Quantcast
Channel: Atlas Obscura: Articles
Viewing all 11432 articles
Browse latest View live

The Lonely Ballad of the Dulles Airport Mobile Lounge

0
0
The mobile lounge at Dulles Airport in action, 1960s. (Photo: Library of Congress/LC-DIG-krb-00774)

If your travels ever bring you to Concourse D of Washington, D.C.'s Dulles International Airport, you may find yourself trundling your baggage toward a shabby room at the end of a hallway. In the room are seats, arranged in a circle around the walls, as if in the lobby of a doctor's office. At the door you may pause. It's hard to tell what this room requires of you. There are not enough seats for it to be the waiting area for a bus but here and there are shiny, floor-to-ceiling metal poles, suggesting transport. An irate voice gets on a loudspeaker and says, “Move to the back of the lounge, folks. Make room for the other passengers.”

And then the whole thing starts moving.

The mobile lounges of Dulles Airport are huge vehicles, each weighing 76 tons with a maximum cruising speed of 26 miles per hour, and can carry to the terminal building up to 90 bewildered, freshly de-planed people. They were designed more than 60 years ago by Finnish architect Eero Saarinen. Their purpose? To radically restructure the idea of airports. And for a brief period, it seemed like they might.

article-image

An aerial view of the mobile lounges lined up at Dulles. (Photo: Library of Congress/LC-DIG-krb-00768)

The logic behind the mobile lounge was this: By the early 1960s, airports had transformed from simple buildings on the edge of a field to ramifying systems of hallways. As planes grew larger, they needed more space as they lined up next to each other along the airport building. As flying grew more popular—though still very much a luxury—airports needed to have more and more gates. The result was that terminal buildings sprouted long protrusions called fingers. Hundreds of feet long, they accommodated jets very comfortably.

For passengers, though, the finger-style airport was a purgatory of walking. In a 1958 promotional film for mobile lounges made by designers Ray and Charles Eames, the footsteps of tired travellers plod over the narration. While it used to be that you could walk straight from the entrance onto your plane, now you were reduced to wandering through a structure built for giants. “Walks, which were once filled with romantic anticipation of adventure, will be come more and more irritating as the high-speed flights come into service,” the film warns.

So the Saarinen-designed Dulles Airport, when it opened in 1962, did not have fingers. Instead, after passengers checked in on one side of the terminal building, they crossed to a row of doors that opened onto a fleet of mobile lounges. While the aircraft, some one or two miles off on the tarmac, were prepared, flyers relaxed in these swank waiting areas, enjoying cocktails from nearby stands. “The short wait is made even more pleasant,” wrote FAA Aviation News in 1965, “by another innovation—piped-in music.”

article-image

Inside the mobile lounge. (Photo: Library of Congress/LC-DIG-krb-00775)

Fifteen minutes before departure, the mobile lounge closed its doors, pulled away from the terminal, and rolled off like a very large dune buggy. Once in reach of the plane, its far end mated with the plane door, and passengers processed onto their flight. The empty lounge headed back to the terminal, to become a waiting room again. The same thing could happen in reverse to bring passengers from planes to the terminal. It could cut the walking distance down to 150 feet from the building entrance to the plane door, and vice versa.

The idea had legs—that is to say, wheels. The monumental Mirabel International Airport in Montreal was designed around mobile lounges. In aviation forums, people recall mobile lounge rides in airports from St. Louis to Jeddah. A version of the Plane Mate, a mobile lounge that could ratchet up and down to meet doors of different heights, shuttled many NASA astronauts from point A to point B. It might have seemed that what the Eames film prophesied, while panning over a field of rocket ships, would come true: “There is a high probability that something like the mobile lounge will be servicing quite a few of the conveyances that are yet to come along.”

article-image

A mobile lounge and plane at Dulles, c. 1960. (Photo: Library of Congress/LC-DIG-krb-00771

But you may have noticed that mobile lounges are not waiting for you at the door of every aircraft. The problems that sparked the mobile lounge certainly have not gone away—in 1958, Dallas Airport had 26 gates; today it has 165. Airports are still spread out. But the solutions now are automatic air trains, which have the benefit of fitting neatly underground, moving walkways, or buses.

The lounges of Dulles, along with Plane Mates, are now relegated to shuttling passengers to and from the D Concourse, which is not yet on the train system. Why did mobile lounges cede the limelight to trains and buses—especially when they could be seen as a kind of glorified bus themselves—so completely?

article-image

A mobile lounge on the tarmac, photographed in 1980. (Photo: Library of Congress/LC-DIG-highsm-15839)

The answer is not clear. “You ask a question which always bothered us, and to some extent still does,” says Jim Wilding, the former president of the Metropolitan Washington Airport Authority.

“Part of the answer is that automated train systems offer a more cost-effective way of moving passengers, especially in the area of labor cost,” he says. But there is another, less quantifiable notion. Passengers arriving off a long-haul flight seem to see a ride on the mobile lounge, once described as a paragon of luxury, as a burden. It is a transformation that has overtaken nearly every part of the air travel experience, which used to be an excuse to put yourself in the hands of a friendly ticket agent or flight attendant. Now, travelers prize what little autonomy they have—choosing to stand, say, on the moving walkway.

“Said more simply, they tend to resent being captured for an additional period of time,” says Wilding, “when all they want is to be let free to be on their way."


The 9,000-Mile Sea Journey of an Irradiated Indian Mango

0
0

article-image

Ripe mangos. (Photo: Ramnath Bhat // CC BY: 2.0)

Farmers in India say the unique aroma and taste of the Alphonso mango comes from the nutrient rich, blood-red soil and the winds blowing over the orchards from the Arabian Sea. The distinct sour perfume of unripe mangos fills the air every harvest across the hillsides in Maharashtra State’s Western Ghats. 

Once ripe, the saffron-yellow mango is known for its intensely fruity taste. The cult delicacy has a passionate fan base in many Persian Gulf states and India. But until just a few years ago, the Alphonso and every other variety of Indian mango was illegal in the U.S.

A bug problem caused the two-decade ban on American imports of Indian mangos, to the great dismay of fans in the country's large South Asian community, who insist mangos from India are more complex in flavor than the Latin American mangos typically found on U.S. grocery shelves. Fears over fruit fly infestation kept the fruit away until 2006, when U.S. authorities relaxed the ban—with some conditions. 

Since then, all mangos moving between India and the U.S. have been expected to undergo irradiation treatment. The U.S. approved irradiation as a safe quarantine treatment for fruit and vegetables in 2002. Fruits from countries including Mexico, Thailand and Vietnam face similar exposure to radiation to eradicate any invasive species they may be carrying.

Normally, fruits like mangos are exported via planes. Yet since Indian mango orchards are thousands of miles away from the U.S. shops, high transports costs weaken the incentive for exporters to compete with mango-producing countries such as Mexico. But this month, state officials in Maharashtra say Indian mangos were sent to the United States by ship for the very first time. Indian press declared it an historic moment. 

In the sphere of Indian-American mango relations, it was progress.

article-image

The mangos traveled on a ship like this one. (Photo: Patrick Denker // CC SA: BY 2.0)

India produces more than half of the world’s mangos every year, yet it exports relatively few of them. The experiment to transport the “King of Fruits” by sea may change that. Shipping mangos abroad nearly halves their transport costs.

To get to New York by boat, one mango takes a 9,000 nautical mile journey. In late June, Alphonso, Kesar and Banganapalli varieties departed the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust in Mumbai, for an expected 22-day journey to New York. Indian exporters hope this lengthy voyage, from orchard, through radiation treatment, and onto a container vessel bound for the Eastern seaboard, will provide a new template for unleashing their mangos on the U.S. market. 

Not everyone agrees, however, that the delicate mango can survive such an arduous journey. 

“We gave up on sea,” says Jaidev Sharma, president of Mangozz, a company that imports mangos from India to the U.S. His company experimented with a sea shipment in 2008. The results were so bad, he says, that the company did not publicize the long-awaited arrival of their mangos.

At sea, the mango is kept at a low temperature to slow down the process of ripening. Mangozz's shipment never ripened properly, and tampering with the ripening process is risky. After the batch softened up at room temperature, the seafaring mangos lacked their distinctive taste. 

Still, mango exporters and state government officials in India have confidence the fruit has the resilience to survive the journey. 

article-image

A mango tree. (Photo: Public Domain)

Mango cultivation is a 6,000-year-old tradition in India. The mangos in Maharashtra State grow in orchards known locally as Aamri. To harvest the semi-ripe mangos, pickers use a net attached around a metal ring on the end of a bamboo pole. A sharpened arrow-shaped tool, stuck to the metal ring, called a zela, is used to dislodge the mangos into the net. The mangos are then placed into a wooden box lined with straw. 

From here, the mangos meant for export to the U.S. are transported to one of two irradiation centers, one at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Lasalgaon, and a second one in Vashi, near Mumbai. The Vashi irradiation hub is new; the Maharashtra state government built it in part to help boost mango exports. 

At the facilities, exposure to radiant energy such as gamma rays renders any bugs unable to reproduce on the long journey to the U.S. Insects are in effect, sterilized, which does not actually kill the bug living inside the mango at the time. The energy waves directly attack the molecular structure that form the pest’s DNA. (The European Union lifted its own ban on Indian mangos this summer, but does not approve of irradiation treatment. Mangos destined for Europe are instead submerged in water at 48 degrees Celsius.)  

The final domestic stop for a mango is a shipping container terminal or a plane. India exported 700 tonnes of mangos to the U.S. this year, more than double what it sent last year. The first sea shipment carried a reported 18 tonnes

article-image

Box of Alphonso mangos. (Photo: Chris Conway and Hilleary Osheroff  // CC BY: SA 2.0)

There are some 1,000 types of Indian mango, and dozens of subspecies and countless hybrid varieties. And some of the very best mangos may never reach the U.S, at least not in bulk. In Devgad, a collection of villages in the Konkan region of Maharashtra, more than 700 farmers produce the Devgad Alphonso. This mango is unsuitable for long-haul travel to the U.S., says Omkar Sapre, head of marketing for the Devgad District Mango Growers Cooperative.

The ocean-bound shipment of mangos in June from India to the U.S. was an experiment to make it easier for producers in Maharashtra State to compete in the American market. But no one back in India knows whether it has arrived in New York yet, and how the produce looked after nearly a month at sea, says Vivek Bhide, president of the Konkan Cooperative Association of Alphonso Mango Growers and Sellers.

There could be a future for sea shipments of mangos with the right logistics, and if the selection of the species is correct, says Sharma, of the Mangozz company. But after his experience of receiving a ship full of flavorless mangos, he says he will leave it to others to experiment. 

Police Impersonators in the UK Are Now on the Hijacking Beat

0
0
article-image

A marked Essex police car. (Photo: davebutton/CC BY 2.0)

On Saturday, in Essex County, England, a group of four men put a blue flashing light on their car and pulled over a white Mercedes Sprinter van. At least one of the men, who identified themselves as cops, was carrying a gun. Two occupants in the van were ordered out, and, within minutes, the four men took off with both vehicles, leaving the van's occupants stranded.

Two days later, the same thing happened, this time with a Volkswagen Transporter van, and with one fewer person purporting to be a cop. Actual police officers say the men were not cops, but, in each case, they did use a car that police have used in the United Kingdom: a Ford Mondeo, adding a hint of verisimilitude to their ruse.

Essex County police said on Tuesday that, in the wake of the incidents they were taking at least one concrete step: immediately halting the pulling over of any motorist by unmarked police cars, barring emergencies. That means for now, if someone in an unmarked car tries to pull you over in this eastern English county, you should call the U.K.'s emergency number to verify that it's real. 

The ploy can be quite elaborate. "Our victims have told us that the suspects are purporting to be police officers and are wearing body armor to further enhance this deception in order to steal these vans," a police official said on Facebook. 

What could the thieves have wanted with the vans? It's hard to say, though vans have been popular targets of theft in Britain in recent years. Mostly, some speculate, the thieves wanted the vehicles to be broken down and sold for parts. 

Puzzlers Just Got a Little Closer to Solving Gravity Falls' Final Mystery

0
0
article-image

Six days ago, Alex Hirsch, the creator of the animated television show Gravity Falls, posted a message on Twitter.

To outsiders, this message might look cryptic. To fans of the show, it was a siren song. 

Gravity Falls went off the air in February, after two seasons, but every episode ended with a coded message. By the end of the show, they looked a lot like this one. When Hirsch posted the message, fans quickly understood what was at stake. At the very end of the show, an image of Bill Cipher, the show's ultimate villain, had appeared. Hirsch was sending them on a quest to find him.

For those of you not in the know, Gravity Falls is a show you should probably have heard of. Maybe you already know about it, or maybe your super cool niece has been hassling you to watch it, but either way, Gravity Falls is a show to know.

The show, which ran on the Disney Channel, tells the story of Dipper (Jason Ritter) and Mabel (Kristen Schaal) Pines, a pair of twins who spend one mysterious summer in the town of Gravity Falls, Oregon. They are staying with their more-than-a-little-shady Grunkle (great uncle) Stan, in the Mystery Shack, a run-down roadside attraction with secrets all its own. Over the course of their summer the twins encounter a series of increasingly bizarre creatures and supernatural forces including gnomes, unicorns, manly manotaurs, a time-traveling loser, a crashed UFO, and an extra-dimensional force of chaos shaped like the pyramid from the back of the American dollar—Bill Cipher. Just to name a few.

The show was the brainchild of Hirsch, who was inspired by his own childhood experiences (sans supernatural forces). He also brought with him a love of mystery and puzzles, which he integrated into the show itself to give viewers their very own mysteries to solve. At the end of each episode a coded message or image would flash on-screen for an instant, that viewers, without much prompting, took to deciphering. As the show went on, the codes became more and more elaborate, growing from single line cryptograms to entire images full of codes and clues. The codes would often employ existing encryption systems like Caesar or Atbash, introducing a whole generation of cartoon viewers to cryptography. Viewers who could crack the codes were often rewarded with cryptic hints and references to the events in the episode. All leading to this final puzzle, released months after the show itself concluded.   

The treasure hunt that Hirsch set off required fans all over the world to search out clues and share them. The first clue was in Russia, another code printed on a dark and folded piece of paper, with a ghostly figure of Bill Cipher in one corner. The second was in Japan. In just a few days, the hunt bounced from Georgia to Rhode Island to Los Angeles, and back to Georgia again. Here’s an example of one of the decoded clues: 

Consider in your quest for truth

The hunter of the fountain of youth

400 before his name is written

Outside the gate is where its hidden

Find what's LOST to pass the test

From a Shrine that's east to a Shrine that's west

The answer: 400 Ponce De Leon Ave NE, Atlanta, GA 30308. (Ponce de Leon is, of course, the explorer obsessed with the Fountain of Youth, and there’s a Yaarab Shrine Temple at that address.)

There were hiccups in the quest, which Hirsch says he created independently and isn't associated with any official promotion. One of the clues, for instance, was stolen by nuns. On the second day of the hunt, one of the clue locations yielded a bag of puzzle pieces and ever since then, people were working to complete it, at one point even taking shifts. Hirsch promised to release the never-seen pilot to show if it was completed; there’s also a digital version that was completed this afternoon. (The reward for that is cut scenes from the show.)

Now, it seems like the hunters are closing in on the prize: just before 6:00 p.m, Eastern time, on Day 6, they found the 11th clue. According to Hirsch, this means “Things are about to get nuts!”

Even though it’s been a collaborative effort to get this far, there is some premium in being the first to find the actual, physical object. To tune in as the hunters sprint towards their goal, there’s a Twitter hashtag or a Reddit page. If you find the statue, though, don't shake its hand.

Wildly Beautiful Photographs of Flamingos From the Air

0
0

An aerial view of Lesser Flamingos feeding in the shallows of Lake Natron, Tanzania, leaving trails in the mud. The lake has mineral-rich waters and mud that are caustic to most other animals. For flamingos, it's a safe haven and an ideal breeding ground. (All Photos: Paul McKenzie)

A version of this story originally appeared on bioGraphic.com.

The classic flamingo silhouette is instantly recognizable: a ball of pink feathers perched on one thin leg, long neck curved as a beak tilts towards the water for food. It's an image so well-known it's been immortalized in kitschy plastic lawn ornaments.

But from the air, a flamingo has a different appeal. In the Lesser Flamingo habitats of Tanzania and Kenya, bright pink specks wade through dark water, leaving painterly trails in their wake. A cluster of birds flies over a monochromatic lunar landscape. A vast flock dots a sea of green. 

“It was like nothing I’ve seen anywhere on our planet,” says photographer Paul McKenzie, who flew over these flamingo habitats to capture images of the birds from above.

In northern Tanzania, by the border with Kenya, Lake Natron's shallow, highly alkalized water is a breeding ground for around three-quarters of the world’s population of Lesser Flamingos. As with neighboring Kenya’s Lake Bogonia and Lake Logipi, also home to the flamingo, the water in this soda lake is so corrosive it can burn through skin. But for the flamingo, it’s not only a place to breed, but feast. The waters, which measure over 35 miles long and 14 miles wide, are dense with spirulina, which the flamingo gathers with its head upside-down, sifting with its beak.

This unique environment also creates some peril for the birds, which are classified as “Near Threatened.” There have been proposals to mine for soda ash at Lake Natron, which would have a deleterious effect on flamingo populations.

For now, though, as these photos show, the birds thrive. Take a glimpse at what McKenzie calls a most charismatic species in its extraordinary natural environment. 

article-image

The flamingos wade through an algae slick on Lake Logipi in Kenya.

article-image

“Flamingos have not only managed to survive in these conditions, they positively thrive. It’s a triumph of evolution that they’ve adapted to these hostile environments," says McKenzie. 

article-image

Flamingos at Lake Logipi in northern Kenya. 

article-image

Leaving their trails behind as evidence of their last stop, lesser flamingos fly over the silt-infused water of Lake Logipi.

article-image

Flying over Lake Natron, a breeding ground for about three quarter's of the world's population of lesser flamingos. The lake has been threatened several times in the past decade by proposals to mine the lake for soda ash. 

article-image

A flock flies over Kenya’s Lake Logibi in search of feeding grounds. The bright birds preferentially eat the algae Arthrospira fusiformis, which tints their feathers pink with the pigment molecules and nutrients the algae contain.

article-image

Flamingos flying over an algae bloom in Kenya's Lake Bogoria. The flamingos' inextricable link to the soda lakes makes them vulnerable to a changing climate and human activity. 

article-image

Tanzania's Lake Natron, with its swirls of concentrated sodium compounds, provides a mesmerizing backdrop for a pair of lesser flamingos.

article-image

Thousands of lesser flamingos congregate in the algae-rich water of Kenya’s Lake Logipi.

Watch a Mini Volcano Simulator Produce an Electrical Storm

0
0

Volcanic eruptions can result in a series of amazing and violent natural phenomena. They can spew streams of lava, generate cloud vortexes, and blanket the sky in thick black ash. And sometimes, when ash particles collide at high speeds, the resulting friction causes bursts of lightning.

Volcanologist Corrado Cimarelli and his colleagues at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany study the lightning events that can occur in volcanic plumes. One of the tools they use is a lab volcano simulator, or shock tube—a three-centimeter-wide vent and a hot, pressurized metal tub that propels real volcanic ash obtained from various volcanoes, including the active Popocatépetl in Mexico and Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland.

The shock tube mimics the kind of pressure found in magma chambers of active volcanoes by accelerating the ash particles at high enough speeds so that the friction from collision allows them to become charged.

In the video below, you can watch the plume turn from a wispy white to a menacing black. Tiny lightning bolts start to flicker and flash in slow-motion in the column of volcanic ash, the shock tube generating lightning up to tens of centimeters in length.

From a series of experiments in 2013, Cimarelli found that smaller particles of ash create a higher number of lightning bolts, BBC Newsreported in 2014. Most recently, Cimarelli and his research group studied the activity at Mount Sakurajima this year and found that the frequency of flashes also varies with the amount of ash spewed into the atmosphere during the eruption.

The researchers believe they can understand more about volcanic eruptions by surveying and monitoring volcanic lighting.

The lightning “is a parameter that can be measured—from a distance of several kilometers away and under conditions of poor visibility—and it can be used as a proxy to estimate the total mass and the size distribution of the ash deposited in the atmosphere,” Cimarelli said in a university statement about the investigations of Mount Sakurajima. “This would enable us to rapidly assess the distribution of ash particles in the atmosphere and if necessary alert the aviation authorities.”

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.

Over 400 Vintage Boomboxes Are Up For Sale

0
0

What is believed to be one of the world’s largest collection of vintage boombox stereos is going up for sale to the highest bidder, according to Stuff.co.nz.

The collection belongs to New Zealander Craig Kenton, who has amassed over 400 of the chunky portable stereos. Kenton has been collecting boomboxes for the past 15 years, turning his love of the popular 1980s icon into a minor obsession. Of the hundreds of stereos stacked along the walls of Kenton’s home, around 300 of them are still in perfect working order, ready to blast a Run DMC cassingle at a moment’s notice.

The bidding for the collection, which was posted to online trading site Trademe.co.nz begins at 20,000 New Zealand dollars, or around $14,000. A child of the 1980s himself, Kenton considers his collection as a sort of work of art, and claims that while he could sell just the 20 finest boomboxes from his collection for $20,000, he’d rather the whole lot stayed together.

His hope, ultimately, is that they can find a home where they can be put on display.

Found: Really Stinky 340-Year-Old Cheese From a Shipwreck

0
0
article-image

Possible shipwreck cheese. (Photo: Lars Einarsson/Kalmar County Museum)

Since the shipwreck of the Swedish royal ship Kronan was discovered in 1980, researchers have found thousands of items that sank to the bottom of the sea in 1676, including the brain tissue of a few unfortunate crew members. One of the newest finds from the shipwreck, though, rivals the brains for pure gooey grossness: researchers have found “some kind of dairy product,” the Local reports, in a small, black jar.

“We think it is cheese,” they told the Swedish outlet. It looks, they said, a little bit like Roquefort.

The Kronan has spent 340 years at the bottom of the Baltic sea: it sunk just before a battle with Denmark and the Netherlands. The most recent exploration of the wreck turned up a diamond ring, gold coins, and the black tin jar. The material that the researchers found inside is “thick and gooey,” according the Local, and it smells. What comes through? A strong aroma “of cheese and yeast.”

This is no bog butter, though. The seabed’s ability to preserve food, even cheese, for hundreds of years is not great. No one’s even thinking about trying to eat it.

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. 


The World's Most Lightning-Prone Place Has the World's First Lightning Forecasts

0
0

article-image

Lightning over Lake Maracaibo. (Photo: Thechemicalengineer/CC BY-SA 3.0)

For centuries, the lightning that lit up the skies above Lake Maracaibo, night after night, was a mystery. The Beacon of Maracaibo, it’s been called, or the Catatumbo Lightning, after the river that pours into the lake where the lightning is most intense. There can be as many as 280 strokes of lightning per hour here: in all the world, this place in Venezuela has the most frequent, densely spaced lightning.

But a team of scientists think they have the answers. In fact, they now understand the lightning system so well that they can create lightning forecasts for months at a time and have set up an early warning system to alert people in the area of impending danger.

Ángel Muñoz, one of the team’s lead scientists, was born in Maracaibo, so when he started doing climate physics, it was natural for him to try to understand the lightning. Starting in 1998, he went looking for its underlying causes. Why is the lightning so frequent? Why is it located where it’s located?

At the beginning, he and his colleagues thought the lightning could be random. At another point, they thought it might have to do with the methane. Under the Maracaibo basin is a giant oil and gas field—one of the resources that gives Venezuela the largest oil reserves of any country on the planet.  

But, if that were the case, they would find the lightning occurring with some measurable randomness. Instead, the lightning kept to a schedule, often starting around sunset and stopping in the early morning hours, before sunrise. Finally, they found the key: an air current that Muñoz likens to “a tide of winds.”

article-image

Catatumbo lightning. (Photo: trekman/Flickr)

Lightning requires two basic ingredients, moisture and lifting force. The air current that the scientists discovered sweeps moisture from the Caribbean Sea over the Maracaibo basin, between the surface of the land or lake and the base of the clouds above. (If you look on a map, Lake Maracaibo is just about due south of Haiti and the Dominican Republic; the lake has an outlet to sea on the north coast of South America.) When that air current, which they call the Lake Maracaibo low level jet, hits the mountains it’s trapped. There’s nowhere to go but up.

Up the air and moisture go, so fast that there's an unusually strong convection upwards—the movement creates large, lightning-ready thunder clouds. But at other times of the day, the winds switch direction, and blow the clouds away. “It’s like the natural clock of the Maracaibo basin,” says Muñoz, so regular that, once he and his colleagues understood the mechanism, a forecast was a natural next step. “If it’s that precise and predictable, you just take advantage of it,” he says.

Earlier this year, the team of scientists published the first ever paper showing that it’s possible to forecast lightning at least three months in advance. (They think they could go further, but they’re being conservative.) The forecast ties the daily working of the low level jet to seasonal fluctuations in moisture and other climatic variables. They can’t actually predict lightning, but they can predict conditions that have a very high probability of producing lightning.

article-image

Lightning strikes up to 280 times per hour. (Photo: trekman/Flickr)

In June, they launched Phase 1 of an early warning system that will alert people in the area when there's likely to be dangerous lightning. In this part of the world, people die from lightning strikes at a rate three times higher than in the continental U.S.; cattle operations lose their stock when cows are struck by lightning; the oil industry has to shut down operations for hours when there’s a lightning hazard. Being able to plan around lightning dangers—and to be more confident of going out on the lake when it’s clear—could make a dramatic difference in both economic efficiency and quality of life in the lake basin.

“I remember my mother and grandmother saying, 'Don’t go out to play next to the lake because there might be lightning,'” says Muñoz. In the places where the scientists do their fieldwork, they’ve become close with local families; they know people who have died because of lightning.

The early warning system is still in the testing phase and they’ll run it for six more months to make sure it’s working properly. If it does, the Catatumbo lighting will not longer be so alluringly enigmatic—a strange and inexplicable bright spot on the globe. It’ll be an unusual but fairly predictable natural wonder. The show the lightning puts on, though, will be just as good.

The Lost Mushroom Masterpiece Unearthed in a Dusty Drawer

0
0
article-image

An illustration of Polyporus beatiei, from Mary Banning's The Fungi of Maryland. (Photo: vintageprintable/Public Domain)

To her neighbors in 19th century Baltimore, the mycologist Mary Banning was a witch-like “toadstool lady”, known for boarding trolley cars with her arms full of slimy, putrid-smelling specimens. Many Americans once regarded mushrooms as unsightly and uniformly poisonous. Mycology—the study of fungi—was no pastime for a woman.

Though Banning would identify 23 new species and complete one of the first guides to the mushrooms of the New World, almost no one in her day knew of her discoveries, or about the striking illustrations she produced in her self-financed home laboratory.

Fungi have a long history of zealous but misunderstood enthusiasts in tight-knit scientific circles. However, Banning devoted her life to mycology at a time when women in science faced as much resistance as mushrooms did in popular cuisine. Only a few scientists were willing to listen to a self-taught, female outsider, and her work would languish in a desk drawer for almost a century before a museum curator uncovered her story.

article-image

Lexington Market in the early 20th century. Banning's move from the rural Eastern Shore to this crowded commercial center may have inspired her to pursue botany. (Photo: New York Public Library/Public Domain)

Banning came from a well-off family on Maryland's Eastern Shore, the youngest of nine children. When her father died in 1845, her fortunes changed for the worse, and she soon became the breadwinner and caretaker for her mother and older sister, Catherine. The three women moved to Baltimore in the 1860s, near the city's bustling Lexington Market, and Banning supported them by working as a schoolteacher.

Perhaps she took up the study of mushrooms as a respite from nursing her sick mother; perhaps, among the soot and grime of Baltimore, she missed the woods of her childhood home. Wherever the fascination began, it would last for the rest of her life and consume all her spare hours.

In the mid-1800s, botany was both a growing science and a popular amateur hobby. While men staffed university departments, a large number of amateur botanists were women. It was an ideal pastime for middle- and upper-class ladies: they could improve their health through outdoor exercise, practice their drawing skills, and celebrate the beauty of God's creations, all of which were essential components of female virtue.

article-image

Coprinus comatus. (Photo: vintageprintable/Public Domain)

Banning could use these rationales to justify her interest in mushrooms, although the case was a bit more tenuous with rotten-smelling fungus than with blossoming roses. As a deeply religious person, she believed that mushrooms' humble status and hidden beauty were keys to appreciating a divine spark in all creation. “Fungi are considered vegetable outcasts,” she wrote. “Like beggars by the wayside dressed in gay attire, they ask for attention but claim none.”

What began as “charity” became “a fascinating occupation”, as Banning taught herself the latest classification systems and devoured all the literature she could find on mycology. She frequented thePeabody Institute Library, whose librarian noted her “pleasant although somewhat erratic manner.” Most important was her pioneering work in the field.

She set out on a 20-year project to document the fungi of her home state, often over rough terrain. “I hire a carriage, a wagon, or any sort of vehicle I can get,” she explained. At the time there was only onepublished work on American fungi, so she would blaze new trails with every species she found and described.

article-image

A stereoscopic view of Druid Hill Park, in Baltimore, from the 1880s. The park was one of Banning's favorite mushroom-hunting spots, within easy reach by streetcar. (Photo: New York Public Library/Public Domain)

While most female “botanizers” sketched flowers, Banning's quest for lowly mushrooms got her labeled a lunatic. “There is no sympathy for the work,” Banning wrote of the people she encountered in her travels, “in fact they regard it as ridiculous.” One man warned her, “you'll poison yourself to death!” When he thought she was out of earshot, he grumbled, “Poor thing…clean gone mad!” Banning took no offense that “they regard me as a crazy woman…I pity their ignorance.”

However, as the yields of her work grew–she ultimately identified nearly two dozen new species of fungus–she felt the limitations of her amateur status and sought access to the male-dominated scientific community.

Banning reached out through the mail, where gender was less of an obstacle and her expertise could speak for itself. Charles Horton Peck, a leading mycologist with a post at New York's State Museum, became her closest confidante. She wrote to Peck in 1879 that “you are my only friend in the debatable land of fungi and your kind instruction is valued above all measure.” Her correspondence with Peck and other mycologists contributed to the growth of the discipline in the United States, but she rarely published and never earned money or recognition. Like many female writers and scientists, her contributions happened off the record and would have remained invisible if not for the chance rediscovery of her work decades later.

article-image

Histilina hepatica Schaeff. (Photo: vintageprintable/Public Domain)

By 1888, at the age of 66, Banning had completed her manuscript on The Fungi of Maryland. With 175 lush, hand-painted watercolors plus extensive descriptions, she knew that it was “too large to be published without incurring significant expense,” and had little hope of seeing it into print. To Peck, she confided, “it is the work of nearly 20 years, begun under the greatest of difficulties, but pursued with the most untiring zeal.” In March of 1889, she mailed him the entire manuscript, deciding that the stewardship of a well-known authority offered the only chance for her work to reach the larger scientific community.

Throughout her career, Banning struggled with doubts about meeting her own exacting standards. Without a university education, she would always feel at a disadvantage. She never actually met Charles Peck, and never had formal training in the field. This was another reason that she let The Fungi of Maryland languish as a manuscript. Banning refused to publish without “being able to certify that all the plants given were rightly determined,” that is, confirmed by other experts–an impossibility since she was the only mycologist who'd seen many of the species described.

In 1894, as her health took a sharp decline, Banning wrote to Peck, “I am never too sick to take an interest in fungi and flowers. I wish I had given my whole life up to that study.” But she still didn't feel safe expressing this regret, and backtracked. “Home duties occupied my time… I had rather die with the feeling of having done my duty than…having gratified an undying love for botany.” For a woman of her era, pure intellectual fulfillment was not a virtuous goal–it was, in Banning’s words, not “right.”

She had not led an ordinary woman's life, though; she made time for her studies by cutting out family and friends, and she put all her savings into equipment and field research. Male scientists made those sacrifices to boost their professional status, but Banning had no hope for any reward besides the knowledge that she had advanced mycological understanding. Unfortunately, Charles Peck couldn't give her even that assurance. After sending her manuscript, she wrote repeatedly hoping for some feedback on her work: “I would like to know if it has been of any use to you,” and again, “I wish you would tell me something about its usefulness.” No evidence of his response remains.

article-image

Lactarius indigo Schw. (Photo: vintageprintable/Public Domain)

TheFungi of Maryland sat largely forgotten in the herbarium of the Peck’s museum. In her final years, Banning was forced to find cheap lodging in a boarding house in Winchester, Virginia, surrounded by “constant jostle and upheaval”. She died there in 1903, and no obituary appeared in the Baltimore papers.

It's a testament to the peculiar solidarity of mycologists that her work inspired others to reconstruct the fragments of her life story. Howard Kelly, one of the founding doctors of the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and a mushroom enthusiast, made a pilgrimage to the State Museum in the 1910s to view Banning's “astounding interesting volume”. He made copies of all her surviving correspondence, the source of her words quoted here.

When John Haines, a curator of mycology at the New York museum, unearthed The Fungi of Maryland again in the 1980s, it was stashed in a dusty, neglected drawer behind a case of taxidermied chickens. The vivid watercolors had somehow survived decades of neglect, and he quickly put her work on display. “I was captivated,” he wrote, “and I want more than anything to see her book printed for all.” However, Haines also failed to find a publisher for such a lavish edition.

Banning dedicated her life to mycology, but she lived in a world where women couldn’t identify first, or even second, as scientists. Her first identity was as a caretaker for her family; her second was as an educator, promoting the morally uplifting effects of nature study. Only a small circle of friends, the most important of whom she never met, understood that her third identity, as an accomplished mycologist, was her truest self.

As mushroom-hunting grows in popularity today, fans of scrutinizing fungus might also bring Banning’s hidden work back into view.

Taxi Drivers In Ghana Skip Work To Fill In Potholes

0
0

Every day, hundreds of taxi drivers in Hohoe, Ghana drive commuters to workplaces, weekly markets, and wherever else they need to go. Over the past few months, though, a growing plague of potholes has made this normally smooth journey increasingly bumpy.

According to News Ghana, this past Monday, drivers took matters into their own hands, trading their steering wheels for shovels. For twelve hours, over a hundred drivers filled potholes.

"According to them, the deplorable state of the roads, which has worsened with the onset of the rains, was having adverse effect on their vehicles and meagre resources," writes News Ghana. Despite repeated complaints, authorities weren't doing much.

Ghana has a reputation for underserved potholes. In 2014, two women made headlines after bathing in one to make a point. One popular joke goes "Pothole promotion: dodge one, get two or more free." This year, roads throughout the country are suffering, holepunched by bad rains, bad luck, and potentially shoddy construction.

In Hohoe, the Municipal Assembly kicked in some filler clay, and the Municipal Chief Executive also helped out. As for the would-be passengers, they had to walk, and business was slow. Thanks to the drivers, though, life should return to its normal pace tomorrow.

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 Public Shaming of England’s First Umbrella User

0
0
article-image

Jonas Hanway walking into the rain, with—controversially—an umbrella. (Photo: Bettmann/Getty Images)

In the early 1750s, an Englishman by the name of Jonas Hanway, lately returned from a trip to France, began carrying an umbrella around the rainy streets of London.

People were outraged. Some bystanders hooted and jeered at Hanway as he passed; others simply stared in shock. Who was this strange man who seemed not to care that he was committing a social sin?

Hanway was the first man to parade an umbrella unashamed in 18th-century England, a time and place in which umbrellas were strictly taboo. In the minds of many Brits, umbrella usage was symptomatic of a weakness of character, particularly among men. Few people ever dared to be seen with such a detestable, effeminate contraption. To carry an umbrella when it rained was to incur public ridicule. 

The British also regarded umbrellas as too French—inspired by the parasol, a Far Eastern contraption that for centuries kept nobles protected from the sun, the umbrella had begun to flourish in France in the early 18th century when Paris merchant Jean Marius invented a lightweight, folding version that, with added waterproofing materials, could protect users from rain and snow. In 1712, the French Princess Palatine purchased one of Marius’s umbrellas; soon after, it became a must-have accessory for noblewomen across the country. Later British umbrella users reported being called "mincing Frenchm[e]n" for carrying them in public.

article-image

Umbrellas on the streets of Paris, in this 1803 painting by Louis-Léopold Boilly. (Photo: Public Domain)

Jonas Hanway, always stubborn, paid little attention to the social stigma. An eccentric man, he was no stranger to controversy—he fervently opposed the introduction of tea into England, at one point penning an “Essay Upon Tea and Its Pernicious Consequences” (1756). He published four books on the development of British trade in the Caspian Sea, leading 20th-century scholar Charles Wilson to call him “one of the most indefatigable and splendid bores of English history.” 

Over the years, Hanway and his umbrella fell victim to all sorts of abuse from Brits he passed on the sidewalk. The most pernicious abuse came from an unlikely source: coach drivers. In England at the time, hansom cabs (two-wheeled, horse-drawn carriages) and sedan chairs were the primary modes of transportation. Business boomed especially on rainy days, as both hansom cabs and sedan chairs came equipped with small canopies that kept passengers dry. When it rained, Londoners flocked to these coaches, so Hanway’s umbrella represented a threat to business.

Fearing an interruption in their personal incomes, many hansom cab drivers and sedan chair carriers grew violent toward Hanway. According to the British history magazine Look and Learn, when they saw him walking by, they often "pelted him with rubbish." On one occasion, a hansom cab driver even tried to run Hanway over with his coach. Hanway reacted by using his umbrella to "give the man a good thrashing." 

article-image

Jonas Hanway, Esquire, in 1781. (Photo: Wellcome Images, London/CC BY 4.0)

The coach drivers, of course, were right to be afraid. With Hanway paving the way, the number of people who owned an umbrella crept upward across England. One historian observed that, soon after Hanway’s taboo-busting umbrella use, in many of the large towns of the Empire, a memory [was] preserved of the courageous citizen who first carried an umbrella.” Almost every English town, in other words, had its own Hanway.

By Hanway’s death in 1786, umbrella usage was on the rise across England. On rainy days, more and more people could be found traversing their cities and towns with umbrellas held proudly above their heads. As a symbol of the changing social norms, people were also becoming less self-conscious about owning umbrellas.

Three months after Hanway died, much to the dismay of London’s coach drivers, an advertisement for umbrellas appeared in the London Gazette“Gatward’s new invented Umbrella Manufactory,” it read, offered an umbrella capable of being “opened and shut with the greatest ease and facility” by means of an innovative “spring lock pillar.”

The rain-repelling revolution had begun, with the dearly departed Hanway as its pioneer. Not all heroes wear capes, but some carry umbrellas.

We're Getting Closer to Knowing Why Bees Are Dying Off Worldwide

0
0
article-image

(Photo: Muhammad Mahdi Karim/GNU 1.2)

The world bee population has been in decline for years now, and scientists have been generally puzzled over the reasons why. Insects, including bees, are essential to pollinating 75 percent of the crops we eat, meaning that bees' continued decline as a species is more than a little worrisome. 

But new research published Wednesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B suggests at least one primary cause: neonicotinoid pesticides, which have been mostly banned in the European Union since 2013.

Neonicotinoid pesticides were found to have decreased the sperm count of male bees by nearly 40 percent, as well as cutting their lifespan.  

Neonicotinoids have been widely used for decades, but in the past several years concerns have been raised about their environmental effects, leading to the restrictions for countries in the E.U. Other countries, including the U.S., only lightly regulate their use. 

"Any influence on sperm quality may have profound consequences for the fitness of the queen, as well as the entire colony,” the researchers said, according to the Guardian

Neonicotinoids, it turns out, are a form of contraception for bees. But just not the kind they asked for or need.

Pokémon Go Players Are Rescuing Lots Of Real Wildlife

0
0

article-image

Real and fake bats, together at last. (Photo: Angell Williams/altered by Cara Giaimo/CC BY 2.0)

Late Monday evening, Olivia Case of Spencer, New York drove to her local laundromat with her iPhone and her three-year-old daughter Lucy. Case, a Pokémon Go fanatic, was after a Dratini—a rare blue dragon-type with pointy ears, who she had heard was spawning nearby.

Instead, as she pulled into the parking lot, she found something else—a baby bat, wriggling around on the ground in front of the building. "He was in this really bright light and he wasn't going anywhere," Case says, so after soliciting advice from Google, she moved him to a darker spot, thinking he might be able to get himself together. "I went around to look for the Pokémon," she says, "and I came back about 45 minutes later and he was still there. He hadn't moved." So she dialed up Cornell Animal Hospital.

Over the past few weeks, a number of would-be Pokémasters have been jarred out of their digital reveries by a more tangible target—actual animals. In most cases, players will laugh, snap a picture, and move on, maybe getting their find ID'd by some willing biologists on Twitter. But some animals, like the bat, fulfill the fantasy even further—they actually need to be caught.

article-image

A more typical Pokémon experience. (Image: brar_j/CC BY 2.0)

"The whole 'Gotta Catch 'Em All,' it's great!" says Victoria Campbell, owner of Wild Things Sanctuary in Ithaca, New York. Campbell specializes in bat rehabilitation, and when Case called in her winged rescue, they sent her to Campbell. "They showed up at almost midnight with this baby bat," she says. "I was like 'Wow, where did you find it?' and they were like, 'We were out playing Pokémon Go.'"

Over the past couple of weeks, Cornell Animal Hospital has gotten in a screech owl, rabbits, an opossum, and a baby squirrel, all from players out hunting fake monsters, says Campbell. In her nine years as a wildlife rehabilitator, no fad has brought in as many injured critters: "This is pretty much the first time I've seen something like this," she says.

This trend, too, is sweeping the nation. In Rochester, New York, a man Pokémoning found eight ducklings stuck in a storm drain, and flagged down an officer, who yanked open the grate. (With actual animals, "you catch them in real life," the rescuer told TWC News.)

In South Houston, Texas, a couple of players rescued a cage full of hamsters and baby mice, abandoned in a park near a Pokéstop. "For such a good deed, I hope you find a legendary Pokémon," one supportive Facebook commenter told them. All fuzzy parties involved are now recovering at local animal hospitals.

This time of the year, it's not unusual to find confused young bats who have crash-landed while hunting or bumbled into human habitations, says Campbell. Luckily, catching a wild, injured bat is not too much more difficult than tossing a virtual Pokéball. "If you find a little bat when you're searching for a Zubat, don't freak out!" Campbell says.

If it's on the ground, or having trouble flying, she recommends the spider-catching method—put a container over the animal, and slide a piece of cardboard gently underneath—or simply putting on gloves and placing it into a box. Then, call your local rehabilitator, the real world's Professor equivalent.

article-image

Zubat, one of many the Poké-rescues. (Photo: Victoria Campbell)

As for this particular bat, he's doing well—drinking fluids, eating mealworms, and getting ready to rejoin his own kind. Campbell has named him, fittingly, Zubat. And Case (and her daughter Lucy) are happy that their app became reality.

"If I wasn't playing, then I would have never found him," says Case. "So I'm really happy that I'm so addicted to this game."

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 Experimental Nuclear Reactor Secretly Built Under the University of Chicago

0
0
article-image

An illustration of the first critical nuclear reaction. (Photo: Gary Sheehan/Public Domain)

On December 2, 1942, the world's first nuclear reactor was fired up in a subterranean squash court. But instead of a top-secret, sterile laboratory miles from civilization, the reactor went "critical" for the first time in a space directly beneath rows of football field bleachers at the heavily populated University of Chicago campus.

To be clear, going “critical,” in terms of a nuclear reaction, isn’t a bad thing. It is simply the moment at which a nuclear reaction reaches a point at which it reaches a critical mass and starts emitting usable energy, be it as a resource or as a weapon. 

The small reactor was built at the University of Chicago as an arm of the infamous Manhattan Project, based in New York. At the head of the project was visionary Italian physicist Enrico Fermi. “He started experimenting with these things at Columbia University,” says Cindi Kelly, President of the Atomic Heritage Foundation. “He realized that the release of atomic energy on a large scale would only be a matter of time."

Fermi was against the use of atomic energy as a weapon, but felt its use as a powerful energy resource made experimenting with it worth the risk. With his team, Fermi set out to prove that nuclear energy could be harnessed as a clean and self-sustaining form of energy.

article-image

Fermi and his team. (Photo: Atomic Heritage Foundation/Used with Permission)

Although there were risks to firing up an experimental nuclear reactor in a densely populated area, Fermi's team chose to do it underneath the school's disused football field because they wanted to use student labor to help assemble the atomic reactor. The University of Chicago had discontinued its football program in 1939, and the Stagg Field facilities were not longer in use, but more importantly, the former athletes had a lot more free time as well, and they made for a handy workforce.

Far from the towering smokestacks more commonly associated with atomic energy today, the Chicago Pile-1 (CP-1), as it came to be known was monolith made of carefully stacked graphite blocks, interlaced with cubes of uranium. Control rods made of cadmium were inserted to absorb any errant radiation from the reaction. It looked, from the outside, like not much more than a pile of black bricks.

Yet the radiation it produced had the potential to blanket the surrounding area with deadly radiation had anything gone wrong. “It was not a bomb,” says Kelly. “Confusion is commonplace today among people who think that reactors will behave like an atomic bomb and make a big explosion. But that’s not the case. It’s a totally, totally different danger.”

The project was top-secret, and only those who needed to know about it were alerted to the existence of the experimental reactor. Not even the mayor of Chicago was told of the project. “It would only be getting everybody excited,” says Kelly. "They probably figured, they wouldn’t have understood if they’d told him."

Despite the potential dangers an experimental reactor posed, Fermi, for one, wasn’t that worried. Prior to activating the pile, dozens of tests had been conducted on specific aspects of the reaction, and multiple safety precautions were put in place. In addition to the control rods, the team also kept a bucket of material that they could use to dowse the reactor with, which would immediately put a stop to the reaction.

"[Fermi] was as cool as a cucumber," says Kelly. "He was completely confident."

article-image

An illustration of Chicago Pile-1. (Photo: Melvin A. Miller/Public Domain)

In the middle of preparing to fire up a potentially hazardous new reactor, Fermi glanced at his watch and nonchalantly sent everyone to lunch, says Kelly. The meal was tense: “At lunch, everyone was thinking about the experiment, but nobody talked about it.”

Afterward, the team returned to the squash court and made history by achieving nuclear criticality for the first time ever. As the reaction gained momentum, creating heat, and throwing off radiation, the scientists, none of whom wore any formal protection, slowly removed the control rods, and measured the amount of radiation the reactor was creating.

Then, when they realized that their experiment had been a success, they replaced the control rods and shut down the reaction. The Atomic Age had begun, not with a bang, but with some careful science. “In Fermi’s words, the event was not spectacular. No fuses burned, no lights flashed,” says Kelly.

After the experiment, Arthur Holly Compton, who had overseen the creation of Chicago Pile-1, reported the achievement to James Conant, chairman of the National Defense Research Committee, using an improvised bit of spy code:

Compton: “Jim, you’ll be interested to know, the Italian navigator has just landed in the new world. The earth is not as large as he had estimated. He arrived at the new world sooner than he expected.”

Conant: “Is that so? Were the natives friendly?”

Compton: “Everyone landed safe and happy.”        

CP-1 was dismantled after its successful reaction, and some parts were used in a later reactor, Chicago Pile-2, while other components were simply buried. The jubilant scientists celebrated by splitting a bottle of Chianti, each of them signing it to mark the occasion.

The bottle can still be found in a museum in Argonne, Illinois, but the true legacy of Chicago Pile-1, the daring experiment that took place right underneath an unsuspecting college campus, can be found in nuclear reactors all over the world, and unfortunately, in bombs as well. 


From Frogs to Immigration, How the Secret Service Kept Tabs on Peaceful Protests

0
0
article-image

(Photo: Ragesoss/CC BY-SA 2.0)

A version of this story originally appeared on Muckrock.com.

A 2011 FOIA request by Jason Smathers led to the release of a little over a week’s worth of the reports from the Secret Service’s Protective Research Information System Management system (PRISM, but a different PRISM than the one Snowden was talking about) regarding demonstrations.

Though the time period is fairly narrow, the variety of demonstrations is nevertheless impressive, from legalization of marijuana …

article-image

to immigration reform …

article-image

to AIDS treatment …

article-image

to the Iranian government …

article-image

and, finally, frog extinction, helpfully labeled under the keywords “Environment/Animal Rights.”

article-image

Interestingly enough, the demonstrations apparently didn’t have to involve the POTUS directly. A follow-up request specifically requesting all PRISM briefings mentioning “Anonymous” only yielded one result regarding Occupy Wall Street.

Read the full release here.

How Firefighters Calculate Containment as They Battle the Sand Fire

0
0
article-image

(Photo: National Wildlife Coordinating Group)

A massive wildfire in California's Sand Canyon—dubbed the Sand fire—has been burning since Friday, claiming at least 38,000 acres of land and the life of one resident. 

By wildfire standards, it's pretty typical for California: it started small, probably somewhere in Santa Clarita, just outside of Angeles National Forest and around 30 miles north of Los Angeles. From there things escalated pretty quickly, and, within hours, thousands of acres of trees and chaparral had burned, helped along by steady winds and dry conditions. 

On Saturday, officials found a body: that of Robert Bresnick, who is said to have refused orders to evacuate in an apparent attempt to retrieve some of his dogs. "He said the fire was burning in his backyard," a friend of Bresnick's told NBC4. "I said get the hell out of there! Leave! He just hung up the phone and started to do that, I think."

And while Bresnick has been the only death, thousands of others were evacuated, in addition to a lot of animals. Around 50 dogs were taken to a local prison to be temporarily cared for by inmates. And elsewhere, the Los Angeles Times reported, there were 165 goats, 111 chickens, and 33 pigs, in addition to over 450 other animals that were rescued.

On Sunday, the fire destroyed the Sable Ranch, which you might remember from the television show Maverick. By Monday, the fire had reached its apex, covering over 35,000 acres. 

By early Tuesday, many of the evacuated residents were allowed to return to their homes, after the fire had moved further to the east.

And Wednesday, firefighters said that they were beginning to turn the corner on the Sand fire, with 40 percent of the fire reported to be contained. 

article-image

Firefighters heading out to battle the blaze. (Photo: National Wildlife Coordinating Group)

At each step that word came up, again and again: "contained." On Monday, just 10 percent of the fire was said to be contained, a worryingly low figure, since it also means that 90 percent of the fire was uncontained. But by Tuesday that figure had inched up to 25 percent of the fire. And on Wednesday officials reported the good news: they were approaching the point at which they could say that most of the fire was contained. 

Containment, in this sense, means something pretty simple. Fire officials precisely track a fire's progress by keeping a close eye on the perimeter of the blaze. Here's a map from Tuesday that shows their progress: 

article-image

If you look closely, you'll see that while the vast ring is mostly red—the "uncontrolled fire edge"—there are some portions of the perimeter that are solid black—a "completed line," or an edge of the blaze that is no longer dangerous. 

Firefighters attack the blaze using a variety of methods, from clearing away wood or foliage that could catch fire, to aerial assaults of fire retardant, to controlled burns, which scorch the Earth before the larger wildfire has a chance to reach it.

The aerial assaults might get the most attention, as they make for splashy photos, but most of the time they only temporarily slow a blaze; crews on the ground then do the real work of halting it. The crews do this by clearing the area of anything flammable and then, often with the help of bulldozers, digging up the soil, and mostly ending the danger from the spreading fire. 

This takes a lot of manpower: nearly 3,000 firefighters are at work on the Sand fire, including 275 engines, 12 helicopters, and 29 bulldozers. Compare the above map to a map offered Wednesday to the public: 

article-image

Black lines abound—the fruits of the firefighters' labor—and which, added up, account for the official containment percentage. 

All of this also helps explain why officials began letting most evacuees back into their homes when the fire was still between 10 and 25 percent contained. Why would they let residents back into their homes while a wildfire was still raging?

Have another close look at Tuesday's operations map above. The black lines, you'll notice, are mostly around population centers, while a vast uncontrolled perimeter elsewhere gives way to only more forest, showing that firefighters worked to protect residents, their homes, and local businesses first. 

article-image

A plane dumping fire retardant on the blaze on Tuesday. (Photo: National Wildlife Coordinating Group)

At 4:15 eastern time on Wednesday, officials posted another update. The blaze was still 40 percent contained, they wrote. But while updates earlier had a tone of urgency, this one felt more routine. Officials thanked a local high school for hosting their command post, while also warning about the danger of exploring areas that were damaged by the fire, or those still being worked on by firefighters. 

And then there was a curious reminder at the bottom, noting that firefighters had occasionally spotted drones in the sky over areas of the fire that are still burning. Since the airspace over the fire has been temporarily declared off limits to most aircraft by the Federal Aviation Administration, flying a drone, officials noted, violated federal law. Drones could also interfere with fighting the fire, they said, adding that sheriff's deputies were searching for those responsible. 

"If you fly," they wrote, "we can't!"

Firefighting, a practice probably as old as man, had encountered 2016. 

In 1972, Two Women Ran For President. It Didn't Go Well.

0
0
article-image

Shirley Chisholm. (Photo: Library of Congress)

Here’s one way to measure progress.

In 1972, there were two women who ran national campaigns to be President of the United States. Shirley Chisholm became the first woman (and the first black person) to be entered into nomination for the Democratic presidential ticket; she came in fourth. Another woman, Linda Jenness, was the Socialist Workers Party’s presidential candidate; at 31, she could not legally have become president even if she had won.

In 2016, there are two women running national campaigns to be President of the United States, and they will be their party’s nominees in the November election. Hillary Clinton will lead the Democratic ticket. Jill Stein will lead the Green Party ticket. (There’s even a push, among certain progressive voters, to choose “Jill not Hill.”)

It’s more common for women to run for president than anyone usually acknowledges, but usually they represent small parties and are ignored by both media and votes. 1972, the year Richard Nixon was reelected, was one of the banner years for female presidential candidates, but they still had to fight hard to be taken seriously.

Jenness was a secretary from Atlanta, active in leftist politics. She and her running mate, Andrew Pulley, who was 21, ran an issue-driven campaign: they advocated for socialized medicine, the repeal of all anti-abortion laws, free childcare facilities, limits on profits from the production of war materials, human rights for prisoners, and other democratic socialist positions. They also believed that they should be able to serve, if elected, despite being below the legal threshold of 35 years of age. “We think that constitutional requirement is ridiculous,” Jenness told one local paper.

Chisholm’s candidacy was more feasible, but most of her supporters did not take the campaign as seriously as she did. Even leading feminists did not throw the full weight of their support behind her: Gloria Steinem said she would support both Chisholm and Sen. George McGovern, the eventual Democratic nominee, who Steinem described as “the best white male candidate.” And once, introducing Chisholm, Betty Friedan said, “We will settle for no less than the vice-presidency.”

When Chisholm took the mic, she pushed back on Friedan’s limited ambitions. She did not want to be vice-president; she was running to be president. “I don’t want half-baked endorsements,” she said. “If you are going to be with me in a half-hearted fashion, don’t come with me at all.”

Being the first black person to be entered into the nomination didn’t help her, either. “Black male politicians are no different from white male politicians,” she said, meaning that they were just as skeptical of women taking power. “This ‘woman thing' is so deep. I've found it out in this campaign if I never knew it before."

That was 44 years ago—closing in on half a century. It took that long for the Democratic Party to go from voting, for the first time, on the nomination of a woman for president to actually choosing a woman as its presidential candidate.

Found: Mysterious Bright Purple Blob, Floating in the Deep Sea

0
0
article-image

THE BLOB. (Photo: Ocean Exploration Trust)

This is one of the best sounds you can hear when eavesdropping on scientists: “Oh, what is that?”

The research team of the E/V Nautilus, a vessel of the Ocean Exploration Trust, was using their remotely operated underwater vehicle to check out the deep sea around the Channel Islands when they saw something they never had before: a small, glowing purple blob. Watch them catch sight of it and get really excited:

Was it an egg sac? A marine invertebrate? An underwater disco ball for fish? The scientists were stumped but, whatever the thing was, they used the suction arm of their underwater robot to grab it.

Upon further examination, the scientists discovered it had “two distinct lobes.” One early guess is that Blobus Purpilis is some type of sea slug—perhaps a nudibranch, a marine mollusk that eschews shells. They’re soft-bodied and often lightly colored, like this thing.

It could take several years to determine what in the ocean this thing is and if it’s a new species. But our blob friend very well could be a creature no human has ever encountered before: after all, it's not every day that one discovers a mysterious purple floating who-knows-what in the water.

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. 

The Story of Laffing Sal, the World's Most Uncanny Animatronic Doll

0
0
article-image

Laffing Sal at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. (Photo: Gary Stevens/CC BY 2.0)

You'll know her by the trail of sobbing children.

Follow the line of confused faces, and you'll find the 6-foot-tall, freckled, curly-haired, gap-toothed animatronic monstrosity. As an antique that's still in use, there’s something both dated and timeless about her. Her outsides are papier-mâché, her insides are carefully-set springs and gears, and she moves with the confidence of an alien spy testing their human body disguise, and laughs in a pitch that conjures visions of demons or the final thing you see before you die.

She is Laffing Sal, a horror-show designed to brighten your day.

While you may have never laid eyes on a Laffing Sal personally, she's permeated our pop culture in ways that few other dolls have. Sal's appeared in The Princess Diaries, the classic noir Woman on the Run, and Fritz Lang's thriller M. Her manic laughter is hidden deep within the background of Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. (As noted in Kim Cooper's 33 1/3 book on the album, the band recorded her soundtrack surreptitiously while in San Francisco's Musée Méchanique.) And she's made appearances in nearly any episode of television set at an amusement park, the arena she was originally designed to haunt.  

article-image

There she is, in San Francisco. (Photo: jjron, GFDL 1.2)

There was a time when the U.S. was blanketed in an army of Sals, constructed by the Philadelphia Toboggan Company (PTC), based in Germantown, Pennsylvania, a manufacturer that specialized in building amusement park rides and attractions since 1904. This mostly meant wooden roller coasters (according to PTC, 82 of them are still in operation today), carousels, Skee Ball machines, and “Crazy Daisy” rides, those teacup-like twirling attractions. But in the 1930s, the PTC got into the papier-mâché game.

They subcontracted the work to Canton, Ohio's Old King Cole company, who first used their thrifty construction techniques to more exotically decorate the rides before constructing stand-alone figures. Early contracts included one with RCA to mass produce replicas of Nipper, the sweet pooch attentively listening to a phonograph, and to department stores around the country, to build laughing animatronic Santa Clauses displayed during Christmas. One day, someone had the clever idea the latter may have more value if not relegated to seasonal employment. As Bill Luca, creator director for the dark carnival ride fansite "Laff in the Dark," described in his history of Sal, the Santa modification involved "substituting a woman's head and legs, making some anatomical enhancements and dressing the figure in a frumpy dress, jacket and hat."

article-image

The Big Dipper roller coaster at San Francisco's Playland at the Beach. (Photo: Smith, James R./CC BY-SA 3.0

This new thing had two moves. Her torso shifted forward and back with a belly-laugh, causing her spring-loaded head to bounce in awkward nods. Another gear moved her arms up and down, as if telling everyone around her to calm down. She also had speakers positioned at the base which played her laugh on repeat. (Originally, it came from a stack of 78 rpm records that needed to be changed periodically by a technician, before tape cartridges automated that job.) It all added up to an early precursor of uncanny valley robotics, humanoid replicas that cause passersby to stare at this weird contraption and wonder if someone was inside staring back.

Since Sal's debut, the reaction to her spastic movements and ear-piercing giggle has been that perfect mix of intrigue and cringe that gets us to buy a ticket to a thriller, only to watch half of it through shielding fingers. In other words, the funhouse aesthetic. So, when the PTC began selling and installing their new funhouses into amusement parks, it was only natural that Sal came along for the ride.

article-image

A Laffing Sal at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. (Photo: mk97007/CC BY 2.0)

No one's sure how many Sals were made. Some reports say 250, others push that number to 500, but then comes the question of what one considers “original” in the official tally. They went for about $360 a pop back in 1940s dollars, nearly $6,200 today, but that hefty price tag wasn't off-putting to carnival attraction owners. Sal was so popular, in fact, the PTC commissioned male counterparts, Laffing Sams, as well as offshoot characters that tweaked the look, like Laffing Farmer, Giggling Gertie, and Blackie the Sideshow Barker. But Sal was the most popular—most had multiple versions on hand in case one broke down.

Unfortunately, there's no complete list or map of the Sals left—no one knows how many lie buried in the depths of long-forgotten warehouses, waiting to send shivers down the eventual discoverer's spine—although Wikipedia does collect a number of examples. 

article-image

An alternate version of Sal—"Jolly Jack". (Photo: Ronald Saunders, CC BY-SA 2.0)

One particularly Sal hotspot is the Bay Area. Playland at the Beach, a seaside amusement park that was located at the western most end of San Francisco, down the coast from Sutro's Bath and Cliff House has long been a destination for Sal-lovers. The area was an unofficial settlement for transients in the late 1800s until the first amusement ride (a roller coaster) was installed in 1884. Other rides and attractions soon followed, and in 1926, George Whitney became the general manager of the complex, now given name and order. When funhouses opened in the 30s, so came the Sals, where they rocked and laughed, and terrorized, until the land was sold to a “naval-less” condominium developer in 1971.

Following the demolition, one Sal—Playland had at least two—wound up in the private collection of John Wickett, a Bay Area eccentric who displayed it in his Museum of Exotica. After his death in 2003, the collection went up for auction. Charles Canfield, president of the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, put in a bid.

“[Canfield] has a great sense of the nostalgia and history of the amusement park history,” says Jessie Durant, the boardwalk's archivist. The company paid $50,000 and gave Sal a makeover—reworking her body, rebuilding her transmission, replacing her motor, digitizing her soundtrack—before placing her in a glass case outside of Neptune's Kingdom, their mini-golf and arcade complex. “Apparently, there's controversy whether or not our Sal has her original head,” says Durant. “But she's still working every day, laughing away, making other people laugh, or run away.” 

article-image

San Francisco's Playland at the Beach, where Laffing Sal first appeared. (Photo: wackystuff/CC BY-SA 2.0)

Playland-Not-at-the-Beach, an odd little museum in El Cerrito claims two Sals. One is a classic PTC creation from a collector in Ohio, while the one (dubbed Sinister Sal) is a contemporary update to the genre designed by sculptor Chuck Jarman. “On special occasions,” reads the website, “we have even let Psycho Sal out of her cage, but she's definitely not for the kids!”

The most-visited Sal in the Bay, though, is located near the entrance of Musée Méchanique, the famed collection of vintage penny arcade machines and moving dioramas at the edge of Fisherman's Wharf. Dan Zelinsky, the museum's director, recalls getting Sal about two decades ago for a price tag near $3,000. “[The seller] called me to come over to his house and look at it,” says Zelinsky. “He had housed it in his stairwell under a blanket. I said, looks great, and went back with a check. But then he decided not to sell it.” 

Years later, the seller passed away and his family put it up for auction, and Zelinsky pounced, both for practical purposes (“it's multilingual, it's something that everyone around the world can relate to”) and his own personal nostalgia (as a kid, Zelinsky often visited Sal outside of the funhouse at Playland.) And now, Sal's back where she belongs, greeting new visitors who either chortle with delight or pant with terror, mostly the latter.

“Kids are scared to death of that thing,” Zelinsky says, a certain glee in his voice. “Their parents bring them in because they grew up going to Playland, so they start it up, and their kids hide. They're like, 'Mom, are you sure this is supposed to be fun?'”

Viewing all 11432 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images