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Humans Are Responsible for 84 Percent of Wildfires in the U.S.

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In the past decades, the number of wildfires in the U.S. has spiraled upwards, as has the cost of fighting them: In recent years, by the end of the fire season, the Forest Service has usually exhausted its budget. According to a new paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, one factor contributing to the increasing impact of wildfire is how often humans ignite them. 

The team of researchers found that, from 1992 to 2012, people were responsible for starting 84 percent of wildfires and that, in most of the U.S., it's more common from humans to start wildfires than for lightning to ignite them, as they report in the new paper.

The researchers looked at 1.5 million government records of wildfires that state or federal agencies had to extinguish or manage—wildfires that posed a threat of some sort. Of the 1.5 million fires in their dataset, lightning was responsible for more than 245,000 wildfires; humans were responsible for more than 1,272,000.

The maps above shows where human-ignited fires dominate (the dots in orange and red). The only place in the country where lightning is the main cause of wildfires, the researchers found, is in mountainous parts of the west, where few people live. 

Human-ignited fires, the researchers also found, are adding months to the fire season. Whereas lightning-ignited fires happen mostly in the summer months, when fuel is dry and lightning more common, wildfires started by humans are more common in the spring months in the east and in the fall months in the west.

This map shows the season in which lightning is most likely to cause fires. For most places in the country, these fires are most common in the summer:

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For comparison, here's a map showing the season in which humans most likely to cause fires. In the east, human-ignited fires are most common in March, April, and May; the majority of those are started when people burn small piles of debris, like leaves or trash. In parts of the south and the west, human-ignited fires are more common in September, October, and November than in other seasons. (The single day on which people cause the greatest number of wildfires? July 4th.)

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"We know globally that climate change is extending the fire season by a couple of weeks," says Jennifer Balch, an assistant professor of geology at the University of Colorado and the paper's lead author. "The fact that people are extending it by months is striking."

The dataset used for this research was compiled by a Forest Service researcher who made it publicly available. Balch and her colleagues stumbled upon it and noticed that, because the data included the cause of the fires, they could look at the spatial and temporal distribution of wildfires started by humans vs. wildfires started by lightning.

Many of the wildfires in the dataset—most of the fire started by debris-burning, for example—are relatively small, but still pose a risk. But people are also playing a role in starting the big wildfires that have run up firefighting expenses and threatened large swaths of land: the most expensive fire in 2016, Balch points out, began after a campfire wasn't properly extinguished.  

The solution, though, may be to better manage the fires human do set—more prescribed burns and control burns, the type of fires that can burn up fuel without endangering either ecosystems or the human settlements. "Given that we're already starting wildfires, we should be starting more of the right kind," Balch says.


These Two WWII-Era Grenades Were Found in a 91-Year-Old's Refrigerator

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On Friday, at the Tappan Zee Manor Nursing Home in Central Nyack, New York—about 25 miles north of Manhattan—two hand grenades were found, perched in the top shelf of a refrigerator door, where one might ordinarily stash a can of Coke or maybe the ketchup. 

Clarkstown (N.Y.) police did not say who made the discovery, or where the grenades came from, except to state that they appeared to be World War II-era devices, and were found in a fridge owned by a 91-year-old man. 

The building was soon evacuated after the discovery while a county bomb squad came and took the grenades away for analysis and disposal. Whether the grenades, one of which was a training grenade, were live is one thing officers are trying to find out. 

It's also still unclear who they belonged to; the refrigerator's owner, was "out for treatment," when the grenades were found, the police said. 

Please don't keep grenades, live or otherwise, in your fridge. 

St. Louis Paid to Move a Historic Three-Story Home Nearly a Mile

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Like some community-minded version of Pixar’s Up, the city of St. Louis has picked up a resident's historic home and moved it across town, almost like it was built for travel.

As St. Louis Public Radio is reporting, the move was made to accommodate the construction of a new National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency facility which will be built on the house’s former site (and surrounding 100 acres.) The other homes and businesses that also sat on the acreage were vacated last year, but the historic building that once sat at 2530 North Market Street was the only one yet to be moved.

The house is home to Charlesetta Taylor, who first moved in when she was just 10, in 1945. Her and her family have lived in the home ever since. After initially protesting the building of the NGIA facility, Taylor was able to work out a solution with the city.

To transport the three-story, 367-ton home, a private company called Expert House Movers lifted the building onto some wheels, and drove it at a leisurely pace to its new address.

Taylor told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that the city, "did not have enough money to buy all the memories and the wonderful things that money can’t buy.”

After some financial calculation, the city came to agree, in a way. The move is set to cost St. Louis around $500,000, or about what they might have paid had the matter wound up in court, a city official told St. Louis Public Radio

The move, the official said, ultimately was a "win-win."

The Mysteries of the First-Ever Map of the North Pole

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These days, climate scientists are looking hard at Arctic maps. As winter sea ice shrinks and cracks appear, they try to understand the reasons for these changes, and determine what we should expect in the future. Centuries ago, though, when people tried to map the Arctic, they weren't too concerned with what was happening to it—they just wanted to know what the heck was up there. And, if they didn't know, they pretty much made it up. Such was the case with the first known map of the Arctic: the Septentrionalium Terrarum, which is filled with magnetic stones, strange whirlpools, and other colorful guesses.

The map's creator, the Flemish cartographer Gerard Mercator, is best known for the "Mercator projection," the now-famed method of taking the curved lines of the Earth and transforming them into straight ones that can be used on a flat map. The Mercator projection was invented for sailors, who, thanks to its design, could use it to plot a straight-line course from their point of origin to their destination. In 1569, Mercator came out with a map of the world based on this principal, which stretched from East to West and promised, in his words, "no trace… of any of those errors which must necessarily be encountered on the ordinary charts of shipmasters."

In order to make his map useful for navigation, though, Mercator had to sacrifice accuracy in other areas—specifically, he had to stretch out the top and bottom parts of his map, making the lands and seas in the far North and South appear disproportionately larger than those nearer the equator. (This is also why so many people think Africa is the same size as Greenland, when it is really about 14 times bigger—the Mercator projection is still very common in schools.)

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Under the terms of this Mercator math, the North Pole would appear so large as to be almost infinite. So instead of including it in the overall projection, Mercator decided to set a small, top-down view of the Arctic in the bottom left corner of his world map. Geographical historians consider this to be the first true map of the Arctic. Over the subsequent decades, as new information came to light, Mercator and his protégés enlarged and updated this original map—the draft above is an attempt from 1606, updated by his successor, Jodocus Hondius—but those original bones remained in place.

By the 1500s, not very many people had ventured up to the Arctic—no explorer would set foot on the Pole itself until 1909. This didn't stop Mercator, who dug into some dicey sources to suss out what he should include. The most influential, called Inventio Fortunata (translation: "Fortunate Discoveries") was a 14th-century travelogue written by an unknown source; in Mercator's words, it traced the travels of "an English minor friar of Oxford" who traveled to Norway and then "pushed on further by magical arts." This mysterious book gave Mercator the centerpiece of his map: a massive rock located exactly at the pole, which he labels Rupus Nigra et Altissima, or "Black, Very High Cliff."

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The presence of this formation was widely accepted at the time. Most people thought it was magnetic, which provided an easy explanation for why compasses point north. But Mercator was not quite convinced by this argument, and included a different rock, which he labels "Magnetic Pole," in the top left corner of the map, just north of the Strait of Anián.

Mercator draws the Arctic in four large chunks separated by channels of flowing water, which meet in the middle in a giant whirlpool. He got this idea from two 16th-century explorers, Martin Frobisher and James Davis, who each made it as far as what is now Northern Canada. Both documented their experiences with vicious currents, which, they wrote, pulled giant icebergs along like they were nothing. "Without cease, it is carried northward, there being absorbed into the bowels of the Earth," Mercator wrote on his original map.

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Each piece of the Arctic also has particular qualities. According to Mercator's labels, the one in the lower right is supposedly home to "pygmies, whose length is four feet"—likely another reference to the Inventio Fortunata, which described groups of small-statured people living in the polar regions. (It's possible that the author of the Inventio was referring to the indigenous inhabitants of Lapland.) The one next door, on the bottom left, is apparently "the best and most salubrious" of all the chunks, although no evidence is given to support this—or to explain why the pygmies wouldn't want to live there, instead.

After Mercator died in 1594, explorers continued to gain new knowledge of the Arctic, and cartographers revised their view of both Poles. By 1636, up-to-date maps of the region lacked Mercator's four regions, along with the Rupus Nigra and the central whirlpool. Instead, they showed one large piece of land, surrounded by smaller islands and, often, adorned with the ship's routes that enabled this geographical knowledge in the first place. As we peer at modern Arctic maps, wondering what changes are ahead, it's fascinating to think back to Mercator's original version, mysterious and broken from the beginning.

Map Monday highlights interesting and unusual cartographic pursuits from around the world and through time. Read more Map Monday posts.

Metal Detector Hobbyists Find Gold in a Field They Got Bored of 20 Years Earlier

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Metal detecting—let’s face it—can be kind of boring. Often, you can go searching and find nothing; more often, when you do find something, it’s trash.

Two British men, Mark Hambleton and Joe Kania, first tried metal detecting about 20 years ago, but, as The Guardian reports, the two friends “became so bored that they gave up the hobby.” Instead, they turned to the slightly more scintillating hobby of fishing.

But Hambleton’s father, himself a fan of metal detecting, pushed them to pick up their old hobby again. One of the places the two friends searched was a field in Staffordshire that they had searched 20 years earlier, during their first metal-detecting foray.

Once again, they started getting bored. But right when they were thinking of heading home, Kania found something. It was gold.

The pair had discovered four pieces of gold jewelry that date back to the iron age. The “torcs” are curves of ornamented gold, three meant to go around a person’s neck, one sized for a wrist. “Hambleton nervously kept the gold by his bed overnight until they could report the find,” The Guardian says.

By law, finds like this one must be reported the British government; the two men will receive a reward, which they will split with the landowner who owns the field where they were found. Archaeologists descended on the field to look for other artifacts but so far none have been found—just the four gold pieces that had been hiding in the field for ages.

A Seattle Taco Truck Opened in the Middle of a Highway Traffic Jam

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Sometimes, when one truck ruins your day, another comes to your rescue. Seattle commuters were reminded of this yesterday morning, when a giant tanker caused a massive traffic jam, and a quick-thinking taco truck made the whole mess just a little better.

According to the Seattle Times, it all started Monday morning at 10 a.m., when a massive tanker full of propane overturned on Interstate 5, jamming the freeway in both directions. As commuters frantically tried to escape, the surrounding streets got blocked up, too, causing a massive gridlock. All in all, the highway was closed for about eight hours, the Times reports.

One vehicle caught up in the crush was a food truck from Tacos El Tajin. The self-declared "Best Mexican Food Truck in Seattle," Tacos El Tajin serves tortas, burritos, gorditas and a lot of other treats that make, say, hours-long imprisonment in one's own car slightly more bearable. With this in mind, around noon, employees decided to fire up the taco truck and start selling lunch.

Rachael and Mike McQuade, who were en route to the doctor when they got stuck, enjoyed two steak and two chicken tacos while missing their appointment. In a cell phone video shared by K5 News, Rachael creeps between rows of stalled cars, bemoaning how close she is to the choke point: "I can see the police cars," she groans. Then she swings around to look the other way, her voice brightening: "And I can smell tacos."

"We are ready to serve food, anywhere," Thomas Lopez, the owner of El Tajin, said later. Who needs propane when you've got this kind of fuel?

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 Animal Soldiers of World War I

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During the First World War, a menagerie of animals became honorary soldiers in the American army. Whether for the sake of comfort, combat, or ceremonial pride, different World War I U.S. military regiments adopted animals into their ranks—from several species of canine to the more unusual raccoon and baby alligator.

Recent photos digitized by the National Archives reveal the range of animal mascots employed during World War I and the relationships soldiers had with these creatures.

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The battlefields of World War I were torn up and destroyed by new machine-based warfare. Tanks, airplanes, machine guns, and mustard gas transformed the trenches of the Western Front into a wasteland. Amid these trying conditions, animals were a source of consolation and familiarity.

“The very presence of animals was a key link with ordinary pre-war life for the soldiers of 1914 to 1918,” wrote Tim Cook in Canada’s History.

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Dogs, cats, foxes, and even lion cubs provided soldiers comfort and kinship as pets and boosted morale as mascots.

But they weren't just there to be friendly and encouraging—they performed military duties, too. Units of both the Allies and Central Powers used tens of thousands of homing pigeons to relay messages due to their agility and ability to fly high above trenches, including Cher Ami the pigeon that saved 194 soldiers with the message he delivered at the expense of his life. Dogs were intelligent sentries and rescuers. They helped lay telephone wires, while one Boston Bull Terrier, Sergeant Stubby, was even able to sniff out and alert soldiers of the presence of mustard gas. Some dogs trained to parachute behind enemy lines.

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Unfortunately, these animal soldiers and mascots were also casualties of war. The German military brought down carrier pigeons with hawks and falcons, as well as machine gun fire. An estimated nearly eight million horses that moved supplies and soldiers died during the four years of World War I, according to The Atlantic. Many were slaughtered to serve as food and, gruesomely, mattresses, wrote Steven Johnston in Political Research Quarterly.

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The horrid deaths and living conditions appalled military officials from multiple nations, some of whom made strides to protect and improve the care for animals used in warfare. Canadian veterinary officer Major D.S. Tamblyn created a service dispatching veterinary sergeants on patrols to care for abandoned horses, wrote Cook.

“I deem this step necessary as a number of cases have been brought to my notice of animals being left to die on the roadside,” Tamblyn once wrote. “I trust this will eliminate such cruelty.”

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In June 27, 1916, the American Red Star Animal Relief organization was founded by the American Humane Association as a kind of Red Cross for U.S. Army animals, according to The National Museum of American History. The organization sought to help the health of animals by recruiting veterinarians, blacksmiths, and stable hands, and published educational pamphlets that gave guidance on first aid for horses. Similarly, the British government recognized the value of messenger pigeons and created the British Defence of the Realm Act, which declared it a crime to kill, wound, molest, or not take adequate care of pigeons.  

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Military mascots were rewarded and memorialized for their service. Many mascots received official military personnel files like soldiers, giving them authenticity. Others, like Cher Ami the pigeon and tough canine Sergeant Stubby, have been stuffed and preserved as war heroes at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

See more World War I military mascots below.

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Scientists Say They've Solved the Mystery of Devil's Kettle

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Devil's Kettle, in Grand Marais, Minnesota, contains two streams: one, the waterfall itself, and a second stream (above left) that disappears down a hole. 

For years, people have been trying to figure out where the water from the second disappearing stream ends up. Ping-pong balls and various dyes have been added to the water in an attempt to find its exit, but, until recently, no one could come up with a conclusive answer to where it went.

But this month, Minnesota Conservation Volunteer, a magazine put out by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, published what scientists now think is the answer: the water, they say, rather than ultimately ending up in nearby Lake Superior, as previously theorized, actually ends up further downstream in the Brule River. 

Their evidence? Water-flow volume, measured before and after the waterfall, their theory being that if the water actually ended up in the lake, the water flow downstream from the waterfall should be demonstrably less.

But it turns out that it isn't, according to their tests. Before the waterfall, 123 cubic feet of water moves per second, whereas after, they found, 121 cubic feet of water was moving per second. 

"In the world of stream gauging, those two numbers are essentially the same and are within the tolerances of the equipment," Jeff Green, a hydrologist with the Minnesota DNR told the Minnesota Conservation Volunteer

The only thing to do now is confirm their theory once and for all, which they will try to do—as others have in the past—with a dye. This particular dye is visible at 10 parts per billion, they said, meaning that it has a better chance of showing up somewhere than, say, some ping-pong balls. That's because, as Calvin Alexander, another scientist working on the project, explains, "The plunge pool below the kettle is an unbelievably powerful system of recirculating currents, capable of disintegrating material and holding it under water until it resurfaces at some point downstream."

Larger objects, in other words, are at risk of simply being destroyed, meaning that the Devil's Kettle, perhaps than more than previously thought, has been earning its moniker all this time. 


Uncovering the Hidden Books Tucked Inside Every Single Library

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Finding an anonymous text, if you don't know which one, exactly, you're looking for, can be difficult, if not impossible. When Emily Kopley, a scholar of British and American literature, was first researching anonymous texts, she would try searching in library catalogs for a variety of terms: "by anonymous"... "no author"... "by a lady."

But in the period she was researching, the early 20th century, signing a book "by a lady" was old-fashioned. Few people signed "by anonymous." Anonymous books wouldn't necessarily be catalogued as "no author," either—there's no agreed-upon system, among libraries, about how to list anonymous or pseudonymous books.

"It's really hard to find them," says Kopley. She had more success looking in scholarly databases, where she could turn up examples that others had written about, and in collections of book reviews. But those searches revealed anonymous texts that were already known, in some way. "The hardest thing is to find a completely unknown or unstudied author who was anonymous or pseudonymous," she says.

At one point in the history of literature, anonymous and pseudonymous texts were common, even dominant. But at the end of the 19th century, as the number of texts being published grew, the percentage and, most likely, the absolute number of anonymous texts being published began to shrink. By their nature, and because there was no agreed upon way to catalog such texts, they're difficult to surface in libraries and archives; as a group, they're hidden away in larger collections. They blend into the crowd.

As Researcher-in-Residence at Montreal's Concordia University Library, a newly created position meant to promote a culture of research, Kopley is searching for ways to resurface and expose anonymous texts. Part of her job is to work with librarians to develop ways to catalog and search for anonymous texts that could make them easier to find. If there were a way to find them and see them more clearly, she reasons, it would be possible to better understand how the use of anonymity has changed—why writers choose to remain anonymous.

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There are many reasons authors choose to publish anonymously or under a pseudonym: to make a controversial political argument or a satirical jab; for women, especially in the past, to maintain their modesty or gain the advantages accorded to a man; to, paradoxically, gin up attention and sales by keeping their identity secret. Plus, when the world of English-language publishing was smaller, publishing anonymously didn't mean giving up acclaim.

"When anonymity and pseudonymity were so common... you have a lot of open secrets. People often know who the authors are," says Kopley.

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In an earlier age of publishing, it was possible, too, to keep better track of every book that was published. Still, anonymous texts were always a bit slippery. The most comprehensive record of such books in English is the Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous English Literature, first conceived in the 1850s and published in 1882. The book was meant to be "a reference book gathering information about known authors of anonymous works," as Leah Orr, an assistant professor of English at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, writes in a recent article on the "dangers" of using the book. It turned out to be an enormous undertaking: its original editor and his successor both died before it was published.

To create the dictionary, its editors relied on information from librarians, bibliographers, and sympathetic researchers who sent in tips and references. But the task they had set themselves was so massive that it was impractical to verify the accuracy of every entry. As a result, the dictionary is an unreliable reference book. As Orr writes, "the evidence cited in the Dictionary is vague, mistaken, or simply not acceptable by the standards of twenty-first century scholarship."

Efforts to develop a cataloguing system for anonymous texts were also limited. In an article on anonymous texts, Kopley writes about the wonderfully named Henry Guppy, a British librarian who in 1901 published a pamphlet on "The Cataloguing of Anonymous Literature," which is, Kopley says, is the only effort she has found to systemize record-keeping for these texts. Guppy's suggestions were limited and wouldn't have made a general search for anonymous texts easier, but he made, at least, a stab at the problem.

Even Guppy's simple ideas were not adopted, though. "There is no agreed-upon way of cataloguing anonymous texts, and thus no way to search for them," says Kopley. "Every library has its own system."

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Kopley first became interested in anonymous texts after reading the nostalgic laments of British writers in the 1920s and 1930s for "Anon," the unnamed author so many past works. At a time when authors were more often being treated as celebrities, writers such as Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden, E.M. Forster, and James Joyce saw virtue in an older way of making art, where authorship mattered less and communities participated more directly in the creation of poems and plays.

But without the ability to easily surface anonymous texts, it is difficult to understand how the use of anonymity has changed over time and why. Kopley's initial research suggests that anonymous authors in the 20th century had many of the same motives as those in the 19th century. Women may have felt it less necessary to choose anonymity over time, but there were still autobiographical accounts that dealt with controversial or charged experiences—homosexual relationships, passing as white, living in Nazi Germany—that relied on the protection anonymity provided.

"The big question is, why do I think finding these texts will be rewarding?" says Kopley. "There are many many neglected novels and other books from earlier eras. Why should an anonymous one or pseudonymous one be more interesting or rewarding? My hope is that there might be more of a narrative to tell about these books. Already there’s an intrigue. There’s a plot. Who is the author? Why are they concealing themselves?"

Because these texts are difficult to surface, they are also in danger of being forgotten, even though they might be kept safe for posterity in libraries. These authors may not have wanted attention called to themselves, but "they may have wanted their work to remain," says Kopley. "In fact, the grim truth is you can’t have one without the other. Their work is forgotten because they signed anonymously or pseudonymously."

If Kopley, along with the librarians she's collaborating with at Concordia, can find a way to rediscover such texts, they could also keep these hidden books from disappearing from memory entirely.

How Judge Wapner Launched the Phenomenon of Court Shows on Modern TV

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

Courtroom drama may be one of our greatest televised resources.

Reality-based shows that take place in a courtroom—of the actual kind, the high concept kind, and the heavily plotted kind—have proven one of the easiest ways to draw a consistent audience since television entered American lives in the 1950s.

Judge Joseph A. Wapner, who died on Sunday at the age of 97, started the trend, and defined it perhaps better than anyone. The longtime People’s Court judge spent 12 years calling balls and strikes in a courtroom that few physically walked into but many were familiar with.

And despite the fact that most of the cases did not reach the level of, say, constitutional law, he saw his role as incredibly important in its own way.

“The disputes are not really small,” Wapner explained in an interview with the Archive of American Television. “The amount of money might be small, but you could sue for a million dollars—because a million dollars are involved—but the same principles of law are involved there as with a case involving 75 cents.”

Yes, Wapner presided over a 75-cent case. The point at dispute? Whether or not a beer was flat.

“This man spent $6 to file the case, $14 to serve the papers—he’s spending $20 just to get his 75 cents back,” Wapner recalled of the case in 1986, which, like many People’s Court cases, was pulled from small claims courts in California’s legal system. “I ruled for the man with the beer.”

Warner, who served as a judge in the state of California prior to his television career, was not the first member of his family to appear on a court show: His father, Max Wapner, was a lawyer on the original (dramatized) version of Divorce Court, which aired from 1957 to 1962. (Yes, the original version of that show used actual lawyers.)

But of course, Wapner wasn’t the only star of this show, nor has he been the only host.

For example, longtime People’s Court host Doug Llewelyn lasted about as long as Wapner did, later replaced by TMZ founder Harvey Levin. Llewelyn, who oddly enough, also has some music video credits to his name—he was the announcer in Nirvana’s “In Bloom” video, and also starred in a Weird Al videoreturned to the show in September.*

And then there is Wapner’s longtime bailiff, Rusty Burrell, who had a lot in common with his TV boss. Both had a longtime background in the California court system. Burrell was a bailiff on some high-profile cases, such as the trials of Charles Manson and Patty Hearst. Burrell often worked with Wapner—and also spent some time on Divorce Court.

Since Wapner’s departure, the show has since gone through a variety of hosts:

  • Late New York City mayor Ed Koch hosted the show for two years in the late ‘90s, making him the only former People’s Court host to host Saturday Night Live… oh, and run a major city.
  • Judge Judy’s husband, Jerry Sheindlin, hosted the show after Koch—which we’re assuming made for a weird couple of years in the Sheindlin household.
  • Marilyn Milian, the current host of the show, has been on the air longer than Wapner has. She came up from the Florida court system, and had been appointed to her role by Janet Reno in the ‘90s. She may no longer be an actual judge, but she still has close ties to her former circuit—because, until earlier this year, her husband had her old job.

Of course, Judge Wapner set the form—not just for his show, but for every other one to come, scripted or not.


Wapner's version of The People's Court ended with its cancellation in 1993, or a year before the O.J. Simpson case, which was branded the Trial of the Century. And for a minute it looked like such gavel-to-gavel coverage of the court system might become a staple of American TV, but what has endured more powerfully instead is what Wapner started: television court shows, despite their lower stakes, perhaps in part because they were an early form of now-ubiquitous reality TV.

Why is that? A couple things: One, it’s a format everyone knows, and two, the shows are cheap to produce. Judge Joe Brown and Judge Alex can fill up a lot of airtime without requiring writers or paid actors. Even if their ratings suck, in other words, they still come out ahead.

And even big-name stars don’t push up the prices too much: It costs roughly $10 million to produce a season of Judge Judy, not factoring in the yearly salary of Judge Judy Sheindlin. Despite the judge’s massive salary, said to be $47 million per year, the show is a huge moneymaker for CBS Television, driving over $200 million in revenue yearly.

That potential for success is probably why “Ragin’ Cajun” James Carville attempted to get a court show of his own in 2014. It didn’t go through, but there is a glorious pilot online.

But there may be one other factor behind the success of court-based shows, whether in reality or dramatic format: You’re guaranteed conflict and resolution, which makes it perfect television.

Just don’t expect what shows up on the screen to match real life, however.

How far off is it? This was a question the American Bar Association covered at its 2014 annual meeting. A few key points touched upon during a panel discussion:

  • In real life, there’s a lot less bending of the law than you think: University of Maryland law professor Taunya Lovell Banks suggests that ethics are a lot more important than many shows imply. “One of my biggest problems with a lot of the shows is that there are never any consequences when lawyers act in unethical ways,’’ Banks explained. “I find myself having to spend the first five minutes of my class—especially my first-year class—saying: ‘you cannot do this; if you do this you will lose your license.’”
  • Good drama doesn’t make good law: Richard Sweren, a onetime criminal defense lawyer and noted writer for the Law and Order franchise, noted that, even with his legal background, he ultimately has to focus less on the law, and more on the plot. “I had to put my legal education, and ethical … all that aside,” he explained. “What makes the best drama? That’s what counts.”
  • Legal dramas influence our perception of the courtroom: NYU Law School Senior Fellow Thane Rosenbaum, who moderated the panel, noted that the law often defines the way that we think of what happens in the justice system. It’s a little more complicated than that, however. “People want to believe that the law not only can provide moral outcomes but that it can discover the truth and that the truth is ultimately the most important thing,” Rosenbaum said.

Author Sarah Kozinn, in a 2015 book on the topic, suggested this problem of television courtrooms changing our perception of actual courtrooms was systemic.

“Like millions of Americans who have never set foot inside an actual courtroom, their first introductions to the legal process might well be through cultural representations of trials in plays, films, books, and television shows,” Kozinn wrote in Justice Performed: Courtroom TV Shows and the Theaters of Popular Law. “So, it is probable that a program like Judge Judy could constitute a substantial part of someone’s knowledge of the legal process.”

In any case, the somewhat convoluted setup of the court show makes it easy to mock the form.

During the final season of the first run of Arrested Development, in an episode produced at a point when the show’s creators knew the series was about to get canned, there was a pretty epic meta-commentary on court shows.

The actor Judge Reinhold got all diva-like about the name of the show—he didn’t want to be called a judge in the series—and there was a house band called William Hung and the Hung Jury.

It was one of the better gags in the series, and a great reminder that courtroom scenes in television shows aren’t actually like the real thing—no matter what Law and Order or Matlock might suggest.

*CORRECTION: This post originally omitted the fact that Llewelyn had returned to the show. 

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

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The Experimental Zoo Where Parrots Rollerskated and Chickens Played Baseball

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Tourists sailing down the highways toward Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1955 would have been filled with gleeful anticipation. Numerous resorts and roadside offerings were on offer to sate their recreational lust: They could drop into the Arkansas Alligator Farm and mingle with the toothsome reptiles, ooh and awe at celebrity likenesses at the Josephine Tussaud Wax Museum, or delight in the animated miniatures of Tiny Town. Or they could go to the newly opened I.Q. Zoo and watch Casey the chicken play baseball, a duck play the drums, and a rabbit dunk a basketball, to name just a few oddities.

I.Q. Zoo was the brainchild of a psychologist couple, Marian and Keller Breland, who not too long before had been working alongside the famous psychologist B.F. Skinner to train pigeons to pilot the first “smart bombs” for the United States government.

Born in 1920 in Minnesota, Marian Kruse was whip-smart, with dark hair and a gentle smile. Her parents affectionately called her “Mouse,” a nickname that stuck for life. Young Marian loved Black Beauty and begged her dad to move to a farm.

“As a child, I was terrifically interested in animals,” Marian told an interviewer in 2012. “I was also, although I didn't know it at the time, interested in the humane treatment of animals.”

After graduating high school as valedictorian, Marian landed a spot in a University of Minnesota psychology class taught by Skinner, the influential psychologist who earned fame (and a long teaching post at Harvard) for his theories, notably “operant conditioning,” the idea that free will is an illusion and behavior is dictated by the negative and positive results it produces. Marian became a favorite student of his; she proofed Skinner’s writings, and even babysat his kids.

Marian was zipping to the health center for treatment from a lab rat bite when she collided with fellow psychology student Keller Breland. Within a year she would graduate summa cum laude and marry Keller. The Brelands were both trusted assistants and graduate students of Skinner’s when he recruited them in 1942 to work on a top-secret government assignment: Project Pelican.

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Project Pelican didn’t involve pelicans, but pigeons, a bird Skinner was fond of using in his research. Skinner believed that by following the principles of operant conditioning he could teach them to pilot bombs on the World War II battlefield. The process began with three pigeons encased in the nose-cone of a bomb.

“They had been taught to peck at a target shown on a ground-glass screen in exchange for food,” wrote John N. Marr in his essay Marian Breland Bailey: The Mouse Who Reinforced. “If the bomb deviated from the target, the pigeon's’ pecks at the screen would transmit signals to correct the bomb's heading.”

In 1943, Skinner went to Washington to show off his deadly flock.

“They opened the pigeon chamber and saw three pigeons pecking away,” said Marian. “This caused them several minutes of disbelief, I'd say.”

The pigeons were never deployed. “A variety of reasons had been given,” wrote Marr. “but none related to the birds’ behavior.”

Despite the fate of Project Pelican, a light had been flipped on in the minds of Marian and Keller. If they could train a pigeon to guide a bomb, they reasoned, they could probably train other animals to do extraordinary things. And if they could do that, there was probably money to be made.

They started training animals at their home, and then on a small farm in Minnesota, applying ideas gathered from studying with Skinner. The common practice in animal training was to intimidate and dominate animals; dogs and other creatures were punished for not doing what their owners wanted through physical and verbal reprimands. The Kellers’ took a much gentler approach: they ignored behavior they didn’t want and rewarded behavior they did, typically with food.

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This worked remarkably well. Eventually, they started training animals on behalf of General Mills, whose labs they had used when training their bomb birds. Enter the crowd-pleasing chicken: The Brelands trained hens to perform stunts that could be used to promote chicken feed all over the country. Breland chickens played pianos and “asked” for food by pushing a button. They trained a cow to “take quizzes” by pressing light-up “yes” and “no” targets, they trained a pig named Priscilla to knock over a stack of dishes. Word of their incredible success spread and they began training animals for television and film, including Buck the Bunny, a rabbit who starred in commercials for Coast Federal Savings, picking up coins in his mouth and dropping them into a bank.

In 1955, they opened I.Q. Zoo and travelers far and wide were introduced to the wonders of the Breland menagerie. “There is no punishment involved in the training at all,” read an ad for the zoo. “Once they are trained, they will not forget, and are happy and eager to perform.” Visitors, and the media, were enchanted.

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“At a little farm near Hot Springs, Ark., I saw a chicken do arithmetic problems and a rooster knock out a tune on a piano. I played a pinball game against a turkey, and invariably lost. I watched a hamster imitate Tarzan on a trapeze, a rabbit play baseball and a dozen chickens swing baseball bats,” reported a Popular Mechanics writer in 1953.

As their success grew, so did the pool of animals they trained. They taught a reindeer to operate a printing press, they trained parrots to balance on soccer balls and rollerskate, goats to push baby carriages, and a cow to play the harmonica. They trained cats, raccoons, squirrels and even dolphins. Chickens remained a perennial favorite, they “did math”, walked on tightropes and played tic tac toe with visitors. Under the banner of their business, Animal Behavior Enterprises (ABE), they also sold coin-operated displays that housed trained chickens, and these were scattered throughout the country.

Such a contraption in Manhattan’s Chinatown captivated New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin, who wrote an ode to the chicken in 1999. “When I tell the chicken story,” he writes, “I always point out that nearly all the people I take down there have precisely the same response to the prospect of playing ticktacktoe with a chicken. After looking the situation over, they say, “The chicken gets to go first!””

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Ten years after the opening of I.Q. Zoo, the Brelands had grown supremely confident in their unusual skills.

“I wouldn’t hesitate to sign a contract today to produce a thousand white rats to play tiddly winks,” Keller told the Associated Press in 1962. He would never have the opportunity to accept this challenge before his death, three years later in 1965.

Bereft, Marian also needed help running ABE and the I.Q. Zoo. Help manifested in the form of Bob Bailey, a man who had been training dolphins on behalf of the Navy.

As the Breland’s star was ascending, Bailey was working as a researcher at UCLA’s medical school. One day he spied an ad; the Navy needed a director to head up their new dolphin training program.

“How I ever got the job to this day I do not know,” said Bailey in a 2016 talk. “I had never trained a dolphin in my entire life!”  

At a desert base in California, Bailey trained dolphins to detect mines and carry messages and equipment. Among the consultants he called in to help him with the task were the Brelands. And when he grew frustrated with the Navy’s obsession with learning how to communicate with dolphins, he accepted a job at ABE in 1965. After Keller died, Bob took on many of his responsibilities. And Marian and Bob continued to work on behalf of the government.

In addition to the I.Q. Zoo, Bailey told Smithsonian magazine, the team had a special set-up for training animals run covert missions.

“We had a 270-acre farm,” he said. “We built towns. Like a movie set, there’d be only fronts.”

Marian and Bob trained boobies to fly through mazes, pigeons to thwart ambushes, ravens to plant bugs, dogs to locate mines, and cats outfitted with recording equipment to surveil people.

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The extent to which these animals were actually used is obscured behind government secrecy, but Bailey told Smithsonian that “We got the ravens into places. We got the cats into places.”

Marian and Bob married in 1976 and ran the I.Q. Zoo and ABE until 1990. Marian passed away in 2001; Bob continues to teach and consult on animal training. The Brelands’ and Bailey’s helped popularize the notion of training through positive reinforcement, not yelling and hitting. Among the other methods they brought to the mainstream was the use of the clicker, a much beloved tool for dog trainers today, including those who work in dog cognition labs.

In his love letter to the Chinatown chicken, Trillen described a 1999 rendezvous with Marian and Bob in California. Both “showed up in matching Hawaiian shirts, as if to underline their status as retired”. But they were nominally retired, because they had just arrived from teaching a class to guide-dog trainers in the methods of operant conditioning. And behind their vehicle they hauled a trailer full of their training tool of choice—chickens.

Boston's Beloved Citgo Sign Might Be Getting Priced Out of Its Home

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Boston’s beloved neon Citgo sign may have finally run out of gas, if their landlords have anything to say about it. As The Boston Globe is reporting, the huge, historic sign, which has become a landmark for city residents, is now in danger of losing its rooftop realty if it doesn’t pay higher rent.

When Boston University sold the building at 660 Beacon, atop which the sign is perched, last October to New York real estate firm, Related Beal, it was clear that there would need to be some discussion about the iconic logo’s future. The sign sits near the end of the Boston Marathon and is a prominent feature in the backdrop of Fenway Park, making its airspace highly valuable to marketers, and Related Beal knows it. According to the Globe, Citgo currently pays $250,000 a year to keep the sign in place, but Related Beal is asking for ten times that.

Currently the real estate firm is in negotiations with the petroleum company to see if they can reach a compromise. Meanwhile, Boston isn’t taking the possible loss of the sign lying down. The Boston Landmarks Committee is currently reviewing a proposal to give the sign landmark status so that it might have extra protections should the negotiations go south.

Even then, the people of Boston aren’t likely to let the sign go easily either. It was previously saved in the early 1980s by public outcry when Citgo tried to remove the sign themselves.

Making Fun of Thomas Edison

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On March 25, 1878, in an unsigned editorial, The New York Times spent a few column inches dragging a public figure through the mud. "Something ought to be done," about this person, they began, "and there is a growing conviction that it had better be done with a hemp rope." Their subject, they alleged, was a public figure "of the most deleterious character," hell-bent on "the destruction of human society"—all words fit for a true enemy. But the Times wasn't skewering a corrupt politician, or even a rival newsmaker. Their target was Thomas Edison, and the provoking incident was his recent invention of the phonograph.

Looking back on Edison now, it's easy to see him as a perpetual hero. Although he had his fair share of scandals—the War of Currents, the Great Phenol Plot, the patent disputes—his modern reputation paints him as a man who single-handedly invented the 20th century with an electric-light halo around his head. But a trip back into the archives reveals that he was not always so revered. Although Edison elicited reams of fawning and excited coverage, the publications of his time also occasionally painted the great man and his inventions as creepy and dangerous—or, more often, just plain laughable.

The late 1870s marked a time of great inventiveness. In 1878 alone, the world was introduced to Alexander Graham Bell's telephone, Eadweard Muybridge's stop-motion photography, and Gustav Kessel's espresso machine, to name just a few world-changing examples. In such a competitive atmosphere, novelty, more than usefulness, was the order of the day. Inventors were expected to prove how revolutionary their new gizmos were, and in turn, publications rewarded them with breathless coverage. At times, to the layperson, "progress seemed like an onslaught of newness for its own sake," writes the media scholar Ivy Roberts in a new paper in Early Popular Visual Culture.

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Edison was a big player in this era of discovery. Throughout the winter of 1877 and the spring of 1878, he traveled the world demonstrating his newest invention, the phonograph. Scientific American describes a typical show: Edison put the machine on a table and turned the crank, and the phonograph proceeded to "talk," introducing itself and exchanging various pleasantries with gaping onlookers.

The news media responded swiftly and variously. While plenty of outlets sung the praises of this new techno-talker, others took the opportunity to poke fun. The aforementioned New York Times editorial leans equally on scaremongering and humor, switching between over-the-top mockery and genuine fear. "He has been addicted to electricity for many years," the editorial posits, tongue firmly in cheek, before more seriously alleging that the phonograph, with its ability to record speech, "will eventually destroy all confidence between man and man."

Cartoonists had an especially good time with the phonograph. On March 21, 1878, the front page of the illustrated newspaper TheDaily Graphic featured ten separate sketches of ways phonographic technology might go wrong: greedy thieves might trick elderly millionaires into vocally amending their wills; sketchy neighbors might use opera recordings to lure women out of their homes; and wives might frighten their husbands out of sleep by playing a tape that yells "POLICE! FIRE!" over and over again.

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Puck, a New York-based humor magazine, published several illustrations suggesting alternate uses for the technology. In one of them, an angry wife records herself lecturing her absent husband, so that when he finally returns from the bar, he can simply press play and let her sleep. Another cartoon, by George Du Maurier in London's Punch weekly, shows a demure, well-dressed woman on a street corner, silently cranking her own voice out of a phonograph. "How much better if, instead of hirsute Italian organ-grinders parading our streets, we could have fair female phonographers playing… their original voices!" the caption jokes.

Needless to say, this mockery failed to stop Edison, who continued to put out earth-shaking inventions. By the summer of 1878, he had introduced the megaphone, an instrument which, he promised, would vastly expand the scope of what the average human could hear. Although he marketed this as a wholesome device—one that could help the hearing impaired, surveyors, and opera-goers—the press once again latched onto its more scandalous and ridiculous possibilities. As Roberts details, publications from Scientific American to Scribners put out illustrated covers in which gentry are using the megaphone to spy on their faraway rural neighbors. (It didn't help that Edison originally called the megaphone "the telephonoscope"—a name which, as the New York Sun quickly pointed out, is "incongruous and absurd," because "a voice cannot be seen.")

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Later that July, Edison traveled west to view a rare solar eclipse, prompting a wave of send-ups from regional papers. In the July 27, 1878, issue of the Denver Tribune, a satirical writer known only as "Gnorts" devoted his column to making fun of Edison. "He is going to accomplish something in a short time more wonderful than all the rest of his grand achievements, and which will greatly astonish all mankind," wrote Gnorts, before detailing this supposed venture: Edison planned to use the unique properties of the eclipse to lasso the sun and pull it closer to Earth, melting the ice caps, enabling the discovery of the North Pole, and ensuring that all of the world's population would have to pay him for heat and light.

"Should the plan above not be satisfactory," concludes Gnorts, "Mr. Edison will then divide the sun into many millions of small ones and lease them out to all who desire suns, upon the same conditions that he at present leases his telephones and phonographs." The inventor was also a boon to advertisers: "Not even Edison, with all his inventive genius and extensive research, can find a fat person that Allen's Anti-Fat will not reduce at a rate of from two to five pounds per week," read one clip in the Cheyenne Daily Leader. And as Edison made his way across the country, the Mercury and the Daily Sun, two rival Wyoming papers, quickly took to comparing each other to his more ridiculous inventions as a form of ribbing.

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Even after this journey, Edison didn't rest, and neither did his critics. In September of 1878, he began talking about his plans for the electric lightbulb. Now so canonical it has become the literal symbol of inventiveness, electric light, too, was viewed with some skepticism. According to Roberts, news of its impending arrival was greeted in the London Times with a spirited debate. One October letter to the editor warned that electric lightbulbs would lend a grayish cast to ladies' faces, making them unattractive. "Anything more ghastly and unnatural than the blue-white of the new illumination could scarcely be," agreed another, warning that its "weird blueness" would turn people into "an assemblage of ghosts." "The effect may be poetical if you please," this letter concludes, "But it is the poetry of… mortal decay."

A few months later, George Du Maurier, the cartoonist at Punch, followed his phonograph sendup with an entire Edison-themed series. In one caricature, a mother and father in England watch and speak with their vacationing children, who are far away in the Antipodes, almost as though they're using a 19th century version of Skype. Du Maurier calls this invention "Edison's Telephonoscope"—which, as Roberts points out, hearkens back to to the megaphone's earlier, much-satirized name. In another three-part cartoon, gentlefolk of all ages fly through city streets, hover above country fields, and tumble around a well-appointed parlor, all thanks to "Edison's Anti-Gravitation Underclothing."

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"From the perspective of the Victorian reader, 'Edison's Telephonoscope' satirised the inventor's misplaced confidence," writes Roberts. "It encouraged readers to examine both the benefits and drawbacks of technological progress and supersession." As she points out, much of the worry and satire surrounding Edison taps into anxieties about wealth, social class, and access. Who could afford the telephonoscope, if it existed? Would the megaphone truly help everyone, or would rich people use it to spy on their poorer neighbors? And is it so far-fetched to think that—if he could—Edison might privatize the sun? A slightly later cover, from a July 1879 issue of the New York Daily Graphic, continues in that vein: it shows Edison, who at that point was looking for a new way to mine iron ore, as a pointy-hatted wizard searching for precious metals in his backyard.

Today—when the pace of discovery has, if anything, accelerated—new inventions, and their inventors, inspire similar fears and feelings. Smart fridges and private moon journeys are seen as megaphone-esque playthings of the errant rich. Facebook algorithms and cell phone cameras are, like the phonograph, greeted as the likely tools of the coming surveillance state. Although the question of whether any of these perpetual fears will come to fruition—whether this constant influx of technology will bind us, rather than free us—depends on your perspective, one enduring tragedy is clear: after all these decades, we still don't have anti-gravitation underclothing. Perhaps Elon Musk will take that on next.

Found: 47 Lumps of Orichalcum, an Ancient Alloy Attributed to Atlantis

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Off the coast of Sicily, near the city of Gela, a new expedition to a 2,600-year-old shipwreck has returned with 47 lumps of orichalcum, a rare alloy said to be mined on the fabled island of Atlantis, Seeker reports.

The shipwreck dates back to 600 B.C. and was previously explored in 2015, when underwater archaeologists found 39 ingots of the metal. This trip also yielded a jar and two Corinthian helmets.

Orichalcum was supposed to be a shiny alloy, much like brass. It’s known from ancient texts, like Plato, which described it as a rare metal, mined at Atlantis. Plato described a temple to Poseidon that had an entire pillar of orichalcum, Seeker says. LucasArts fans of a certain age may remember it as a feature of the computer game Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.

In 2015, after this shipwreck was discovered, Sicilian officials started describing the metal found there by the same name. The ingots were made from zinc, charcoal and copper, News Corp Australia reported at the time; tradition had it that orichalcum was made of copper, gold and silver. The metal found by the shipwreck, though, matched ancient descriptions of orichalcum, which was supposed to have a red tone to it.

Whether or not the metal found in this particular shipwreck is the orichalcum of old, it is a strange and rare discovery—possibly sent to the sea as an offering to the gods.

Meet Bessie Coleman, the First Black Woman to Get a Pilot's License

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In the summer of 1922 a biplane whirred above an amazed crowd gathered in a New York airfield. The pilot, an African-Chocktaw-American woman named Bessie Coleman, made daring figure-eight loops and perilous barrel rolls, smoke swirling across the sky.

The New York Times reported that she flew planes “of many types” on her international flying license, the first woman of color to accomplish this in the world. Coleman, “without any instruction, flew a 220-horsepower Benz motored L. F. G. Plane,” in Europe, the Times impressed, and she had already become skilled in flying “the largest plane ever flown by a woman.”

This was not expected behavior in the 1920s. Men and women of color were not only seen as people who couldn’t fly—they were not supposed to fly. For Bessie Coleman, this was not a barrier. It was a challenge.

Born in Atlanta, Texas, Coleman walked miles to school, where she soon revealed herself to be smart—especially in math. Her mother taught her about strong black figures, and recognizing her intelligence, allowing her to keep her earnings as a laundress so she could finance her education past the eighth grade. She attended the Colored Agricultural and Normal University, now called Langston University, until her funds ran out. Despite this setback, she continued to work and save money until she was able to move to Chicago to join her brothers in 1915.

It’s not entirely certain when Coleman first decided she wanted to fly planes; but the possibility began to seem more real when she worked as a manicurist in the White Sox Barber Shop in Chicago. Her brother, a veteran of the First World War, told her teasing stories about France, where women were allowed to fly planes. She applied to schools in the United States, but no school would take on a woman of color as a student.

France was just the key Coleman needed to begin her next step—she saved up for French classes and learned the language; and on some added encouragement from Robert Abbott, owner of the Chicago Defender, she left. In 1921, Coleman earned an internationally respected license to fly from the Federation Aeronautique Internationale—two years before Amelia Earhart received her own international license.

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Back in the United States, however, Coleman had to make a living. The commercial aviation division rejected her bids to work; a more popular career stunt flying called “barnstorming,” presented itself, but again, no one would train her to perform advanced aerial maneuvers in a plane. She made a return trip to Europe, and in 1922, after advanced intensive training in France and Germany, Coleman began a career flying stunts—multiple loops, spins, barrel rolls and dives across the sky for paying crowds.

Despite criticism from the press for her daring, complex aerial maneuvers, and unabashedness, Coleman gained a following and quickly became a sensation in both black and white newspapers. Coleman was a brilliant self-promoter, but fame was only a piece of what she wanted to accomplish. In an interview with the black-owned newspaper Chicago Defender she revealed it felt like her duty to encourage flight for African Americans.

“I made up my mind to try. I tried and I was successful,” she said, adding famously that she “shall never be satisfied until we have men of the Race who can fly. Do you know you have never lived until you have flown?” She then continued “with a charming smile” that after being turned down by the first French school she traveled to, which was afraid to teach women aviation due to past deaths, she ultimately studied flight in the city where “Joan of Arc was held prisoner of the English.”

For the next five years, Coleman was known as Queen Bess—the aviatrix who flew biplanes called “Jennys” and leftover aircraft from the World War I. But this was a small part of Coleman’s dreams—she meant to use her life as a leading example to the world of what women of color and people of color could accomplish. Starting in Houston, Texas and her hometown of Waxahachie, she traveled across the country to lecture audiences in churches, theaters and schools as an authority on aircraft flight while showing videos of her work, pointedly leading by example.

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At every turn, Coleman brought her standards to elevate noxious, racist situations. When black spectators in Waxahachie were told to use a segregated entrance, she leveraged her position against the show promoters to let everyone enter the same way. At the time, it was common for women to be offered film roles to further market themselves as they grew famous; but when Coleman found that her role in the movie Shadow and Sunshine required her to act as an offensive African-American trope, she left the contract and didn’t look back. Instead, she made deals with businessmen who wanted flying lessons, and would buy her airplanes in return.

Amid her fame and steady influence on the American public, Coleman’s death was a tragic surprise. In 1926, on an exploratory flight to scout out a parachute jump location, her mechanic flew and lost control of the plane due to a wrench in the engine compartment. Coleman, unbuckled so she could easily scout the area, was thrown to her death from 3,500 feet in the air. Then thousand people mourned at her coffin in Chicago that year, and black pilots from Chicago instituted an annual fly over of her grave. Her life inspired William Powell to found the Bessie Coleman Aero Club and created the first all-black air show, and in 1977 a group of African American women pilots established the Bessie Coleman Aviators Club.

Bessie Coleman did not come to fly circles around spectators easily. In fact, she was warned; by U.S. culture, by race and gender barriers—she was given reasons not to pursue her goals, be outspoken, or use her talents to their fullest. In response, she dealt in possibilities; when she found herself up against the odds, she calculated her next move. Nearly 100 years later, it’s likely that Coleman would have liked to spread the famous message which is attributed to her, to those who persist today: refuse to take no for an answer.


After a Heated Response, the City of Vancouver Is Reconsidering Its New Logo

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Last week, after an $8,000 rebranding effort, the city of Vancouver unveiled a new logo for itself. Shown at the top of the above image, the new logo says "CITY OF VANCOUVER" in blue and green Gotham typeface.

Although the old logo (shown at the bottom of the image) had a cheeky flower blooming from the top left, this one is no-nonsense, with zero adornments. You can imagine the city blowing the pencil shavings off of it, dusting its hands, and smiling at a job well done.

There's only one problem: everyone hates it. 

"@CityofVancouver you really call that a logo? You took the words 'City of Vancouver' and changed the colour, I could do that in 3 seconds," Twitter user @mrtheking16 wrote earlier today. "the new vancouver logo is so bad," @xavthedragon agreed, understatedly. At least one local copy shop decided to offer a similar logo design free with a print order. "Save $8,000!" they wrote on Facebook.

Members of the local design community went so far as to write an open letter to the city expressing their dissatisfaction. "The city has severely failed to produce an inspirational mark that authentically represents [us] and makes us proud," the letter read, in part.

One signatory, creative director Brock Ellis, gave CBC News a more detailed critique. After Gotham's ubiquity during the first Obama campaign, "there was this 'stop using Gotham movement" among designers, he says—in other words, this particular bat signal is all played out.

Ellis also lacks patience for the city's claim that the simpler logo is easier for non-English speakers to read. "I don't understand how this wordmark can be more easily recognized by people who don't speak English when it consists of three English words," he told the CBC.

Finally, Ellis thinks the design fails the ultimate brand loyalty test: "I can't imagine anyone getting [this logo] tattooed on their body," he said.

Meanwhile, the logo designer for the nearby city of Chilliwack is also angry with Vancouver—because he thinks they ripped off his design, which is slightly better, and at least has some mountains in it.

In an unsurprising twist, Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson announced Tuesday evening that the city will hold off on using the logo for now. "I have asked the City Manager not to put the wordmark on any permanent City assets while we engage with the design community and public," he wrote in a statement. So if you see the logo on any trash cans, know that it’s unauthorized.

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.

How the FBI Thwarted a Non-Existent Plot to Assassinate Margaret Thatcher

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

In February 1981, FBI Director William H. Webster received a priority memo from the Bureau’s Alexandria office—a source of known standing had uncovered a possible plot to assassinate Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher during her upcoming visit to the United States.

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How had he stumbled upon this information? By quite literally stumbling into it - he had been out drinking at a bar when he overheard two men with “English or Irish accents” doing what can only be described as “plotting.”

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The source recalled their suspiciously detailed conversation in suspicious detail …

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and gave an equally suspiciously detailed descriptions of the individuals.

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As for motive, the source also provided a list of overheard phrases that reads like the word bank for a Northern Ireland conflict word jumble.

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The FBI ran the whole thing by their Northern Irish experts, who confirmed that, yes, they were talking about Northern Ireland, and additionally provided background on the “H” mentioned by the two suspects.

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So without a moment to lose and Thatcher’s life hanging in the balance, the FBI leapt into action, interviewing bar staff for potential leads on the suspects and informing local Bureau offices to alert for the IRA gearing up to make a move.

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Which is where things start to fall apart.

After talking to waitstaff, the FBI was able to track down two suspects that met the source’s description - only they weren’t Irish Separatists plotting to overthrow the yoke of the British opression, but a couple of insurance claims adjusters from New York who had spent the evening getting drunk and talking about insurance claims.

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The Bureau even went to the trouble of confirming that neither spoke with an “English or Irish accent.”

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At the national level, things didn’t fare much better - what local groups the Bureau talked to all maintained they had nothing planned but peaceful protests …

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including the “Squash H” group mentioned by the source, which almost seemed amused to be considered a danger to anybody.

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Confidence waning, the FBI tried in vain to convince the source to submit to hypnosis (!) to confirm their recollection of the evening …

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and barring that, a polygraph to see if he made the thing up.

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While the source refused on both grounds, he did selflessly offer to keep drinking at that bar on the off-chance the suspects return.

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With all leads dried up and Thatcher un-murdered, the FBI decided to just quietly close the case.

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As for the suspect, for all we know, he’s at that bar, drinking still. Read the full investigation embedded below.

Behold the Erdapfel, the World's Oldest Surviving Globe

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If the world’s oldest surviving globe has taught us anything, it's that just when we think we're starting to figure out how the world works, turns out we barely know anything at all.

Known formally as the Erdapfel (or “Earth Apple”), the oldest globe is an impressive and beautiful artifact, even if its cartographic science is a little off. The Erdapfel dates back to 1492, and is far from the first globe ever created, but it is, so far, the oldest discovered terrestrial globe still in existence.

Round representations of the Earth go back to Ancient Greece, and the earliest spherical maps of the world were being created in the Islamic world in the 13th century or earlier. But none of those are thought to survive. Other than descriptions and flattened maps that would have covered earlier globes, the Erdapfel is the oldest remaining artifact of its kind.

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Also called the Behaim Globe, the construction of the Erdapfel is credited to the 15th century polymath Martin Behaim. Behaim, a German, was a well-known geographer, merchant, mariner, and philosopher. It was after his travels across the Known World, to places such as Portugal and the West Coast of Africa, that he returned to his native Nuremberg, where he convinced the city council of his hometown to commission a globe from him.  

Behaim may get the credit, but it actually took a number of artisans to complete the project. Unsurprisingly, the Erdapfel’s construction is a fair bit more elegant than the cardboard globes of today. It's made of hardened strips of linen that were formed around a clay ball and then pulled away. These delicate halves were then joined around a wooden frame.

The map art on the surface of the globe took a small team to complete. Foremost among them was the artist Georg Glockendon who, along with the painter Hans Storch, did the actual illustration work. Later, a scribe came in to add some 2,000 place names.  

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Behaim led the construction and provided the cartographic information that informed the illustrations. He took his vision of the world from a number of sources, ranging from the historic geography of Ptolemy to the explorations of Marco Polo. While the globe turned out to be quite beautiful as an object d’art, its accuracy as a geographic instrument was out of date even in 1492.

The Erdapfel is covered in a cornucopia of beautiful little illustrative details, including over 100 miniature objects and figures. These include flags; saints; kings on their thrones; animals such as elephants, camels, and parrots; fantastic beasts such as a sea-serpent and a mermaid; and boats that share the seas with painted fish.

As to the actual mapped aspects, there's pretty much just one large land mass, representing a Eurasian continent, surrounded by islands and ocean. The measure of the coasts and placement of major geographic features were inaccurate even by the standards of the day, and the globe also featured such elements as the phantom Saint Brendan's Isle, a long-rumored, mythical island that never existed. 

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Still, Christopher Columbus would not return from his American expedition until a year after the creation of the Erdapfel. In its moment, Behaim’s globe could pass as not wholly unrealistic.

Behaim gave the globe to the Nuremberg city council, which held onto it until the 16th century, when they finally gave it back to the rather disinterested Behaim family, who put it in storage. The family's apathy may have ultimately saved the Erdapfel, however, as it remained essentially forgotten until the 19th century, when later generations rediscovered the artifact. Behaim's descendants lent the globe to the German National Museum in Nuremberg in the early 20th century, and in 1937, it was purchased for the museum at the behest of Adolf Hitler himself, who felt that such an important German artifact should remain in the country.

Since then, the Erdapfel has remained in the hands of the German National Museum. Today, the museum is attempting to create a digital record of the globe’s surface, now darkened from centuries of age and multiple restoration attempts, to share online. Even if Behaim’s globe remains a poor example of cartography, it continues to live on as a strange and lovely vision of the world as we once thought we knew it.   

Found: Fossil Evidence of the Oldest Life on Earth

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The Nuvvuagittuq Supracrustal Belt (perhaps the best-named geological formation out there) is a stretch of rock in the northern part of Quebec, Canada, on the Hudson Bay. The Nuvvuagittuq Supracrustal Belt is some of the oldest sedimentary rock on the planet—it is between 3.7 billion and 4.29 billion years old.

The belt also includes “one of the oldest—if not the oldest—iron formation known on Earth,” as a team of researchers write in a new paper published in Nature. That makes it a promising site to look for traces of some of the earliest life on earth, and here the researchers have found tiny formations that, they report, “represent the oldest life forms recognized on Earth.”

The rocks of the Nuvvuagittuq Supracrustal Belt show signs that they were once part of a deep-sea hydrothermal vent, the type of place where it’s thought life on Earth first emerged. At contemporary hydrothermal vents, the microbes that live there leave behind recognizable signatures. The researchers describe them as “cylindrical casts” that are “formed by bacterial cells and are undeniably biogenic.” In the ancient rock, they went looking for similar structures and found “tubes and filaments” that seemed like they also could have been created by microbes.

Similar ancient structures have been found before, but in previous cases there have been questions about whether the tubes were created by living organisms or through nonorganic geological processes. The researchers conclude that these new discoveries should be attribute to living organisms by considering the structure of the tubes and the context in which they were found.

That means, they write, that “ancient submarine-hydrothermal vent systems should be viewed as potential sites for the origins of life on Earth, thus primary targets in the search for extraterrestrial life.” Research like this isn’t intended just to understand where all living things on earth came from, though; it is also meant to help humans find life on other planets.

The WWII Plan to Mess With the Japanese by Dyeing Mt. Fuji

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In the waning months of World War II, as the likelihood of a land invasion of the Japanese home islands loomed, the United States’ Joint Intelligence Center, Pacific Ocean Areas (JICPOA) instituted a new psychological warfare unit under the command of Colonel Dana Johnston.

While psychological warfare—propaganda broadcasts, leaflet drops and the like designed to demoralize enemy soldiers and civilian populations—played an important role in the war effort, the occasional head-scratcher of an idea emerged from the murky world of “psy-ops.” In the case of JICPOA’s newly-formed psychological warfare unit, perhaps the most audacious—if not quirky—campaign considered was a mission to dye the revered Mt. Fuji as a psychological blow against the Japanese.

Aside from serving as an unmistakable point-of-reference for American bomber crews, Japan’s iconic Mt. Fuji was frequently invoked in both Allied and Japanese propaganda efforts. An ingrained symbol of Japanese culture with deep spiritual and historical meaning, the image of Fujiyama was seen as a potent tool by propagandists. As Dr. David Fedman, an expert on late-WWII bombing campaigns against Japan at UC Irvine notes, Mt. Fuji was “cast [by the Japanese] as an alpine feature that bound the swelling imperial sphere together … the sacred epicenter of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” Leaflets dropped on the battlefield and the Japanese home islands by the Allies commonly featured renderings of the famed peak—often alongside ominous images of American B-29 bombers—with messages designed to appeal to soldiers’ and civilians’ sense of nostalgia, duty, home and family.

That Mt. Fuji would then become a physical target of Allied psy-ops is not surprising. As detailed in a declassified 1945 memo from Col. Johnston to JICPOA’s commanding officer, General Joseph Twitty, the proposed operation would “give Fujiyama with some color other than that seasonably endowed by nature.” In other words, the plan called for the marshaling of considerable manpower and equipment to dye Mt. Fuji black.

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The idea may seem preposterous, but the approach was standard. Dr. Fedman points out that JICPOA embraced a culture of creativity and officers were encouraged to share proposals—“no matter how ludicrous”—that never left the planning stage. In the case of Mt. Fuji, Col. Johnston dutifully explained to General Twitty in his memo that the proposed action would ultimately prove impractical, ineffective and even counter-productive.

Largely covered in snow from October through June, the 12,365-foot peak, Col. Johnston noted, would require frequent missions to re-dye its 370-square-mile surface after each snowfall. Moreover, persistent cloud cover shrouding Mt. Fuji in colder months would limit the visual impact to those in the immediate vicinity of the mountain. While Col. Johnston noted that local “superstitious farmers” might experience a psychological shock at waking up to a newly dyed Mt. Fuji, the broader population would remain unaware of the change.

Col. Johnston further posited that even if successful in the face of logistical hurdles, such an operation might unintentionally provide Japanese propagandists with ammunition of their own. Indeed, Johnston’s memo theorizes that the Japanese government could seize upon the action as an “inhuman act of the beastly enemy.” Not to mention the propaganda value in declaring the proposed action a desecration of a national shrine, “which, in fact,” Col. Johnston conceded parenthetically, “It is.”

Ultimately, the ambitious plan came to naught. It was recommended to General Twitty that JICPOA instead stick with tried and true campaigns of simply dropping leaflets over civilian populations on the home island; invoking Mt. Fuji on paper being the better tactic than physically altering the peak. Aside from sparking an enduring internet urban legend in the early 2000s of an Office of Strategic Services plot to paint the iconic mountain bright red using 30,000 planes and 12 tons of paint, the proposed campaign against Mt. Fuji remains a quaint historical footnote from the closing months of World War II.

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