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The Hideous Jug That Duped 'Antiques Roadshow'

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Usually the appraisers on the hypnotic PBS hit, Antiques Roadshow, seem to be pretty spot on with their appraisals of the knick-knacks and furniture that cross their path, but every once in a while, even the experts make a mistake.

Such an error occurred last year, when one expert priced a (seemingly purposefully) ugly jug at up to $50,000, Hyperallergic pointed out. But, as it turns out, it was simply a high school art project worth much less.

The item itself is a crude ceramic jug covered in grotesque faces both large and small, made from simple glazed clay. When the show aired, in a segment called “Grotesque Face Jug,” appraiser Stephen L. Fletcher was quite impressed with the piece, praising it for the unique, detailed faces. His guess as to the pot’s origin was incredibly specific, dating the piece back to around the turn of the 19th century, having been made somewhere in the “middle-Atlantic states, headed southward.” Fletcher then priced the piece at between $30,000 and $50,000. Alvin Barr, who had originally paid just $300 for the item, was stunned.

But as it was later reported in the (Bend, Oregon) Bulletin, the jug was actually a high school art project created in 1973 by Betsy Soule, who now works as a horse trainer. Once Fletcher was informed of the true origins of the piece, he gave it a new valuation at $3,000 - $5,000, dropping a couple of zeroes, but still pricing it much higher than one might expect for a high schooler’s project. (The show also issued a correction on its website.)

According to the Bulletin, Barr is actually happier with the lower appraisal, saying, “I hated it when it was $30,000 to $50,000, because who wants $30,000 to $50,000 lying around their house?” He now keeps the monstrous jug on a table.


Solving the Mystery of Early Polar Exploration Through Stamps

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A glimpse into Admiral Richard Byrd's 1928-30 first Antarctic expedition. (Photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild/CC BY-SA 3.0)

It’s a mild afternoon, sunlight meandering through the windows. You’ve finally gotten around to doing a little attic inventory, and armed with dust cloth and waste bin, you survey the files and folders, boxes and briefcases that scatter the floor.

Between old tax returns, yearbooks, clothing from god-knows-where, and back issues of magazines long since folded, you find an envelope, slightly moldy and frayed at the edges, with an arrangement of stamps and strange postal marks, not from any recognizable country. What is it?

Strangely, an errant piece of mail might be a vital historical document. All around the world, important documentation about early exploration to the North and South Poles hides in boxes and binders. You might just be in possession of a paper artifact revealing a polar expedition that has been, up until now, lost to snow and ice. 


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A letter from American Charles Wilkes to his wife in Washington, DC, sent during his pioneering 1838-42 expedition to the South Pole. (Photo: Courtesy of Hal Vogel)

Just about every year since the 1980s, an illuminating piece of polar post turns up in someone’s attic, according to Hal Vogel, vice president of the American Society of Polar Philatelists (ASPP). The ASPP is an organization of 220 independent philatelists—stamp collectors— interested in mail and polar history. The group, founded in 1956, shares findings and updates through a quarterly publication, the Ice Cap News, and meets at an annual convention, where top exhibitors are handed out awards based on the quality and rarity of their artifacts. Mostly, though, members of the ASPP, who come from nearly 20 different countries, seek out and pore over envelopes and stamps sent home from exploratory expeditions, ships, and research stations in the world’s two extremes, mostly dating from the late 1800s to early 1900s.

Polar philately, the art of studying delicate slips of paper that have withstood thousands of miles and perhaps hundreds of years, provides a glimpse into the sheer bravado of the age of polar exploration. Polar philatelists are lured by that same mystery that lured the pioneering polar explorers—a shared fascination with a harsh and vast unknown.

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A letter dispatched to the wife of Adolphus Greely during his 1881-84 Lady Franklin Bay expedition. (Photo: Hal Vogel)

In the hands of the expert philatelists, each letter dispatched from the far reaches of the North or South Pole might hold some clue to life on the outer edges of Earth—a special edition stamp, perhaps, or a missing last will and testament, musings that might shed new light on a recorded expedition, or reveal a completely unknown event.

The historical gaps come, according to Vogel, due to the lack of human witnesses to life on the poles. The earth’s southernmost continent did not even become known as “Antarctica” until 1890, thanks to British cartographer and geographer John George Bartholomew.

It was as a boy growing up in the 1950s that Vogel discovered canceled envelopes and postcards as unique, individual ways to document history. By age 12, he began to wonder: how do you get mail to the South Pole? While watching a program on his home’s black and white television set, he saw something about an explorer headed to the South Pole. He sent the explorer, Dr. Paul A. Siple, a letter, and 18 months later, Vogel received a reply from the man’s assistant. “I supposed that was one of the first letters sent from the new South Pole post service,” Vogel says. It got him hooked.

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Eric Marshall, Frank Wild and Ernest Shackleton bundled up at a new Farthest South latitude in January 1909. (Photo: J. B. Adams/Public Domain)

These polar explorers were the astronauts of their time, says Vogel. “They were exploring conditions, lands, science, people, that in some cases were totally new and unknown. They did have an element of hazard—in many cases, extreme hazard.” In a group of 21, only seven might return, as with the instance of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition (1881-84).

The early polar adventurers faced grave dangers on their trips—“You can only make one mistake on a polar expedition,” says Vogel. In some cases, entire expeditions disappeared, a letter home possibly being one of the only traces left behind. It brings to mind a British voyage to the Arctic in 1845 known as Franklin’s lost expedition. Of the 129 men who set out together, not one returned. It was in Disko Bay, on the west coast of Greenland, that crew members wrote their final letters home, giving us glimpses into the mind of an adventure unaware of its own imminent failure.


In some ways, the polar regions transport us back in time, to concerns over communication, safety, and sovereignty that have already been resolved elsewhere.

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A polar artifact from the 1878-80 Vega Expedition, the first to navigate through the Arctic's Northeast Passage. (Photo: Hal Vogel)

Mail itself began around the 15th century, but no one ventured near the North or South Pole until the late 1800s—let alone sent a letter from out there. The first fully government funded American expedition was not until 1881, one of the country's two major contributions to the First International Polar Year (1882-83). The first successful trips to the North and South Pole were not for another four decades, taking place in 1909 and 1911. The U.S. postal service was established in 1775, but it would be nearly two centuries before post reached the poles.

The U.S. Navy put a post office at the South Pole in 1956, perhaps as more of a publicity stunt or geopolitical move than as a practical matter—trumpeting the ability to send mail from the bottom of the world. Mail could only make it in and out by airplane, an impossible feat in the Antarctic winter.

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Admiral Robert Peary during his 1891-1892 expedition to Greenland. (Photo: Frederick Cook/Public Domain)

“I was interested in documenting what we might call the pre-philatelic period,” says Vogel. “Up to the end of World War II, we had very little knowledge of mail related to these polar expeditions.” As the decades went by, more mail originating from the poles, though not necessarily sent through the formal postal system, began to be discovered. Vogel collected all of his findings in a book, Essence of Polar Philately, published by the ASPP in 2008. It presents lists and examples of material that documents the various polar expeditions up until 1924, some of which had never been heard of before. Vogel says that it’s been called “the Bible of polar philately.”

More routine discoveries can still yield extraordinary findings. For instance, not all the crew members on the First Byrd Antarctic Expedition (1928-30) were accounted for in the expedition’s records—a man named John Morrison being one example. The only reason that we know Morrison was aboard at all is thanks to mail he sent from their ship, the Eleanor Bolling.

Here are three other cases of polar stamp detective work:

BICKMORE
One of the great stories in polar philatelic discovery is that of Albert Smith Bickmore, a zoologist and a founder of the American Museum of Natural History. From 1864-67, Bickmore was on a one-man scientific expedition researching shells, stones, and ethnology in the South Pacific (today’s Indonesia and Malaysia). In his subsequent book, Travels in the East Indian Archipelago (1868), Bickmore only mentioned spending time in the Dutch East Indies and China—yet a piece of post would prove otherwise.

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A piece of inward mail from the wife of the leader of 1898 U.S. Army Alaska Exploring Expedition No. 3. (Photo: Hal Vogel)

When Bickmore’s envelope initially resurfaced, it had drawn philatelic attention for its unique transit marks, which revealed a rare rate period in the postal relationship between Hawaii and the continental U.S. The transit marks also revealed an amazingly long and circuitous postal route—overseas from Siberia to Hawaii, from Hawaii to San Francisco, and then overland another 3,000 miles to Maine. But the international missive exposed yet more: a phase of Bickmore’s explorations previously unknown.

It was not until later, when Bickmore’s letter caught the attention of polar philatelists, that a new puzzle piece was found. Its transit marks showed that the letter had been posted by Bickmore from Siberia, in the Russian Arctic—a pit stop left unmentioned in his book.

PEARY
Venturing further northward beyond Bickmore’s trip to Siberia, you will come upon Admiral Robert Peary’s 1909 attempt at the North Pole. Peary had been trying to reach the North Pole for two decades by this point, and he’d lost nearly as many toes as he’d spent years trying. He had sent a letter to his attorney as he was traveling north to Greenland in which he set forth, in effect, his last will and testament in case he didn’t return. For a long time, nobody knew if Peary had been successful, or had even survived—and if he hadn’t, that piece of mail would have been our last record of him.

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The first mail from Newfoundland from the reporter who had just interviewed Robert E. Peary after his North Pole success. (Photo: Hal Vogel)

But Peary did return alive, and when he descended to Battle Harbor, Newfoundland, he dispatched an announcement and then simply sat and waited for the journalists to flock. Perhaps the most prized pieces of mail from Peary’s great triumph are the letters from journalists claiming to be the first to board his ship for an interview.

WILKES
Another instance of polar mail that deserves an almost mythical status are the messages from the leader of the expedition that confirmed the existence of Antarctica as a continent.

It was a trip that lasted from 1838 to 1842, led by U.S. naval officer Charles Wilkes, known as the Wilkes Antarctic Expedition. Wilkes’ crew surveyed and reported land along the Antarctic barrier land mass, and a part of the region duly became known as “Wilkes Land.” Their trip provided the first proof of an Antarctic continent—and indeed, “Wilkes Land” came to exist in geographical parlance before the term “Antarctica” itself.

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Schooner A.W. Greely frozen in for the winter of 1937-38 near Etah, Greenland during the MacGregor Arctic expedition. (Photo: Bobhaybob/CC-BY-SA-3.0)


The niche art of polar philately is a reminder of how little we know and how little we are. Two centuries ago, the earth’s two poles were unmapped and unknown. Yet in the 19th century, they drew uncounted Arctic explorers, many of whom did not return and of whom we have no record. Most details of their journeys will forever be unknown.

But to think: back in the dark, dusty corner of that moldering box, a new detail might just be discovered.

Found: A Napoleonic War Diary Hiding in a Bookstore in Tasmania

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No one knows how long the journal was sitting there, or how it got to Tasmania, but recently, the owner of a second-hand bookstore in Hobart found an 1811 diary of a soldier who fought in the Napoleonic Wars just sitting around in “a pile of old books tucked away in a cupboard,” the BBC reports.

"We have NO idea exactly HOW important this little book actually is - and whether it has been sufficiently studied at all," wrote the proprietors of Cracked and Spineless New and Used Books, when they first posted about their find. But it turns out that the author of the journal, Lt. Col. John Squire, is “a moderately well-known figure among scholars who study the era,” says the BBC—a very professional soldier who also happened to be a good writer with a reputation as a chronicler of these early 19th century conflicts.

Squire belonged to the British Army and was stationed in Egypt, in the Netherlands, in Sweden, and all the way across the ocean in South America. This diary covers the siege of Badajoz, a Spanish city on the Portuguese border, directly west of Lisbon. This would be one of Squire’s last campaigns: he died the next year, “of fever and prostration,” according to the Dictionary of National Biography.

How did one of his last journals end up across the world 200 years later? It’s really a mystery: no one even knows how long the book was sitting in back of the shop. The British first colonized Tasmania around the same time Squire was fighting in Europe; perhaps, the journal came across the ocean early on, with another British solider availing himself of land grant. However it arrived on the island, though, the journal could be worth thousands of dollars—not a bad find for any used book store.

The co-owners of the shop, Richard Sprent and Mike Gray, seem to be taking it all in stride, though. "People get very excited about old, leathery things," they wrote on their Facebook page.

Bonus finds: A possible Mayan city, identified using star maps and satellites; an alligator foot stuck in a dashboard

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. 

Mystery Person Buys $17.2 Million Kneeling Hitler

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This past Sunday, a sculpture by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan hit Christie's auction block. Called "Him," the statue—which looks like a kneeling child in a tweed suit, but with Hitler's face—is made of wax, resin, and human hair. Someone bought it for $17.2 million dollars—nearly $10 million more than anyone has ever paid for a piece by Cattelan, according to ABC News.

Now people would really like to know who it was. After a flurry of bids, the sculpture was sold "to an undisclosed buyer," the New York Times reports. "There are all sorts of conspiracy theories," an anonymous art consultant told Page Six. Though many think it was art collector François-Henri Pinault, others theorize it could have been Qatari Sheik Khalifa Al-Thani, who has been buying up pieces for years to populate the Museum of Islamic Art Doha, or Peter Brant, who is a known Cattelan fan.

"Him" has always courted controversy: some have said that it turns Hitler into a punchline, and one painter, Walter Robinson, called it "the most cynical avant-garde artwork in history." Cattelan himself has said that even while working on it, he wanted to destroy it. Now, the mystery buyer will have to decide what to do with it.

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.

This Guy Dug a Well in 40 Days After His Wife Was Denied Access to Water

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(Photo: Neogeolegend/CC BY-SA 3.0)

An Indian man dug a well for his wife in just 40 days, after she was denied access to a community well by upper-caste villagers, according to the Press Trust of India.

Bapurao Tajne lives in a village in the state of Maharashtra in central India, where residents have been suffering from a drought. 

But Tajne told PTI that his wife—like Tajne, a Dalit, formerly known as "untouchable," or excluded from the country's caste system—was denied water by locals. 

So, to get his revenge, Tajne, a laborer, worked for hours a day to dig his own well, hitting pay dirt after a little more than a month, all while being mocked, he said. 

“I was ridiculed by my family among others, but I was determined,” Tajne told PTI

The well also drew the attention of government officials, who said they were looking into the incident. 

For Tajne, who PTI said was "beaming with confidence" after completing the well, he's presumably just happy to have some water. The well, PTI reported, now supplies water to the entirety of the area's Dalit population. 

The First Restaurants Only Served Soup

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Trendy bone broth pop-ups are far behind the original restaurants, which only served patrons soup. (Photo: Hoyabird8/CC BY-SA 3.0)

Humans have always known, on some level, that soup is good for sickness. Recently, for example, studies have shown that chicken soup has soothing, anti-inflammatory properties. But even as early as the 12th century, physicians would recommend chicken soup to help fight a cold.  

Perhaps more surprising, though, is that the world’s first restaurant, as we know it today, was all about liquid dining—specifically, broths.

In the 1700s, the French food service industry was a highly-regulated environment. As Christine Blau writes for National Geographic, at the time, city-dwellers did not have full personal kitchens in their homes, so they ate from communal platters laid out for guests at local inns, or at street vendors.

If they had the means, they could visit multiple such vendors, who each specialized in a particular trade, such as roasting meat or baking bread. At the time, authorities required butchers, bakers and food sellers to stick to their own trades. These street vendors, known as traiteurs, would typically belong to guilds based on the kind of wares they sold, such as the Pastry Guild, the Breadmakers Guild, or the Roasters Guild, etc.

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A modern-day traiteur in France. (Photo: DC/CC BY-SA 3.0)

Around 1765, a man named Monsieur A. Boulanger decided to veer away from these regulations and open up a new kind of establishment in Paris. Though one could purchase food at inns and taverns, and the ancient Greeks and Romans had their thermopolia, it is Boulanger who is credited with creating our modern concept of a restaurant: A place where one can sit down between a range of times and order a meal that is cooked on the premises. According to Larousse Gastronomique, the French culinary bible, Boulanger set up an establishment whose sign proclaimed, “Boulanger débite des restaurants divins,” or “Boulanger sells restoratives fit for the gods.”

It is also from Boulanger, and the other soup-sellers that sprang up in his stead, that we get the word “restaurant.” At the time, “restaurant” meant “restorative” and described the meat-based consomme that was sold at these establishments. The word came from the French word “restaurer,” which means “to restore [life].” The broth was indeed thought to restore strength to people who were feeling unwell. (Somewhat counterintuitively, the first restaurants were entirely predicated on health, and not taste.)

At first, Boulanger’s consommes fell within regulation, but following the popularity of his eat-in concept, he began serving pieds de mouton à la sauce poulette–that is, sheep’s feet in white sauce. While this might not sound incredibly appetizing to us now, it certainly set Boulanger’s competitors on edge. They claimed that the new dish was no longer a soup, it was a stew.

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Before Boulanger, European dining options were limited to taverns and inns–where there were a lot of other things going on. (Photo: John Lewis Krimmel/Public Domain

Boulanger was brought to court for infringing on the monopoly of a local guild’s sale of cooked foods. He was clearly an enterprising man, however, and managed to convince the court that the dish was in fact a soup; he prepared the egg-yolk enriched sauce on the side and poured it over the mutton, while his competitors slowly cooked all the ingredients, including the meat, into a ragout.

As a result, Boulanger and his imitators were allowed to continue to thrive. Eventually, the French Revolution loosened up much of the regulation around these establishments. Within 30 years, over 500 new restaurants opened in Paris, and larger and more fanciful restaurants opened, such as the Grande Taverne de Londres in 1782.

Today, we have trendy bone broth pop-ups opening by the dozens to appeal to the health food market–but Boulanger cashed in on it first.

Watch These Amazing Alpine Goats Scale a Near-Vertical Dam

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On the face of the 160-foot-tall, near-vertical Cingino Dam in northern Italy, mountain goats cling skillfully to the stones that jut out from the wall. In this video, the Alpine ibex (Capra ibex) slowly navigates the sheer dam, a feat that makes tightrope walking look easy.

They slide, tiptoe, and gallop up and down the wall—and they are clever about their climbing. At the 1:17-mark, you can see one goat survey the dam before strategically inching down.

Why do the Alpine ibex perform this crazy climb? It’s all for a lick of salt

Ignoring the steep angle, the goats walk across the dam to continue to lap up the minerals, which they need for nutrients in their vegetarian diet. Scientists also believe that some animals lick dirt and minerals because it neutralizes toxins they may ingest. 

The Alpine ibex became an internet sensation when an Italian hiker, Adriano Migliorati, posted pictures of the goats dotting the dam. Many people were convinced the photos had to be fake, but this gravity-defying behavior has been seen by other mountain goats in the United States, according to National Geographic.

The Cingino Dam is actually a bit easier for the Alpine ibex to climb than other constructed dams because the rough surface gives more spots for footing, Jeff Opperman, senior advisor at the Nature Conservancy, told National Geographic.

“These animals can overcome what looks like impossible topography to get what they want,” he said. And he’s right: it’s pretty incredible to see what these Alpine ibex will do to forage for food.

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.

A Teen Says He Found a Lost Mayan City Using Old Star Maps

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UPDATE: A lot of scientists have expressed their skepticism that Gadoury really uncovered anything of any real significance

A teenager in Quebec recently noticed something that no one had ever noticed before. 

William Gadoury, 15, had been looking over some ancient star maps and maps of Mayan cities in his small Canadian hometown of Saint-Jean-de-Matha—normal teen stuff—and discovered something interesting. Mayan cities, which were dotted seemingly randomly across the Central American landscape, were not positioned randomly at all. They lined up with certain star constellations, Gadoury told the Le Journal de Montréal.

In all, Gadoury was able to link 22 constellations with 117 Mayan cities, according to the Independent. But a 23rd constellation presented a puzzle. Two of the stars lined up with known cities, but a third didn't, instead pointing to a remote area on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. 

With the help of Google Maps and the Canadian Space Agency, Gadoury uncovered what appears to be evidence of human activity at the site, specifically a square-like structure underneath the growth:

"There are linear features that would suggest there is something underneath that big canopy," a space agency official told the Independent. "There are enough items to suggest it could be a manmade structure."

What's next? Gadoury has already been in touch with Mexican archaeologists about exploring the lost city he discovered. He has named it K'aak Chi, which means Mouth of Fire.


Russia Built a Huge Tunnel to Save a Near-Extinct Group of Leopards

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An Amur leopard. (Photo: William Warby/CC BY 2.0)

Amur leopards are among the world's most endangered species, with only around 70 known to still exist. Around 56 of those are in a national park in Russia, known as Land of the Leopard.

Until recently, Land of the Leopard had a major highway running through it, problematic for the leopards, who probably can't be expected to look both ways when crossing. 

Of particular concern to officials were known migration routes that crossed over the highway, which connects Russian harbors with China in the far eastern Primorsky Krai province.

 

Russia's solution? A 1,900-foot tunnel, built underneath the migration routes, according to RT. The tunnel opened in March. 

Sergey Ivanov, a Kremlin official, told the state-controlled TASS news agency that the rare leopards' numbers have been growing, with leopards even starting to roam outside of the park's boundaries. 

Ivanov was also proud of the tunnel, saying that it had been a long time in the making. The tunnel, he added, would also make the highway safer for drivers, using a curious metaphor in the process. 

"We have killed two birds with one stone," Ivanov told TASS

Take a Ride on 9 of the Most Incredible Model Trains in the World

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You'll need a full-size map to navigate this miniature world. (Photo: mr_t_77/CC BY-SA 2.0)

All aboard for some tiny travel! At places like Germany's Miniatur Wunderland or Northlandz in New Jersey, miniature train sets have been expanded to staggeringly detailed model worlds. Some of the world's most impressive model train sets feature hundreds of tiny people forever frozen in their workaday activities, creating a still universe, brought to life by the passing trains, some of which run on such a complicated system that they have to be controlled using full-size locomotive technology.

Here are nine of the world's most incredible model train sets:

1. Miniatur Wunderland
Hamburg, Germany

This mind-boggling miniature world claims the honor of being the world's largest model train set, and while that's a bit hard to verify, it's certainly not hard to believe. With over 50,000 feet of track and over 900 trains buzzing along them each day. And it's not just the trains that move in this model world. There is a giant/tiny airport with taxiing planes, and city streets where police cars and firetrucks zoom along, controlled by sophisticated software. Seen up close, it's easy to mistake it for the real world.

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(Photo: Thomas Hermes/CC BY-SA 2.5)

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(Photo: I, Dannebrog Spy/CC BY-SA 2.5)

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(Photo: Bill Rand/CC BY 2.0)

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(Photo: gheeke/CC BY-SA 2.0)

2. Roadside America
Shartlesville, Pennsylvania

Roadside America is a not only a titanic miniature railway model, but also a historic testament to one man's love of model railroads. The giant display was first started in 1935 by Hamburg resident, Laurence Gieringer, who opened his own house to display it. As the rail lines grew and his model world continued to expand, Gierenger's project moved to larger and larger spaces until it was installed in its current location in the 1940s.

Today, the diorama covers 8,000 square feet with hundreds of mini-buildings, 18 different trains, a working waterfall and a little Statue of Liberty. God Bless, Roadside America.

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(Photo: Douglas Muth/CC BY-SA 2.0)

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(Photo: Beck Gusler/CC BY-SA 2.0)

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(Photo: Beck Gusler/CC BY-SA 2.0)

3. The Garfield-Clarendon Model Railroad Club
Chicago, Illinois 

Located in Chicago's Clarendon Park Community Center, the Garfield-Clarendon Model Railroad Club's sprawling model landscape has been in the works since 1947. The club is dedicated to entertaining and educating people about railworks, using their miniature operation. While the layout has been moved and expanded a number of times over the years, the current incarnation features over 1,500 feet of tracks with a special eye towards recreating the exact details of a real railroad, right down to the meticulously handmade tracks.

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(Photo: Steven Vance/CC BY 2.0)

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(Photo: Steven Vance/CC BY 2.0)

4. Northlandz
Flemington, New Jersey 

Both one of the more eccentric model railroads in the world, and the one of the largest in America, New Jersey's Northlandz is a massive installation that is the passion project of one Bruce Zaccagnino. Having never ridden a real train, Zaccagnino started building the model trains in the basement of a home he was constructing with his wife, Jean, in 1972. Since then, he has continued to expand his little world, which now comprises multiple floors, hundreds of little trestle bridges, and miles of track.

As an added bonus, his homemade museum also includes a large doll collection.

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(Photo: Tyler Cole/Atlas Obscura)

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(Photo: Tyler Cole/Atlas Obscura)

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(Photo: Tyler Cole/Atlas Obscura)

5. The New Orleans Train Garden
New Orleans, Louisiana

Take a trip through the history of New Orleans train travel a this spectacular, organically minded model railroad system. Built by renowned artist Paul Busse, the New Orleans Train Garden is actually located in the City Park Botanical Garden, and is decorated with actual living plants. The trains that run along the 1,300 feet of track are special as well, each being a replica of a train or street car that traveled the city around the turn of the 19th century.  

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(Photo: InSapphoWeTrust/CC BY-SA 2.0)

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(Photo: The_Doodler/CC BY-SA 2.0)

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(Photo: The_Doodler/CC BY-SA 2.0)

6. Hara Model Railway Museum
Nishi-ku, Japan 

Opened in 2012, this Japanese model train museum is already one of the most stunning creations of its kind in the world. Built to house the work of model train enthusiast Nobutaro Hara, who began his model train hobby in the 1930s, and working at it throughout his life thereafter. While the Hara museum does not run his complete collection of trains, which numbered over 6,000, it does operate around 1,000 of them, sending them clicking and clacking down 1,500 feet of track.

Many of the trains are even powered by miniature overhead power lines, just like in real life. 

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(Photo: y.ganden/CC BY 2.0)

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(Photo: y.ganden/CC BY 2.0)

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(Photo: y.ganden/CC BY 2.0)

7. San Diego Model Train Museum
San Diego, California

Managed by a quartet of model railroad clubs, the giant display at the San Diego Model Train Museum, in Balboa Park has been chugging along since 1982. Covering 2,700 square feet of indoor space, the exhibit is one of the largest of its kind in the world, and is broken up into four large dioramas, each managed by a different model train club. There is also a gallery of toy trains for anyone who just wants to do some trainspotting.

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(Photo: Michelle Enemark/Atlas Obscura)

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(Photo: Michelle Enemark/Atlas Obscura)

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(Photo: Michelle Enemark/Atlas Obscura)

8. Miniature Railroad & Village
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Held in the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, the Miniature Railroad & Village (official name) display is one of the nation's finest examples of model railroading. The display has been in its current home since 1992, but its roots go back to the 1920s when the little model world was established by a World War I veteran who began recreating his Pennsylvania hometown.

Today however the huge display covers much more ground, but is still focused on recreating a somewhat freeform version of Pittsburgh throughout the ages. The display is so beloved that Lionel Trains, probably the world's leading manufacturer of model trains, releases a special edition boxcar each year that can only be purchased through the museum.

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(Photo: J Aaron Farr/CC BY 2.0)

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(Photo: Klaus Nahr/CC BY-SA 2.0)

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(Photo: J Aaron Farr/CC BY 2.0)

9. The Great Train Story
Chicago, Illinois

When the model railroad exhibit at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry first opened in 1941, it was one of the largest displays of its type anywhere in the world. While other train displays have since eclipsed the museum's display in size, today it is about twice as large (3,500 square feet), and still as impressive.

The display is meant to represent a train trip from Chicago to Seattle, and features little landmarks from both cities. Look for Captain Kirk on the Space Needle!

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(Photo: hibino/CC BY 2.0)

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(Photo: calamity_sal/CC BY 2.0)

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(Photo: David Wilson/CC BY 2.0)

How Radioactive Animals Become Tools, Pests and Political Statements

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A deer hangs out at the Savannah River Site nuclear reservation. (Photo: Savannah River Site/CC BY 2.0)

In the late 1970s, a worker at South Carolina's Savannah River Site nuclear reservation peered into a seepage basin and spotted a small, out-of-place turtle. Scooping it out of the nuclear waste, the worker toted his new charge to a nearby ecology lab, where he figured they'd know what to do with it.

As he walked in the lab door, a radioactivity counter began beeping. The lab technician tested the mud on the worker's shoes, figuring he'd tracked in some of the site's contaminated muck. When the shoes came up clear, the confused technician tested further. After a few more swipes, the culprit emerged: It was the turtle.

Though this was the first radioactive turtle found at the Savannah River Site, it was far from an anomaly—there or elsewhere. Across the world, such creatures scurry, swim and fly among us. Unlike popular representations might lead us believe, most of them lack grotesque deformities, special abilities, or weird proclivities for pizza. Instead, like that turtle, many of them are totally healthy and happy—living relatively normal lives and, unless we try to eat them, posing little direct threat to humans.

But that hasn't stopped us from trying to ascribe meaning to these nuclear animals. Over the decades, people have come up with numerous ways to relate to them: as public health threats, as research tools, or even as political statements. What lessons, if any, should we take from the turtles?

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Salmon spawning near a former reactor site at Washington's Hanford nuclear reservation. (Photo: US Department of Energy/Public Domain)

According to Dr. Andrew Karam, a nuclear safety consultant, most people interested in radiation and living things focus on two interconnected concerns: "The effects of the radiation on the organisms, and the effects of the organisms on the radiation." Although scientists argue about exactly how exposure manifests in different species, thanks to a 1996 UN report, we have a pretty good idea of roughly what types are most vulnerable. "In general, the more sophisticated the organism, the more sensitive it is," says Karam. Mammals and birds are easily affected by radiation, while fish and insects show fewer signs. The same goes for plants. "A colleague told me that, after Chernobyl, he could tell where radiation doses were dangerously high because that’s where the pines had suffered or died," says Karam. For moss and lichens, though, the exposure barely registered.

When it comes to radioactive animals, Chernobyl's wildlife gets a lot of the limelight. And with good reason—in the 30 years since the reactor disaster mandated a mass human exodus, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone has become a kind of ad hoc wildlife refuge. As Henry Shukman writes in Outside, the area has become "a giant radiation lab," where creatures live with "a preindustrial number of humans and a postapocalyptic amount of radioactive strontium and cesium." Former streets are now tangles of dense forest, trafficked only by birds and butterflies.Wolves hunt elk near abandoned buildings. Large mammals have moved in, in numbers unseen since the 19th century. Scientists flock there, too, trying to see whether the benefits of our immediate absence outweigh the harms of our toxic legacy.

But Chernobyl's creatures aren't the only irradiated ones on the planet, and their extreme situation is far from the lone option. Thanks to energy facilities and weapons manufacturers, creatures across the globe show heightened radioactivity counts. This leads to Karam's second area of concern—which is, for nearby humans at least, much more immediate. Even as nuclear facilities count on well-built infrastructure to protect their surroundings, animals and plants can act like living leaks, absorbing high levels of radiation and then bringing it into the neighborhood. 

Environmental contamination is probably the biggest threat to humans from irradiated animals, but that threat differs greatly according to species. Small animals with limited home ranges and zero burrowing instincts "are pretty innocuous," says Karam, but fast-moving, hard-digging creatures can scatter contaminants far and wide. This is a particular problem at Washington State's Hanford nuclear reservation, a former plutonium factory currently undergoing a multi-decade cleanup that has been repeatedly critter-compromised. In 1959, radioactive rabbits strewed high-cesium droppings across four square miles of the reserve; in 1998, "hot" fruit flies from the plant hitched a ride to a nearby dump, necessitating a 210-ton garbage recall. More recently, a sole contaminated mouse spurred a 60-trap hunt. (Employees have to keep a lookout for plant runaways, too—tumbleweeds have been known to suck contaminants up through their taproots and roll helter-skelter into the wilderness.)

At the Savannah River Site, scientists treat radioactive critters in a slightly different way, using them to figure out where waste might be coming from. The site holds decades' worth of sludge in seepage bins, which occasionally leak into soil and ponds. Scientists will catch nearby turtles and alligators and test them; if a reptile beeps, they'll know that its home zone needs more help. Then, they'll toss it into a fenced-in pond to keep it from spreading the contaminant further. Ordinary citizens get involved, too: after the annual deer hunt, everyone sends their venison in for testing, and cuts out any radiation-heavy chunks.

For animals that are raised solely for food, radioactivity can be a death sentence—once meat or milk outstrips government radiation limits, it's considered unsafe for human consumption, and therefore unsellable. After the 2011 Fukushima disaster, the Japanese government issued a kill order for the area's thousands of no-longer-edible cattle, calling them "walking accident debris." In protest, a rancher named Masami Yoshizawa moved back to his abandoned farm and took in about 300 irradiated cow refugees, feeding and housing them in defiance of what he saw as government apathy. "I decided to become the resistance," he told the New York Times in 2014.

Radiation may not give a turtle or a rabbit true superpowers, but it does make them, to borrow from Yoshizawa, scaly, fluffy parts of the resistance. When the U.S. government has to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars helicopter-scanning for rabbit droppings, it's hard not to take that as some kind of statement—about nature, about human priorities, about past decisions' long chain of unpredictable consequences. Radiation might be invisible, but, as Karam says, "you can't get away from it." Especially not when it poops in your backyard. 

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

The Small London Company That Makes the World's Most Beautiful Globes

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Mini Desk Globes and an Ochre Livingstone desk globe in Bellerby & Co's London studio. (Photo: Ana Santl)

Looking at a globe close-up is a wonderful thing. Interacting with a round replica of our world gives an entirely different sensation to say looking at Google maps and even a physical atlas doesn’t really give the true geographical sense of our planet. Two dimensional maps, often relying on the Mercator Projection, can show Greenland to be the size of all of Africa when it’s really more like Mexico. It takes a globe to really see that Texas may be the largest state in the continental U.S. but Australia’s largest state is three times its size. Or that the entire eastern seaboard of America fits quite comfortably into Kazakhstan.

For Peter Bellerby, a passion for globes has quite unexpectedly turned into a successful business—his company is one of the world’s only remaining traditional globe makers. “I think everyone has some sort of soft spot for globes,” he explains. “Maps are wonderful but globes are tangible and tell so much more of a story.”

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Peter Bellerby in his studio. (Photo: Ana Santl)

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A handcrafted and hand painted globe in progress. (Photo: Tom Bunning)

Bellerby had been dealing globes of a much different nature, running a successful bowling alley, when he ran into difficulty finding a well-made globe to give to his father for his 80th birthday in the early ‘00s. He decided that the only thing to do was to make one.

Making a globe by hand turns out to be quite difficult. After you create perfect sphere, you have to precisely align thin paper strips at the North and South poles. Even finding an accurate map to use proved problematic. “We created our own cartography from scratch pretty much. I originally licensed a map and found so many errors that I spent a year re-working it all,” he says. After two years of trial and error, Bellerby finally ended up with his ideal vision of a globe around 2008.

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Horizon bands for the bases of the globes hang in the studio. (Photo: Tom Bunning)

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Painting the first layer of pigment on gores. (Photo: Tom Bunning)

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The desk of a globemaker. (Photo: Gareth Pon)

Each Bellerby globe is work of art, meticulously and delicately painted in watercolor. The continents and coast lines are lovingly shaded in sumptuous colors as charcoal, turquoise, Prussian blue and champagne. Today Bellerby & Co. is a team of 10 or so artists and globe makers operating out of a studio in North London. The globes have appeared in the 2011 film Hugo, and as the starts of a first-ever globe exhibit at the Royal Geographical Society. Online, they maintain a big social presence, especially through their Instagram, which features office dog George and daily globe facts (like Uruguay has the longest national anthem and its president donates 90 percent of his salary and lives in a one-bedroom house with a three-legged dog). 

When the Louvre wanted a copy of the original celestial globe made for Louis XVI in 1683, the commission was given to Bellerby.

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A colour chart made by the head painter at Bellerby & co. (Photo: Ana Santl)

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The smallest size of globe, the mini desk globe, is prepped. (Photo: Ana Santl)

“A lot of it was stubbornness in the end,” he explains. “I had a random idea for a hobby and it got out of control. If I didn’t turn it into a business after a certain point, it would have been an insanely expensive globe just for my father.”

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Inside the studio. (Photo: Alun Callender)

One of the company’s most daunting undertakings was to make a version of the legendary “Churchill”globe. Originally crafted during World War II by Weber Costello in Chicago, these giant globes have a 50-inch diameter and weigh over 700 pounds. They were commissioned by the Office of the Strategic Service (the forerunner of the CIA) with a particular purpose in mind: Both President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill would have identical globes, thought to be the most accurate ones ever made at that point in time, that they could reference together while formulating their war strategies.

Bellerby says it takes around six months to complete just one of the globes, which range from £999 ($1440) for the smallest to £59,000 ($85,000) for the Churchill. 

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Watercolour artist paints the detail on a larger globe. (Photo: Tom Bunning)

They also take commissions. Bellerby says that they have completed a Pangea globe (“the ultimate historical globe”) but they don’t advertise projects like that.

“I think it is more than globes,” explains Bellerby, “There is huge satisfaction in making something people will really cherish, something that isn’t a throwaway item and something that hopefully will remain in families for generations.” 

Update, 5/11: An earlier version stated that Texas was the largest state in the U.S.—it's the second-largest, after Alaska.

Found: A Fugitive of 48 Years, Outed by His Social Security Application

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Stackowitz when he was arrested. (Photo: Georgia Department of Corrections)

Forty-eight years ago, in 1968, Robert Stackowitz was in a low-security prison work camp in Georgia, serving a 17-year sentence for a 1966 robbery. He had a number of long years ahead of him, and one day, in the infirmary, he saw an opportunity. He escaped.

Now 71, Stackowitz was arrested in Connecticut this week, the Associated Press reports.

Georgia investigators reopened the cold case five months ago, according to the AP. They found that Stackowitz had started using his real name again and were able to match a photo from his driver’s license to an old picture. The U.S. Marshals Service also told the AP that Stackowitz’s Social Security application help them locate him, without specifying how, exactly.

Stackowitz had been living in Sherman, Connecticut, where he was arrested, for at least 26 years, the Hartford Courant reports. He had connections to the state before the arrest: it’s where he was married, three years before the robbery. For many years after his escape, he’d been using the name Robert Gordon, and was known around town as “the boat repair guy,” who’d work on boats in the town marina.

The arresting officers told reporters that Stackowitz was calm when they showed up. “"He did say he knew this would come someday,” one told the Courant.

Bonus finds: 1,284 foreign planets, the world's oldest axe, Britain's largest gold nugget

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. 

Sold: A Custom Revolver Owned by Brigham Young

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The elaborately decorated revolver that once belonged to the second president of the Mormon Church, Brigham Young, just sold at auction to an unknown buyer. The ornate firearm was originally given to the church leader as gift, but has since been passed down among his descendants, who finally decided to auction off the item to the highest bidder earlier this month.

Young, best known as one of the central leaders of the Mormon Church and for having a lot of wives, was also one of the settlers of the Western frontier, founding Utah’s capital, Salt Lake City in the mid-1800s. When Young put down settlements in the Salt Lake Valley, he envisioned it as a new promised land for the Mormon people, who he had led there, after having been driven out of Illinois. After settling in the valley, Young was appointed Governor of the Utah Territory by President Millard Fillmore, and it was during this tenure that he received his custom revolver as a gift from St. Louis gunmakers, H.E. Dimick & Company.

According to Rock Island Auctions, the gun was probably given to Young after he employed the gunmakers to supply his new territory with weapons. The firearm, a Colt Pocket Percussion Revolver, was engraved with intricate filigree all down the barrel, extending to the handle, where there is also an inscription to Young. The grip around the handle was also made of antique ivory. The gun came in a fancy, felt-lined rosewood box which also had an inscribed metal plate affixed to the interior.

“[He] would undoubtedly have used [the gun] when necessary to protect himself, his family and those who might need it from nefarious persons as was his Constitutional right," according to the auctioneers. 

Having been passed down throughout Young’s descendants, the gun, and its box and accessories, were kept in incredible shape. It sold to an anonymous buyer earlier this month for $632,500.             

A Secret, Wild Pocket Of Central Park Reopens

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Central Park is full of delights: cute dogs, film crews, baby strollers, guerilla art. But do you ever wish you could see a bit more of its wild side?

Now's your chance. After 80 years of hosting only birds, insects, and at least one coyote, Hallett Nature Sanctuary is once again open to human visitors. Weeded and restored, it also boasts a new raw wood gate, fresh trails, and yet another hidden space—a "sanctuary within a sanctuary" featuring hilltop benches donated by a local gem dealer, reports the New York Times.

Once called the Promontory, the four-acre area was closed off in 1934 by Robert Moses, who wanted to preserve it as a bird sanctuary. Left to fend for itself, it became overgrown with non-native plants, less a sanctuary than a muddle of weeds and branches. In 1986, it was renamed for George Harvey Hallett, Jr.—a peace-loving birdwatcher who once served as the executive secretary of the Citizen's Union—but kept closed.

The Central Park Conservancy began restoring it in 2001, as part of a $40 million Woodlands Initiative. "Hallett Nature Sanctuary is a perfect example of how even the 'wildest,' most naturalistic habitats in Central Park require constant planning and care in order to thrive," its website explains .

Now it's all birds, nice plants, and gem dealer benches. Those who want to explore its slightly tamer trails can do so during specific windows listed on the Conservancy's website.

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.


The Hidden History of America's 19th-Century Mania for Panoramic Prints

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A view of Colorado Springs. (Image: Henry Wellge/Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division)

Thaddeus Mortimer Fowler died while working on a view. In 1922, when he slipped on the ice in Middletown, New York, and broke his leg so badly he never recovered, he was almost 80 years old, and he had been drawing birds-eye views of American places for 54 years. He had made more than 400 in total—240 just of towns and cities in Pennsylvania.

In the years after the Civil War, he was the most prolific of a small group of itinerant viewmakers who traveled the country to capture its boom towns, villages, and cities in lithographed prints, making a living selling those drawings to proud citizens.

These views were one of America’s first fads. These panoramic maps were hand-drawn from an imaginary viewpoint, elevated high above the streets, revealing the shape, situation and details of America’s growing cities. They were hugely popular, “almost a mania,” according to one contemporary writer. 

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Santa Barbara. (Image: E.S. Glover/Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division)

As John W. Reps documented in his seminal study on Views and Viewmakers of Urban America, roving artists like Fowler made close to 5,000 views of 2,400 different places, from the largest in the country to small villages in New Hampshire and nascent cities in the West.

Not long after Fowler died, these prints went out of style; today, they often turn up in boxes in used bookstores or in street fair stalls alongside old maps and scientific prints. Flipping through a pile of prints, the individual places they’re meant to celebrate can blend together, and they seem standardized enough that it’s easy to forget someone made them.

Most viewmakers have become anonymous, with time; we know their names but nothing else about them. The exception is the handful of men—Fowler, Albert Ruger, the Bailey brothers, and a few others—who in the decades after the Civil War made a career of spending their lives on the road, making drawings of place after place.

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Des Moines, Ia. (Image: A. Ruger/Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division)

T.M. Fowler turned up in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1864. He had wanted to fight in the war, and though it wasn’t over yet, he had been injured, badly, in the Battle of Bull Run, and discharged in 1863. For the past year, he had been traveling among Union soldiers, making tintypes. He had an uncle, who was also a photographer, who would give him a job in Wisconsin.

Within a few years, though, he had met Albert Ruger, who after the war had started traveling around the Great Lakes states and drawing the cities he visited there. They were different types of men: Ruger, the elder, had enlisted only at the end of the war, while Fowler had been eager to join the army. But they got along well enough that Fowler became Ruger’s agent and apprentice.

To make a view of a city, artists like Ruger and Fowler would begin by walking the streets of a town. They might have a map of the area, too, but as they canvassed the area, they would sketch the city’s buildings, parks, and landmarks. Using imagination and basic tools of perspective, they would use those sketches to make a preliminary drawing of the place. With that draft, the artist’s agent—or sometimes the artist himself—would solicit subscribers, through newspaper placements and pitches to prominent businesses and citizens, who might buy a pile of copies.

With enough orders (a minimum might be 250 for a small city), the viewmaker would perfect his drawing and have lithographic printing stones made for a run of prints. Some artists and their agents would include the names of important businesses or places at the bottom of their view, or line the border with vignettes of significant buildings. The surest way to be among those honored was to commit to buying a healthy number of the prints.

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One of Fowler's Pennsylvania views. (Image: T.M. Fowler/Library of Congress, Geography and Maps Division)

Viewmaking wasn’t an entirely new idea. In Europe, panoramic city views had long been made from woodcuts or engravings, and commercial lithographic printing made it to America in the 1820s. The earliest views of American cities were made before the war, often by respected artists looking to make some actual money. What was new about the American viewmakers, and particularly the ones working after the war, was the volume of their work—”the sheer number of images drawn, printed and published,” Reps writes—and the geographic span of their work.

These 19th-century viewmakers revealed the variety of American cities at a time before most Americans had stepped very far outside their hometowns. Boston, New York and Pittsburgh were tightly packed into the curves of rivers; Louisville, built up along the wide and flat expanse of the Ohio River river and sprawling out into the flat beyond; the small and sparse Western cities—Colorado Springs, laid out neatly before mountains, with a colonnade running down the center, Cheyenne, with most of the six-by-five-block grid half empty of houses.

Viewmakers also provided a record of a city's shifting fortunes. In 1848, as the California Gold Rush began, San Francisco was just a collection of slant-roofed buildings by the bay. By the end of 1849, the city's population had increased 25-fold. Artists also made views of places that never grew large or important. The only town that was too small to merit a view was one that couldn’t muster enough subscribers to pay for it.

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Pittsfield, N.H. (Image: George Norris/Library of Congress, Geography and Maps Division)

Many of the artists who made these views were immigrants to America, and not all of them were dedicated to this particular career. Philadelphian W.W. Denslow, who drew New York City, as well as towns in Maryland and Pennsylvania, was best known for his illustrations for The Wonder Wizard of Oz books, and later Oz costume sets and comic strips. 

Another viewmaker, George Baker, went to California looking for gold but had also lined up a gig with the New York Tribune to draw what he saw out there. Artist Camille Dry dwelled on St. Louis until he had created a 110-sheet view of the city, and then stopped making views altogether. Others, though, spent many years of their life traveling the country and its territories to peddle their prints. One viewmaker, Henry Wellge, visited 27 states and territories.

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A very commercial hand-drawn view from 1907, with photos. (Image: Grafton Tyler Brown/Library of Congress, Geography and Maps Division)

The most prolific, though, learned to concentrate their efforts on particular areas. Fowler started out drawing places in Wisconsin, Indiana and Michigan, and after marrying and moving east in 1875, Fowler continued to spread his efforts across the country, in New Hampshire, Nova Scotia, Kansas, North Dakota, and Ontario. But in the 1880s, he lit on a new strategy. He started concentrating on Pennsylvania.

Every year, he would pick a particular area in the state, and he would travel from town to town there, making views. One year, he went north of Philadelphia; another he focused on Scranton. After he had covered the east, he worked in the western part of the state, in Pittsburgh and the surrounding towns. When he had exhausted the possibilities of Pennsylvania, he moved south to West Virginia. This strategy kept him in business for two decades. In total, he drew 240 views just of places in Pennsylvania.

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Another Fowler view of a Pennsylvania town. (Image: T.M. Fowler/Library of Congress, Geography and Maps Division)

These lithographed views have a charm to them, capturing American cities at a point when they didn’t have to work quite so hard to sell themselves. Cities were growing, and people were proud of that. One reason that the prints went out of style is that places started changing so fast that the technology couldn’t keep up. 

In the new century, though, the business started changing. Artists would include blimps and planes in their pictures to imply the view reflected one actually seen from above, and soon photographs taken from planes would make these imagined views seem old fashioned.

During the Great War, this strategy got Fowler in trouble—he was accused of being a German spy. Still, he loved the work. Just a few years before he died, when he was first working on Middletown's print, he wrote his granddaughter in 1920 that he had felt “unadulterated joy” walking the streets in order to craft a view of the town.

A Look Inside Florence's Strangest Archive

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One of six archival rooms on the first floor of Tuscany's Villa le Corti. They hold the Corsini family’s archived history, from the 1360s through the 1960s. (Photo Courtesy New York Times Style Magazine)

For most of us, understanding our pasts requires a bit of detective work—piecing together family stories, yellowing scrapbooks, and saved letters to form an idea of what life was like for those who came before.

But what if you had more than just scraps and pieces? What if every relative you ever had kept a diary, and they were all in one place?

One Florentine family has managed just that. In a recent feature in T Magazine, reporter Tim Parks visits the Villa le Corti in Tuscany, which houses the Corsini family archives—4,000 feet of volumes spanning 600 years of history, painstakingly recorded in day-to-day detail.

The tradition was started in 1362 by Matteo di Nicholò Corsini, a cloth trader who, like other Florentine merchants of the time, thought it best to keep a record of his every transaction. "I... Matteo, will write down every thing of mine and other facts about me and my land and houses and other goods of mine," he wrote.

Unlike his peers, though, Matteo managed to pass this proclivity down through dozens of generations. "For 600 years his descendants followed his example, writing down everything about themselves and preserving everything they wrote," Parks writes.

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The Villa le Corti, home of the Corsini family's extremely comprehensive archives. (Photo: Sailko/CC BY-SA 3.0)

Flipping through the thousands of volumes yields a pizzeria's worth of slices of life—the last will of a 14th century cardinal, the health concerns of 16th century merchants, the private notebooks of 18th century women. The medium lends the sense of history and connection a material component. "Wherever you come to in the archive you are immediately overwhelmed by an intense awareness of paper," writes Parks:

"There is the thick sepia-toned, slightly porous paper of the 1400s and the ultrathin glossy correspondence paper of the 19th century. There are papers with elaborate watermarks, and with tiny cuts made in the 16th century to show that the surface had been disinfected against the plague. Some papers have been eaten away by silverfish; others have gotten wet and smudged."

In the 1960s, the family stopped recording their every move, instead dedicating their archival energies to preserving what they already have. Parts of their villa are now open to visitors and scholars, and others who want to dive into a very specific library—one that houses a thin, deep core of the past.

Watch a Man Tightrope Walk Across the Moon

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There is nothing quite like a long lens shot of the moon: the resulting shots make our closest neighbor appear supernaturally enormous. Even more magical is when a subject is placed in front of the moon in the shot, which the video above accomplishes in a wondrous manner.

The video, entitled "Moonwalk," shows the late free climber and highliner Dean Potter, who climbs to the top of a rock formation in Cathedral Peak, a mountain range in Yosemite National Park. At the top is a slack line that connects to another peak. In an instance of perfect timing, he walks across the cord as the moon rises behind it, so it appears as though he is walking across the colossal moon. 

"Moonwalk" is a work of art in itself, and is not only a testament to climbing and tightrope walking, but also to the skill it takes to capture a beautiful shot. 

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.

This Scientist Has Created Speakers That Spew Scents, Not Sounds

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Cyrano is David Edwards new invention to communicate through scent. (Photo: © Wayne E. Chinnock/Vapor Communications

David Edwards is obsessed with olfaction. The Harvard University professor has spent the last five years building a library of digital smells. The goal? To figure out a way to transmit those aromas through technology—carrying and communicating scent memories through the air.

Now, he has stored a selection of these scents on a “scent speaker” called Cyrano.The device emits olfactory notes, which you can arrange into playlists on a smartphone app. With a few bursts, a home stereo system in a New York City apartment can evoke the scents of a Hawaiian vacation, or a Christmas market in Germany.On a long car trip, Cyrano can be an olfaction companion, transporting drivers to places beyond where they are actually going. The plastic, silver canister about the size of a few stacked tuna cans was designed to fit nicely in a cup holder, but can also be propped on a desk or nightstand.  

Edwards, who developed devices for inhalable insulin, vitamins, and the tuberculosis vaccine back in the late 1990s, thinks of scents like notes in a song. He describes Cyrano, which debuted last month at the “What Emotion Smells Like" event at the Rubin Museum, as a stereo transmitting smell through the air like music. Everything you are able to do with digital sound can be done in a similar way with digital scent since both are transmitted through the air, he explains.

Cyrano’s first prototype contains three scent cartridges and produces 12 different aromas, like orange ginger, Tahitian vanilla, and even suntan lotion. Hooked up to the iOS app oNotes, a user can customize “mood medleys” or playlists of scents to digitally communicate smell and emotion.

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Perhaps it is just a coincidence, but Cyrano de Bergerac did have quite a large nose. In the play about the playwright's life, the actor playing Cyrano often wears a mask with an exaggerated long, pointed nose. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Scent is a cultural and personal experience. With Cyrano, which is named after the French poet and playwright, Cyrano de Bergerac, you can create aromatic moments and memories with scent just as you do with music. Indeed, scent can be as informative and immersive as sound. It can tell you if your toast is burning or if there is a gas leak, while also evoking memories and emotional experiences. “It could be a world of scent from the past; it could be a trip to Bora Bora; it could be a great breakfast,” Edwards says. Cyrano aims to transport users to those places.

“Of the five senses, the only sensation that is communicated directly to our brain is the sensation of scent,” he notes. The olfactory nerve leads right to the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain that processes memory. When we smell, our bodies sometimes react physically before cognitively becoming aware of the smell. Our physiological and neurological connection with aromas makes our ability to smell a powerful sensation.

While technology has exploited light and sound, scent has never been successfully integrated into the digital world. For one, scent particles have mass, which is more difficult to control. It is a property that has proven to be an obstacle for previous scent-technology apparatuses, like the late 1950s theater odor systems Smell-O-Vision and AromaRama, which filled the theater with different scents as a film played. Edwards says going to a movie with these scent technologies was like spilling whisky on your clothes–the scent particles lingering in the fabric. “In general scent has been too messy. The first scent is good, but then it just doesn’t go away.”

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The four scent pods can provide an array of aroma combinations. (Photo: © Wayne E. Chinnock/Vapor Communications

That’s why he designed Cyrano to deliver faint wafts of scent signals, even much less than an air freshener. The amount of scent is just enough so a person can detect it for a short amount time before the next scent in the mood melody starts to play. Scientific studies and data explains why certain scents biochemically connect to different emotional states like, for example, how peppermint perks us up and how lavender makes us feel calm. Since we also lose scent sensation after several minutes of exposure (also known as olfactory fatigue), the device creates an evolution of scent signals that can make you feel more awake, focused, or relaxed.  

An initial batch of 500 Cyrano speakers are available to order now. Right now, Vapor Communications, the tech company that designed the product along with Edwards and Rachel Field, Cyrano’s co-founder and one of Edwards’ former Harvard engineering students, is focusing on the car market. However, Edwards believes the technology could also be used in stores and subways in its present form, and foresees scent opportunities in the entertainment industry in the future.

“We created this virtual world, now how do we get back to the real world and how do we bring the real world into a digital experience?” he says. “Our senses are really connected to what it means to be alive.”

China Is Tired of Graffiti Artists at Mount Everest

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A lot of people go to Mount Everest, probably because it's the highest mountain in the world. 

But that also leads to a lot of problems. Like garbage, and human feces, and death. It also leads, in some places, to graffiti. 

You can probably guess what a lot of it is: "I was here," mostly, written in many different languages, according to the BBC

But now China has decided they've had enough, introducing a plan this week to "name and shame" graffiti artists who leave their work at the base camp on the Chinese side of the mountain, the BBC said. 

China will also leave designated graffiti boards, for those who can't resist leaving a mark. For those caught leaving graffiti on non-designated surfaces, they will be publicly blacklisted by China, the BBC said. 

So think twice before you tag the world's tallest mountain. It probably isn't worth it. 

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