On July 19, 1987, a Ferrari owner in Orange County, Calif., discovered their car had gone missing. This was a nice car—1981 Ferrari 308 GTSi, in red, naturally. They reported the car stolen and were compensated by their insurance company. That’s how these things go.
Recently, someone decided to ship the car to Poland. They listed it under a false vehicle identification number, as a 1982 Ferrari. The false VIN tipped off Customs and Border Protection that something was off—it had already been used to ship a different car to Norway, back in 2005.
They brought in a Ferrari factory expert, who was able to identify the car. With the real VIN, CBP found the original theft report. The car is still worth about $50,000, CBP says. What happened to the car between 1987 and 2016 is still a mystery, though. It only has 45,000 miles on it, so it doesn’t seem like it’s been used much. Kind of a shame—if you’re going to steal a car, doesn’t it seem like a joyride is in order?
Every day, we highlight one newly found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com.
A Euphrates soft-shelled turtle, possibly taking a break from ferrying souls. (Photo: Dûrzan cîrano/CC BY-SA-3.0)
Across history, various mythologies have incorporated the idea of a being or spirit that guides the deceased to the afterlife—names like Charon, Anubis, the Valkyries, or the Grim Reaper might immediately jump to mind.
But have you ever considered being carried to heaven by a turtle?
Recently, a team of French and Turkish researchers discovered an unusual burial at Kavuşan Höyük in southeastern Turkey, an Assyrian site dating between 700 and 300 BC. According to a Discovery News report, the burial site contained the skeletons of a woman, aged 45 to 55 years old, a child around 6 or 7 years, and numerous turtle, tortoise, and terrapin remains.
Specifically, remains of 17 Euphrates soft-shelled turtles, one spur-thighed tortoise, and three Middle Eastern terrapins were ritualistically incorporated into the burial. In a paper published in Antiquity, the researchers explain that the different chelonians appear to have played different distinct roles in the funerary rites; the Euphrates soft-shelled turtles were “clearly butchered” and likely consumed as part of a funeral ceremony, while the other chelonians were only represented by their empty shells, indicating the remains were included as grave goods. Interestingly, the researchers connect the inclusion of the turtles’ shoulder bones to far more recent cultural practices in the area, noting, “As recently as 40 years ago in south-eastern Turkey, these skeletal elements were regularly hung around the necks or shoulders of infants to protect them against the ‘evil eye’.”
Lead researcher Rémi Berthon explained the significance of the grave to Discovery News, stating, “Although the Middle Eastern terrapin is very common in eastern Turkey, this is the first evidence of its use as a grave good. Finding Euphrates soft-shelled turtles in a burial is unprecedented as well.” Despite the novelty of the discovery, the researchers support their claims of turtle spirit guides through evidence in ancient texts, noting their use in Babylonian funeral and religious ceremonies among other depictions. And because ancient texts also make a point of describing the Euphrates soft-shelled turtle’s “aggressive, biting nature,” the researchers conclude that the woman in the grave likely held a high social status, justifying her community taking the time to catch 17 extremely surly turtles.
In concluding their findings, Barthon’s team notes that turtles are still believed to ward off death in southeastern Turkey, 2,600 years after this unique burial occurred. One might consider it another indication that it’s turtles all the way down.
Generally, American law protects prisoners’ rights to exercise their religious beliefs. However, that protection relies on the courts agreeing that your beliefs constitute a religion. Unfortunately for Nebraska inmate Stephen Cavanaugh, a U.S. District judge ruled this week that his religion of choice, Pastafarianism (also known as, and referred to in court documents, as FSMism) does not qualify for Constitutional protection.
Judge John Gerrard provides a great primer on Pastafarianism for the unfamiliar:
FSMism is a riposte to intelligent design that began with aletter to the Kansas State Board of Education when it was considering intelligent design. See, Bobby Henderson, The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster 111-13 (2006) (FSM Gospel). The primary criticism of intelligent design—and the basis for excluding it from school science classes—is that although it purports to be "scientific," it is actually "an interesting theological argument" but "not science."
The conceit of FSMism is that, because intelligent design does not identify the designer, its "master intellect" could just as easily be a "Flying Spaghetti Monster" as any Judeo-Christian deity—and, in fact, that there is as much scientific evidence for a Flying Spaghetti Monster as any other creator. See FSM Gospel at 3-4. 1 As the FSM Gospel explains, "[w]e are entering into an exciting time, when no longer will science be limited to natural explanations. . . . Propelled by popular opinion and local government, science is quickly becoming receptive to all logical theories, natural and supernatural alike."
Based on this history, prison officials—and later, the court—not unreasonably determined that Pastafarianism is more satire than religion, and denied Cavanaugh such religious practices as wearing a pirate costume instead of his prison jumpsuit. But this particular cut-and-dry case belies Pastafarianism’s status worldwide.
Since its introduction in 2005, the mythology of Pastafarianism has grown to encompass pirates, an afterlife with a beer volcano, and more. There is, of course, a snazzy orientation video to welcome you into the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s noodly arms:
In fact, Pastafarianism is an officially recognized religion in three countries—first in Poland, where it became an officially registered religious community in 2014 thanks to a legal technicality, then in the Netherlands this past January. And just this weekend, New Zealand recognized the first legally-binding Pastafarian wedding, officiated by “minestroni” Karen Martyn. The happy couple were wed in the customary pirate's garb, and Martyn is ready to perform additional ceremonies for any legally eligible adults, explaining to the BBC, “I've had people from Russia, from Germany, from Denmark, from all over contacting me and wanting me to marry them in the church because of our non-discriminatory philosophy.”
In Czechia and Lubbock, Texas, Pastafarians have been allowed to wear their traditional headdress—a colander—in state ID photos, according to the New York Daily News. Actually, getting permission to wear a colander in official photos is one of the adherents’ favorite evangelical strategies, judging by posts on the official site and elsewhere. Basically, this goofy-sounding belief system is full of enthusiastic followers who are eager to see their religion legitimized.
Will Pastafarianism’s religious status be debated by the Supreme Court any time soon? Cavanaugh and his legal team have not indicated publicly that they intend to appeal the District Court’s ruling, but some Pastafarians are calling for further action. Right now, we’ll have to wait and see—but if past efforts are any indication, we might be taking Pastafarianism a lot more seriously in the future.
Every positive has a negative, every yin has a yang. On the one hand there is El Dorado, the mythical Andean city that for centuries was rumored to sparkle with gold, its splendors manifold, its location unfathomable. On the other there is Conrad, a small town located on the gently rolling Iowa prairie whose wonders are specific and whereabouts well signposted.
El Dorado is known as the Lost City of Gold. Conrad, by contrast, is the Black Dirt Capital of the World.
When the first settlers, led by the lushly bearded J.W. Conrad himself, set up camp here in 1853, there were few trees, just unbroken grasslands stretching as far as the eye could see. It is perhaps no surprise that given the relentless monotony of the horizon, these pioneers should look downward for inspiration. What they found was mesmerizing—striking black soil.
Twelve thousand years of prairie grass had seeded, sprouted and withered on these poorly drained plains, laying down a thick layer of black organic matter that extended two feet deep. When combined with the thick covering of minerals deposited here by centuries of dust storms, the soil of Conrad had become a magical mixture of humus (a layer of organic matter, not chickpeas), sand, silt and clay. The settlers soon found that whether they planted corn, oats, wheat or hay, all grew with remarkable prolificacy.
It’s difficult to pinpoint the most fertile place on earth. Some have suggested that the Pampas of Argentina have soil of especial richness. Others posit certain areas of the Ukraine, where the fecundity of the soil has led to a $900 million black market in “chernozem” (“black dirt”). However the National Laboratory for Agriculture and the Environment, located a dispassionate 53 miles away from Conrad, has declared Conrad’s soil among the richest farmland in the world. What’s more Grundy County, in which Conrad is located, heads the league in Iowa State University’s famed Corn Suitability Ratings. Not only does it have the highest average—84.7—of any county in Iowa, it absolutely trounces the next most fruitful area, Mitchell County, whose pitiful 77.7 rating makes you wonder if the poor folk who live there can muster two cobs to rub together.
To celebrate its luscious loam Conrad holds a festival each year with the surprisingly indefinite title, Black Dirt Days. It is quite the hot ticket. The local newspaper boasts of hundreds of people lining up to watch the Black Dirt Days parade “more than 30 minutes” before it starts. The festival itself is replete with quilt shows, pony rides, tractor pulls and snow cones. Yet while these entertainments may seem no different to those of any small town fair, the cause of its celebration really does set Conrad apart.
The fact is that worshiping soil is something of an anomaly in human history. Societies have throughout history connected the earth’s fecundity with gods and goddesses, but these have largely been broad nature deities rather than divinities linked specifically to soil. One of the only societies to develop specific soil worship prior to the Iowans of Conrad was found in ancient China. Soil is at the heart of the Sheji tan altar (“Altar of Soil and Grain”) built in Beijing in 1421, in which a raised platform holds five kinds of differently colored earth—yellow, green, red, white and black. The differing colors represent the five elements but also the basic soil types to be found throughout the country. Indeed this altar was the continuation of a practice that started in the ancient Zhou dynasty. When underlords in the Zhou were enfeoffed, the king would give them clods of earth from his own Sheji tan altar that would correspond to the soil of the land they were set to rule.
Nevertheless dirt has never been held in such high regard as the plants that grow within it. We hold harvest festivals to celebrate the earth’s bounty but we rarely celebrate that bounty’s birthplace. In so ignoring it we do it a disservice for dirt has played an essential role in the human diet, not just in terms of what it can grow, but in and of itself.
Grundy County tops the Corn Suitability Ratings. (Photo: regan76/CC BY 2.0)
Geophagy—the practice of eating earth—has been taking place for millennia. It still exists in sub-Saharan Africa where pregnant women commonly eat tablets made from clayey soil. The reasons for doing so are both nutritional (the soil is high in magnesium, potassium, copper, zinc and iron) and also the fact that eating earth relieves morning sickness and protects the stomach against toxins. In North Carolina and Georgia in the United States, “Mississppi Mud”—kaolin clays—is still popular as a kind of proto-Pepto-Bismol.
In fact eating dirt was probably the very first example of humans taking medicine. Even now this ancient trend is slipping back into mainstream cuisine. In Japan—which combines a smattering of soil deities borrowed from China with an inordinate number of Michelin-starred restaurants– tsuchi ryori (“earth cuisine”) has become increasingly popular. The chef, Yoshihiro Narisawa, has been serving his Soup of the Soil, made up of burdock root pan-fried in earth, for over a decade.
During Conrad’s Black Dirt Days there are neither soil deities to be venerated nor soil delicacies to be eaten. But in many ways Conrad has been ahead of the curve in its single-minded appreciation of its dirt. In recent years there has been an increasing clamor to reassess soil as a strategic resource. The loss of soil is increasingly being used to explain the demise of many ancient societies, from the Minoans and Mesopotamians to the Incas and the Aztec. Whether through the axe (deforestation) or the plow (agriculture) when soil is eroded faster than it can be replenished the collapse of a civilization is sure to follow. In Conrad itself that famed black dirt has already decreased from the two feet of topsoil the original settlers found to an average of between six to eight inches today. As the amount of farmable land lessens so its value increases. Soon Conrad and El Dorado may not seem quite so different.
The mosaic floor. (Photo: Wiltshire Archaeology Service)
Sometimes there really is a secret world hiding in the backyard, just underneath the ground. In Wiltshire, in the south of England, one family decided to install some electric cables in the ground to light their converted barn. Just 18 inches under the soil, their work crew found mosaic stones in red, blue, and white.
When archaeologists showed up to see what they could find, they found the remains of an awe-inspiring Roman villa, that was once three stories tall, with 20 or more rooms just on the ground floor.
In addition to the well-crafted mosaic floor, archaeologist found brooches, coins, heating pipes in the floor, the remains of hunted animals and “extremely high status pottery,” the Independent reports. They also found the shells of oysters, that would have had to have been transported, in basins of salt water from the coast, 45 miles away.
The villa dates back to 175 to 220 A.D., but even after the Roman Empire left England, the house still stood, until about 1,400 years ago. The modern-day house is built from two laborers’ cottages, in the center of the old villa, which was forgotten so completely that a child’s coffin, of Roman origins, had been used as a geranium planter.
Every day, we highlight one newly found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com.
"Sunset Over the Golden Horn," by Ivan Constantinovich Aivazovsky, from 1866. (Image: Public Domain)
Sunsets: they're great. Nowadays, we can show off our sunset-spotting prowess across a variety of media. You can Tweet a sunset. You can Snap a sunset, then 'gram it for good measure. You can Youtube or Vine a variety of sunsets over the course of a particular timespan. The possibilities are as large as the sun itself.
But before color photography was invented in 1866, those who wanted to get across their latest and/or greatest sunset experience had only two available modes: painting, and extremely purple prose. Many, many people rose to the challenge: Newspapers, memoirs, travelogues, and scientific treatises are all full of charmingly lurid paeans to the colorful end of the day, tinted further by a variety of forces.
Criteria for this collection was scrupulous: no fictional or metaphorical sunsets (otherwise, you open yourself up to poetry—a terrible wormhole); no sunrises (too sanctimonious); pre-1866 only. Here are the most vivid sunsets we found.
1. "The Suns true place..."
"By which Tables on Saturday April 9th, at the time of Sun-set, supposed at 7 ho. 3 minutes P.M. I find:
"Where, after all, shall we find Sunsets equal to British ones? Where such serenely beautiful horizons—such rich and varied dyes–such mellowness of light—such objects to be irradiated by it—and evenings so happily adapted for contemplating them? The mixture of fierceness and gloom in a West India Sunset, call the mind the coarseness of the people there, and the implacable deadliness of the climate; the milder glories of one in the Southern Atlantic, can be enjoyed at sea only, where everything else is unpleasing; the effect of a similar scene in America is injured by want of objects of antiquity, and of the lofty associations connected with them; and in India, the tropical glare attending the departure of day, forces us to imprison ourselves while it is taking place, and to remember that we are in exile."
John Howison, "Sunset in Different Climes," Times Telescope, 1826
3. "A smaller minute sprinkle"
"There was a fine sunset over the hills of Granada. I imagined it lighting up the Alhambra. The clouds were like great wings of gold and yellow and rose-colour, with a smaller minute sprinkle in one spot, like a shower of glowing stones from a volcano. You see very faint imitations of such lustre in England."
"The mists were rolling away from his feet in huge wreaths, which gradually, as they became thinner, received and transmitted the rays of an evening sun, and were lighted up with a golden and crimson radiance, glorious to behold, and increasing every moment in splendor."
"To a native of New England, few objects appear more beautiful than the setting of the sun as it appears from the hills and valleys of her mountains. The clearness of the atmosphere, and the brilliancy of the colors, fasten his gaze upon the west as the sun has just sunk behind the mountains. As he passes, however, to the middle and western parts of the State of New York, the sunsets become still more beautiful, and often absolutely splendid."
"What can the citizen, who can see only the red light on the canvass of the waggon at the end of the street, and the crimson colour of the bricks of his neighbor's chimney, know of the flood of fire which deluges the sky from the horizon to the zenith? What can even the quiet inhabitant of the English lowlands, whose scene for the manifestation of the fire of heaven is limited to the tops of hayricks, and the rooks' nests in the old elm-trees, know of the mighty passages of splendour which are tossed from Alp to Alp over the azure of a thousand miles of champaign?... What recollection have we of the sunsets which delighted us last year?"
"The island seemed to fold in, as it were, with the westerly cliffs of the Cape, until in a south view they formed one towering, stupendous mass of dark rocks, most richly tinged with the changeful rose color, and purple, and gold of the sunset's glorious hues, which shone forth in still greater lustre from contrast with the deep chasms and ravines which were in almost black shadow, and with the white crested hills of the blue sea, that dashed their glittering spray high over the broken crags. It was a scene never to be forgotten."
The sun, flinging his parting rays across the sky. (Photo: Coffee/CC0)
8. "A tedious, stupid sun"
"If ever there was a tedious sunset it was the one that took place on this night. Sunsets had been generally rather a fertile source of conversation at Mr. Tulip's. It was usual to go out on the piazza and watch them, and expatiate upon their beauty—though, if I may be allowed to whisper the heresy, I never in my life saw sunsets that were all so like one another as those at Tulipton—and the ladies grew sentimental watching them, and the gentlemen poetical, and much enthusiastic exclamation attended the retirement of the drowsy luminary. But on this memorable occasion every one grew disgusted with him. There never was such a tedious, stupid sun."
F.J. O'Brien, New York Times, 1853.
9. "Athwart his majestic easel"
"As the sun goes down he begins to fling his parting rays across all the sky, from horizon to zenith. He paints the clouds with his fiery pigments, and they glow with gorgeous colors from lake to river. Golden and yellow near the track of his disappearance, the hues change to boundless masses of pink, and crimson, and scarlet, and purple, further up the dome of the sky... Fiery as are the colors this sun-painter flings athwart his majestic easel, yet are they by so much the more quickly burned out and faded. The sunset is gorgeous only to be perishable and transitory. Gold changes to crimson, crimson deepens to purple, and soon the glory of the heavens is passed away. We turn and journey silently down to the lake."
"Letter from Lake Oscawana," New York Times, October 13th, 1865.
The creatures depicted on land in the 16th-century Carta Marina are not particularly unusual: the map's lands contain knights on horseback, wild boars and bears climbing trees. The west side of the map, however, shows a much more fanciful plethora of wildlife.
Cartographer Olaus Magnus created the Carta Marina while staying in Rome, between the years 1527 and 1539. However, Magnus was originally from Sweden, and chose to depict the Nordic countries in his map. The Carta Marina was one of the most precise depictions of any part of Europe at the time—although its portrayal of the oceans was not quite as accurate.
The northern seas on the map are filled to the brim with all kinds of aquatic monsters. Some maps of the era depicted dragons to metaphorically indicate uncertainties or dangers in a region. But the Carta Marina's mythological sea creatures were thought to really exist at the time Magnus drew them. He even identified each creature in the map's key. You can take a closer look at some of them below.
Unsuspecting sailors cook a meal on a sea monster off the coast of Iceland.
Magnus described this creature as a whale whose skin resembled the sand on a seashore. An English ship is depicted as having laid anchor on the whale, and two unwitting sailors are cooking a meal on its rump.
Sailors attempt to scare away attacking sea monsters with frightening sounds and empty barrels.
Just beneath Iceland, the Carta Marina offers up a curious sight: a sailor aboard a ship, playing the trumpet for two sea monsters. The sounds, along with the empty barrels shown, could have been a futile attempt to scare away the attacking beasts.
A vividly red sea serpent envelops a ship that came too close for comfort.
The infamous Leviathan appears on the western edge of the map.
One of the more recognizable shapes on the Carta Magna is the Leviathan, a sea monster that has been documented since the Old Testament days. In the map, only the creature's head is shown emerging from the sea, but Magnus describes its whole length to be over 300 feet long.
One can hardly ignore this bizarre swimming owl, the xiphias, which is being attacked by a rhinoceros-type creature that sinks ships by swimming beneath them and cutting into their hulls.
Ambergris is a highly valuable substance even today.
This is not technically a monster, but rather an absurd phenomenon. These green lumps make up a large chunk of ambergris, a highly prized mix of whale vomit and feces that still sells for exorbitant prices today.
Map Monday highlights interesting and unusual cartographic pursuits from around the world and through time. Read more Map Monday posts.
For modern wildlife smugglers, luggage linings and secret pockets are old hat. Last week, customs officials at Ho Chi Minh City Airport nabbed a man with almost a dozen live songbirds hidden in his pants, Thanh Nien News reported Wednesday.
The man had attempted to hide the birds by strapping them to his calves and pulling his trousers over them. Officials found more birds in his luggage, bringing the total count to eighteen.
The man was attempting to smuggle them into Taiwan, where a single bird can draw up to $1200 on the black market, News.com.au writes. The Institute of Tropical Biology identified eleven of the captives as members of protected species, including a white-rumped shama and a melodious laughing thrush, both prized for their songs.
The melodious laughing thrush, a protected species, sells for thousands on the songbird black market. (Photo: Charles Lam/CC BY-SA 2.0)
As News.com.au points out, gruesomely creative bird-smuggling is an occasional airport occurrence. Last year, a man tried to secret two dozen yellow-crested cockatoos out of Indonesia by stuffing them into plastic water bottles.
In this case, each bird was bound in a cloth cylinder so that it couldn't move its wings. The rescued birds were taken in for medical treatment, and the case is being investigated by customs and police. Aspiring birdleggers, beware—even a dozen pairs of wings won't help you fly the coop.
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.
Fish markets are full of fascinating sights, but as one unlucky (and rightfully outraged) observer discovered in south China’s Hainan Province, they can also hold some nasty surprises, like piles of protected sharks being sold for food.
As reported in National Geographic, photos appeared last week on Chinese social media of the scene at a fish market in Sanya. They appeared to show as many as 100 scalloped hammerhead sharks piled up and laid out for sale. These hammerheads can be found in oceans across the world, including the South China Sea, where the sharks are sought after for their meat and fins, which is used in the Chinese delicacy shark fin soup. The market was selling the sharks for a little over two dollars a pound.
For their part, the fishermen selling the sharks claimed that they were not aware that the animals were protected. They said that the sharks end up in their nets as an unwanted byproduct when fishing for other catches, and they were just trying to unload their unwanted gains. This may actually hold some water, as the scalloped hammerhead is not listed as endangered in China, but was classified as such in an international trade agreement regarding wildlife in 2013.
Whether or not this unfortunate shark debacle is the result of ignorance or greed, the hammerheads (over 1,300 pounds worth of the animals) were taken off the market. The director of the fish market has also vowed to try to increase awareness of which species are protected. But poaching in the South China Sea continues to be an issue, affecting not just the sharks, but turtles and coral as well. In China the number of high-speed fishing boats outnumbers the amount of law enforcement vessels 300-to-1, meaning that ending the sale of protected sharks is probably going to take a lot more than awareness.
Jerrie Cobb, in the Altitude Wind Tunnel in April 1960. (Photo: NASA/Public Domain)
Claudia Kessler is currently sifting through applications for Germany’s first female astronaut. That's right—first. In 2016, all 11 of Kessler's compatriots who have been to space so far have been men.
Kessler is CEO of the aerospace recruiting company HE Space. (That unfortunate name was based on a founder’s name, not the male pronoun, but she joked that she’s wanted to change it to SHE Space.) As the European Space Agency isn’t likely hiring new astronauts any time soon, Kessler has taken the matter into her own hands. She launched her private initiative called Die Astronautin in March. Her plan is to eventually train two finalists and pick one for a weeklong journey to the International Space Station. The mission would take place in 2020, at the earliest, and it would be funded through a mix of sponsors and crowdsourcing.
If Kessler succeeds, she would only slightly shift the overall gender imbalance in spaceflight. To date, more than 540 people have been to space . Just 59 of those astronauts have been women.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that spaceflight—like many science and tech fields—has traditionally been dominated by men. What may be surprising is that some women (and men) were pushing for gender diversity in space before any human had even left the planet. A look at an early chapter in the history of spaceflight might explain why progress for female astronauts has come in fits and starts.
Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman to go into space, in 1963. (Photo: ESA)
In the 1950s, American aerospace researcher Randy Lovelace developed a rigorous medical test to qualify NASA’s first astronauts for space travel, the Mercury 7, who included Alan Shepherd and John Glenn. Lovelace was basically a weeklong physical that used the most intense tests available to uncover health defects that could possibly compromise an astronaut exposed to the rigors of spaceflight. The candidates were subjected to a litany of X-ray scans, heart checkups and circulation tests. They also floated in dark isolation tanks for hours, and they were put into a coffin-sized radioactivity counter that doubled as a claustrophobia test.
Outside of NASA’s official astronaut training program, Lovelace was curious about how women would fare in his exam.
At the time, there was a lot of public discussion around the prospect of female space travelers, says Margaret Weitekamp, a historian and curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. The Man and the Challenge, a fictional TV show about an aerospace medical researcher, included a plot in 1960 about how women would do in space simulations. The real-life scientific community had good reason to think that women might be better suited physically for flying in a small spacecraft, where every pound takes up precious (and expensive) real estate. On average, women are lighter and smaller than men, and they require less food, less water and less oxygen. Women also tend to have better cardiopulmonary health, and in the 1950s they were outperforming men in isolation tests, Weitekamp said.
Seven of the original "Mercury 13" at Kennedy Space Center in 1995. (Photo: NASA/Public Domain)
Survival inside cramped space capsules wasn't the only concern. The public and scientists alike were envisioning a future where space stations would orbit Earth, housing astronauts for years at a time. So naturally, the question of sex came up. And the discussion wasn’t always decorous. In 1962, the German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun commented on the possibility of female astronauts by repeating a joke that NASA was “reserving 110 pounds of payload for recreational equipment.”
Author Martin Caidin had taken the issue a little more seriously in his 1958 cover story on space travel in the men’s magazine Real. Caidin was concerned about “the enormous sexual problems” that would arise if astronauts were sent into space with an all-male crew at the peak of their sexual prime. He said castration, homosexuality and celibacy were unacceptable options. On these terms, he generously offered that “there’s no reason in the world why a woman wouldn’t do as well as a space ship crew member as a man.”
Astronaut Mae Jemison on the Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1992. (Photo: NASA/Public Domain)
Lovelace had a less offensive, though still gendered, role for women in mind. He couldn’t foresee how advances in computers and digital cameras would take some burdens off humans in space exploration. He imagined astronauts of the future would live inside sprawling space labs where they’d conduct experiments and complete reconnaissance missions with telescopes and binoculars—with the help of a female support staff.
“Lovelace was thinking that if you’re going to have such a large installation in space, you’re going to need secretaries, you’re going to need lab assistants, you’re going to need telephone operators, you’re going to need nurses, and that means we need to know whether women can survive being in space physically,” Weitekamp said. “On one hand, he’s very much a visionary in terms of space exploration, and on the other hand, he’s very much a product of his time.”
Lovelace launched a privately funded Women in Space Program. He invited a top young pilot named Jerrie Cobb to be the first woman to undergo his exams, and in 1960, she passed. In 1961, Lovelace sent letters to another 25 talented female pilots asking them to undergo his test at his clinic in Albuquerque. The exams were enthusiastically covered in the media with articles in magazines like McCall’s and Parade. Including Cobb, 13 women in total passed the test. They’ve sometimes been called the “Mercury 13.” But these women were never together as a group in the 1960s. And Weitekamp thinks the nickname probably perpetuates the misconception that this program was ever officially sanctioned by NASA—which it wasn't.
Astronauts (L-R) Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger, Naoko Yamazaki, Stephanie Wilson and Tracy Caldwell Dyson, in 2010, marking the first time four women were in space at the same time. (Photo: NASA/Public Domain)
The Lovelace women were supposed go undergo further aeromedical tests during jet flights at a military base in Pensacola, Florida. In her book Right Stuff, Wrong Sex, Weitekamp describes how Lovelace asked the Pensacola base to wire the Pentagon to find out if they could use military equipment to determine difference between male and female astronauts. They received a joke in reply: “If you don’t know the difference already, we refuse to put money into the project.” Cobb eventually was able to undergo—and pass—the simulation testing in Pensacola, but the program was canceled before the other women could participate. Weitekamp said the Pentagon didn’t want to seem like they endorsed any qualifying tests for female astronauts.
In 1962, some of the Lovelace women testified during a congressional hearing about whether NASA was discriminating on the basis of sex. (This was before sex discrimination was even made illegal by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.) The complaints were ultimately dismissed. NASA reasoned that its astronaut candidates had to be jet test pilots, and women were explicitly excluded from becoming jet test pilots at that time because it was deemed too dangerous.
Weitekamp thinks NASA ultimately didn’t pursue a testing and training program for female astronaut candidates because such a move would have been considered some kind of “social experimentation.”
Expedition 16 commander Peggy Whitson, the first female commander of the International Space Station, pictured in 2008. (Photo: NASA/Public Domain)
Political considerations became paramount. “I don't know that people always remember that when John Kennedy gets up before a joint session of Congress on May 26, 1961, and sets the goal that we’re going to go to the moon by the end of the decade, the U.S. had only 15 minutes of human spaceflight at that point, and only suborbital,” Weitekamp said. “They end up on a track toward this lunar goal. NASA somewhat streamlines this program toward this goal and is really not interested in what it would have seen as social experimentation.”
It was up to the Soviet Union, the only other major space player at the time, to shatter the cosmic ceiling. When cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space in June 1963, NASA largely dismissed her feat as a stunt. And though Tereshkova was chosen from a pool of several trained female cosmonauts, the Soviets didn’t send another woman to space until Svetlana Savitskaya’s flight in 1982. Tereshkova recently told BBC News that the space program authorities deemed it “too dangerous” to send another woman to space after her milestone mission.
NASA's first six female astronaut candidates, pictured in 1979 (L-R): Shannon W. Lucid, Margaret Rhea Seddon, Kathryn D. Sullivan, Judith A. Resnik, Anna L. Fisher, and Sally K. Ride. (Photo: NASA/Public Domain)
Tereshkova’s flight reopened the wound for those who had hoped Lovelace’s Women in Space Program would be taken seriously. In July 1963, Life magazine printed pictures and short bios of the 13 Lovelace woman with a withering article under the headline “The U.S. Team Is Still Warming up the Bench.” The author, Clare Boothe Luce (who was a playwright, congresswoman, ambassador and fascinating figure in her own right), wrote, “The U.S. could have been first to put a woman up in space merely by deciding to do so.”
“The Lovelace women were ahead of their time,” Weitekamp said, noting that there was a distinct lack of organized feminist groups to advocate for them. “The idea of sex discrimination wasn’t enshrined in law in any way that would help them. I think that when you look at these histories, it’s not the slow steady progress that one might sometimes hope for.”
Jerrie Cobb next to a Mercury spaceship capsule. (Photo: NASA/Public Domain)
In 1978, NASA finally chose its first female astronauts, six mission specialists in a class of 35. By then, civil rights activists and second-wave feminists had raised the national consciousness about equality. And the leaders of space agency realized their Astronaut Corps needed to better reflect the face of country—in other words, it couldn’t be made up of just white men. NASA even brought in Star Trek actress Nichelle Nichols to help recruit women and minorities. The design of the Space Shuttle also allowed for a greater diversity of astronauts; the program was newly open to scientists and doctors outside the more homogenous pool of candidates that came from military flying programs. Still, the women of the 1978 class had to navigate an organization that wasn’t always used to having women in the room. Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, was asked if 100 tampons would be enough for her 7-day mission.
The future is a little brighter for gender equality in space. NASA’s most recent class of astronauts, announced in 2013, is 50 percent female. They’re the first group of space flyers who could be selected to go on a mission to the Red Planet. That means we might have a shot of getting the gender balance right when we become an interplanetary species. “If we go to Mars, we'll be representing our entire species in a place we've never been before,” one of those new astronaut candidates, Anne McClain, told Glamour magazine earlier this year.
In the private industry, some women have risen to high-power roles, like Gwynne Shotwell, who is president and COO of Elon Musk’s company SpaceX. Russian space officials, too, have stepped up their game. Last year six women successfully completed an 8-day mock lunar mission, ahead of a future Russian moon mission planned for 2029. "There's never been an all-female crew on the ISS," experiment supervisor Sergei Ponomaryov reportedly said. "We consider the future of space belongs equally to men and women and unfortunately we need to catch up a bit after a period when unfortunately there haven't been too many women in space."
Sally K. Ride, the first American woman in space, shown here on board the Challenger in 1983. (Photo: NASA/Public Domain)
Despite better representation, women in the industry still have to deal with sexism. Those women who took part in the mock moon mission were asked how they would live without men or makeup for a week. Before her flight in 2014, Russian cosmonaut Yelena Serova was asked during a press conference how she would bond with her daughter and take care of her hair during her stay aboard the International Space Station. Gesturing to her fellow male cosmonauts, Serova shot back: “Can I ask a question, too? Aren’t you interested in the hair styles of my colleagues?” Female NASA astronauts who have kids are inevitably asked about being away from their families for long stretches of time. It’s hard to imagine the same being asked of their male counterparts or splashy headlines about an “Astronaut Dad.”
“There is a lot of attention paid to the first women to do something,” Weitekamp said. “Equal credit needs to be given to the women who follow in their wake who don't have to deal with as much public scrutiny, but who are nonetheless held to a very high standard.”
China is releasing waters from dams in an attempt to ease the pain from a long-lasting drought that has affected areas up and down the Mekong River, which stretches from western China to Vietnam.
But at the famous Mekong Delta, where the river meets the sea in south Vietnam, the extra waters don't seem to be helping much, as the area contends with its worst drought in 90 years.
The drought, which experts say is partially brought on by El Niño, could affect commodity prices, from sugar, to coffee, to shrimp, Reuters reports, as southeast Asia remains a huge exporter of goods.
Further upriver, China has built dozens of dams to power their ever-expanding industrial economy. And, while, Reuters reports, Vietnam has lauded China's gesture in releasing some waters from the dams, farmers on the delta say they haven't seen much impact.
"It's been too hot toward the bottom of the pond and shrimp can't stand it," To Viet Tien, a shrimp farmer, told Reuters. "On this (salty) soil, it's impossible to switch to another crop."
Whatever new waters do come will just be a temporary reprieve, since environmentalists and residents say that the dams are destroying the Mekong Delta, by interrupting water flows and blocking alluvial soils from making it downstream.
"A shortage of fertile soil is the unavoidable death," one expert told Reuters.
"The homemaker walks miles every day, from sink to icebox, from cupboard to stove," explains the male narrator of the short film above, entitled Easy Does It.
The 1940 video, produced by Chevrolet, attempted to measure the amount of work women did each day, whether at the typewriter or within the home. It then presented examples of "muscle-savers" being invented to make the work more efficient, such as a washing machine.
"Even an efficiency expert would be staggered by the amount of chasing around and indoor roadwork that the 'little woman' takes as a matter of course," continues the narrator. Though it tries to show female empowerment through various "muscle-savers," the film falls into the trap of portraying women as a "fair and weak" sex in desperate need of man-made inventions.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
The public has spoken, but even after weeks of polling and tens of thousands of votes, it remains unlikely that a new British research ship will be named Boaty McBoatface after all.
This, despite the name getting over 124,000 votes from the internet public in a poll, winning decisively and besting its next closest competitor, Poppy-Mai, by over 80,000 votes.
On Monday, Jo Johnson, the Conservative Science Minister who will be ultimately approving the name, said that Boaty McBoatface was "not suitable," crushing the hopes and dreams of the whimsical everywhere.
It was always going to be a tough upstream paddle for Boaty, especially after even its creator, James Hand, a former BBC radio presenter, disavowed his creation and voted instead for "RRS David Attenborough."
Monday's remarks, however, portend final doom for Boaty, since Johnson has also said the poll will just be one factor in the naming decision.
Boaty's life was short if wondrous, though Boaty's supporters continue to fight.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
Taking an experience like going to the movies and converting it to your living room is a hugely controversial thing, despite the fact we've been doing it for decades.
Rich guy and wannabe disruptor Sean Parker is learning this the hard way, thanks to his efforts to sell a product called Screening Room. The service would allow homes access to first-run movies through a set-top box for a price of $50 a pop—not cheap at all, but potentially cheaper than a night at the movies. Parker has some defenders, like super-director J.J. Abrams, but largely he's hearing a lot of complaining. Parker probably knows that this is not a new fight he's in the middle of, and some of the prior fights have forever shaped the way we view movies.
Example? Letterboxing, or the black bars that frame most movies on television screens. While there's a good technical reason for their existence, they came about basically thanks to an effort by the movie theater industry to keep butts in seats.
See, the 4-by-3 layout of most televisions produced in the pre-HDTV era was fine for most early films, but in 1953 Hollywood shifted gears in response to the growing small-screen threat, releasing a wide array of competing technologies to allow for increasingly wider film resolutions.
One early technology, Cinemascope, compressed wide images onto 35mm film using an anamorphic lens, then stretched those pictures out onto a giant, slightly curved screen, to create an experience that theaters hoped would make television seem pathetic in comparison. A later variation of the format, Panavision, became the industry standard and is still in use today.
A competing technology, Cinerama, used an even more-ambitious trick: it displayed the film through three different projectors, each aiming at different parts of an extremely curved screen. The result was bold, and though the technique itself isn't used today, some of the theaters it inspired are considered legendary.
All these tricks were great for filmgoers, but when the movie inevitably was put on a TV screen, it often meant a game of compromises.
Many television networks decided to tackle the issue by using "pan-and-scan" versions of the films, which basically involved a film engineer selectively focusing on small parts of the screen and shifting the layout so as to match what was happening on the screen.
This technique, as you imagine, has some really negative effects on the films that used it. If a film was framed so that two people were standing far apart, for example, one would inevitably be cut off. Panning-and-scanning could hide moments of tension or even remove key characters from a scene.
It ensured that movie theaters had the better product, sure, but the popularity of home video ultimately made the issue untenable.
Beyond being controversial with serious film buffs, it's far more so for the directors, who often were forced to make compromises just to take advantage of home video's reach.
"The only time I lose my integrity as a filmmaker, is when my films go on TV. I lose it because I'm very frame-conscious, very conscious of my visual compositions, and I do a lot of things to tell a story by where I put characters and objects within the frame," the directing legend told the reviewing legend.
These compromises, Spielberg continued, damaged his artistic vision.
"You can either pan and scan, which means you electronically pan the frame, or you make internal cuts in a scene, from one side to the other," he explained. "The problem with cutting is that you're adding cuts where a cut is not required—where you don't want a cut. When I see my movies panned and scanned, it's like some of the scenes were being redirected by someone else."
Letterboxing was the solution to this problem—and the approach that Spielberg greatly preferred—but for decades, it was a hard sell with consumers, who believed they were missing something.
"A director works painstakingly to set up a shot or scene—the whole meaning of which is lost when a film is cropped or panned and scanned to fit a standard television screen," he said.
Despite support from big-name directors, letterboxing took some time to get off the ground. Ultimately, though, we can thank an obscure video format for its existence.
As we pointed out last year, RCA's video-on-vinyl Selectadisc VideoDisc was not a well-loved video format, but the Capacitance Electronic Disc that drove the format does have the honor of being the first to have a movie released for it that used letterboxing.
That film, Federico Fellini's Amarcord, came about in January of 1984. Other early films that used the technique include Monty Python & the Holy Grail and the Woody Allen film Manhattan.
From there, the Criterion Collection took the concept and ran with it. The company, launched in 1984, represented one of the first concerted efforts to release films in a home-video format that perfectly matched the original layout of the films upon their release.
The strategy, started with its Laserdisc release the SuperScope-shot 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, was intended to keep the filmmakers' original vision intact.
"We endeavor to present every film in its original aspect ratio (i.e., the ratio of height to width of the image), unless the filmmaker expressly requests a slightly different framing," the company says in its FAQ. Criterion, uniquely, also releases early 4:3 films with a small letterbox around all sides, so as to avoid oversetting by televisions.
Spielberg aside, mainstream films had a harder time embracing the letterboxing strategy, something evidenced by one of the earliest widescreen releases, Ghostbusters 2.
At first, customers were confused—why was a third of the picture gone?—and that led to complaints, which eventually went up the food chain.
As it turned out, those consumers had a point, because the person who did the letterboxing decided it would be a great idea to format the screen narrowly, but still do up the film in a 1.66:1 pan-and-scan format. So it was basically the worst of all worlds.
Eventually, though, the release of the DVD helped ease mainstream interest in letterboxing. In 2003, the video chain Blockbuster, which was still influential at the time, formally decided to favor widescreen films in stocking DVD rentals, a move that effectively proved that widescreen films had gone mainstream.
A 2004 Slate piece argued that this proved that widescreen had become a bonafide phenomenon.
"There's a bigger factor behind widescreen's triumph: what you might call the continuing education of the filmgoer. If casual movie fans prefer pan-and-scan and film buffs prefer widescreen, then one way to tip the balance is to turn the casual fans into buffs," Bryan Curtis wrote in the piece. "The DVD format seems to have had precisely that effect."
These days, letterboxing is so common that many directors use it for purely artistic reasons.
Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel, which covers three different eras, quietly uses aspect ratios commonly associated with each era—1.37:1 for the 1930s, 2.35:1 for the 1960s, and 1.85:1 for 1985 to the present.
In an interview with Filmmaker Magazine, Anderson said that he was able to get away with it essentially because we're used to seeing letterboxes everywhere.
We see it everywhere, sure, but still, letterboxing remains something difficult for some in the TV industry to accept.
One attempted trend to tackle the issue is something called the CinemaWide TV, a 21:9 screen with an aspect ratio that roughly matches wide-screen films, so there'd be no letterboxing whatsoever.
"Anything that's not an ultra-wide-screen movie—like the vast majority of HDTV programs, games and, yes, many films—appears tiny, with big black bars to either side, or else must be cropped or stretched to fill the screen," they wrote.
A recent effort by Samsung, however, gets around this by actually being two televisions that can join together to become either a 16:9 screen or a 21:9 screen.
To this day, some networks, as well as services like Netflix, struggle with the aspect-ratio issue. In 2013, Netflix faced controversy after a Tumblr site, "What Netflix Does," revealed that the company was crudely cropping a number of films in very awkward ways. (The Tumblr site appears to be down at this juncture, unfortunately, replaced by a spam site, but the Internet Archive is your friend.)
The company was quick to defend itself, saying that the issue was a quality-control issue often raised by differences in different global markets.
“We want to offer the best picture and provide the original aspect ratio of any title on Netflix," spokesman Joris Evers explained to The Huffington Post. "However, unfortunately our quality controls sometimes fail and we end up offering the wrong version of a title. When we discover this error, we replace that title as soon as possible.”
That said, running into panned-and-scanned movies these days is no accident: University of Wisconsin Film Researcher David Bordwell last year noted that cable channels are still doing it to this day, though updating the technique for the HDTV era.
In one notable case, The Graduate's opening credits are shown in widescreen, only to switch to pan-and-scan a moment later.
The fascinating thing about this piece is that when I mentioned this concept to people, many of them—including major film buffs—weren't even aware what letterboxing was, or that it was at one point controversial.
That to me suggests a major shift in perception within just the last few years. I'd like to think that two things happened to encourage that shift: Laptops and smartphones.
Watching a video on these devices, particularly in full-screen, generally means that there will be some natural letterboxing going on, just simply due to the design of our machines. A YouTube embed commonly has a letterbox, even though we never really think of it like that.
As a culture, I think we've come to embrace that our videos don't always go edge-to-edge, and find comfort in that. We weren't buying Spielberg's argument back in the day, but we made our peace.
That said, though, if you watched a Cinerama film in its natural letterbox style, you'd probably notice, because it's incredibly weird.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
In Guyana, where forests cover over 80 percent of the country, the threat of illegal logging is ever present. A lot of the time, it's hard to even know if it's happening. That's in part because the country's population is so small, just 735,000 people to keep watch on 83,000 square miles of country.
But around 9,000 of those residents are Wapichan, an indigenous community living the country's southern region, where forests are repeatedly threatened. Wapichan community members had long sought ways to fight the loggers, who were threatening their homes, but, according to Quartz, found it hard to persuade the government to intervene, in part because they couldn't always prove illegal logging was happening.
That's where drones come in. Or, specifically, one drone, a fixed-wing model that tribe members built, incredibly, by watching DIY videos on YouTube. A camera mounted on the drone captures images of the logging, evidence the Wapichan community can then take to the Guyanese government.
The drone has now been documenting the forests for months, and the Wapichan's struggle with combating the loggers continues. According to Quartz, they are optimistic that the country's new president, elected last year, will work with them.
“We are the guardians of the forest,” Nicolas Fredericks, a Wapichan leader, told Quartz. “We will not stand for [its] destruction in the name of development.”
When we talk about human flight the first names to come up are inevitably Orville and Wilbur Wright, who piloted the first powered plane in 1903.
But long before that famous flight, German aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal, also known as the Glider King, was taking short flights in his homemade craft from his custom launch hill. Unfortunately, it was that same drive to conquer the skies that would lead to his untimely death.
Lilienthal was born in the small Prussian town of Anklam in 1848. He took an early interest in the science of bird flight, and began studying it in grammar school. Working with his brother Gustav, who, as with the Wright brothers, would become his lifelong partner in research and study, Lilienthal began experimenting with human flight by 1867.
The brothers wanted to emulate what they saw in nature and create an apparatus that could mimic the effects of bird wings. Lilienthal tirelessly studied the movement of birds, attempting to divine, from even their slightest action, the secret of their ability to fly. In his book, Bird Flight As A Basis of Aviation, which collected his research and studies in 1889, he described how small birds like swallows are too hard to observe—“they are too small, and their incessant hunting for insects introduces too many erratic movements.”
After leaving grammar school Lilienthal studied mechanical engineering. Following a brief stint in the military, he worked for years as an engineer, never giving up on his dream of flying. In 1883 he opened up his own fabrication shop, which he used, in part, to begin creating the winged apparatuses that he dreamed up. In the beginning, this literally meant crafting huge wood and cloth wings to strap on to his arms.
His first model (of which no images survive) was a big set of wings called the “Seagull,” named after the bird on which he'd modeled the apparatus. From there his designs began to get more precise and elaborate. Lilienthal performed his first flight in 1891, launching himself from the top of a steep hill near the German towns of Derwitz and Krielow. He was strapped into a monoplane with a 25-foot wingspan which would come to be known as the Derwitzer Glider, and on that first flight he was able to glide for about 80 feet. While it wasn’t exactly Superman-level human flight, as a proof of concept, it was everything Lilienthal had hoped for.
The early aviator continued to create new gliders and single-person planes, tweaking their dimensions and experimenting with new control schemes, always trying to make them lighter and more maneuverable. During the five years following his first successful flight, Lilienthal created at least 10 more distinct models of aircraft. Some could fold up their wings like a bat while others could flap using an elaborate pulley system. Tail fins were added for extra stability. Lilienthal had begun to usher in an age of what some called “Manflight.”
Lilienthal was an enthusiastic promoter of his aeronautic explorations and turned his test flights into popularly attended events. As the frequency of his test flights increased he created a hilltop launch platform near his home just outside of Berlin. Called the Fliegeberg, the steep hill was capped with a 33-foot tall tower for him to jump off. It was also a handy location for him to gather observers and admirers. Lilienthal was diligent about recording his flights in photographs, over a hundred of which survive to this day, and which, at the time, helped him earn his fame as the “Glider King.” Among his fans were American mechanics and aviators-to-be, the Wright Brothers.
Unfortunately the good times couldn’t last. After performing around 2,000 test flights over five years, Lilienthal’s took to the skies for the final time on August 9, 1896. One of the major issues the Glider King experienced in each of his aircraft was how to offset the top-heavy nature of their design. Lilienthal could exert some control over the flights by shifting his center of gravity, but there was still a tendency for the gliders to nosedive. On that August afternoon, Lilienthal was on his fourth test of the day when a gust of air sent his glider plunging. Unable to correct the fall, the Glider King plummeted 50 feet to the ground, wrecking the glider and breaking his back.Lilienthal was rushed to the hospital by carriage, but it was too late. The Glider King died the next day from his injuries.
After the crash, Lilienthal had remarked “Opfer müssen gebracht werden!” or “Sacrifices must be made!” His tragic death was not for nothing. Thanks to his evocative photographs and daring experiments, human flight began to seem not like the dream of crackpot inventors, but a noble and achievable goal. Lilienthal’s death was also one of the inciting events that pushed the Wright Brothers into aviation. Even in death, the Glider King helped human beings conquer the skies.
Today, Lilienthal is remembered by a number of monuments, including one atop the Fliegeberg, as well as his own museum. But really, looking at the photos of the ambitious man in flight may be the best way to recall Lilienthal. They just make you want to shout, “Go, Glider King, Go!”
Cougars are great gardeners. You won’t see them carefully pruning bonsai trees with their claws or paging through a Burpee seed catalog, but scientists say that one of these bigs cats can plant around 94,000 seeds in a year. They do this by doing what cats seem to do best: eating and pooping.
Ecologists have been saying since the 1960s that apex predators—the carnivores at the top of their local food chain—keep the world green by killing and eating plant-eaters and keeping them in check, allowing plants to flourish. New research on cougars, though, suggests that some carnivores keep the world green in another, more direct way, by spreading the seeds they ingest when they eat their herbivore prey.
Cougars and other cats have a need for protein that restricts them to a diet that’s primarily meat, gaining them the badass term “hypercarnivore.” Obviously, they don’t set out to eat plants, but they do wind up consuming a lot of seeds when they eat other animals that do.
Biologist José Hernán Sarasola has seen this first hand. He and his research team spent months collecting and picking through cougar scats in Argentina’s Parque Luro Natural Reserve, where the cats’ diet is mainly made up of eared doves. In just 123 scats, they found nearly 32,000 seeds from different plants that the doves feed on, the bulk of which came from three grasses. When they planted some of these seeds, they sprouted just fine, and passage through the cougars’ guts doesn’t seem to hurt them.
A large part of a cougar's diet at Argentina’s Parque Luro Natural Reserve is the eared dove. (Photo: Dominic Sherony/CC BY-SA 2.0)
Given the density of cougars in the reserve (nine animals per 100 square kilometers, or 39 square miles), the researchers estimate that the cats could spread about 5,000 seeds from just those three common plants per square kilometer every year.
That’s a lot of seeding, and the researchers say it shows that big cats and other predators are doing an important and overlooked job. By spreading that many seeds around, cougars help plants colonize new and unoccupied areas, and keep genes flowing back and forth between populations.
These effects likely aren’t confined to Parque Luro, either. The cougar’s range extends from British Columbia down to the southern tip of Chile, and it’s the most widespread mammal in the Western Hemisphere. Elsewhere in the world, seed-eating birds are found in most ecosystems, the researchers say, and overlap with big cats in many of them, so wild felines may be greening things all over the planet.
When Sheldon Gosline was living in China in 2013 to study the country’s lesser-used languages, a colleague at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences showed him a mysterious set of ancient inscriptions, etched into flat stones and found by farmers in Guangxi province.
“He said, ‘See what you make of this,’” Gosline remembers. “No one has been able to figure this out.”
When Gosline looked at the inscriptions, he noticed something no one else had. Several characters appeared to belong to the Indus script, an undeciphered set of symbols that date back more than 4,500 years. Others could have been Persian cuneiform, turned on their sides. It was the first clue that led him to a lush mountain plateau, overlooking a river valley, where he found what he believes could be the ceremonial grounds of an ancient civilization.
It was the stuff of Indiana Jones dreams. Gosline's training is in Egyptology, but as a unaffiliated researcher he has dabbled widely in ancient history. For more than a decade, he has been playing with the idea that the earliest writing in China could be connected to writing from the Indus Valley, where an early civilization stretched across parts of India and Pakistan. Writing didn’t appear in China until more than a thousand years later, in the second millennium B.C. There’s little evidence of how it was developed, and no evidence that languages from further to the west had any influence.
But if Indus or Persian characters had made their way to southern China, it would suggest, at the very least, that the people living there had an extensive trade network that connected them, perhaps indirectly, to South Asia and the Middle East. At most, it could mean that imperial conquerors from northern China had wiped out evidence of a thriving writing culture in the south. Either way, it would undermine a traditional way of understanding China’s history, where Chinese culture was developed exclusively in the north and diffused outwards.
Gosline’s discovery raised questions with huge implications. What was Persian cuneiform doing in a remote village in southern China? Could it be real? If it was real, what did it mean?
Dragon Bones and Text
In the great tech story that is the 5,000-year-old history of writing, ancient Sumerians were the early adopters. The first examples of writing appeared in Mesopotamia, around 3,500 to 3,000 B.C.; Egyptian, not far behind, was either developed independently or cribbed from the Sumerians in an early case of intellectual property theft. In China, the first comprehensive writing system appears a good millennia and a half later, around 1,200 B.C., with no obvious reference to any other writing system in existence. As far as the archaeological records shows, Chinese characters sprang fully formed from the earth, on “dragon bones.”
For who knows how long, farmers dug these bones, the remains of turtles and oxen, from their fields and sold them to practitioners of traditional medicine. It wasn’t until 1899, after either being prescribed the bones as a malaria treatment or, less romantically, buying them from an antiques dealer, that a scholar recognized their inscriptions as early forms of Chinese characters. Dragon bone dealers tried to keep their locations secret, but in the 1920s, a team of archaeologists discovered the bones’ source, at Anyang, a site a few hours south of Beijing, in the Yellow River basin, where they found thousands upon thousands of dragon bones, all carefully inscribed with prophecies from the past.
The bones, they determined, had been used to read the future. Ox scapulae and the plates of turtle shells would be thrown into a fire and the cracks that developed interpreted as augurs. Whatever the bones foretold would later be carved onto their surface. Some had etched on them names of the soothsaying kings, too, and now, instead of the future, those inscriptions shed light on the past. The kings’ names matched with later records of a Shang Dynasty that had ruled in the second millennium B.C.
Before, the Shang dynasty had been more legend than history, but the discovery of the “oracle bones” shored up a long-held tenet of Chinese history: China’s Yellow River basin, where the oracle bones were discovered, was the cradle of Chinese civilization. From this northern area came China’s Confucianism, its structured societies, its technological innovations, its heroes and kings. Slowly, that culture was spread through the area we now call China, starting under the expansionist Han empire that ruled from 206 B.C. to 220 A.D.
One of the original inscriptions found in Guangxi. (Photo: Sheldon Gosline)
The inscriptions Gosline had been given, though, came from the south of China, in Guangxi province, which borders on Vietnam. Guangxi is about as far from Henan, where the oracle bones were discovered, as Kansas City is from New York, and in the annals of Chinese history, this area was considered a backwater. It’s a mountainous region, and even today, it’s less industrialized than other parts of China and pocketed with nature reserves.
Both because of the subtropical climate and because of its history, little archaeological work has been done in Guangxi. But, if a century ago dragon bones dug from a field could lead archaeologists to one of the oldest known dynasties of northern China, perhaps stone inscriptions dug from southern fields might lead to another great discovery, a place and people that had been overlooked.
If, that is, these new inscriptions were even real artifacts of another age. “Some people wanted to write the inscriptions off as a complete forgery,” says Gosline. Originally, he was skeptical, as well, but he became convinced they might be authentic. Those first examples might have been brought in by farmers, but he had found more of the Persian-looking characters in inscriptions uncovered in an official archaeological dig of the same area. If the inscriptions were a forgery, the culprit would have had to bury those fragments in a way that fooled archaeologists. Usually, too, forgers will copy published texts, but Chinese scholars had never seen anything like these. The rotation of the Persian-like characters, 90 degrees from their proper position, also convinced Gosline that the inscriptions were real.
“Why would a forger go through that elaborate disguise, of hiding that it's old Persian?” he says. “The simple solution is that it's genuine and, somehow, in antiquity, there was some sort of trading or culture connection with the Persian empire.”
Guangxi, where Gosline's inscriptions were found, is far from the Yellow River basin, long thought of as the cradle of Chinese civilization. (Map design: Blake Olmstead)
Then, Gosline made a discovery of his own. In the spring of 2014, he traveled south, to an excavation site opened by local archaeologists, in the same area where those first stones had been found. Gosline doubted he might find anything of interest here, until he started walking the site, and he noticed the rocks. Hulking, some almost as tall as he was, they were spaced symmetrically, in even intervals, and seemed to be arranged purposefully—like they lined up, along particular diagonals. Many of them were lined with deep crevasses. Could they be inscriptions, too? “It was evident to me that the space was somehow special,” Gosline would later write. That’s when he got a piece of paper and started to map.
He noted the regularly spaced markers, along with what he describes as “a man-made platform of megalithic construction.” Behind that platform, there was another stone, with an indentation at the center—what “appeared to be a carved chair or throne.” He sat down, and when he looked up, towards the platform, he “sensed a harmony and that I was in the midst of an ancient time calculating device,” he would write. On a rock at the very center of the site was a particularly notable set of lines: later, Gosline would identify an inscription there—the Chinese character for “harmony.”
Pingguo County, situated in Guangxi Province, China. (Photo: Sheldon Gosline)
Gosline knew that what he had found wasn’t as immediately impressive as an Egyptian tomb or a Mayan pyramid. In a lecture at the Explorers Club in New York City later that year, he would pose the question: “What does civilization look like?” What he had found, he suggested then, might not be as dramatic as “monumental art” or “fantastic tombs with golden treasure”—but it could be connected to a civilization that, in some speculative accounts, had advanced throughout the peninsula now divided into Laos, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia and the evidence for which “has been, shall we say, to some degree suppressed by the empire to the north that took control.”
Maybe, in other words, he had found evidence of a civilization that was lost on purpose.
If Gosline’s theories defy categorization, so does the man himself. He is not a conventional scholar. After piecing together what he thinks might be evidence of missing link in Chinese history, he didn’t publish his findings in a peer-reviewed academic journal. He didn't have a permanent position as university faculty, and he's not a recognized expert on Chinese history or Persian cuneiform. His career has long followed a romantic streak—in many ways, Gosline is a throwback to a time when scientific discovery was governed by curiosity more than credentials.
When choosing a college, for instance, Gosline decided on the University of Pennsylvania over Princeton, he says, because on a visit, he went into the Penn Museum, which has one of the largest Egyptology collections in America, and thought, This is what I want to study. It was an impractical career choice, but he threw himself into it. He started taking classes on Middle Egyptian, and, for his work study job, creating tracings of ancient Egyptian stelae. Soon, he was working on excavations at Abydos and Memphis. After college, he went to Cambridge, England, where he boarded with Professor Joseph Needham, an expert in Chinese history, and the two men would go about the house dressed in the clothing of the cultures they studied, Needham wearing Chinese styles and Gosline, Egyptian.
Gosline had a knack for falling in with characters: After Cambridge, he spent a year as a curatorial intern at a Virginia art museum, where he befriended Roger de la Burde, a wealthy Polish emigré who claimed he was a count and whose 1992 death was wound into a murder mystery. For himself, Gosline pursued the aesthetic of an old-school explorer. At one point, he had a series of pictures taken of himself, dressed in turban, jeweled vests, and a dramatic mustache, and when he started an academic publishing company, he called it Shangri-La Publications.
His research career, too, had the trappings of freelance adventurer. After doing graduate work at University of Chicago and University of Wisconsin, he made his way by leading archaeological tours in Peru and Egypt, teaching Egyptology in China, and along with his academic press, opening a Shangri-La clothing and gift store in Ithaca, New York. Through the early 2000s he published academic papers semi-regularly in Discussions in Egyptology (a British journal, no longer in publication, which printed contributions “just as we receive them”) and the China-based Journal of Ancient Civilizations. Through Shangri-La Publications, he released a series of books, including one detailing a method of creating cursive hieroglyphic characters based on techniques for writing Chinese. Though it had “really bad graphics,” he admits, and a reviewer said it was “a curiosity more than anything else,” it's now in its third reprint, according to Gosline, and still selling.
In 2011, he moved to London to pursue a Ph.D, in the history of medicine, at University College London. Once he completed the degree, he decided to return to China to research the writing of the country’s minority groups. That line of exploration had led him to this spot in Guangxi. He suspected the gathering of rocks might be an ancient observatory, organized to track the movements of the sun, by the same people who had somehow encountered written characters that came from far to the west. He knew he needed experts to help establish what he had found. He would reach out to Chinese archaeologists and experts from the West in archaeoastronomy, he thought, and they would come back to check his work.
Archaeology, Old and New
Western archaeology came to China rather recently, in the 1920s, but records of people collecting, studying and keeping relics date as far back as Chinese history itself. What stories get told, though, always depends on who’s talking. Throughout the history of archaeology in China, K.C. Chang wrote, in the 1986 version of his Archaeology of Ancient China, the investigation of ancient objects had “always been a tool of Chinese historiography.” As the Han dynasty expanded its territory with incursions to the south, historians were already crafting stories about the northern kings and innovators of the past and about the rightness of the Han leaders who had decided they should control all the land they could.
For most of the 20th century, Chinese history was told as a story of diffusion, in which the people that Han armies encountered in the south, who they called Yue, benefitted from the north’s cultural exports. The Yue were thought of as barbarian people, less civilized than their conquerors. They spoke different languages; they wore their hair differently. They occupied roughly the same space in Han thought as the Gauls did in Roman history.
To some extent, the archaeological record backs up this story. There have been significant archaeological finds in the south: some of the earliest evidence of hominins inhabiting this part of the world came from limestone karst caves in Guangxi province, hundreds of thousands of years ago. But the people living in the area before 1000 B.C. tended to live in egalitarian societies, without social differentiation between higher and lower classes of people. No traces of prehistoric cities have been found in the area, either. The first elaborate bronzes to appear in the area came from the north; local bronzework on that level didn’t start until hundreds of years later. There has been nothing found in the south that compares to the spectacular archaeological discoveries—the oracle bones, the oldest-known noodles, the Terracotta Army—that have come from the north.
The story of south and its culture, though, is still contested. Some Vietnamese historians draw a direct line between the people who lived in this place thousands of years ago and the people who now live in Vietnam. Viet is actually another form of the Chinese word Yue, and in one version of this history, the Yue people resisted the incursions from the north and became the ancestors of the present-day Vietnamese people. If the history of southern China can be seen as part of a noble Vietnamese history, any major finds could be put into service of that story, as well.
One of the possible inscriptions Gosline found in Guangxi. (Photo: Sheldon Gosline)
In June of 2014, Gosline returned to what he calls the “observatory complex,” this time with a whole team in tow. There was an expert archaeoastronomer from England, a scholar from India, and a handful of Chinese experts, from both the Chinese Academy of Science and Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute of Archaeology. Besides the stone arrangements that had first caught Gosline’s attention, they planned to examine caves he thought could contain royal burials and two other sites, where he had found more inscriptions and intriguing stones.
Over the next few days, the scientists of various stripes canvassed the area. They sat in the chair. They cleared the growth from the large platform. They measured angles and looked for alignments between stones and celestial events. They examined the lines in the stone and took impressions, in silicone, to examine under powerful microscopes. They searched for evidence of human occupation of those sites.
After all the work was done, Gosline was satisfied. “We confirmed most of the things I'd found as potential alignments, and we confirmed that there was artifact evidence in the area that showed human occupation,” he says. He was convinced that what they had found indicated the possibility of a civilization with time-keeping technology, advanced mathematics, writing, and monuments, he said at the talk at the Explorers Club in New York, that same fall.
The Chinese scientists who had joined him at the site, though, were less convinced that what they had found amounted to that much. “I’m afraid you would be disappointed on the so-called Pingguo County archaeoastronomical site,” one of the team members, Dr. Xu Fengxian wrote me, when reached by email.
Not long after the team came back from the field, Dr. Xu wrote a report on alignments between the stones and celestial phenomena, using the “chair” that Gosline had identified as a starting point. There was one significant finding, she wrote: “On the winter solstice the sun really set in the direction of the huge stone”—the megalithic platform. “Even so, I don’t agree that the huge stone could have been used as a sunset point on winter solstice.” The chair-stone was rough and showed no evidence of human activity. It was so close to the huge stone that it would have been difficult to observe anything by sitting there.
Features like this "megalithic platform" and slanted rock seemed like they might have been used as part of an observatory. (Photo: Sheldon Gosline)
The Chinese scientists were skeptical of the other features Gosline had found, as well. At two sites that he had them examine, they found no evidence of human occupation. The caves that had excited his interest were not gravesites, Professor He Nu wrote in another report. The Chinese scientists also found that “most of the scratches, the petro-glyphs and plan maps on the rocks...are natural.” Even the stone planks with the inscriptions on them couldn’t be said to show much. “The most fatal problem is that the planks could not be dated precisely,” wrote He. (Gosline says that after the fieldwork, the group gathered to give oral reports, and one of Chinese specialists did say the carvings were consistent with drill holes and leaned towards saying they could be an inscription; the published report only included her more skeptical analysis. He also points out that the Chinese scientists compared the petro-glyph lines with jade etchings and says one wouldn’t expect to find the same traces of a human hand in a stone inscription.)
Despite those hesitations, the Chinese scholars recommended that more work be done at the first site. It “might have worked as an important settlement” in the area, according to He.
The fact that Gosline seems to follow an Indiana Jones narrative is not exactly a compliment. The story of a white man who comes to a foreign land and thinks he finds something new, a civilization that hasn’t been recognized, is old and tired. In one version, the Westerner discovers something that’s new only to him, like Angkor Wat. The people who lived in Siem Reap knew about the giant, overgrown temples in the forest; they were “lost” only to the West, which hadn’t had hold of them to begin with. In another version, the explorer is looking for a legend and just isn’t there—at least, not in the form he imagined—like the Lost City of Z. Or maybe the Western scientist does actually find a place that was lost, to everyone, like Tut’s Tomb, only to spirit the most valuable treasures far away.
In any version, though, these type of adventures are hard to come by in the 21st century. When National Geographicannounced the discovery of a lost city in a Honduran rainforest, people who had been studying the area for years fought back against the narrative of the “lost city.” Not only had extensive archaeological work already been done in the area, they wrote, but local hunters and fishers visit even the most remote place of the region.
Layer on the contested history of the south of China, the imperial instincts of Chinese rulers going back hundreds of years, and the interference of British colonialism and all the ideas about nations and cultures that came with that. Add in a more recent idea: the development Chinese culture is a more complicated story than was once allowed. Archaeologists have discovered ancient cities (like Sanxingdui, excavated in Sichuan in 1986) that were contemporary with but distinct from the northern Shang dynasty, and they indicate that Chinese culture did not come exclusively from the north, packed like a Blue Apron box, with everything needed in perfect proportions, instructions included.
Given all that, what kind of lost civilization are you left with?
“To say that there are lost civilizations there is one of those Western fallacies,” says Erica Fox Brindley, a cultural historian of early China, who teaches at Penn State University. But she also disputes the old story that people from the north “swept across the Southlands with such political, military, and cultural force that the Southerners were naturally swayed and won over by it.” Perhaps southern people did not adopt northern culture wholesale—or if they did, perhaps that didn’t happen until much more recently, within the past 500 years. Even though the old paradigm of early Sinicization has not been truly challenged, Brindley writes in her book Ancient China and the Yue, it’s “clearly a gross oversimplification of modes of cultural change in Chinese history.”
Gosline examines possible inscriptions at the site in Guangxi. (Photo: Sheldon Gosline)
Brindley has spent the past few years studying the history of early China’s southern frontier, which extended from roughly the area on China’s southeastern coast where Taiwan sits off the mainland, west to mountainous Yunnan province, where China borders Myanmar. The scant information about the people who lived here comes mostly from archaeological evidence or from written accounts from northern dynasties, but in her book, Brindley pieces together a picture of a region of independent kingdoms, of people who likely spoke many different languages and who were connected in trade both over land and through seas and rivers. In some places, people in the south even made markings on their pottery that some scholars believe could have contributed to the development of writing further to the north.
But all the Yue people were not necessarily connected in a cohesive “civilization” (a term that archaeologists use variably, but often to refer to states). Even until a few hundred years ago, there was notable cultural variation in Guangxi and evidence that centralized powers had trouble controlling it.
Gosline identified a character for "harmony" on this rock. (Photo: Sheldon Gosline)
Francis Allard, one of the only Western archaeologists to work in the province, has found that in pre-Imperial times even across short distances, of 50 miles or so, the archaeological materials that turn up tend to be very different—an indication that this area was likely populated by small and distinct groups living in mountainous area. In prehistoric times, these people were connected by indirect systems of trade with the north and with people further to the south, in what’s now Vietnam. They made cliff paintings, too. “It’s not rare to find incised symbols on stones and pottery in southern China before the emergence of Chinese writing,” says Allard. But these are small-scale societies, with great cultural variation. In Guangxi, he says, ”there is nothing in that area that members of public would think of as a civilization.”
Gosline’s original observation, that the newly discovered inscriptions looked to include Persian cuneiform, is still unproven, too. The scholars I talked to found the idea intriguing but unlikely. Even Nie Hongyin, the colleague who originally shared them with Gosline, isn’t fully convinced. “Sheldon’s suggestion is probable but there remains a doubt,” he wrote, in an email.
None of this is entirely inconsistent with Gosline’s ideas. The region “needs to properly studied in a methodical way,” he says. “That’s what I would really advocate.” Without a fuller analysis, he points out, there’s always uncertainty; it’s not possible to say, right now, what level of importance the site he identified has compared to other sites that might be found in the region. “I have doubts,” he says. “But it’s not the kind of doubt where we shouldn’t do anything about it, but where there’s a question that we should really try to answer.”
Oracle bones from the Shang Dynasty in a pit at Anyang Yinxu. (Photo: Xuan Che/CC BY 2.0)
That is happening. Scholars like Brindley and Allard have dedicated years to better understanding the culture and history of the prehistoric populations in this region “There was this incredible history of people probably going up and down the coasts from thousands of years” that deserves more attention, says Brindley. Allard is fascinated by big, flat stone “shovels,” polished and intricately carved, that were made in southern Guangxi some time in the third or second millennia B.C. and used in a religious fashion. “If you look at the blades, they would have taken a tremendous amount of time to make,” he says. But the edges indicate that they were never used. Instead, they were arranged against one another, with their blades pointing up, at sites where no other artifacts had been found.
When the shovels are found outside of their core area, though, they’re no longer arranged in that same, strange fashion. What intrigues Allard is the question of how people at the time understood these objects. Four thousand or so years ago, what did they think the stones were for? What did they think of the people who made them? All we have left are the ghosts of language, land and rocks marked by nature and human hands, intricately carved or covered in dull creases, open to interpretation from amateurs, scholars and everyone in between. But we’re still trying to figure out what they mean.
Telex Island is part of an archipelago that starts just north of Amsterdam and curves along the coast of the North Sea. Since the 17th century, a parcel containing the belongings of a wealthy woman sat underneath the sands of the sea floor. Its contents were preserved for hundreds of years, until a diving club uncovered them.
Inside the package, they found a book with the seal of British King Charles I, a lice comb, stockings, and a metal ball that would have be stuffed with sweet-smelling leaves, flowers and other matter that could mask the smell of a person’s body.
The most important find, though, was a silk damask dress, the sort of object that’s rarely preserved as well as this one.
The dress had a pattern of flowers, but unlike the silk bodices in the package, had no embroidery, beading or other ornamentation. Although to 21st century eyes, it might look like a fancy dress, it’s the sort of outfit that wealthy women in the 17th century would have worn every day.
The woman’s belonging weren’t the only finds from this shipwreck, either. Divers also uncovered highly-prized wood, material used for varnish and crates that likely held spices. The shipwreck was full of luxury items and, combined with the clue of the kingly seal, that's led conservators to believe the passengers may even have been royalty.
Every day, we highlight one newly found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com.
It sounds like the premise for a riddle: At the South Pole are two crystal balls that provides unfailingly accurate information—not about the future, but about the past.
This is no trick. It's just meteorology. The dual glass spheres at the South Pole are Campbell-Stokes sunshine recorders, orbs that capture the number of hours of direct sunlight each day, as well as its intensity.
Sunshine recorders first came about in the 1850s, thanks to John Francis Campbell—the Campbell in Campbell-Stokes. Around 1853, Campbell, a Scottish author who focused on Celtic folklore, developed a desire to quantify sunlight. As he recalled some 25 years later, he had "some notion of the nature and power of sunshine," and "wanted something to record and measure the work of it as a barometer weighs air, and a thermometer measures heat."
A Campbell-Stokes sunshine recorder in Antarctica. (Photo: Akulovz/CC BY-SA 4.0)
At the time, Campbell was acquainted with the burning-glass, a convex lens that focused the sun's rays to create an intense beam of heat and light. The use of mirrors and lenses to concentrate sunshine has been around since the days of the Ancient Greeks, when, according to the relevant mythology, Archimedes laid waste to a fleet of Roman enemies by bouncing the sun's rays off a parabolic mirror and scorching the unsuspecting sailors.
This painting, by Giulio Parigi circa 1600, shows Archimedes burning Romans to a crisp with his giant sun mirror. (Image: Public domain)
Armed with knowledge of the burning-glass' workings, Campbell sought a way to not only trace the sun's path, but record the intensity of the light over the course of a day. He came up with a glass sphere. The technology behind it, Campbell wrote rather poetically, was thus: “When a transparent sphere is set out of doors all the shining bodies that stud the visible sky shine through it to opposite foci.”
Campbell didn't have any transparent spheres lying around, but he did notice the abundance of hollow glass globes, which were being made for lampshades. He tracked down a maker of such lampshades and, in Campbell's words, “fraternized with him in his workshop, where he lived with a wife, and a tame squirrel, and a canary, and some flowers, at the top of a high house where the sun shone cheerily.”
Amid all this whimsy, Campbell found time to develop his sunshine recorder, which combined a hollow, six-inch-wide glass sphere with a hard wooden bowl. He placed the sphere on top of a three-inch tumbler, then put both in a 12-inch-wide wooden bowl on the ledge of a south-facing window. As the sun blazed across the sky each day, it traced a path in the wood. The more intense the sunlight, the deeper the engraving.
This design suited meteorologists just fine until 1879, when physicist/mathematician Sir George Gabriel Stokes came up with an ingenious modification.
Instead of letting the sun scorch a path into the wooden bowl, Stokes introduced removable cards made of thick paper, which were placed in the bowl and swapped out each day. He also switched the material of the bowl, from wood to metal.
A removable card showing a day's worth of sunshine in Nunavut, Canada. (Photo: Alan Sim/CC-BY-SA 2.0)
Such Campbell-Stokes sunshine recorders are still used today. Blue Hill Observatory in Massachusetts has one, as does Hong Kong Observatory. But among the most impressive sites is the South Pole, where two recorders sit back-to-back on the roof of the Amundsen-Scott Research Station. In winter, when every day and night is dark, they record nothing. But in summer, when the sun doesn't set for six months, the light eventually burns a path through both.
