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Between the Folds of This Silk Fan Is a 19th-Century Horse Racing Program

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It was February 20, 1892, in the middle of New Zealand’s hottest months. In the stands overlooking Ellerslie Racecourse in Auckland, an earl and a countess watching the races cooled themselves with a fan made of fine silk, feathers, and ivory. But this was no ordinary fan. If you looked closely between the creased silk, you could make out the names, ages, and weights of the horses as well as the program for the day’s races.

The special racing event was held in celebration of the earl, William Hillier Onslow, the governor of New Zealand, who was about to return to his parliamentary career in England. For special Auckland Cup races and events, programs were fashioned out of the finest material, but it was rare to find one crafted into the form of a fan.

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The ornate fan program was given to the Onslows as a farewell token. It was completely decked with valuable materials and references to the honoree. The trim of the 12-inch-tall fan is adorned with feathers, while the ribs are made of ivory that are etched with intricate patterns. The silk is printed with typical information of a race book that you’d get today, says Andrew Henry, a librarian and heritage resource developer at Auckland City Libraries, which holds the limited-edition silk race program fan in the Auckland Libraries Ephemera Collection.

The horse’s name, age and weight, the rider and his colors, the time each race starts, the distance and winning stake are all there. The February 20, 1892 issue of the New Zealand Heraldalso noted that the cover of the books featured the monogram of the club and the Onslow coat of arms and motto “Festina lente,” which is Latin for “Make haste slowly.”

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Silk programs weren’t uncommon in the Ellerslie Racecourse stands. “It would seem that for special events with visiting dignitaries it was quite common to print on silk,” says Henry. The Auckland Libraries Ephemera Collection also has an assortment of playbills printed on silk from the mid to late-19th century. But this is the only race program fan ever found.

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But Henry has yet to come across another silk racebook that’s been converted into an alternative item. “February 20 is around when we get the hottest weather here in New Zealand so it could be very hot wearing Victorian-style clothes to the races,” he says. The fan potentially could have been used for “practical purposes.”

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Even though the object was a lavish gift, the actual race was not a success at all, says Henry. The newspapers lamented the poor weather and turnout, as well as the small amount of money that had been wagered. But despite the disappointments of the race day, at least we ended up with this one-of-a-kind fan.

Object of Intrigue is a weekly column in which we investigate the story behind a curious item. Is there an object you want to see covered? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.


Watch Lights in Madison Square Park Pulse to Heartbeats

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In 2008, if you took a walk through the central oval lawn of Madison Square Park in New York City at dusk, you would have been immersed in flashing lights pulsing to the beat of someone's heart. Created by artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, "Pulse Park" was a temporary interactive installation that transformed Madison Square Park into a brilliant beating heart made of 200 beams of light.

The intensity of the "matrix of light beams" was synchronized with a person's heart rate, which was measured by sensors near the north end of the oval lawn. As a park visitor's systolic and diastolic activity was recorded, the spotlight rays would eventually dance across the grass to the time of the heartbeat. Then, as the person left the sensor, their heartbeat pulses would be sent to the first light, bumping previous recorded heart rates down the circle. 

At a given time, 200 people's heart rates could be seen flashing at once, capturing a small sample of the city's pulse. "The electrical activity of the heart is amplified by 150,000 watts of light," the video says. 

This is one of several heart-inspired art installations Lorzano-Hemmer has created. He made an interactive "Pulse Index" that records people's fingerprints and heart rates and displays the data on large monitors in Sydney museum, and a water hose that uses heartbeat data in a park in Spain. In 2015, he projected powerful beams into the sky, the lights flashing in time with heart rates of people in Abu Dhabi.  

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.

Found: Some Old Uranium in This Woman's Garage

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Certain uranium isotopes, famously, were used to start the nuclear age, like Uranium-235, the isotope used in the bomb known as "Little Boy," which fell on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and almost instantly killed an estimated 70,000 people. 

Uranium-238, on the other hand, is a bit different, since it's the isotope that, by a wide margin, is the one most commonly found in nature. Not typically used in nuclear weapons, Uranium-238 is used in nuclear power plants, but on its own, Uranium-238 is relatively harmless. Just don't swallow or inhale it (doing so, you might guess, increases your risk for cancer.)

On Monday, a woman cleaning out her garage at a Phoenix retirement community came across some Uranium-238. But, not knowing exactly what it was, she did the prudent thing and called the authorities. The uranium was inside a three-inch-thick lead case, according to ABC15.

The woman, who was not named, said that it was likely her late father-in-law's. He was a chemist, according to the Arizona Republic, and performed experiments at home. All of which isn't very reassuring, but state officials said tests revealed that the area around her home and garage did not contain excessive amounts of radiation. 

The uranium itself was safely carried away for disposal, a bit of the element that, this time, probably won't end up being used for any deadly aims. 

Local Council Is 'Sorry' After Planting a Bunch of Trees on a Soccer Field

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In Logie Durno, in the council area of Aberdeenshire in northwest Scotland, local children, as they frequently do across the world, sometimes like to play soccer. 

Fields there (known as pitches across the pond) are available for just this use, but recently residents were startled to find that a bunch of fruit trees had been planted on one of them, directly between two sets of goal posts. 

All of which prompted a few ridiculous-looking pictures (like the one you see above) to spread across social media.

The trees had been planted by the Aberdeenshire Council, in what they told the BBC was part of a "biodiversity" initiative. 

But they did so apparently without consulting locals, who were confused and angry. 

"Unless Aberdeenshire Council has added the trees for extra dribbling practice, I think it’s ridiculous," a community worker told the Evening Express. "It’s so strange, I just can’t understand the thinking behind it—especially plonking them right in the pitch."

A spokeswoman for the council said that they would consult with the community on where to go from here, while offering a seemingly very British apology. 

"We are sorry for any inconvenience this has caused," she said.

The True Origins of the Phrase 'Bleeding-Heart Liberal'

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Westbrook Pegler was extremely good at calling people names. Particularly politicians. In his syndicated newspaper column, he called Franklin D. Roosevelt “Moosejaw” and “momma’s boy.” Truman was “a thin-lipped hater.”

Pegler was a bit of hater himself. He didn’t like the labor movement, Communists, fascists, Jews, and perhaps most of all, liberals. In one 1938 column, he coined a term for liberals that would eventually come to define conservative scorn for the left. Pegler was the first writer to refer to liberals as “bleeding hearts.” The context for this then-novel insult? A bill before Congress that aimed to curb lynching.

Before the 20th century, the phrase “bleeding heart” was popular in the religious-tinged oratory of 19th century America. Throughout the 1860s, it comes up often in poetry, essays, and political speeches, as an expression of empathy and emotion. “I come to you with a bleeding heart, honest and sincere motives, desiring to give you some plain thoughts,” said one politician in an 1862 speech. The phrase comes from the religious image of Christ’s wounded heart, which symbolizes his compassion and love. It was a common enough phrase that London has a “Bleeding Heart Yard” (featured prominently in the Dickens novel Little Dorrit) which is named after a long-gone sign, once displayed at a local pub, that showed the Sacred Heart.

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By the 1930s, though, the phrase had fallen out of common use and Pegler, who one politician called a “soul-sick, mud-wallowing gutter scum columnist,” recruited it into a new context, as a political insult. He was a master of this art. As a contemporary of his wrote in an academic article on political name-calling, “Pegler has coined, or given prominence to, a fair share of unfair words.” (Pegler also called the AFL a “swollen national racket,” economics “a side-show science,” and Harold Ickes, who ran the Public Works Administration, “Donald Duck.”)

Pegler first used “bleeding heart” in a column castigating liberals in Washington for their focus on “a bill to provide penalties for lynchings.” Pegler wasn’t for lynchings, per se, but he argued that they were no longer a problem the federal government should solve: there had only been eight lynchings in 1937, he wrote, and “it is obvious that the evil is being cured by local processes.” The bill, he thought, was being “used as a political bait in crowded northern Negro centers.” And here was his conclusion, emphasis ours:

“I question the humanitarianism of any professional or semi-pro bleeding heart who clamors that not a single person must be allowed to hunger but would stall the entire legislative program in a fight to ham through a law intended, at the most optimistic figure, to save fourteen lives a year.”

Pegler was apparently pleased enough with this use of “bleeding heart” that he kept it up. He later wrote of “professional bleeding hearts” who advocated for “collective medicine” after a woman couldn’t find a doctor to help her through labor, and lobbed the insult of “bleeding heart Bourn” at a rival, left-leaning columnist. By 1940, he had condensed the phrase down to “bleeding-heart humanitarians” and “bleeding-heart liberals.”

Pegler’s usage did not immediately catch on, though. (Perhaps that’s because he went on to become so right-wing that he was asked to leave the John Birch Society.) If the New York Times’ archives is any indication, through the ‘40s and ‘50s, “bleeding heart” was most often used to refer to the flower Lamprocapnos spectabilis, which grows rows of pretty pink blossoms, and occasionally sports.

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“Bleeding heart” was revived in a political context in 1954, by another infamous right-winger, Joe McCarthy, who called Edward R. Murrow one of the “extreme Left Wing bleeding-heart elements of television and radio.” It wasn’t until the 1960s that it really started to come into common use, though. In 1963, the satirical columnist Russell Baker put it on a list of political insults: “If one is called a ‘phoney,’ about the only thing he can do is come back with some epithet like, ‘anti-intellectual’ or ‘bleeding-heart liberal’...or ‘you must be one of those peace nuts.’” By the end of the decade, Ronald Reagan, then newly elected governor of California, had picked it up as a way to describe his political trajectory. “I was quite the bleeding-heart liberal once,” he told Newsweek. By 1970, he was known as a “former ‘bleeding heart’ Democrat.”

After that, the phrase was fully ensconced in political short-hand and quickly claimed by liberals as a positive trait.  “You are called a bleeding heart liberal because you have a heart for the poor,” one told the Times. “Count me with the bleeding heart liberals,” an NAACP lawyer wrote in a letter to the editor.

The Best Way to Find a Time Capsule

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There might not be buried treasure in your area, but there could very well be a forgotten time capsule, which can be just as exciting to discover.

Let's start by defining just what a time capsule is. For centuries, human beings have been creating keystone caches, stashing things in walls, or burying keepsakes for posterity. Any of these could be considered time capsules in the broad sense, but properly, true time capsules have something more going on than just piles of hidden junk.

“I define time capsules quite narrowly, as something with a target date,” says Nicholas Yablon, an associate professor of American studies at the University of Iowa, and an expert on time capsules. Yablon has spent the past seven years researching the practice of burying and unearthing time capsules in the era between the 1870s and the 1940s, for a forthcoming book on the subject. “In the media, any box that gets opened is called a time capsule. That leads to a lot of confusion when you’re actually looking for time capsules online, or anywhere.”

In fact, the term “time capsule” wasn't popularized until 1939, when it was used by the Westinghouse company to describe a collection of items they buried as part of the World’s Fair that year. Expected to last 5,000 years, the original Westinghouse time capsule (they buried another in 1965) was intended to be a survey of information about life in the mid-20th century. Some of the items included were a 22,000-page essay recorded on microfilm and a vial of tooth powder (think proto-toothpaste).

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Prior to the high-profile Westinghouse exhibitions, time capsules were called any number of different things, and were usually the province of a local government or historical society, making them somewhat more difficult to track down. "For earlier examples of this practice, you have to do more creative searching," says Yablon. "They have names like 'century vault' or 'centennial safe' or 'memorial chest.' Every one seems to have a slightly different name." 

When trying to track down time capsules, Yablon starts with available archives and targeted Google searches. Keywords such as “deposit,” “box,” and “sealed” are good indicators that you might be on the right track. “Sometimes just random references I’ll find will lead me to the existence of a time capsule,” he says. “Some of those have been opened and are in archives now, but others were still unlocated. Some are not yet due to be opened.”

If you're lucky enough to track down an undiscovered time capsule, it’s important to play it cool. While it might be tempting to rush out and try to dig it up yourself, remember that most historic time capsules were meant to be a communal experience. Especially during what Yablon calls the “Golden Age of Time Capsules,” roughly the 1930s through the 1950s, the intention was to represent a community at a certain point in time, acting as the only form of long-term social posterity available. 

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Another issue to consider is that some of a time capsule's contents, usually paper ephemera (people love to bury books and papers), could be decayed and quite sensitive if they are old enough. “If you find one, contact the historical society or an archivist, and get people interested before it gets forgotten again,” says Yablon. “If it gets dug up inadvertently, it’s important to keep it sealed.”

The contents of every time capsule are different and there is no set definition of what should be placed inside, although Yablon says that there are some things that tend to be found again and again. Newspapers, phone books, directories, and photographs are especially popular. Then there are the more wondrous and bizarre things that people see fit to send into the future. “There was a matchbox with a molar tooth in it that I found in one time capsule, and it had a label saying, ‘Robespierre’s Tooth.’”

In recent decades, the practice of burying time capsules has fallen out of favor a bit, and even the more personal caches of things that people hide away, Yablon says, have become more banal and less of a conversation between generations. “In the 1970s, time capsules became more solipsistic," he says, "with people just kind of doing their own time capsule in their backyard, burying their own possessions, in a very non-collective way.” 

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But none of that means there aren’t still amazing time capsules out there to find. Both of the Westinghouse time capsules are still waiting where they were buried. The International Time Capsule Society maintains a list of the 10 most-wanted time capsules, including one at MIT that was placed beneath an 18-ton cyclotron, and a series of 17 time capsules that have been lost around the city of Corona, California.

As a researcher of time capsules of the past, Yablon says he doesn't consider himself a time capsule hunter. But he believes in the future of the time capsule, which should continue to give interested searchers something to quest after, so long as society survives. “The objects we leave behind or don’t leave behind for future generations will continue to interest people,” he says. 

Found: An Essay Winston Churchill Wrote About Alien Life

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Late in the 1950s, when he was solidly in his 80s and retired, as much as was possible for a man like him, from political life, Winston Churchill brought a draft of an essay down to a villa in southern France.

The place belonged to his publisher, Emery Reves, who had bought it from Coco Chanel with the money he made from selling the foreign rights to Churchill’s books on World War II. In his old age, Churchill preferred the warmth and luxury of this place, named La Pausa, to the colder, grayer atmosphere of England, and he would stay for long stretches of time, being treated royally by his hosts and working on his History of the English-Speaking Peoples.

This essay, though, covered a different topic, one that was less typical for the aging statesman, as a new report published in Nature reveals. Originally titled “Are We Alone in Space?” the essay explored the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

Churchill had first started working on the essay in 1939, before the start of World War II, and it ran about 11 pages. At La Pausa Churchill worked on revising it, changing the title to “Are We Alone in the Universe?” The essay was never published, though; Churchill left the draft at La Pausa, and in the 1980s Wendy Reves, Emery’s wife, gave it to the National Churchill Museum, in Fulton, Missouri.

Last year, the museum’s new director, Timothy Riley, rediscovered this essentially unknown piece of writing. When he handed it to Mario Livio, an astrophysicist and author, it was “a great surprise,” Livio writes in Nature. Riley wanted a scientist’s opinion of the essay: Had Churchill gotten it right?

As Livio writes in his Nature note, Churchill’s great curiosity extended to science, and he was the first British Prime Minister to have a science adviser on his staff. He had written about evolution, cells, and fusion, and in this essay he took on the question of alien life with reasoning that “mirrors many modern arguments in astrobiology,” Livio writes. Churchill considered the size of the universe, the key role of water in sustaining life, and the habitable zone of any solar system, where conditions and distance from the star might be most hospitable to life. He also was able to see past a then-current theory (later proven wrong) of planet formation that made finding life elsewhere less likely.

“I am not sufficiently conceited to think that my sun is the only one with a family of planets,” Churchill wrote.

Much of Churchill’s reasoning has been backed up by the modern science of exoplanets. As he imagined, it’s possible to find planets throughout the universe, and it seems possible that one day we will find evidence on life on other planets. The essay, writes Livio, is a testament to Churchill’s willingness to embrace science and use all the tools at his disposal to understand the world. “At a time when a number of today’s politicians shun science, I find it moving to recall a leader who engaged with it so profoundly,” Livio writes.

Murcia, Spain, Has a New Eel Staircase

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Every day, pedestrians in Murcia, Spain use the Manterola Bridge to cross over the Segura River and get to work, class, or other engagements.

Starting this week, though, they'll have new commuting company. Thanks to a recently installed eel staircase, European eels traveling upstream will be passing right under their feet, Murcia Today reports.

Back in the 1990s, the Segura River was one of the most polluted in Europe, thanks to runoff from canning factories. By then, there was hardly any wildlife in the river. But over the past decade, as restoration efforts ramp up and the water becomes cleaner, many animals, including eels, are moving back in.

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Now, the eel population is large enough to justify its own infrastructure. This "eel staircase" or ladder is actually a ramp covered in artificial grass, which lets the eels wriggle over a small weir in the middle of the river and travel upstream. (European eels are usually born in the Sargasso Sea, and swim up inland rivers to live out their adult lives. They then return to the sea to spawn, restarting the cycle.)

"It is hoped that [the staircase] will enable eels to travel 15 kilometers further inland than is currently the case," or about 9 miles, Murcia Today reports.

If it's successful, the river will get at least one more eel staircase before the end of summer. Murcians, get ready for some buff eels.

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.


Found: An Albino Kangaroo Abandoned in a Dam Evacuation

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Nearly 200,000 people in California's Central Valley were evacuated this week—and later allowed to return—after officials said they were concerned that a spillway connected to the Oroville Dam might collapse. 

The dam, located some 70 miles north of Sacramento, is the tallest in the U.S., It stands 770 feet, which beats Nevada's Hoover Dam by 44 feet. Should the dam fail, a massive, lethal wave of water would be unleashed on several towns to the south, the largest of which, Yuba City, is home to over 65,000 people. 

So when residents were ordered to evacuate on Sunday, many left in haste, including some, in Sutton County, California who left behind a few of their pets, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. And not just any pets: an albino kangaroo, a red kangaroo, and a muntjac, a type of small deer—named Kenzie, Dottie, and Mary, respectively. 

The animals were found safe—if perhaps a little traumatized—by the California Highway Patrol, officials said Tuesday, and, for now, are staying with a California family that has cared for abandoned animals in the past. The animals' owners were not named, but, hopefully, they'll be reunited soon. Their temporary caretakers said that Kenzie, in particular, was used to sleeping in bed with her owner. 

The Hidden Tunnel Workers of Chongqing

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Under the pavement of Fujiagou, a small town in the greater city of Chongqing in southwest China, craftsmen and women hustle to produce machinery parts in tunnels that were built as shelter against brutal bombings during the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Chongqing, one of China’s fastest growing municipalities, is home to an array of tunnels built to defend the city—then known as Chung-King—from the hundreds of Japanese air raids that took place from 1939 to 1941. These raids usually targeted residential areas or other non-military marks. It was a campaign designed to terrify the local population into submission.

Now, decades after the war, the tunnels are used in very different ways: as grocery stores, restaurants, and factories.

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Many tunnels in Chongqing were used unofficially as storage areas and businesses following the war. Now, things are more official. The people working in the tunnels are a mixture of locals from the city and rural migrants who have come to earn money to send home to their families. Those pictured here work in a former Jialing motorcycle factory that now produces machine parts.

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“I came to this place two months ago,” says factory administration worker Chen Wen Yan. “We were colleagues at first, now we feel like family”. Members of the management have their own rooms, but the workers inhabit a room with about 17 people sharing bunk beds.

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The days are long and the pay is low compared to the average city wage. Signs placed by factory bosses highlight the need for care in the tunnels, but workers wear little to no protective clothing save for face masks and overalls with cartoon animals.

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But the days of working in these conditions are coming to an end. The local government has already closed over half of the tunnels in the area, to be converted into a museum and memorial for the war and it casualties. In 2017 the whole area will be transformed to accommodate, not workers, but tourists eager to see the battleground that survived the onslaught of war, then helped to rebuild industry.

The Improbable Life of the Inventor of the Modern Bra

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Mary Phelps, known as Polly to friends, was born in 1891 to a family that could trace its heritage to such luminaries as William Bradford, Plymouth Colony's first governor, and Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat. As New England royalty, Polly grew up in New Rochelle, New York, wanting for nothing.

It wasn’t until 1910 that Polly realized something important was missing from her life. She was busy one day preparing for a debutante ball when she looked in the mirror and realized she loathed the way a corset made her look. It bunched up her bodice and squished her breasts into a single, uncomfortable monobosom. In her memoir, The Passionate Years, she referred to it as “a box-like armour of whalebone and pink cordage.”

Like all great innovators before her, necessity was the mother of Polly’s invention. She grabbed a handkerchief, ribbon, and a needle, and before the party was off the ground, had fashioned herself a new undergarment: the modern bra.

Polly wore her new bra to the party and turned heads. Not only was she wearing considerably less under her dress than most of the other women, she was also thrilled to tell everyone about it. Society may have been scandalized, but the girls went crazy for this new garment. So light! So comfortable! No whale bones making a stomach sandwich with your ribs! When a stranger offered a dollar to make her one of these new fangled backless brassiers, Polly realized she had a hit on her hands.

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“That night at the ball,” Polly later wrote in The Passionate Years, “I was so fresh and supple that in the dressing room afterward my friends came flocking around. I gave them a peek and outlined the invention...From then on we all wore them.”

Bra-like garments go back to Ancient Egypt—Polly wasn’t the first to create one. In 1859, Henry S. Lesher invented a “breast pad and perspiration shield,” though his garment was torturous to wear. They were mostly made of rubber, making them hot, impractical, and uncomfortable. Another forerunner was invented by Luman L. Chapman. He created an improved corset, which included a sheet metal front clasp and “breast puffs,” which helped relieve the tightness of most corsets.

So Polly wasn’t the first to develop a more effective breast delivery system, but she was the first to file a patent on the forerunner to today’s wireless bra. Polly filed for a patent for her “backless brassier” on February 12, 1914, and it was granted in November of that year.

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In her patent application, Polly wrote that her new invention was "capable of universal fit to such an extent that… the size and shape of a single garment will be suitable for a considerable variety of different customers" and was "so efficient that it may be worn even by persons engaged in violent exercise like tennis."

With her patent in hand, Polly started the Fashion Form Brassiere Co., where she employed women to manufacture wireless bras. Another big reason the modern bra caught on? World War I. Unlike corsets, these brassieres required no metal. Metal was for war machines, not a woman’s cleavage. Polly’s patent was not only better for women’s health and fashion, but also for our boys abroad.

But before her invention really took off, Polly sold the patent to The Warner Brothers Corset Company for $1,500. Warner went on to earn more than $15 million from the bra patent over the next 30 years alone.

For most people, patenting the modern bra might be the crowning achievement of an otherwise ordinary life. But Polly had never been most people.

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After her first marriage ended in divorce, Polly married Harry Crosby and the couple moved to Paris, where Polly decided to reinvent herself. She rechristened herself Caresse Crosby (she’d briefly considered calling herself Clytoris, but instead settled on naming her whippet that instead), and the pair vowed to live, what Harry called in a telegram home to Boston, “A mad and extravagant life.”

The Crosbys spent the next several years raising hell in the City of Lights. Together they opened a publishing company, Black Sun Press, and quickly amassed an impressive roster of authors including D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, Lewis Carroll, James Joyce, Charles Bukowski, and Henry Miller. Time magazine would go on to describe Caresse as the "literary godmother to the Lost Generation of expatriate writers in Paris." Black Sun Press became one of the most important publishing houses in Paris.

When not publishing, Caresse entertained Paris’s ex-pats with booze-fueled all-night sex romps that would have made Lord Byron blush. She and Harry bought an abandoned mill outside of Paris, named it “Le Moulin du Soleil” (The Mill of the Sun), and turned it into one the world’s greatest party venues. A plain, white wall functioned as their guest book—all famous guests were instructed to sign it on their way out. The wall was eventually destroyed during World War II, but we know such luminaries as Salvador Dali and D. H. Lawrence signed it (ironically, so did Eva Braun).

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The Crosbys’ private lives were as wild as their social scene. Their open marriage led to affairs on both sides. Harry painted his fingernails, wore a black gardenia in a buttonhole, and had the bottoms of his feet tattooed. They bought their own tombstones, kept them on the roof of their apartment building, and grew fond of sunbathing naked on them. They roared around Paris in a green limousine convertible, with their whippets in the backseat wearing goggles.

The Crosbys’ marriage ended abruptly in 1929, when Harry killed himself in a murder-suicide pact with his mistress. His final entry in his journal, according to the author Geoffrey Wolff, read, “One is not in love unless one desires to die with one's beloved. There is only one happiness it is to love and to be loved.”

Caresse took the million-dollar fortune left her by Harry and returned to America, where, in addition to Black Sun Press, she established Crosby Continental Editions, which published Hemingway, Faulkner, Dorothy Parker and others. She would go on to open an art gallery in Washington, D.C., star in several experimental dance films, and ghost write pornography for her friend Henry Miller. Caresse also married a football player 18 years her junior, then divorced him to romance a black boxing star, and later had an affair with the famous architect Buckminster Fuller.

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At the age of 60, while on a tour of Italy, Caresse fell in love with a run-down castle near Rome named Castello di Rocca Sinibalda. She bought the castle, which came with a title, making her Princess Caresse Crosby. Caresse turned the castle into an artist’s colony for her friends, and spent the rest of her life dividing her time between its hallways and the U.S.

Caresse Crosby died in 1970, in Rome. Just before she died, a documentary filmmaker made a short movie about life in her castle. While giving him a tour, 70 year-old Caresse flashed the camera. No doubt her breasts were marvelously well supported.

Ordinarily Tame Pet Squirrel Attacks Burglar, Defends Owner's Home

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Adam Pearl, of Meridian, Idaho, owns a pet squirrel named Joey, who enjoys Whoppers (the candy) and running around Pearl's home, occasionally spooking guests. 

Joey doesn't usually bite, Pearl told KIVI, "but you never know," he added, "because he is a squirrel"—a squirrel, we now know, with a protective streak for his owner.

Or at least his owner's house.

Because on Tuesday, when a burglar entered, hoping, apparently, to make off with some of Pearl's guns, Joey sprang into action and attacked, driving the thief from the home with much less loot than he hoped for. (Pearl's gun safe was never breached.)

Joey's heroism might have gone unnoticed except for an observant cop, who saw some scratches on a suspect's hands. When asked if it was the work of a certain squirrel, the suspect admitted it was. 

"He said, 'Yeah, damn thing kept attacking me and wouldn't stop until I left,'" Pearl said the cop told him.

You probably shouldn't keep a pet squirrel for a lot of reasons, but Pearl and Joey seem to be getting along for now, even if Joey probably just wants to spend his days hanging out with other squirrels and not being called to violently defend his master's stuff. 

Remembering Nüshu, the 19th-Century Chinese Script Only Women Could Write

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In 1988, Yi Nianhua, a frail, sickly woman in her 80s, spent many evenings scribbling elegant characters at a table in her kitchen in the small rice-farming village of Shangjiangxu Township, China. With only a blunt writing brush, the elongated script came out fat and blotchy on the newsprint she used for paper. But Cathy Silber, a professor at Skidmore College in New York, worked alongside Yi in her kitchen, diligently deciphering and studying the written language.

“Out of the thousands of scripts that are gender-specific to men, here we have one that we know is gender-specific to women,” says Silber, who has been researching Nüshu since 1985. Yi was one of the last remaining writers of Nüshu, a fading script that only women knew how to write and read.

Stemming from the southwestern Hunan Province county of Jiangyong, a small group of women in the 19th and 20th centuries practiced this special script that no man could read or write. The writing system allowed these women to keep autobiographies, write poetry and stories, and communicate with “sworn sisters,” bonds between women who were not biologically related. The tradition of Nüshu is slowly vanishing, but at one time gave the women of Shanjiangxu freedom to express themselves.  

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In the middle of the 20th century, it wasn’t uncommon for Chinese women of higher socioeconomic classes to write songs, ballads, complaints, or stories, as Wilt Idema details in the book Heroines of Jiangyong: Chinese Narrative Ballads in Women’s Script. However, it was extremely rare to find such intimate texts from peasant women. As of 2012, there were approximately 500 known texts written in Nüshu, ranging from four-line poems to long autobiographical narratives. Today, the texts that have survived give researchers such as Silber the opportunity to peer into the daily lives of Chinese women throughout this period of history.

When Nüshu was first discovered by people outside of Jiangyong in the 1980s, the media sensationalized the script as an invented, secret language that women could use to spite men and a patriarchal society. This is what initially drew Silber to study Nüshu. But what she found was that men were well aware that women had been writing in the script. It wasn’t an entirely new, made-up language but actually a writing system for the local dialect, and if men heard Nüshu read aloud they most likely would have been able to understand. Men mostly just didn’t care to learn how to write in women’s script.

“Men were not exactly clamoring to be let in on this ‘secret,’ just as they were not storming the lofts demanding to learn embroidery,” Silber says. “Even though it wasn’t a secret, it was for all practical purposes used exclusively by women.”

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During the 19th century, many of the communities throughout China were structured around a highly patriarchal system. Women had to follow the “three obediences”—obey one’s father, husband, and son. The practice of foot binding—preventing young girls from walking to show their high social standing—was still widespread throughout Jiangyong County, and unmarried girls were tucked away in house lofts doing needlework, weaving, and household chores.

“Jiangyong County girls were referred to as ‘upstairs girls,’” writes Fei-wen Liu in the book Gendered Words. Historically, writing in China had been a privilege of men, Liu explains, while women were largely denied access to literacy. Even when women could write and receive education, it was largely limited to urban elites. Yi Nianhua, born in 1906, came from an educated family and was one of the few girls who was allowed to attend classes with boys, says Silber.  

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The exact origins of Nüshu are hazy. Scholars have debated various plausible hypotheses for why the script was created. Some have suggested that it derived from writing systems among southwestern local minorities, or even inscriptions found on oracle bones. A local legend says that it was first written by an imperial concubine in the late 11th century, who used Nüshu to communicate the sorrows of her life to people back home—a subject Silber has written about for the magazine Ms. The most popular explanation is that Nüshu was created in retaliation of women’s exclusion from education.

“I wouldn’t say that, ‘oh, women were oppressed and deprived of access, and therefore they [created Nüshu],’” says Silber. “But, I would say that the emergence of this kind of phenomenon is consistent with a very sex-segregated society.”

No concrete historical evidence exists to prove any of these theories.

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The first definite record of Nüshu dates to 1931, but Silber and most academics reason women likely began writing it in the early years of the 19th century. The script is syllabic, each sign standing for a distinct unit of sound in the local dialect. More than 1,000 signs have been counted thus far, according to Idema.

“It’s more efficient than Chinese because it’s phonetic,” says Silber. “A single symbol would represent every syllable with the same sound. So you get more bang for your buck with each character.”

Additionally, Nüshu’s elegant, elongated lines contrast the stocky, squat blocks of Chinese characters. The visual beauty of Nüshu is distinguished by fine wisps and thin strokes, flanked by diamond shapes and precise dots. Some people even called it ‘mosquito writing’ because the characters looked like they were drawn by the legs of an insect, says Silber.

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Traditionally, women would use a sharpened bamboo stylus dipped in ink, and write verse on paper, cloth, and fans. However, Yi and the last surviving writers were forced to use what they had, even writing the beautiful characters down with a ballpoint pen on the edges of newspapers.

Nüshu was used in a variety of ways, often reflecting the different phases of women's lives. Young girls would write letters to each other, as well as prayers, plights, and pleas to goddesses that they would leave at temples. One of the most common texts found in Nüshu were the “third day missives,” or sanzhaoshu—a cloth-bound book written and delivered to brides the third day after their weddings. The books contained messages of congratulations—and condolences—from the bride's mother, female relatives, sisters, and peers. Women also wrote lengthy autobiographies. Unlike diaries, these texts contained narrative verse, telling the life story of the woman, says Silber.

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In addition to the written language, women also recited Nüge or “women’s songs,” tunes that had a particularly “haunting minor melody,” says Silber. The Nüshu tradition has even inspired the composer Tan Dun’s recent concert called The Secret Songs of Women, allowing the text to be sung again. The song below, translated by Silber, was sung by Tang Baozhen, one of Yi’s sworn sisters.

On red paper, I write a letter.
I'll have my say.
Today you who know my heart haven't gotten out of bed,
Though the sun shines in the room, over the mountains.
I told you to avoid it and you didn't,
Now you're ill and it's too late.
A cold or a headache is easy to cure,
But you did it too soon after childbirth and died....
We spoke true words,
And if you'd kept them, you'd still be worth something.
We went to the street, bought red paper,
We bought red paper and made a contract.
We made a contract, and said those words,
Just like buying a field of rice seedlings.

The practice of Nüshu was passed down from mother to daughter, but the writing has dwindled drastically with time. During the 1949 Chinese Revolution, many texts were burned or destroyed. The new marriage law and socioeconomic reforms changed the state of society for women, which may have decreased the need for writing in a female-specific script, notes Liu. Some women also had their writing buried with them when they died, leaving few surviving original scripts from the period.  

Yi died in 1991 at the age of 85. The last identified woman to possess genuine knowledge of Nüshu died in 2004, according to China Daily.

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Since the outside world learned about Nüshu in the 1980s, there have been a few attempts to bring the written system back. Locals have held classes, and texts were preserved in a museum in Jiangyong County. Academics at Tsinghua University in Beijing taught Nüshu at one point (to both men and women) to preserve it. However, the women’s writing may soon be an extinct system.

Silber plans to return to Jiangyong County this summer. She is continuing her research for an upcoming book she’s writing about Nüshu and the women in the region.

“To me the most interesting thing of all is how these texts shaped women’s understandings of themselves,” says Silber. “This writing system teaches us quite a lot about the relationship between literacy and different powered groups in society.”

Found: A Glimpse of Marcel Proust, Caught on Film

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The film above is thought to contain the only known footage of Marcel Proust, the French author most famous for the masterwork In Search of Lost Time. The footage was captured in 1904, at the wedding of Élaine Greffulhe, the daughter of one of Proust's great friends. Watch as the couple pass, and then about 35 seconds in, after singletons have started skirting down the side, he appears—a man in a bowler hat and a light grey suit.

This footage was found in an archive at the Canadian National Cinema Centre by Jean-Pierre Sirois-Trahan, a professor at Laval University, in Quebec. It's impossible to know for sure if the man in the grey suit is Proust, but experts are enthusiastic about the possibility, TheGuardian reports. The author was known at this point in his life to favor the bowler hat/grey suit combo, and the man's face shape also matches pictures of Proust.

It's likely, too, that he would have been at this wedding. The bride's mother, the Countess of Greffulhe, was close enough with Proust that she inspired one of the characters in his books. 

 “There can be no absolute proof that it is indeed Proust," one expert told The Guardian. "But in any case, it’s a valuable document about the world of In Search of Lost Time.”

A Philly Guy Filled a Crack in the Street With Sprinkles

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Most days, South Philadelphia resident Rebecca Kenton looks out the window of her apartment and sees an ordinary, right-angled crack in the street, jutting through the concrete as street cracks are wont to do.

But yesterday afternoon—Valentine's Day—she saw that her friendly neighborhood infrastructure breach had dressed up for the holiday: Someone had filled it to the brim with rainbow sprinkles. Photos show the eight-foot crack multicolored and resplendent, if a little garish.

When Billy Penn asked the Streets Department about the impromptu maintenance, they refused to be caught up in the spirit. “Appropriate materials are used to do repairs; ice cream toppings are not one of them," they replied.

The outlet also tracked down the sprinkler, a restaurant worker named Dave S. Pettengill who moonlights as a public artist. Pettengill "has produced multiple pieces based on street flaws," Billy Penn reports. This one, which he calls "A Valentine to Philly," took three pounds of sprinkles. Don't worry Streets Department—he expects it to melt in the rain.

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.


In Heraldry, Hearts Can Symbolize Everything From Lily Pads to Testicles

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For about as long as heraldry has been around, the heart symbol has been a common feature on coats of arms and other armorial bearings. The earliest examples date back to the Middle Ages. “You can find [hearts on] ancient arms back when there were actual heralds going from shire to shire, recording arms from people who had themselves either adopted or created [their own coats of arms],” says David Robert Wooten, the executive director of the American College of Heraldry.

The exact meaning of any single symbol on a coat of arms can vary widely. These are symbols, after all, that were created for very specific people or families. “A hundred years from now, that meaning will be completely lost, and only the person in that family and the persons in his immediate family would have known what was intended,” Wooten says. One exception to this, however, are canting (or punning) arms, which are designed to act as a sort of visual play on a family name. For instance, a coat of arms for someone named Hartford might feature a heart above water, literally fording a river. 

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When hearts are employed, as they often are, they can absolutely stand for the sorts of ideas we might expect them to today: love, loyalty, fealty, kindness, and the like. They can also carry a religious connotation, say when they're depicted surrounded by flames or thorns. But in some instances, a heart can also represent concepts that are a far cry from feelings of kindness and love. Maybe the most famous instance of this alternate symbology is the use of hearts in the coat of arms of Denmark. One feature of its design is a portion featuring a trio of blue lions surrounded by red hearts (pictured above). Here, the hearts are in fact thought to represent lily pads.

In Denmark, these symbols are often referred to as “søblade” or “sea leaves,” and in the abstract, the shape of a lily pad is similar to the classic heart. Still, Wooten believes that even if this was one intended meaning, the hearts would also have carried their more traditional meaning as well. “You could say it’s a lily pad, but it’s red and it’s shaped like that, so the intent is that it’s a heart more than anything else.”    

Depicting hearts in alternate configurations, to subtly change their meaning, is even more common. Instead of a regular heart, with the scalloped bumps at the top and the point at the bottom, there are many cases where the shape has been repurposed. Among the ways Wooten says he's seen hearts incorporated into other symbols include as the hand basket of a sword, the end of a key, as an arrowhead, and as the leaves of a shamrock or trefoil.

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Famously, the coat of arms of the 15th century Italian military leader Bartolomeo Colleoni includes three upside-down hearts. Historically however, it's believed these are meant to symbolize pairs of testicles. This coat was likely an example of punning arms, with Colleoni sounding remarkably close to the Italian word “coglioni,” meaning “testicles.” In life, Colleoni was also rumored to have three balls. “Obviously it didn’t spread too far and wide, otherwise, we’d see a lot of testicular hearts out there,” says Wooten  

Thanks to their instant recognizability and infinite symbolic malleability, hearts are one of the most used symbols in heraldry, and they aren’t likely to disappear any time soon. “It’s not for ownership of an item, or bravery in battle, or anything else, it’s for love of family, love of God, love of whatever, so it’s an easy thing to insert into and commonly express,” says Wooten. Also, testicles.  

When Churches Tried to Get Dirt on a Famous Sexologist From the FBI

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

When the final season of Showtime’s Masters of Sex started this past Fall, it occurred to me that the show’s protagonists, sex researchers Dr. William Masters and Virginia Johnson, would be excellent subjects for a FOIA request to the FBI - after all, not only were they sex researchers when such a thing was frowned upon, but they were sex researchers when J. Edgar Hoover was in charge of the Bureau.

While the FBI said they had nothing on Johnson, they did indicate records on Masters were sent to the National Archives and Records Administration, so I filed a request with them. A couple months later, NARA came through - the eight responsive pages provided were not exactly what you would expect, but they’re interesting nonetheless.

If the FBI was dealing honestly, then they never investigated Masters - but they did field multiple letters asking for information about him. At least initially, this dealt with Masters’ role as part of the nonprofit The Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS). Giving out accurate information about human sexuality was always a priority for Masters, and, well, some people didn’t like that, including representatives of various churches.

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Others were more concerned with the possibility of communism infiltrating the National Council of Churches and, as a result, SIECUS, which they endorsed.

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Each request was rebuffed in a letter purportedly from Hoover, citing that any files were confidential.

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This all makes more sense when you check out the reply that Hoover sent to Paul McKnight, editor of New Jersey’s Newark Weekly newspaper. McKnight had asked for “any information the Bureau may have concerning the activities of SIECUS,” and also politely turned down - however, the internal note appended to Hoover’s response, while noting that the FBI had no file on Masters, does include all of the details on which SIECUS doctors (and their family members) were communists and/or homosexuals.

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Because after all, this IS from Hoover’s FBI.

If the note is any indication, this was either more than paranoia or it was specifically the very type of paranoia practiced at the FBI. Apparently, according to the Bureau’s Bufiles system, they had SIECUS’s Dr. William Genne on a list of NCC members with ties to communist fronts. As for whether or not this is true? That will probably require another FOIA request.

Read the full file embedded below:

Using a Motor to Make Two Hearts Fuse

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Next time you want to tell a loved one how you feel, you can build them an electrically powered heart. In the video above posted on YouTube by MrfixitRick, two copper-wire hearts spin together as one in a romantic dance (set to the doo-wop tune "Be Excellent to Each Other"). The simple spinning invention is called a homopolar motor.

These motors are easy to make. To build one of your own, all you need are three common household items: copper wire, an AA battery, and a magnet. For the magnet in the video, MrfixitRick used a bass speaker and a stack of pennies to direct the current flow.

The flat, negative end of the battery is placed on top of the magnet. When the copper wire touches the battery's positive terminal tip it completes the electric circuit and begins to rotate. The homopolar motor was first demonstrated by scientist Michael Faraday in 1821, making it the very first electrical motor to ever be built.

"The flat heart shape is the most basic of homopolar motors," MrfixitRick writes in this how-to guide. But people have gotten creative and elaborate with the wire shapes.

Someone crafted a carousel.

MrfixitRick has also made a dragonfly homopolar motor that even hums and vibrates.

Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.

The Surprisingly Stubborn Theory That Beethoven's Heartbeat Influenced His Music

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The spring of 1809 was a rough time for Ludwig van Beethoven. His beloved, the countess Giulietta Guicciardi, had recently cut off contact, citing irreconcilable class differences. He was experiencing an expanding rift with his brother and former manager, Kaspar. Perhaps worst of all, his patron and close friend, the Archduke Rudolph of Austria, was being forced out of their home city of Vienna, fleeing Napoleon's oncoming troops. 

So that April, while preparing for the Archduke's departure, Beethoven did what composers do with their excesses of feeling: he went to the piano. The result was the first movement of what is now called the Piano Sonata in E-flat Major, Opus 81a. The work begins with a three-note, descending motif, over which, on the sheet music, Beethoven wrote "Le-be-wohl"—German for "fare thee well." This pattern repeats throughout the piece, which eventually unspools into a lament that alternates between brooding and cathartic, driven on in parts by an unusual, galloping rhythm.

Writing on Opus 81 in 1899, the musicologist Frederic Horace Clark called its principle sentiment a "mixture of pain and loss." "Here the tears course silently down," he wrote. More recent criticism agrees: "It is hard to see how anyone performing the work would fail to recognize that Beethoven is saying [farewell] over and over again," Edwin Thompson Jaynes wrote in 1994. But where some educated listeners hear emotional pain, others are attuned to ghosts of a more physical ailment. For decades, music-loving cardiologists have interpreted the stuttering rhythms of Opus 81a as potential signs of an undiagnosed cardiac arrhythmia.

A cardiac arrhythmia is any type of unusual heartbeat: one that's too fast, too slow, or skips around a lot. While having one can be a problem, they're often benign. Although he couldn't take advantage of today's relevant diagnostic procedures, there's no reason to think Beethoven—who suffered a number of ailments, from deafness to diarrhea—didn't have one. "He may have had a cardiac arrhythmia that was probably benign," says Zachary Goldberger, a cardiologist at the University of Washington Medical School.

Beethoven doesn't mention heart health in his letters, and his autopsy report is silent about it as well. But in Goldberger's mind, what we do know of the composer's life and work suggests he might have experienced some off-kilter beats, and listened to them. Arrhythmias often come during periods of stress, and Opus 81a, at least, was written during a difficult time. "Perhaps his loss of hearing heightened other senses and made him more aware of his heart rhythm," says Goldberger.

Along with two colleagues—Steven Whiting, a musicologist, and Dr. Joel D. Howell, an internist—Goldberger published a paper on the subject, "The Heartfelt Music of Ludwig van Beethoven," in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine in the spring of 2014. But speculation about Beethoven's heart dates back to at least 1980, when, in a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association, the physician Samuel Vaisrub brought it up as one example of what he called "the close link" between music and somatic rhythms. "Long before [Willem] Einthoven recorded heartbeats through graphic representation of their electric potentials, Beethoven expressed them in musical notes," Vaisrub wrote. "Having experienced frequent cardiac arrhythmias, he composed music (ie, Sonata No. 81) that reflected a disordered rhythm."

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It's hard to say where Vaisrub got this theory—he died soon after his letter was published—but over the years, others took it up. In the introduction to his 1995 work History of the Disorders of Cardiac Rhythm, the cardiologist Berndt Lüderitz mentions Beethoven's Opus 81a in between accounts of other musicians, including 17th-century vespers singers, who took more straightforward inspiration from the heartbeat. (That's where Goldberger learned about the theory.) Two years later, the cardiologist Tsung O. Cheng put forth a brief reading of Opus 81a, too—"Having experienced frequent premature ventricular beats," he wrote, "[Beethoven] composed his Piano Sonata op 81a… which reflected a disordered rhythm."

Goldberger and his colleagues went further than most—in addition to thoroughly examining Opus 81a, they dug into two other Beethoven pieces, Opus 130 (or "String Quartet in B Flat Major") and Opus 110 ("Piano Sonata in A Flat Major"). The first has a section that Beethoven labeled should be played "Beklemmt"—German for "heavy of heart" or "squeezed." The second features repetitive, arrhythmic figures played by the left hand, as well as a somewhat breathless melody covered by the right.

Although Cheng passed away last year, and Lüderitz could not be reached for this article, both expressed delight at the study's new conclusions after it was published. For some doctors, matching up dead people with potential illnesses is a way of playing historical detective—shunting contemporary knowledge back into the past, where, even if it can't help, it can shed some light on the mysterious lives of figures we now admire. Goldberger brings up the persistent speculation that the gangly Abraham Lincoln may have had Marfan's syndrome, and mentions that one of his colleagues thinks Mozart may have died from trichinosis. Cheng in particular made something of a hobby of posthumously diagnosing classical composers—according to his speculative tally, Mozart also suffered from infective endocarditis, and Brahms had liver cancer.

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But others are less enthusiastic about this line of inquiry. "The idea that Beethoven’s arrhythmia of the heart (if that’s in fact what he had) could explain the mystery of his music’s quixotic rhythmic structures doesn’t actually help you much in terms of understanding, say, the op 130 quartet," wrote Tom Service in the Guardian. "The issue is not so much what the inspiration, medical or otherwise, might have been, but what composers do with it that matters."

Goldberger has a different read on the research's purpose, which he says can enhance appreciation of well-tread pieces, and even bring some underappreciated ones back into the spotlight. "I'm not sure [speculating on his heart] elevates my own listening," he says. "But it certainly makes me more attuned to the remarkable rhythms he has." Enjoying them centuries later, Beethoven's musical decisions still ring true, whether they came from his heart, or merely from his brain.

Someone Made Off With a 1,000-Pound Chicken Statue in North Carolina

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In a bit of foul play, a statue of a chicken was stolen over the weekend in Alexander County, North Carolina.

The statue, seen above, weighs 1,000 pounds and is said to be worth $1,100, according to the Alexander County Sheriff's Office

It was taken by an unknown thief or thieves overnight between Saturday and Sunday.

It's three feet tall and made of concrete, and while the base was recovered not long after the theft, the bird itself is still missing. 

Perhaps more mysterious is why the chicken statue existed at all. The Statesville Record & Landmark named the owner of the statue as Pete Gilleland, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Atlas Obscura

But the world needs more massive, unnecessary chicken statues so if you know where the statue is or you are in fact the thief, please return it. Thank you. 

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