention a suggestive baseball headline, “Yankees Beat Reds 3-2”).

Indeed, when Funt told the Milwaukee Journal, pre-broadcast, that he "ran into trouble in Moscow," he was referring not to any security-related or political difficulties, but to the infamous suitcase gag. Some Russian men, when asked to help an American schoolteacher with her unexpectedly heavy burden, didn't struggle gallantly or try to talk their way out of it. They "picked it up and breezed off with it," Funt said. Sometimes, where there's a will, there's a way.

Louis Albertini's time in Kazakhstan has brought with it unexpected fame. (Photo: Louis Albertini)

Twenty-six year-old Michigander Louis Azamat Albertini has been interviewed by Kazakhstan’s Esquire magazine, featured on national television, and sought out by catwalk models.

Kazakhs are fascinated by Albertini, a young professional who looks distinctly like one of them despite being raised elsewhere. Barely 24 years old, the nation of Kazakhstan still feels largely invisible to the world. The idea that an American can fit in so effortlessly among them is both surprising, and perhaps, validating. 

Albertini was born to Kazakh parents in Voronezh, Russia, in November of 1989, just two weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the turning point in a revolution that would soon spread to his birthplace. In 1992, a year after the momentous dissolution of the Soviet Union, he was adopted by an American family at the age of three, his birth name Azamat shifting to his middle name.

Albertini arrived in Kazakhstan for the first time in August 2015, but knew little about the country before stepping off the airplane to start a job in marketing and communications for KIMEP University in Almaty through the fellowship program Princeton in Asia. He'd studied Russian and Economics in college, spent two summers in Russia, and met a few Kazakh students studying on scholarship in the U.S., but that was about it.

Kazakhstan, which gained independence in 1991, is the ninth-largest country in the world by geographical size. The nation of around 17 million people has had the same president since its founding, and its economy—which thrives on oil—is the biggest in Central Asia. The official languages are Russian and Kazakh, and ethnic groups include Uighur, Turkish, Tartar people, as well as Russians, Uzbeks, Ukrainians. 

Albertini with the camera crew for one of Kazakhstan's national television channels after filming. (Photo: Louis Albertini)

In the Esquire interview, Albertini talks about his adoption and childhood and what it’s like to feel both foreign and local. The piece went up at 9 a.m. on a Wednesday in late October. When Albertini logged onto Facebook an hour later, he had over 200 friend requests, 100 new messages, and around 600 new notification alerts.

The U.S. embassy in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, and the U.S. consulate in Almaty, the country's largest city, shared the article. When Albertini went to the supermarket later that day, a girl called his name and asked for a selfie with him. Messages continued to come in for the rest of the week—people saying how they live in the U.S. but are raising their Kazakh kids American, a Kazakh who recently moved to Grand Rapids. People even messaged in Russian saying things like, "You are the brother I’ve never had."

“It’s kind of intense. I just got shared all around,” says Albertini. The interview quickly became one of most popular stories in the history of Esquire Kazakhstan.

The Esquire interview came about when a writer overheard Albertini and a Kazakh friend of his chatting at a bar. She was confused as to why they were speaking English, because she thought they were both Kazakhs, and later messaged him to ask whether he’d be willing to do an interview.

Can you name three things you know about Kazakhstan? (Image: Stasyan117/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 4.0)

People tell Albertini that his story is inspirational, and say they admire him for trying to explore his heritage, saying that his choice to come to the country was very profound. “I don't see it like that,” he says. “I haven't really done anything but literally go to Kazakhstan.”  The whole thing has been a surreal experience, he says.

In Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he grew up, people tended to think Albertini was half Japanese, or maybe half Korean. People just didn't really know anything about Kazakhstan, he says. “A lot of older people just think it's an extension of the Soviet Union, or it's somehow related to Pakistan." 

Mentioning the travel writer Pico Ayer’s TED talk, “Where is Home?”, Albertini says that one geographic coordinate doesn’t tell the whole story. He uses his public speaking invites, like a broadcast for the consulate and a presentation for Pecha Kucha, a platform similar to TED, to share the idea of being able to identify yourself in multiple ways at the same time. A lot of people in Kazakhstan, he says, still see identity as very black and white. 

When he spends time with white Americans of European origin in Almaty, Albertini can immediately see the attention that foreigners, in particular expats, receive. If Albertini keeps his mouth shut (and isn’t recognized), he’s ignored, blending right into the background. Once, when Albertini was explaining that he’s American, one guy responded, “No you’re not.” The guy then pointed to Albertini’s lighter-skinned friend and said, “He’s American.”

Saken Seifullin, a pioneer of modern Kazakh literature. Ethnically ambiguous, n'est-ce pas? (Image: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Albertini was totally thrown off. “It kind of ruined the night for me,” he says. He’s even had other Americans tell him that his English is really good. Instead of being embraced as a fellow countryman, he’ll get thoroughly interrogated about where he was born and where he’s from. The small comments chip away at him, he says. 

“When I first came to this country, I was like—I’m an American in Kazakhstan. And now it's like, if I'm an American but everyone sees me as something else, where is that balance then? I now feel a little less American, to tell the truth, and more Kazno-American, or Americanistan, I don't know.”

When Albertini’s Italian-American mother recently visited Almaty, locals assumed that she was some important business woman and Albertini was just ushering her around. Cab drivers and merchants would speak to him in rapid Russian, referring to his mother as his “boss” and giving him quizzical looks when he called her “Mom.” 

These days, Albertini has been getting more and more involved in the local startup culture. He’s been thinking about creating an informational entrepreneurship advocacy platform that can connect local Kazakhstan startups with U.S. investors, or even starting up a local necktie business. His increased visibility has given him connections and opportunities that would have been impossible three or four months ago, such as the chance to pitch an idea to the vice-minister of finance and development in Astana.

Fame aside, Louis Azamat Albertini’s time so far in Kazakhstan has exposed that most folks, Kazakh, American or otherwise, struggle with identities that don’t fit into neat categories. 

The castle dig (Photo: Cotswold Archaeology/Mark Price)

While digging in the exercise yard of a defunct jail, construction workers in Gloucester, England, unexpectedly unearthed a castle wall from the 12th century.

Back around the year 1110, the rulers of Gloucester built an impressive castle "similar to the Tower of London," the Western Daily Press Reports. It had three chapels, two drawbridges, and walls that were a solid 12 feet wide. 

During the 15th-century reign of Richard III (the hunchback king with a bad reputation who was recently found buried under a parking lot), the castle became a country jail. For the next 200 years or so, it served as a makeshift lockup until, in 1787, it was knocked down to make way for a dedicated prison.

This prison, which closed in 2013 following many updates to the buildings, is now in the process of being renovated. When the old basketball court was dug up, an archaeological team found a wall from the original castle just two feet beneath the ground.

It's not clear yet what this discovery means for the future of the site. It was slated for redevelopment of some sort, but as one local planner told the Gloucester Citizen, "you can't just ignore that there is a castle there."

Bonus finds: Bitcoin guy, 55 bronze Buddhas, a new Australian dinosaur

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

The Ghostbusters Firehouse or Hook and Ladder 8 (Photo: Philip Ritz/Wikipedia)

Who ya gonna call? Ghostbusters!

But where ya gonna call them? At their iconic firehouse headquarters, of course. In the film, the spook chasers' firehouse is as much of an iconic piece of the action as the Ecto-1 car or their homemade proton packs. It appears in Ghostbusters video games and even has its own LEGO set. But in reality the firehouse has a history that is more Old New York than supernatural hot spot.

Hook and Ladder 8, the building used for the exterior shots of the Ghostbusters' HQ, is a working firehouse that has been around for more than a century. In fact, the firehouse even pre-dates the Fire Department of New York. When Hook and Ladder 8 was established, the firefighting forces of New York were made up of a bunch of loosely affiliated companies of volunteering men.

In 1866, just one year after these disparate fire brigades were incorporated under the umbrella of the Metropolitan Fire Department, the Hook and Ladder 8 company moved its operations to the current spot on North Moore Street in Tribeca. At the time, an older school building occupied the site.

It's no Ecto-1, but it'll have to do. (Image: Joi Ito/Wikipedia) 

It was not until the 1898 unification of the five New York City boroughs that the Fire Department of New York as it exists today was born. With the development of this larger, more centralized force, Hook and Ladder 8 received a brand new firehouse in 1903, although it looked much different than it does today.

The new building, designed by the Superintendent of Buildings at the time, Alexander H. Stevens, was one of the first firehouses of its kind. Prior to Stevens’ tenure as the Superintendent, the design and construction of New York’s firehouses was outsourced to the architectural firm of Napoleon LeBrun & Sons. But when Stevens came in, he took over the creation of new fire buildings. His signature style was Beaux-Arts, a classically tinged school of design that would inform a number of New York buildings—most famously, Grand Central Station.

Stevens’ archetypal firehouse design had tall banks of windows on each floor and a central, arched portal on the ground floor that provided vehicle access. Hook and Ladder 8’s new building was one of the first buildings to show off the design, embellished with a decorative cornice above the truck entrance. When it was built, it was twice the size it is today, with two vehicle doors. The firehouse was cut down to its current dimensions in 1913, when Varick Street underwent an expansion that forced the building to downsize.

The sign from Ghostbusters II hanging on the wall of the current station. (Image: Roberto Ventre/Flickr)

For decades, the firehouse and its men protected the city as one of many reliable FDNY fire stations. Then the Ghostbusters came to town. The film, much like the firehouse itself, was much different in its initial stages. In an early version of the script, the story took place in a future world where the Ghostbusters were a municipal force like the police or, well, firefighters. In accordance with that, a firehouse was chosen for their base of operations, and Hook and Ladder 8 became forever known as Ghostbusters HQ. The logo sign used in the movie and its sequel still hangs in the station to this day.

Once the excitement of the films died down a bit, it was back to business as usual for Hook and Ladder 8, which returned to being a standard (if now instantly recognizable) fire station. It would go on to be featured in the movie Hitch and an episode of Seinfeld, but these subsequent brushes with fame could not separate the firehouse’s legacy from that of Venkman, Spengler, Zeddemore, and Stantz.

While a new crew of Ghostbusters is set to hit screens in 2016, it has yet to be seen whether they will use the Hook and Ladder 8 as their digs—but the 21st-century spook chasers would be hard-pressed to find a location any more indelible.

The caverns and chambers of the Molnár János cave are large, larger than inactive caves in Budapest and are still being formed. (Photo: Laszlo Abel)

Beneath the city of Budapest lies a hidden subterranean world that reveals an unknown chapter of the city’s famous spa culture. With over 80 geothermal springs and around 200 caves found to date, the Hungarian capital is home to the world’s largest known thermal cave system. While most are familiar with the city’s steaming thermal baths, some of which date back as far as the Ottoman occupation in the 15th century, the source of Budapest’s thermal waters is a curiosity in itself.

Budapest is split into two parts by the Danube River: Pest, the main economic and cultural hub lies on a flat plane, and mostly residential Buda is defined by hilly territory dotted with elegant villas. You’ll find the famous Buda Castle and most of the city’s thermal baths on the curvier banks of the river, but you’ll also find adventure and mystery below, in a complex labyrinth of caves that wind underneath the houses and streets of Buda, including the world’s largest underwater thermal water cave, the Molnár János Cave, whose curative water is still pumped into the popular Lukács Baths.

Budapest lies on a geological fault line, where the ascending thermal water dissolved many cave passages close to the surface. Because these caves were carved out from the inside from water coming from below, they did not have any natural entrance to the surface, so most of the caves lay hidden until the early 20th century, when they were uncovered due to quarrying or drainage groundwork that took place in the hills.

Szemlohegy caves. (Photo: Livia Novak)

Pál-völgy was the first cave system to be accidentally discovered in the residential part of the Buda Hills, but it was the Szemlő-hegy caves, located 800 meters away, that revealed the mysterious origins of these caves. Today, parts of both caves can be entered and explored.

Uncovered in 1930, the Szemlő-hegy caves are around 2,200 meters long. The temperature drops to 46° Fahrenheit as you walk down the artificial, paved tunnel into the cave. Inside, the network of water-carved tunnels curve into bends with striking, pinkish mineral formations decorating the walls. Some of the shapes lie in undulating layers, others resemble small cauliflower heads, while some of the mineral deposits mimic flowers, which earned the cave its nickname the “Underground Flower Garden.”

Above and across, chambers open up to other passages and caverns, all adorned with mineral ornamentation. There are little to no stalagmites or stalactites, in fact all the features making up this floral tapestry of minerals can be attributed to the cave’s thermal water origins.

Mineral deposits in Szemlohegy caves. (Photo: Livia Novak)

As the city expanded, more cave systems were uncovered in turn. Ferenc-hegy was discovered during drainage groundwork, then the extensive Mátyás-hegy cave network, which can be visited even by amateur spelunkers in the company of a guide, and finally József-hegy, a cave which has the richest mineral formation in all the Buda caves and is open only to researchers. 

There is one cave that is not like the others: the submerged Molnár János cave, which an active thermal water cave located only meters from the Danube river bank.  

If you walk past the Lukács Baths, stop and look across the road. There is a small lake set next to a ruined bath covered with a dome cupola, with birds flying in and out of its abandoned windows.  Despite its Ottoman appearance, this forgotten bath dates back to the 19th century and was the first building that used concrete in Hungary, but the real mystery lies underneath its lake.

Above ground at Malom Lake. (Photo: Jennifer Walker)

The algae-covered pond called Malom Lake marks the source of a thermal water spring that has been known for its thermal and curative properties ever since the Romans. Under the pond, Roman construction testifies to the city’s bath culture going back centuries, but divers were more interested in the underwater cave that lay beyond the entrance of the spring.

In 1974, the divers explored and charted this submerged cave, which measured around 400 meters in the initial investigations. But there was more to it than met the eye. While the water’s temperature was a pleasant 68º Fahrenheit, divers noticed the wall of the cave was also warm. However, it was not until the early 2000s that further exploration began and a whole new cave system was uncovered after divers drilled through the wall and saw the cave continued beyond that initial chamber.

Cave diver Zsolt Szilágyi dived the cave over 300 times as an explorer and as a dive guide, and worked with some of the exploration teams in uncovering the cave.  “It was difficult to investigate the cave further since the nearby Lukács Bath gets the water from this cave. There was a pipe that ran into that cave at the time, and we were not allowed to disturb the water too much, because, otherwise the silty water could contaminate the bath,” he says.

The Molnár János cave is only accessible to qualified cave divers. (Photo: Laszlo Abel) 

Szilágyi continues, “However, in the early 2000s, they moved the pipe to another location, so divers could investigate and found that the cave system continues beyond the first chamber, this marked the start of the new exploration. Until 2011, we found the cave system was around seven kilometers long.”

The Molnár János cave is not only still active as a thermal water cave, but it’s still being formed. The water in the cave is an acidic cocktail of sulphuric acid and carbonic acid, which come from the thermal springs carrying up hydrogen sulphide and the high concentration of carbon dioxide which dissolve in the water. This corrodes the walls of the limestone cave, not only carving out the cave itself, but also leaves a silty deposit on the walls. This makes exploration difficult, since the disturbed silt alters the visibility of the cave and contaminates the water.

“When exploring the cave, our main issue was the visibility, since time is very short and sometimes here in the Molnár we had to take a mental picture of the wall we were working on and then drill - because the visibility gets bad,” says Szilágyi.

The thermal water from the Molnár János is used in the nearby Lukács Baths. There water was once delivered to the baths via a pipe, although the baths also have their own springs delivering the thermal water.  (Photo: Laszlo Abel) 

The exploration revealed a complex network of large caverns, narrow channels, underwater lakes and walls featuring mineral deposits.

The explorations and dives stopped in 2011, after the tragic death of a diver. Even though the cause of death occurred due to unrelated health reasons, the caves was closed for all visitors until fall of 2015. Soon qualified cave divers will be able to visit the cave again.    

If you’re interested in the cave, but you’re not a qualified cave diver, you can get an impression by visiting the Szemlő-hegy show cave or by suiting up with a helmet and a guide to explore a part of the extensive Mátyás-hegy system.

“Molnár János is similar to Szemlőhegy,” says Szilágyi, “but the Molnár János is ten times bigger. I would say it’s very similar to Mátyás-hegy too, but in much bigger in proportions. The caverns and tunnels are much larger and wider, but the caves are very similar.”

The Molnár János cave was once accessible only via the source of the water at Malom Lake, but since another artificial entrance has been created to make life easier for divers and explorers. (Photo: Laszlo Abel) 

The only way into Mátyás-hegy requires a scary 10-meter vertical descent down metal ladder. Inside though, the headlamp reveals a labyrinth in patches that goes off in multiple directions. Some places require you to slide down shafts, or crawl along narrow corridors and squeeze through tight walls that appear to move in waves. At the lowest point of the caves open to amateur spelunkers, getting back up requires a spot of rock climbing up a vertical wall in one of the chambers, but shining a light through the passage above make you feel like you’re trapped in a rock-carved anthill in places. At this point, imagining the chamber to be submerged in water at a bigger scale is daunting to the uninitiated.

“The Molnár János cave is like a swiss cheese, the Matyás-hegy caves too, and after diving 50 to 60 caves, I have only ever seen these caves with this kind of structure,” adds Szilágyi.   

After hours of being underground, the feeling of inhaling fresh air is welcome when I finally emerge. But deep under the city, the traffic from the surface is silenced. Wandering Budapest’s streets it’s difficult to imagine that under the city and its spas there is an extensive network of caves as well as underwater complexes that go unnoticed by locals on a daily basis. Budapest’s caves still carry many secrets, and who knows how many more caves, chambers and caverns lie undiscovered under the Hungarian capital.  

Giant polar bear right now with @kuminaidoo@Greenpeace. "We must not fail." #COP21pic.twitter.com/2fpFLdEtHK

— NZYD (@NZYD) December 9, 2015

The newest face at the COP21 climate conference in Paris is snow-white, craggy, and about the size of a small car. 

Aurora, an enormous polar bear-shaped protest puppet, rolled into the conference venue this morning accompanied by human activists from Greenpeace, the Associated Press reports. The bear weighs three tons and is the size of a double-decker bus. A head-turner on its own, it also ensures critical mass—since it's essentially a giant puppet, about 45 people are required to keep it running smoothly.

#Greenpeace’s massive polar bear is hungry for an ambitious #climate deal. #go100re#COP21pic.twitter.com/2Fv0K7JwNO

— Greenpeace (@Greenpeace) December 9, 2015

This morning, the bear joined other Greenpeace activists in the Le Bourget Blue Zone, where representatives from indigenous groups in Brazil, the Russian Kamchatka Peninsula, Canada's Northwest Territories and elsewhere spoke on behalf of their communities.

Indigenous peoples "are on the frontline of climate change, and are suffering its first and worst impacts," said Vyzcheslav Shadrin, there on behalf of Russia's Yukagir people. "We have a right to be recognized in this international forum." The Paris climate accord has thus far not mentioned indigenous people specifically. The latest draft is scheduled for release later today.  

The latest in a long line of Greenpeace protest bears, Aurora already has one victory under its ruff. Earlier this year, it hung out next to Shell Oil's London headquarters for a month, roaring occasionally, until the company announced it would stop drilling in the Arctic. 

 

We did it!! 🎊🎉🎊 Thank you to everyone that was a part of this HUGE campaign. Shell have left the Arctic and Arora will be leaving us and heading for Paris. Thank you so much to Emma Thompson for being here today for Aroras big send off. #arcticroar #savethearctic #byebyeshell

A photo posted by Greenpeace UK (@greenpeaceuk) on Sep 29, 2015 at 4:40am PDT

Aurora and handlers will stick around through the end of the talks on Friday, and likely join more protests. "We want the bear to represent everyone hoping in the next 72 hours," for a robust agreement, said Greenpeace UK's head of media, Ben Stewart. This group likely includes Aurora's less enormous real-life counterparts, who, due to climate change, are getting even smaller. 

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.

A passport belonging to Russian-born American ballet dancer Adolph Bolm. (Photo: Library of Congress)

A passport is one of the most powerful documents you can possess. It is also one of the more socially and politically contentious. 

The little leather-bound booklets serve to identify us, but they do so in stark, non-nuanced ways that don't tell the full story of who we are—or may even distort it. They enable mobility but also restrict it, using something as arbitrary as nationality as the determining factor.

Our relationship with passports has always been complicated. For centuries prior to the introduction of the modern passport during World War I, travel documents were generally simple letters of introduction granting special access to society’s elite. They were required of some places, but not others. For a long time, up until the second half of the 19th century, it was legal for a person of any country to go to the French or Belgian consulate and obtain one of their passports for travel. It was a loosely regulated, seemingly arbitrary system.

An Italian passport issued in 1909 to a woman and her son. (Photo: Library of Congress)

By the early 20th century, however, the modern passport was introduced—and soon came to be seen as a document that placed the trustworthiness of an individual in doubt. During World War I, in response to fears about the wrong people crossing the wrong borders, new travel document requirements were introduced to ramp up security and control emigration. This caused consternation among the public. The British became particularly offended when, in 1914, passports demanded written details about their appearance, and soon after, a photograph. These oversimplifications of identity made travelers feel as though they were being treated like criminals, complete with descriptions or mug shots.  It was front page news when, in 1919, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson needed to have a passport created so that he could travel to Versailles.

Earlier versions of the passports required that their bearer describe personal features such as height, forehead, and nose (most people listed “average”; a few listed “Roman”). In one case, a man described his face as “intelligent,” only to discover that officials had replaced the adjective with “oval.” This clinical self-categorization was considered a challenge to traditional notions of respectability and privacy. The passport rendered things like reputation irrelevant, deeply unsettling those accustomed to automatic access and privilege. Vocal opponents declared that the passport’s existence implied that the government didn’t trust them, and that the state was taking control over personal identity. The line between identity and identification started to grow blurry.

Over the next several decades, up until the 1940s, the public complained very vocally about what became known as the “passport nuisance.” Major American and British newspapers also ran frequent editorials on the passport, framing the document as an affront to the dignity of the traveler. This was a time when driver's licenses were still rare; the concept of Social Security only came about in the late 1930s, and in 1942 nearly half of Americans still lacked birth certificates.

The complete passport of a Polish citizen, dated 1931. That photo would not make the cut today. (Image: Julo/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 2.5)

The picture-enhanced passport represented an era of increased bureaucratization and “paperization,” a term used by Craig Robertson, author of The Passport in America: The History of a Document. The passport stood for much more than a booklet for those able to travel. It hinted at a culture of distrust and documentation that was just starting to truly take shape. 

Craig Robertson became interested in passports when he came across a 1923 Associated Press story about a Danish man who’d shaved off his mustache. The article reported that guards at the German border had turned the Dane away on the grounds that he did not resemble the mustached man in his passport. The fellow lingered long enough to regrow his mustache, then returned to the border and reclaimed his identity. 

"When I read that, it really shocked me," says Robertson. "It made me realize that when passports emerged they were a new technology and brought with them new understandings of identity, a new form of literacy around documents."

An 1856 drawing by Bayard Taylor showing an official examining a traveler's documentation. (Image: Library of Congress)

The introduction of the passport photo in 1914 grew into a contentious issue, and in some ways it caused the greatest discomfort. Writer Paul Fussell, in his 1979 essay “The Passport Nuisance,” describes the passport photo as “perhaps the most egregious little modernism,” a tiny thing that breeds “anxious self-awareness, that secret but overriding self-contempt.” The photo also creates an oddly frozen identity; you may be 24 today, but in your passport photo, you’re still 15.

Passport photo requirements have become much more stringent than they were a century ago, when you’d often see hats, multiple people, or cut-out individuals. In 1920, The League of Nations held the first conference to set passport standards. Now, governments put out detailed lists of rules, specifying permitted accoutrements and facial expressions. So unflattering do passport photos tend to be that there’s an old adage that says, “When you look like your passport photo, it’s time to go home.” (It was even used for the title of a 1992 book.)

In 1957, the director of the U.S. passport office acknowledged that people looked thuglike and abnormal sitting for their passport pictures. Robertson talks about how the photo captured a new anxiety that the state can somehow take control of your identity—a version of your identity disconnected from the local community in which you live. 

A 1924 British passport—back when a passport number only needed to be four digits. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

“We really see this notion that 'the state no longer trusts me,'” says Robertson. “It creates that sort of questioning of self, and then questioning of government.” 

Fussell writes that for the modern traveler, the passport initiates a moment of humiliation, “a reminder that he is merely the state’s creature, one of his realm’s replaceable parts.” It’s a moment that makes travel a bit less romantic for the privileged—and can make migration next to impossible for refugees.

In 2015, a century after the passport became a “nuisance” to Western society, the Syrian refugee crisis and global fears over terrorism have resulted in increased governmental scrutiny of borders and travel documents. More than ever, individual identity is inextricable from national identity—and the distrust that accompanies such categorization. 

“At its core, it’s still this bizarre practice,” says Robertson. “You present a passport, a booklet, and have to prove to the border guard that you are the document. Lots of people assume it’s the other way around,” he says. “It’s this notion that the most authoritative representation of you is not your embodied identity, but the piece of paper.” 

A miniscule slip of land sitting of the coast of Nagasaki, Japan has seen a long and troubled history. 

Hashima, a less than one square kilometer island, was once the most densely populated place on the planet. Today it is a ghost town, completely uninhabited for over 40 years, its hundreds of densely packed concrete buildings crumbling into the sea. 

The land was developed by the Mitsubishi Corporation as a coal mine in the early 1900s. During WWII, the labor in the undersea mine was done by Korean and Chinese prisoners of war (POW) with no regard for the safety or survival of the prisoners—leading to the death of over 1,000 POWs in the mine.

After the war ended Mitsubishi continued to run the operation with Japanese workers, effectively turning the entire island into a company town. Schools, restaurants, brothels, and gaming houses, were all encircled by a protective seawall. The island which held 6,000 people was so densely built up with concrete structures it became known as "Midori nashi Shima," or the island without green. 

Eventually, the coal ran out. Mitsubishi closed the mine in 1974 and everyone left. Since that time the buildings have been slowly crumbling, leaving an astonishing ghost island floating in the ocean. The island was officially closed to all visitors from 1974 to 2009, but recently the site has been re-opened to tours. The site has officially been included on the UNESCO World Heritage list as of July 5, 2015.

Minneapolis-based YogaQuest leads a costumed yoga session at a science fiction convention. (Photo courtesy of YogaQuest)

Are you dreading the upcoming resolution season because you want to start being more active, but gyms are for mundanes? Is the thought of being surrounded by bulging muscles giving you uncomfortable flashbacks of high school swirlies? Does the sound of new-age music piped softly into yoga class make you want to rip your ears from your skull and throw them into a Dimmu Borgir concert?

Well, you may be in luck, because there are alternative workout spaces popping up around the country that finally make gym culture friendly to weirdos, dorks, and dweebs.

Andrew Deutsch, founder of Nerdstrong Gym in LA, realized that there was a market for geeky gyms when he couldn't get any of his friends to come to Crossfit classes with him. When his friend David–who was also his Dungeons & Dragons dungeon master–crashed with Deutsch for a while, Deutsch tried to convince him to work out on the equipment he'd set up in his garage. But David just wasn't finding the workouts inspiring. "So I was like, well, what if I did a dungeon workout, where you kick down the door, you battle a monster, and then you go to the next room and the next room, like you would in D&D?" Deutsch recalls. What if the workout was about imagination, not competition? That piqued David's interest, so Deutsch devised the story for a D&D workout, complete with monsters and traps.

Soon, nerdy friends were flocking to Deutsch's garage gym every Sunday for Lord of the Rings workouts, Batman workouts, Godzilla workouts, Star Wars workouts. "It was my stealthy way of getting them to work out in an atmosphere that's open and welcoming and not the typical gym atmosphere," he said. Deutsch got teased a little at his Crossfit gym for running a nerd exercise group, but the level of interest surprised him–and it kept growing. Finally, in 2014, he opened Nerdstrong (then called Nrdfit) to the public.

Though he's a little nerdy himself, Deutsch was enough of a jock that he was initially surprised by Nerdstrong's popularity. "I didn't know there was this community of people that were underserved," he said, "and they've just been gradually showing up more and more." He and his coaches talk to every new member individually about their history and experience with physical activity, and many have never been to a gym at all because they find it so unwelcoming. Here, they've found a place where they can swing maces, attack the "Death Star" (it's a tire), or pretend to be Indiana Jones, all in the name of getting fit. More importantly, they've found their people.

"We're called Nerdstrong not because we do tons of nerdy things, but it's the community that's nerd-focused and nerd-centered," says Deutsch. In many ways, that community has taken on a life of its own; the gym has spawned several sub-communities of people who work out together and hang out together outside of the gym, like the all-women Misfits and the LGBT-friendly Queerstrong. Oh, and the Hufflepuffs. ("They're not anything else, they're Hufflepuffs. If you put them in Slytherin [for a Harry Potter-themed workout] they're like 'I'll do it this time.' They have chants about being Hufflepuffs.")

And while Nerdstrong has its share of casual members, a lot of nerds have become devotees. David, Deutsch's DM and the original inspiration for the D&D workout, is now a trainer. 

An Indiana Jones workout at Nerdstrong. (Photo: Nerdstrong Facebook)

While Deutsch started his nerd gym primarily for his friends, Justine Welch Mastin of the Minneapolis yoga studio YogaQuest was initially looking for a place that she herself could feel more at home. "Yoga was meaningful to me, but so much of the yoga culture felt forced and exclusive," she said. "I found that I was pretending to be someone who I wasn't. I didn't feel authentic, but I didn't know what, if anything, I could do about it."

Mastin realized that she wasn't alone; geeks in general were lacking "conversations on how to care for themselves or the narrative that they were worth caring for." That was the key to what would become the YogaQuest mission. "I'm not just saying 'okay, so you're fat and weird, that's okay, we can work with that,'" says Mastin. "I'm saying 'you are a vital human being who deserves to move your body and have community.'" As a psychotherapist, Mastin wanted to make the positive aspects of self-care and physical movement available to a larger range of people – to her people, specifically.

As with Nerdstrong, Mastin says that community is the most important part of YogaQuest: "We can't foster growth and open dialogue if we can't trust each other. To appeal to geeks, the first thing to do is to show them that this space is for them – whatever that means."

Kate Harding, who's taken a class at YogaQuest (and is a friend of mine), said that this sense of inclusion and belonging was the most appealing part: "It's a unique and really charming, approachable environment. Everyone who works there oozes nonjudgmental friendliness." YogaQuest regular Rebecca Wegscheid agrees, saying that nobody at YQ judges her either for not knowing a pose or for being in the wrong fandom: "I am accepted as I am, flaws/nerdiness/ability and all. The general attitude about each person who walks through the door at the studio is a huge factor in this: each person that walks in is introduced as a friend. Not a client, not someone who has/hasn’t done yoga before, but a friend." Even the decor shouts "you belong here." Harding describes the studio as "like walking into a ThinkGeek catalog."

This works, she notes, partly because it's obvious there's no pandering going on. "There are also pictures of the staff attending various cons and cosplaying Supernatural out in the woods in their spare time, in case you're worried that it's just a gimmick," she says.

That said, YogaQuest isn't just about doing yoga with nerds; it operates differently from a typical yoga class, too. Instead of a sun salutation or a Bikram series, participants move through poses dictated by a reference-heavy adventure written and read aloud by Jenny Milos (who originally just wrote scripts, but is now also certified as a yoga instructor). The YogaQuest website offers a long list of fandoms Milos has based her scripts on; among others, she's written narratives for Buffy yoga, Rocky Horror yoga, Iron Man yoga, Monty Python yoga, Twin Peaks yoga, and Sharknado yoga, and Mastin says that students are requesting new fandoms all the time. Another Minneapolis nerd exercise option, the belly dance class Geek Slink, also meets in the YogaQuest studio for people who prefer other movement options.

If you're a geeky yogini but you can't make it to Minneapolis, artist Scott Wayne Indiana has run three sessions of Dungeons and Dragons yoga in Brooklyn and Austin. D&D yoga participants make up characters and are led through a narrative adventure, doing poses to represent climbing, fighting, and acts of stealth or strength. Like a regular, sedentary Dungeons & Dragons session, they even roll dice to determine the outcomes of some of their actions. There are no new classes on the schedule, but you can get the full audio of the Austin session and follow along with the pose chart.

But what if you're disaffected in a different way? What if you're more into death metal than Doctor Who, or you're a goth who wants to put some muscles on your Jhonen-Vasquez-character physique? In that case, you've got your pick of Healthgoth personal training in Chicago, a spinning gym called Monster in New York, and heavy metal yoga in Brooklyn, Austin, and Pittsburgh.

When Johnny Love, a Chicago DJ and music producer, decided to start improving his physique, he did it by going to the gym with his friends "who are all either goth, metal heads, punks etc. … all wearing all black, because that's what we all own." Love encountered the term "health goth," and it resonated with him, but he was disappointed to find that it was a cyberpunk-like aesthetic originated by Portland artists (or, in Love's words, "a stupid meme made by nerds") and not a movement about getting jacked while wearing black. So he bought Healthgoth.com and decided to make it more like his idea of what "health goth" should be.

Love uses the site partly to market T-shirts with death- and disaffectation-based takeoffs on traditional sporting goods iconography. But people in his Chicago music circles started to ask him for workout advice, and he gradually moved into personal training. He says he hopes to open a Healthgoth gym in LA in the near future. "The biggest problem at gyms, including the one I go to, is the overwhelming bro mentality," says Love. "Our crew still deals with shit from the bro cliques at the gym, including the employees, because we're not talking about sports and we wear all black, so basically it's high school all over again." The Healthgoth gym will eschew bros, TV sports, and top 40 music.

In other ways, Healthgoth hews close to a standard gym mentality, unlike a place like YogaQuest that seeks to change attendees' attitudes towards fitness and self-care. Love's "Healthgoth fitness Bible" (and it should really be the "Healthgoth Liber AL vel Legis") is the same recitation of intense nutrition and bodybuilding rules you might get from a typical jock trainer, plus a reference to leather harnesses. Monster Cycle is similar: SoulCycle with better music. They're partly about making fitness welcoming for people who might feel out of place when surrounded by colored spandex, but they're also about leveraging goth color schemes and attitudes, and perhaps the pressure to wear fishnet shirts, in order to tempt or shame a new population into standard hardcore fitness routines.

Heavy metal yoga is more low-key. The Brooklyn classes, taught by Saskia Thode, replaces sun salutations with obeisances to Satan, chants of "om" with Cookie Monster growls, and prayer hands with metal horns. As you might intuit, it's more than a little tongue in cheek. For people who find the touchy-feely new-age attitude of many yoga classes off-putting, though, avoiding breezy positivity has an appeal even if you're not especially into metal, witchcraft, or Satanism. One participant reported that she expected to find the trappings gimmicky, but wound up enjoying the opportunity to tap into her anger instead of being encouraged to release it. Pittsburgh-area Black YO)))ga—the spelling is a reference to metal band Sunn O)))—takes a similar approach to embracing anger, offering metal-, noise-, and industrial-fueled yoga classes to "people who may battle depression, anxiety, alcoholism, drug addiction, trauma/PTSD, phobias, dark passengers, etc.," with the motto "You can't fully appreciate the light until you understand the darkness." Austin's Black Metal Yoga also offers "enlightenment through darkness." Namaste.

If you're not lucky enough to live near one of these workout options for weirdos, sit tight—or even better, do a few Game of Thrones- or Sherlock-themed exercises while you wait. "The question is always, 'when can I get one in my town?'" says Deutsch. He's hoping to open a new Nerdstrong location in LA soon, and maybe that will be the necessary proof of concept to make it more widespread. And the more visibility alternative workout spaces have, the more people will be inspired. Someday, your biggest complaint about the gym might be not "what's with all these meathead jocks?" but "what's with all these Hufflepuffs?"

 

Кто, если не я? #ЗаБарсика #БарнаулЗаБарсика

A photo posted by Кот Барсик (@barsikbarnaul) on Dec 10, 2015 at 12:59am PST

The year of the political outsider has reached its scruffy apex. When asked who should be their next mayor, the residents of Barnaul, a city in the Altai region of West Siberia, overwhelmingly chose a cat named Barsik. 

A survey posted on the Altai community's Vkontakte page—Vkontakte is Russia's most popular social network—found that 91 percent of respondents chose Barsik over the six human candidates. Although it was a thoroughly unofficial poll that drew only 5,400 votes, a small fraction of Barnaul 700,000 residents, its results have brought international attention to the city. Because a cat mayor is the world's business.

Barsik has five more days to campaign before the December 22 decision, and supporters have been hitting the pavement, posting supportive photos on Altai Online, crowdfunding for a Barsik billboard, and soliciting endorsements from regional officials. These higher-ups have found various reasons to approve—one politician called the candidacy an "effective protest," while the Altai governor says the cat is "a nice image" that suggests "well-being and warmth."

Downtown Barnaul. (Photo: Muad'Dib/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

This fuzziness would be a welcome departure from Barnaul's mayoral track record. The last human to hold the position, Igor Savintsev, was corrupt enough that he was forced to resign this past August. Savintsey was the first mayor to be appointed by commission rather than elected by the people.

As this appointment strategy is still in place, there's little hope the populist Barsik will claw his way to the post. Still, the undercat's supporters hope Barsik's presence pushes the other candidates to clarify their positions. "We don't know their programs, motives, or what they want for the city," Barsik's anonymous human companion told IBTimes UK. To rectify this problem, Barsik's team has used his growing platform to pose five questions to the cat's human rivals, on topics ranging from the future of Barnaul to the city's stray animal problem, to attempt to suss out how they would use their power. (Barsik's own motives and intentions have been made clear by several popular videos of him yawning and batting at a small feathery toy.)

Regardless of next week's outcome, Barsik is "not giving up on his political ambitions," says his human companion. With such success straight out of the gate, a long career seems assured. The cat may even develop a cowboy strut. 

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.

Some of the world of classroom wind instruments.  From top to bottom: Yamaha soprano recorder, Swanson Tonette, Conn-Selmer Song Flute, Grover-Trophy Flutophone, Suzuki Precorder. (Photo: Phil Wink, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Commons) 

All across America, for decades, a strange cultural ritual has been enacted. Students at the end of elementary school are herded into rooms and handed a simple, hard white plastic instrument called a recorder that seems pathologically incapable of creating any complex music. 

Learning to play the mass-produced wind instrument is an integral part of the curriculum of most elementary school music programs in the United States. Screechy, hesitant, clumsy, it’s hard to imagine anyone actually playing the instrument seriously. 

But this disposable educational toy is a relatively new chapter in the instrument’s long, storied history. Its journey to U.S. classrooms involves a passionate German composer and a plethora of suddenly cheap plastic. There’s much more to the recorder than butchered renditions of “Mary Had A Little Lamb.”

Learning the recorder, a source of pain for centuries. (Photo: Library of Congress)

“The recorder is very old, almost as old as notated western music,” writes John Everingham, the owner of Saunders Recorders, a specialist dealer in recorders in Bristol, England. Instruments that are immediately recognizable as recorders have been discovered dating back at least 700 years. (One particularly famous example is the Tartu recorder, found in an ancient Estonian latrine and dated to the 14th century. An archaeologist actually played it. After cleaning, presumably.) 

But what really is a recorder? The recorder is a type of flute; in fact, it’s probably the original kind of flute, and technically the flute that we all recognize as a flute, the one that’s played by blowing into the side of the instrument, is called a “transverse flute.” The English name “recorder” is kind of an oddball; in most other languages its name positions it as some sort of flute. It’s flûte à bec in French, meaning “beaked flute” and referring to the shape of the mouthpiece, which sort of looks like a bird’s beak. In German it’s blockflöte, with “block” referring to the part of the recorder that constricts the breath of the player—a block of wood. (In English that block is called a “fipple,” which is a fun-sounding word.) The English name dates from an obsolete meaning of the word, which was more like “practice.”

An alto recorder. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

There are similar flute-type pipes around the world, but the recorder, says Everingham, is generally assumed to be a western European creation. Other flutes, like the Japanese shakuhachi, look much like a recorder but are constructed and played differently. (The shakuhachi is played by blowing air over the surface of the mouthpiece, like a beer bottle.) “The design has changed over the centuries but the distinguishing feature of the recorder is the hole covered by the thumb at the top of the instrument, and a hole for the little finger at the bottom,” says Everingham. Without those bottom holes an instrument would be more accurately described as a whistle.

The recorder is a very direct instrument; unlike most others, the sound comes not from the vibration of any other material (like a string in a guitar or a reed in a saxophone) but from the constriction of the breath. It is, basically, a whistle, and changing the path of the air by covering up holes in the body of the recorder changes the notes. That makes for an easy instrument to play but also a strange one. Because there’s no modulation of the player’s breath, it requires a lot of concentration to keep the tone steady. “If you're nervous if comes through, laughing it comes through, you have to be pretty focused,” says Susan Burns, the administrative director of the American Recorder Society.

Mouthpiece of a Shakuhachi. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

 There are many many varieties of recorder; like other woodwinds, it comes in sizes that are roughly pegged to the human vocal range. The recorder that we all learned to play (sort of) as kids is the soprano recorder. The recorder can be as large as the sub-contrabass recorder, which is about eight feet tall and requires a long tube-shaped mouthpiece trailing downwards from the top because no human can actually stand and play it. On the other end of the spectrum is the garklein, a teensy, high-pitched variation. “It's about six inches long and makes my dog howl every time i play it,” says Burns. 

In modern musical culture, the recorder has two very distinct purposes: as a teaching aid and as a revival instrument. “The Baroque era was kind of the golden age of the recorder; Bach wrote many many pieces, Vivaldi, all the big guys,” says Burns. It was not a solo instrument, but usually used with many other recorders of varying sizes. Its heyday was short-lived, though. The transverse flute (which we would recognize today as the “normal flute”) arrived from Asia in the 14th century and steadily supplanted the recorder until it essentially replaced it by the mid-19th century. “You don't find it too much in a modern orchestra after 1850,” says Burns.

A box of soprano recorders, and flashbacks to grade school music class. (Photo: Melissa Gutierrez/flickr)

But the instrument was rediscovered in the early 20th century and quickly put to use as a revival instrument. Soon enough its plaintive, childlike tone branched out from there; some rock and pop acts used it (Paul McCartney was a fan, using it in some Beatles songs like “Fool On The Hill” and some of his solo work), and it was also snagged by some more contemporary and even avant-garde composers. It can be very pretty!

But where it’s most recognizable is as a teaching tool. It has a few key advantages in that capacity. For one thing, ever since the 1960s, it’s been manufactured in insanely cheap plastic, which is near-indestructible and can actually sound quite good. “Some of the very cheapest recorders can produce sounds very close to the very best, but at a hundredth of the price,” says Everingham. It’s an accessible instrument. Unlike, say, a saxophone, or even a guitar, no real technique is needed to actually make sound come out. You simply blow, which gives young students a big step up in the learning of the recorder. And the soprano recorder is a perfect size for a small child’s hand, so there’s no need to make a smaller version for younger players.

The soprano recorder came into being as a teaching tool in the early to mid-20th century thanks to the efforts of one Carl Orff, a sort of revivalist German composer. He’s best known as the creator of Carmina Burana, the name of which may not ring a bell but which we can absolutely guarantee you have all heard, most likely in the trailer of an action movie. Here:

Aside from his compositions, Orff was perhaps the most influential and important architect of music education theory in the 20th century. His Orff Schulwerk was an approach to teaching music that relied on rhythm and creative thinking above rote memorization. It also called for an array of simpler instruments, largely those that mimicked the vocal range of a child. The rationale: if a child can sing it, he or she is more likely to understand it. The instruments should also be inexpensive, simple to understand, and easily stored. That’s where the soprano recorder comes in, along with other common teaching instruments like the glockenspiel.

Bass, tenor, alto/treble, soprano/descant and sopranino recorders. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

As for manufacturers, many stepped up with the proliferation of advanced plastic work to create incredibly low-cost versions. No one company really pioneered the plastic recorder; Yamaha, Zen-On, and Aulos occupy the higher-end plastic recorder market, but mostly, those are not the models used for schools. Even a $5.00 recorder can be too expensive when multiplied by hundreds or thousands of students. Instead, low-cost makers like Lyons sell fairly decent plastic recorders for around a dollar each—and they’ll go cheaper if you buy in bulk.

Not everyone is thrilled that the recorder is most often associated with elementary school. “[I] tend to the view that the recorder is not so very suitable for children to play in their formative years. Indeed its use in schools throughout the world have made it more an instrument of torture than an instrument of music, and it must have turned generations off music-making for the rest of their lives,” writes Nicholas Lander, the proprietor of the very useful Recorder Homepage site, in an email.

Even Susan Burns, who in our phone conversation showed nothing but gleeful joy in talking about the recorder, defended it from this characterization: “It is a professional instrument in its own right. Everyone says, oh, it's so easy to play, but it takes a lifetime to master.”

A woman applies lipstick in Joseph Caraud's La Toilette, 1858. (Photo: Public Domain/The Athenaeum)

Glass and tin bottles hide snug in a case, waiting for a woman’s daily ritual. She reaches for a bottle of ammonia and washes it over her face, careful to replace the delicate glass stopper. Next, she dips her fingertips into the creams and powders of her toilet table, gravitating toward a bright white paint, filled with lead, which she delicately paints over her features. It’s important to avoid smiling; the paint will set, and any emotion will make it unattractively crack.

In Victorian England, these were some of the ways women began their daily beauty routines. Unfortunately, cosmetics of the era were plagued by caustic chemicals that could also cause bodily addiction. And, similar to today, the advice on how, if, and when to use these treatments came from the era’s most popular beauty columns.  

One such column, from Harper’s Bazaar, was called “The Ugly Girl Papers: Or, Hints for the Toilet.” It was written by a Mrs. S.D. Powers, a beauty expert of the time, and became so popular that it was re-published in 1874 as an anthology. The “Ugly Girl Papers” has the tone of a wise aunt with endless advice on how to solve your beauty woes.

In one chapter Powers asks, “Is there such a being as a hopelessly homely woman?” It is a rhetorical question, and readers of the time would have known the author’s firm belief that one could go from average to “charming” with just a few dress and makeup adjustments. Powers prized subtlety in makeup, though, and always included careful reminders to be sparse with powder and rouge.

According to Powers, women’s beauty was an elaborate, skilled, and semi-secret performance. “Everybody knows they are inventions, and accepts them as such, like paste brilliants at a theatre,” she wrote.

A woman queries the durability of cosmetics at a pharmacy. (Photo: Wellcome Images, London) 

Victorian beauty ideals were unsurprisingly obsessed with pallor: upper class white women chased even whiter skin, a symbol that their privilege never left them working in the sun. “It was all about how to make your skin more translucent,” says Alexis Karl, a perfumer and lecturer who has researched Victorian cosmetics extensively.

There were two dominant makeup styles in the 1800s: “natural” and “painted.” The ideals of “natural” skin care conjured images of the “English Rose”; a wholesomely beautiful woman with good morals, but Karl notes “it was understood that there was a lot of artifice going on.” The “painted” beauty regime was seen as a bit risqué; these women were not hiding their artifice nor their desire to be beautiful.

Similar to the “no-makeup makeup” trend that exists today, the natural look was often achieved through unnatural preparations, many of them homemade. Modern beauty practices belie the roots of current ideals: a chemical called Taraxacum is suggested as a sort of 1800s chemical peel by Powers, who says “the compress acts like a mild but imperceptible blister, and leaves a new skin, soft as an infant’s.”

To keep the face fresh, she advises coating the face with opium overnight, followed by a brisk wash of ammonia in the morning. For the woman with sparse eyebrows and eyelashes, mercury was often recommended as a nightly eye treatment, eradicating the need to use heavy makeup. “The look of the consumptive was very desirable: the woman with the watery eyes and pale skin, which of course was from the cadaver in the throes of death,” says Karl.

An 1898 advertisement for Dr. Campbell's Safe Arsenic Complexion Wafers. (Photo: Jussi/flickr) 

To get this near-death look, women would squeeze a few drops citrus juice or perfume into their eyes, or reach for some belladonna drops, which lasted longer, but also caused blindness. Pale skin was encouraged with veils, gloves and parasols, but could also be bought: Sears & Roebuck sold a popular product called Dr. Rose’s Arsenic Complexion Wafers, which were just that–little white chalk wafers filled with arsenic for delicate nibbling. They were specifically advertised as “perfectly harmless.”

Arsenic, a natural metalloid found in the earth’s crust, is an extremely toxic compound that can be tolerated for a time when eaten in small amounts (and has occasionally been used in medicine). Long-term exposure, however, is extremely unpleasant: nervous system and kidney damage, hair loss, conjunctivitis and growths called arsenical keratoses plague the body along with, yes, vitiligo, which causes pigment loss in the skin. Arsenic, which became addictive as a person’s tolerance built, was used in as many forms as possible.

Lola Montez, a Victorian actress and traveling beauty writer, wrote in her book The Arts of Beauty about how women in Bohemia (now a part of the Czech Republic) regularly bathed in arsenic springs, “which gave their skins a transparent whiteness.” She also warned of the price: “once they habituate themselves to the practice, they are obliged to keep it up the rest of their days, or death would speedily follow.”

Though beauty-related deaths were not always reported as arsenic poisoning, it wasn’t that Victorian women didn’t know arsenic was toxic or addictive. It was not uncommon for it to be used as a poison by murderesses of the era, and by the late 1800s arsenic was known to be a dangerous ingredient when used in dyes and wallpaper. The use of arsenic in small quantities for skin lightening was considered so effective that it continued for decades.

An advertisement from 1847, for François Gregoire & Co's "Enamel of America for beautifying and preserving the complexion". (Photo: Library of Congress)

The mentality associated with using dangerous substances was possibly rooted in the era’s culture. ”Toxicity is one thing, but there was also a stream of mortality running through daily life,” says Karl. Victorian life was full of everyday dangers beyond poisoned products; diseases, fires and electrical mishaps may have contributed to an obsession with death that made domestic dangers, like skin care, easier to overlook.

While the skin remedies geared toward a “natural” look were dangerous, the painted ladies were hardly better off. Women who used these products coated their faces and arms with white paints and enamels, in an effort to cover their natural skin tone and mimic an extremely pale complexion. These products were made from lead, which is corrosive–the more paint you wore, the more you needed to wear next time to cover your damaged skin. Vermillion, sometimes called “red mercury”, was a known poison and lip tint.

Many advice columnists, including Montez, vehemently hated enameling. “If Satan has ever had any direct agency in inducing woman to spoil or deform her own beauty, it must have been in tempting her to use paints and enameling,” Montez declared. 

John Singer Sargeant's painting Madame X. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons) 

One famous painted woman, Virginie Gautreau, depicted in a black dress in Sargent's famous portrait “Madame X”, was admired and hated for the sensualization of her corpse-like skin. “Madame X would use indigo dye to paint veins on her arms, over the enamel. She was highly skilled–these women were literally living pieces of art,” says Karl.

While wearing the enamel, painted women had to keep a largely emotionless face, against the risk that the enamel would crack. According to Karl, they made a concerted decision to paint rather than employ “natural” cosmetics methods, which were used out of sight and at home. Once you began to paint, everyone knew you did so, and in a social sense you could never switch to a natural look.

When read as a collection, beauty columns like “The Ugly Girl Papers” have a strangely contradictory feel. In one instance, Powers claims that “ammonia is the most healthful and efficient stimulus for the hair” and in another insists that to remove unwanted hair, all that is needed is a good application of ammonia.

The frontispiece for The Ugly Girl Papers: Or, Hints for the Toilet. (Photo: Internet Archive)

Youthful grace was emphasized, until Powers herself aged, when she began talking of the beauty found in grey hair. There is a surprising amount of advice that seems comparable to beauty and health columns of today, including eating well, keeping fit, and developing mental health and a sense of self-worth. At the same time, none of the above were optional lifestyle choices in the eyes of many beauty mavens at the time: the word “duty” comes up in these columns a lot.

Today’s consumers like to think they are savvier than the Victorians, of course, and there have indeed been some improvements. Ingredient lists are now a legal necessity, and contemporary wearers tend to approach makeup as a conscious method of self expression and creativity rather than as a duty.

In some senses, though, it’s hard to miss the parallels to contemporary beauty tips dispensed by blogs and vlogs, and the potentially risky treatments that wax and wane in popularity and endorsements. “It’s kind of like how people say ‘Oh, Botox for your eye is probably not good’ while others say ‘but she looks so good now!’” says Karl. “So how far have we really come?”