Early in the morning on September 21, 1909, a Brooklyn chauffeur driving at high speed, a rogue policeman who was participating in the joyride, and 10 people riding in a farm wagon were seriously injured after the chauffeur, John McAnderies, crashed into the wagon. The "joy-riding" of Mr McAnderies was blamed for this collision.

This crash was no isolated case. In the beginning of the 20th century, the United States seemed to be full of reckless drivers causing chaos and damage in vehicles that belonged to their employers. As the Washington Times of October 11, 1908 claimed, while European chauffeurs occupied a position of standard servitude, “groveling without a thought of rebellion,” this was not the case in the United States, where the American chauffeur “lords it over the auto, the roadway and the general population.”

In the early 1900s, automobiles, a relatively new invention, were a “plaything for the rich,” says Dr John Heitmann, a Professor of History at the University of Dayton. Those who were wealthy and privileged enough to own cars were often unsure of how to operate them. So for both practical and status reasons, a chauffeur was hired. The number of chauffeurs increased rapidly, so much so that around 1908 the majority of car-owners in the state of New York had a chauffeur.

By 1911 there were 450,000 cars in the United States and 100,000 chauffeurs. These drivers seemed to have unprecedented power and control over their employers. Dr. Kevin Borg, a history professor at James Madison University, says that between 1903 and 1912, this situation was often termed the “chauffeur problem” by the chauffeur’s employers and automobile garages’ managers.

Instances of joyriding chauffeurs began appearing in the press throughout the United States. One report from 1906 recounted how a “reckless chauffeur” had zoomed past a horse carriage, which frightened the horses into running away and caused the carriage to overturn, injuring the occupants. However, the joyrider could not be apprehended as neither their identity nor their number plate was known.

Apprehending a joyriding chauffeur who was drink-driving and even running people over was not always a straightforward process. Even if the automobile had a registration number that could be spotted, it might not be correct. One North Dakota newspaper article from 1909, which detailed all of the mischievous antics chauffeurs used, noted that “to evade detection he often hangs a false number on the machine” and “if he runs over anybody which he frequently does, it is his favorite trick to put on extra speed and escape before he can be arrested.” The same article suggested that chauffeurs were inclined to gather up “women of questionable character and drinks that are still more questionable” and then go on to “ride up the town.”

Joyriding was only one part of the chauffeur problem. In the early 20th century, many automobiles were stored publicly in garages. The chauffeur often had significant power over where the cars were housed and who had access to them. This meant that the chauffeur in question could gain influence on the garage owner and often obtain 10 percent of whatever the fees were for the storage of the automobile. If owners were unwilling to pay, chauffeurs had ways of extorting the money. This could include deliberate damage to the vehicle by the chauffeurs who then placed the blame on the garage owner, leading to their employer no longer wishing to do business with the garage.

Another way that chauffeurs could abuse their position involved passing off the employer’s car as their own and making money ferrying other passengers. This illicit service was aided by the garage owners who were hesitant to question the chauffeurs about their unauthorized use of the automobiles. Drivers could profit handsomely by hiring themselves out as a “limousine service to downtown theatergoers.” Sometimes it was only after the automobile crashed that the owner would become aware the car had been even taken from the garage.

Other infractions, as reported by the New York Tribune in November 1910, included chauffeurs blaring noisy horns without thought for those around. Some of the horns were “locomotive whistles,” blasted at a volume “enough to wake the dead.” Rather bizarrely, chauffeurs were also singled out in the report for their “desertion of wives.” Dr John Heitmann also notes that there were wider concerns about the relationship between a chauffeur and the wife of the car owner.

Those who felt victimised by the chauffeurs were occasionally stirred into action. In 1905, at a meeting of the Automobile Club of America in New York City, a Mr Shattuck noted that for chauffeurs the “temptation to fraud had been very great.” One newspaper article from the Yorkville Inquirer of January 20, 1911 considered whether a trained marksman could hit a joyriding chauffeur as a last result if they were unable to obtain to take down their license number required for an arrest. The newspaper admitted that, most likely, passersby would get hit.

Less drastic and more amusing solutions for dealing with chauffeurs’ reckless joyriding were also proposed. A cartoon in the Omaha Bee of September 7, 1909 suggested an automobile design with the chauffeur’s section placed comically far ahead so that any collisions would endanger the driver rather than the passenger. This, it was argued, would “discourage reckless driving.”

Fines were also suggested as a way of dealing with joyriding chauffeurs. Increased legislation meant that the chauffeur could be held financially responsible for any damage they caused, while the owners of the car would not be accountable so long as they would act as a witness against the chauffeur. The Evening World of June 6, 1904 illustrated all the ways whereby a “reckless chauffeur” might have to pay heavily. Institutionally, establishments were created by motoring clubs to provide owners with repairing and tyre services for their cars in order to navigate around financial exploitation by chauffeurs.

But the “chauffeur problem” did somewhat persist. In 1909, one hearing over the Allds-Hamn Bill, which sought to punish “ joy-riders” in New York, declared that 90 percent of automobile accidents were caused by “joy-riding chauffeurs.” Drivers defended themselves in publications like The American Chauffeur: An Automobile Digest. “Professional chauffeurs are hardly ever to be found intoxicated,” read one article, published in 1914, “this being a habit indulged in largely by the so-called joy rider type.” Some chauffeurs also blamed pedestrians, stating that if it were not for the “jay walking” of irresponsible pedestrians, joyriding would be harmless.

By around 1914, the power of the chauffeur had been weakened through legislation that restricted their freedom and increased surveillance in motor garages. Although chauffeurs made attempts to organize, they could not reclaim the position they had once held. Drivers-for-hire became more regulated and under the control of their employers and the motor garages.

Chauffeurs’ authority was further undermined by their employers' reduced dependency on them. “Motorists could turn elsewhere for mechanical expertise, rather than to chauffeurs,” says Borg. With more and more cars every year, “automobile and mechanical knowledge diffused,” particularly “with the motorization of the U.S. Army for WWI.” The technological foundation on which the chauffeur’s power rested had been removed, and growing numbers of motorists who could not afford chauffeur got behind the wheel themselves. Joyriding was over. The insolent drivers had been tamed. And with that, the chauffeur problem was solved.

Looking inward to discover your next travel destination might seem counter-intuitive, but as the rise of ancestry tourism can attest, travelers are increasingly opting for adventures that uncover their own identity.

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For some, seeing a percentage breakdown of where their DNA comes from around the world spawns a new breed of wanderlust. Unearthing your ancestors’ origins may inspire you to learn more about where your family came from and how the culture of that place contributes to who you are now. 23andMe believes that everyone should not only have access to their DNA, but also have the ability to create long-lasting ties with the people and places around the world who have forged it.

Between July 12 and August 3, 23andMe will select 23 lucky winners to travel to destinations based on their personal DNA results.

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There are a lot of pests in New York City to worry about, like roaches (which I had once, before I bought this roach gel, which killed them in such a way that when you woke up and went into the kitchen you would see them crawling ever so slowly to their deaths, which was immensely satisfying) and mice (which I also had once, though I think it was just one, which I killed with a mousetrap and it was pretty gross) and bedbugs (which I've never had and don't even want to think about and don't have a story for.)

But you don't usually count honeybees among possible infestations. Cherisse Mulzac certainly didn't. She had seen a few dead bees around her Brooklyn home over the last year, but that didn't prepare her for what was developing above her bedroom ceiling.

As she started to notice more and more bees in the house this spring, she called Mickey Hegedus, a beekeeper, who tore open her ceiling on Wednesday. Inside he found a massive hive—around 35,000 strong, according to FOX5.

"It's a beekeeper's dream, really, to find a hive so healthy and functional inside the walls that I can then cut out and take home," Hegedus told FOX5.

The beekeeper sucked them out with a low-pressure vacuum and took them to a hive in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Mulzac wasn't left empty-handed though, as Hegedus gave her the hive's honey, about 70 pounds of it. "It’s literally 100 percent all natural, probably better than the stuff you can get in the store," Mulzac's son Stuart told The New York Post.

Should you worry about bees if you live in New York? Probably not, though it has been an excellent spring for them. But if you see a few dead bees lying around the house, don't wait too long to pick up the phone.

In 1863, Col. Robert Gould Shaw led the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, the Civil War’s first all-black regiment, into battle in South Carolina. Shaw carried a sword, and when he was killed in battle, that sword disappeared. Two years later, it was rediscovered and given to his parents, CBS News reports. But then, in the course of time, it was lost again.

Turns out, it was sitting in an attic in Massachusetts’ North Shore, not far from Boston. Recently, descendants of Shaw’s sister were sorting through attic storage, when they came across a sword.

“Uh oh. There are three initial on it: RGS,” Mary Minturn Wood told her brother, as CBS News reports.

He replied: “Ohhh, this is the sword.”

The family has now handed this relic over to the Massachusetts Historical Society, along with family papers and letters, photographs, and other artifacts. The sword is the highlight of the collection: It is, says the society’s curator, is “a magnificent specimen of a sword… exactly what a colonel would carry in a war.”

Perhaps you've heard this one before: In the Victorian era, upper-crust society members were so cartoonishly prudish that it was considered proper to cover up the legs of tables or pianos, for fear of bare "legs" of any kind being too evocative.

In reality, this oft-repeated notion was probably just a joke that at some point managed to grow into something bigger. “Regarding Victorians covering furniture legs for the sake of purity: That's a myth… at least the ‘for the sake of purity part,’” says Therese Oneill, author of Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady’s Guide to Sex, Marriage and Manners.

As for the origins of this “common knowledge” historical myth, it seems to have come from a 1839 travelog by a writer and officer in the British Navy, Captain Frederick Marryat.

In his book A Diary in America, which recounts Marryat's experiences traveling through the young country, the naval officer appears to have invented the legend without even trying. The idea seems to have stemmed from an anecdote wherein a young woman Marryat was traveling with scraped her knee while visiting Niagara Falls. When Marryat asked if her “leg” was okay, she was apparently scandalized, replying that a gentleman only refers to “limbs” in the presence of a lady, and never "legs," even when talking about furniture.

Marryat goes on to explore this ludicrous concept by saying that he later visited a seminary where he saw a piano with legs covered by “modest little trousers with frills at the bottom of them.” The captain says that the coverings were there to maintain the “utmost purity of the young ladies.”

Despite being an ostensibly true, if colorfully embellished, account of his travels in America, these brushes with overblown modesty were probably more comical than canonical.

While it is true that during this era, some people covered parts of their furniture, they did so in an effort to keep their valuables from being damaged, not to hide the alleged sexuality of a dining table. “Victorians liked embellishment—cloth dye was the boldest and most adhesive it had ever been—so it wasn't unusual to see all manner of decorated cloth draped on furniture,” says Oneill. In Matthew Sweet’s Inventing the Victorians, the author refers to Marryat’s account as “credulous and antagonistic,” pointing out that the concept of covering furniture legs for modesty was actually a dig on the perceived stuck-up prudishness of Americans.

Even so, the idea so well illustrated the overblown modesty of the day that it managed to catch on incredibly quickly. In Charles Dickens’ mid-19th century novel Martin Chuzzlewit, first serialized starting in 1842, one of the characters experiences a version of Marryat’s tale when he utters the idiom “the naked eye,” shocking the American woman he is speaking with into silence. Notably, Dickens was a friend of Marryat’s.

The gag that stuck-up Americans were covering their furniture out of modesty was quickly adopted by the British media, appearing in newspaper stories and music hall songs, according to the writer Tony Perrottet. But over time, what started as a joke about Americans morphed into a broadly held belief about Victorians in general, maybe even especially the British. “The joke was on Americans, but somehow we twisted it around to apply to the English,” says Oneill.

By the mid-to-late 20th century, the myth had attained notoriety thanks to a general view of Victorians as uptight prudes. In Sweet’s book, he cites multiple instances of the idea of Victorians covering their table legs being referenced, including in the introduction to the Thomas Hardy classic Far From the Madding Crowd.

Even today, the idea still lingers. But as Oneill bluntly puts it, covering furniture has never had anything to do with being too sexy. “It wasn't to protect the decency of a nation when 80 percent of the population either shared a one-room house with their sexually active parents or worked on a farm where breeding and bodily functions where a fact of life.”

At 1992's Democratic National Convention, a Dominican priest showed up on a tricycle. Attached to the back was a confessional booth, with a sign that read "Portofess." The priest said he biked to New York, where the convention was held, all the way from California. The church, according to the priest, needed to take a "more aggressive stance and go where the sinners are." He was ready to take confession from any politician who wanted or needed it.

The Portofess made papers all over the country. But soon enough Reuters revealed that the Archdiocese in California had never heard of this priest, who called himself Father Anthony Joseph or, sometimes, Father William. All other efforts to find him after the convention failed, as well, because he wasn't a priest at all, but a character conceived by artist and activist Joey Skaggs, who has perfected the art of pranking the media.

Skaggs's works include "Fish Condos" for upwardly mobile guppies, "Santa's Missile Tow," which featured Santa and his elves bringing a missile to the United Nations, and many other sculptures and performances. He talked to Atlas Obscura about what it took to create the Portofess and what reactions he got from the police, protestors, and the public.

Back in the early 1990s, where did the idea for the Portofess originate?

Well, I’ll go back before the 1990s. If you look at my career, beginning in the early '60s, I was adamantly opposed to the war in Vietnam and the hypocrisy of the church. I was raised both from an Italian Roman-Catholic mother and a Southern Baptist father who met in New York. I was raised as a schizophrenic, from the Catholic side to the Baptist side and rejecting all of it. My work reflects not accepting doctrines I was brought up with.

If you’re going to make spectacles, you’re going to have to be mobile. The police will try to get you. But if you’re pedaling around, it’s easier to get to the site or many sites and to move on. The confessional booth fit into my criteria for a mobile spectacle. It was making commentary—I hoped it made commentary on everyone’s willingness to confess to Oprah or Geraldo or Sally Jesse Raphael. I had actors come up to confess and the public—once well- primed—the public lined up to confess. I couldn’t keep them out.

Did the actors actually confess?

They actually confessed! I of course had to bone up on confession and forgiving them. I bought a bunch of Catholic textbooks, so I could sound authentic. Someone actually confessed to murder, and I didn’t know what to do and what my responsibility was. I told the detective, and said, "What can we do?" He said, "Maybe he’s pulling your chain." That person was a total stranger. I told him, "Don’t do it again?"

What do you even do in that situation?

Just hope he doesn’t have a gun and doesn't come back when he finds out you’re a prankster!

How else did you prepare?

I was traveling in Italy and sketching confessionals there and in New York. The booth had to fit in and out of my studio on Waverly Place, near Washington Square Park. I had to get a tricycle that would hold it. I went to a tricycle company in Long Island and told him I need a bike that can hold 500 pounds, a platform, and rubber tires—I didn’t want to get a flat. They custom-made it. Then the problem was, where do I park it? None of the parking lots in New York wanted to take it.

I built the booth in Hawaii, where I have a house, and shipped it in my studio in New York! I had to bolt it all together in the streets in my priest outfit and then pedal it to the convention. Then I had to have people watch the booth or bring me drinks or be ready to pedal the tricycle away if I were arrested.

How did you come up with the name Portofess?

It’s like a Porta-Potty. But a confession. The name was obvious to me. The names I come up with—it’s like I could write headlines for the New York Post.

So then you biked up to the DNC.

There are thousands of journalists there, waiting for action. They’re hungry for something. I had a professional furniture maker spray the booth so it looked well finished. I had a fine craftsman working with me. It wasn’t a refrigerator box on the back of the tricycle. I had a beautiful full priest outfit—I was walking down Broadway, and saw a priest outside a church. I asked him, "Excuse me, Father, where do you get your threads?" He invited me in and showed me the catalog they used to order all their clothes. He said, do you want one? I've got extras here. I ordered the whole outfit from there.

Everything is in the detail. I’m very detail-oriented because that's what’s convincing. The sculpture looks beautifully well made. I had glasses on, and I just looked the part of a priest. Of course, I had friend who would come and step into the confessional booth and tell me dirty jokes. I had a tape-player playing Gregorian chants. I had a little flyer and hand out, saying “Religion on the move, for people on the go.” I had a little basket on my tricycle in the front and people—especially journalists—reached in to take that. I said I had pedaled all the way from California. The story and the visuals were too good. With Clinton running it was a juicy situation, to hear confessions of the politicians.

Some of the hoaxes take a lot of time, two years. Some have to be nurtured. Every one is different challenge, and I like that. I’m an artist; that’s what I do. This is my artwork. It’s not like I’m a joker. It’s written, produced, directed staged, acted, and photographed. It's a very complicated, complex process. It’s like doing a film or a theater piece without the stage.

What were some of your favorite reactions to the booth?

I was attacked by militant feminists who were pro-abortion, and they had bright yellow stickers that said, "I fuck to cum, not to conceive." They slapped one on me, and on the confessional booth. For the first time in my life, the police came to my rescue. I’ve been taken away by the police so many times. But now these good Catholic Italian and Irish cops were going to come to save the priest. I didn’t know where my enemies were coming from—would it be irate police, irate Catholics, irate pro-abortionists? It was a day of conflict, which is what I love. I know it’s working when you have all these controversies and conversations and debates happening all around, which is what happened.

Why was 1992 the right moment for this piece?

I could have done it anywhere. I could have pedaled down to Wall Street and heard the confessions of the brokers, or gone to Washington and parked in front of the White House. That would have been a great commentary, as well. What the confession booth represents is powerful, and I had many other sites I could have taken it to.

Taking it to the convention meant that all I had to do was show up. I didn't have to do any promo. The visual was so striking that all I had to do was appear. I always think about these things—do I need to put out a press release, do I need a brochure, do I need to put out an ad? What do I need to do to get attention for this? With the confessional booth I didn’t have to do anything, and I could pedal away.

Steve Powers from Fox News loved me, he considered me his good buddy. He had interviewed me many times. At the convention, Steve Powers comes running up to do a story. I thought—"Oh no, and I start to pedal away." I'm waiting of him to say, "Joey Skaggs, you son of the bitch, I got you." But the clothes made the man. He saw the priest, and that was the story. I was so shocked that he didn’t recognize me. You are not an individual person, you are a subject, and they suspend critical analysis for wishful thing: "This story is too good."

To watch it firsthand, to be the instrument of it, it’s bizarre to see how it works like that.

In the early 1930s, the British astrologer Gabriel Dee recorded a series for Pathé News in which she offered life advice to viewers based on their zodiac signs. Dee, who also read fortunes and discerned personality from a person's eyes, recommended professions for—and discussed the flaws of—members of each zodiac sign.

As the film above shows, she believed that Cancerians ought to become dairy farmers, milkmen, potters, glass blowers, zookeepers, dog breeders, or gardeners. But if none of those positions were available, they should definitely work in "fishy job[s]," especially ones that involved "bathing in every shape and form."

In other films, each devoted to an individual zodiac sign, Dee diagnosed Gemini as being the type to "use the phone volubly," and recommended they become clerical workers, airplane pilots, or train conductors because they are so high-strung. Libra is "essentially a marrying sign," according to Dee. "Very few persons born at this time of the year remain unwed and very often they marry for the second and even the third time." Virgos are great at weaving, but quite fussy. If you're a Virgo, you probably "plague people living around you by making them tidier than they want to be." Sagittarians? They love to travel, and are best equipped to work as financiers, horse breeders and racers, or members of "the woolen trade in all its branches.”

Unfortunately, the entire 1930s series is not archived, but if you were born between May 21 and December 22, and want some vintage astrological advice, you're in luck. Dee's tips for Gemini through Sagittarius are available at British Pathé's YouTube channel.

Video Wonders are audiovisual offerings that delight, inspire, and entertain. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.

Sloth love has triumphed. Earlier this week, Atlas Obscurapresented two arguments—one, that sloths are cute and adorable creatures, and two, that sloths are monstrous, disgusting beings—and asked readers to weigh in. The poll has now closed, and the results are clear. Just around 1 in 5 people who took our poll think that sloths are disgusting. Everyone else was head over heels for sloths.

In total, 3,348 people voted at the end of the article, and 2,751, or 82 percent, chose "cute," versus 597, or 18 percent, for "disgusting." This breakdown was essentially the same on Twitter, where we presented an abbreviated version of the debate.

Some commenters suggested that sloths could be considered both cute and disgusting, which we allow is a very valid opinion.

When we asked what swung people's votes, it became clear that the greatest point of contention was what we had called "the latrine thing." For some readers, it made the case for disgusting irrefutable. But for others, sloths' cuter attributes far outweighed their willingness to consume human fecal matter. ("Stop the sloth prejudice! Humans are grosser!" one voter wrote in.) Many readers correctly pointed out that dogs eat all kinds of poop, and we think they're adorable. Another argued, "Cuteness is based on appearance, not behavior."

Other arguments in favor of cute included:

• "They look like E.T."
• "The squawk sound!" (This was very popular argument.)
• "The algae thing is gross, but also resourceful. I respect that."
• "They are animals, and not teddy bears. Of course they are covered in goo."
• "One time I saw one in a onesie and almost died."

We won't claim this as a definitive result, but we're willing to call it. Sloths: no longer "imperfect monsters of creation ... remarkable in their disgusting appearance," as one 19th-century naturalist put it. Sloths are cute.

The seven deadly sins may seem familiar and, with that familiarity, less a matter of life and death and damnation. Sure, greed and envy aren't great, but who hasn’t overindulged in this or that without grievous consequences? But when the list of Christian cardinal sins was first created, they were a big deal: eight of the biggest threats to a devout life as a monk in the desert. Eight? One among those that isn’t included among the sins today, called acedia, was perhaps the greatest threat of all to those monks.

Acedia comes from Greek, and means "a lack of care." It sounds a little like today's sloth, and acedia is indeed considered a precursor to today's sin of laziness. To Christian monks in the fourth century, however, acedia was more than just laziness or apathy. It was more like dejection that made it difficult to be spiritual, avoiding ascetic practices, boredom that led to falling asleep while reading, and frustration with life in a monastery—but the meaning is nuanced and has changed over time. The evolution of the word's use shows just how much the concept of cardinal sin has shifted through the centuries.

To Evagrius of Pontius, acedia was the most noteworthy of the eight vices that he felt could tempt monks to abandon their religious lives. The Greek monk listed gluttony, fornication, avarice, sadness, anger, vainglory, pride, and acedia as threats to devout monasticism in Of the Eight Capital Sins, but argued that acedia was "the last of the sins to conquer." Overcoming the other seven didn't mean a monk was safe, but overcoming acedia, according to Evagrius, brought one closer to God.

Evagrius was a member of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, a group of devout Christian monks and hermits who lived in the Egyptian desert beginning in the third century. By the time Evagrius joined their ranks in the late 300s, there were several thousand monks living in organized communities. They spent their days fasting, working, and worshipping, often in isolation. When the sun and the heat peaked, life could be quite uncomfortable. So it makes sense that Evagrius dubbed acedia the "demon of noontide," a reference to Psalm 91. Siegfried Wenzel, in his bookThe Sin of Sloth: Acedia in Medieval Thought and Literature, wrote that "in the end acedia causes the monk to either give in to physical sleep, which proves unrefreshing or actually dangerous because it opens the door to many other temptations, or to leave his cell and eventually the religious life altogether." Acedia could be resisted, but only through endurance, prayer, and sometimes even crying.

John Cassian, a student of Evagrius's, translated the list of eight sins to Latin and his writings on the subject helped spread the concept of the cardinal sins beyond the Desert Fathers. But as soon as acedia left the desert, the demon of noontide started to become a whole different animal.

The first major edit of the original list happened in the 6th century, when Pope Gregory I shortened it to the seven deadly sins that track roughly what we're familiar with today. He lumped acedia in with another vice, tristitia, or sorrow. The two terms were often used interchangeably until sloth became a more common catch-all. At issue was whether acedia and tristitia were still just concerns for solitary monks, and how dangerous they really were for laypeople.

Even in the Middle Ages monks still struggled to define and clarify acedia. Peter Damiani, a Benedictine monk in the eleventh century, addressed the vice in some of his writings, where "acedia almost amounts to heaviness of the eyelids," wrote Wenzel. St. Rodulpus, according to Damiani, fought acedia by "tying ropes to the ceiling of his cell, putting his arms through, and singing the psalms." St. Bernard of Clairvaux agreed with Evagrius's definition of acedia (as, essentially, the temptation of midday siestas), while Adam of Perseigne felt acedia was an aversion to physical discomfort. Others likened it to a "spiritual loathing" or "inner emptiness."

Few of these interpretations of acedia made much sense outside the desert or the cloisters. Thomas Aquinas's definition of sloth in the thirteenth century still carries the connotations of acedia—a spiritual affliction—but it's clear by then that monks aren't the only ones affected. Sloth, he wrote, "is sadness about one's spiritual good." Geoffrey Chaucer defined "Accidie" as indolence and idleness. Modern interpretations of acedia liken it to depression or ennui, though some religious groups view acedia and depression as separate maladies. The evolution of the sin, from a matter of spiritual inadequacy to the laziness of sloth, reflects the complexity of the history of Christianity and our conception of what is dangerous to the mind and soul.

For the first time ever, a daredevil has used the Scottish spire known as the Old Man of Hoy, as an anchor for a high-wire stunt. And it’s none too late either, since it probably won’t be around forever.

The Old Man of Hoy is a 250-year-old sea stack standing just off the coast of the Orkney island of Hoy, in northern Scotland. The delicate sandstone formation is one of the tallest rock spires in Britain, at around 450 feet tall; climbing it and then balancing on a high wire from its summit isn’t for the faint of heart. According to The Guardian, German slackliner Alexander Schulz and his team went ahead and did it anyway.

After scaling the jagged rock obelisk, the team ran a line from the top of the Old Man to a point on the mainland. Schulz then carefully walked the length of the taut line, arms out for balance against the coastal winds and the distracting movement of the sea below.

"All the time you have to be concentrated, like 100%. And then you eventually make it, to continue standing, balancing. And taking steps," Schulz told the BBC.

Schulz's walk may be the first and last. As The Guardian notes, due to the powerful winds that buffet and erode the tower, geologists estimate that it will collapse in the near (geologic) future.

At an auto shop on U.S. 301 in Manatee County, Florida, someone noticed on Wednesday that a raccoon had made its way into a car that was there for repairs. So employees there called Devon Straight, from a local animal rescue organization.

It was "quite an interesting and challenging rescue," Straight told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. It was challenging not just because raccoons are wild animals and not to be taken lightly, but because the raccoon wasn't alone. "She climbed through the plastic cover over the window and had a baby in the backseat and in the trunk," Straight wrote on Facebook a few hours later. It also wasn't clear right away just how many cubs the raccoon had had. One was near its mother, but there was a second hiding in the trunk, in a puddle of water.

“Every one of us wanted to look in the trunk to see and we’re glad we did,” Straight said. “The little one would have perished back there.” He put the young family in a pet carrier, and released them in some nearby woods. The spooked mother initially ran off, but then apparently remembered her new charges and returned to collect them before disappearing again into the woods.

Happy Friday.

In 1936, between July and November, the forces of General Franco tracked down Spanish revolutionaries in northern Spain, brought them to a site outside of Burgos, executed and buried them. Teams of scientists are now working to excavate mass graves like these, and in this one, they found a rarity—45 preserved brains.

This particular mass grave was dug into “watertight clay soil with high acid content,” reports El País, and that year, the ground would have been cold and wet. The scientists believed the water flood the dead men’s skulls, keeping microbes out, and this combination of factors preserved the brains. Over time, the fatty tissue were saponified—turned into soap—and the brains shrunk, to about one-sixth of their original size. According to El País, they are now the size of about “half an apple.”

The scientists collected these preserved brains and is now keeping them in a refrigerated facility. This is now the “biggest and best preserved collection of saponified brains in the world,” reports El País. There are only about 100 cases of brains being preserved by natural causes, reports Reuters.

The team also found one preserved heart. The scientists are working to identify the men buried in this grave—104 in all—and give their families some measure of closure.

When Dr. Sigmund Rascher of the Schutzstaffel (SS), a paramilitary organization of Nazi Germany, started conducting his merciless medical experiments at the Dachau concentration camp using prisoners as guinea pigs, he sent for a prisoner, an artist, to document his work. His assistant Walter Neff, a former camp inmate himself, approached Georg Tauber, a Bavarian advertising illustrator. Lured by the prospect of a reduced prison term, Tauber took the offer in 1942. However, unable to stomach the barbarity on display, he showed up at these sessions not more than three times.

One day, he told Neff that he had had enough. As Tauber recalled later in a 1946 letter to the Munich Public Prosecution Office, "Neff said to me, ‘Don’t be so stupid, he can get you released in a few months and you’re free.' 'Walter,' I said, 'even if I have to stay here for another ten years, it’s alright. I can’t watch that again, I just can’t.’”

Today, almost 70 years after Tauber’s death from tuberculosis in 1950, his heartrending sketches and paintings of the medical experiments and the horrors of the camp have become the subject of an exhibition at the very site where he was held as an “asocial” prisoner between 1940 and 1945.

Dachau was the first concentration camp ever built by the Nazis, weeks after Adolf Hitler seized power in 1933. There were about 32,000 documented deaths, and thousands more undocumented, at this location. (Numbers here, and in the rest of this article, have been provided by the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site.) It set the template for others that followed.

Apart from the Jews, the Nazi regime also imprisoned those who did not fit its ideal of Volksgemeinschaft (people's community). In the eyes of the Nazis, this included those who repeatedly broke the law as well as members of the LGBTQ community. Another category of persecuted people was the “asocial prisoners.” These were mainly the homeless, drug addicts, people with mental illnesses, beggars, sex workers, as well as the Sinti and Roma.

Tauber fell into the latter category, the turbulent arc of his life mirroring the choppy trajectory of the early 20th century. As a 17-year-old, Tauber volunteered for military service in World War I. Two years later, as he lay injured in bed after a street fight in Berlin, he was given morphine as a pain reliever. This was the beginning of his addiction.

Over the following years, his life was interjected with brief stays in psychiatric hospitals, as well as prisons for minor theft charges, fraud, and forgery. In 1929, he joined the Nazi party but left it a year after Hitler got elected. That same year, in 1934, he separated from his wife, the mother of his twins, and began an itinerant lifestyle. Three years later, he was arrested by the Gestapo for a letter he wrote in which he threatened to murder Benito Mussolini. Then, in 1940, because of his morphine addiction, he found himself at Dachau amid 10,000 other asocial prisoners.

Engaging in any artistic activity was prohibited at Dachau, unless commissioned by the SS. And yet, poetry, music, and painting found their way out of these confines as acts of resistance, self-expression, and documentation. Art also worked as a form of currency in exchange for cigarettes or food.

Tauber initially found an ally in Rudi Felsner, who worked as an employee at an SS porcelain manufacturing company. Starting in 1941, Felsner discreetly provided Tauber with watercolors and other paints in exchange for Tauber’s drawings. The barter system was busted by the SS not long after; Felsner got conscripted as a soldier and was sent to the Eastern Front, while Tauber was detained in a bunker in 1944.

Tauber’s paintings vividly capture the brutality and inhumanity of the medical experiments conducted at Dachau. In one image, he depicts a hypothermia experiment, 300-400 of which were conducted at the Dachau concentration camp, killing about 90 people total. Subjects were made to endure freezing cold water until they reached life-threatening body temperatures. Meanwhile, doctors stood by and recorded physical changes.

“As they were then pulled out of the tank, with a pulley, dead or having collapsed, it needs to be kept in mind that the water in the tank was 8-10 degrees [Celsius] below zero. But that didn’t stop them from ridiculing the subjects,” Tauber wrote in the 1946 letter.

In another of his paintings, American soldiers are seen vaccinating and disinfecting former inmates after the camp was liberated.

Tauber recorded not only his own experiences, but those of his fellow prisoners. Through his renderings, a viewer sees what happens when humans plunge to the very depths of inhumanness: men march to their deaths as skeletons, they are stripped and crushed, corpses are stuffed in ovens when there is no wood.

For decades after his death, Tauber was forgotten. His art had been in the possession of Anton Hofer, another Dachau prisoner. Employees at Dachau, which is now a memorial site and museum, presume Tauber gave Hofer the artwork himself. It was about six years ago that Hofer’s granddaughters chanced upon the drawings in his estate and approached staff at the memorial site with their discovery.

“What was striking about Tauber’s work was that not only did it throw a light on asocial prisoners, of which very little is known, but also about life at the camp after the liberation led by American troops,” says Andrea Riedle, head of the research department at the Dachau memorial site, who curated the exhibition with her colleague Stefanie Pilzweger.

“After the liberation, Tauber and many other prisoners spent more than a month at the camp," says Riedle. "Due to terrible hygiene conditions and overcrowding, infectious diseases like typhus and spotted fever began to spread. The camp was quarantined. Tauber depicted this period in his work."

At the end of World War II, the asocial prisoners faced stigma. According to Riedle, they were denied the status of victims of the Nazi regime, and thus received no compensation. A few months after leaving the camp, together with fellow prisoner Karl Jochheim, Tauber cofounded “K.Z.-Arbeitsgemeinschaft ‘Die Vergessenen,’” an association that campaigned for these “forgotten” concentration camp victims.

While Tauber was inclined to make postcards of his drawings and sell them, other survivors dismissed the idea as unashamedly mercenary. One of them published an article in a newspaper condemning Tauber. Bringing perspective, Riedle says, “Even though he did want to make money, he also wanted to make the drawings public so the people could know about the Nazi crimes.”

During his lifetime, Tauber didn’t see his work being recognized or appreciated. What he did see was two of his pieces being used as evidence at the Dachau and Nuremberg trials. Today, Tauber’s art serves as yet another reminder of the extraordinary cruelty of the Nazi regime.

Fernando Abellanas, a plumber and designer based in Valencia, Spain, has created a secret study under a freeway bridge.

The project, whose exact location is not public, is meant to evoke the contradictions of city living. In his studio, Abellanas is at once intimately connected to the thousands of people driving across the bridge above him and also completely alone.

Abellanas has long possessed an artistic streak. As a kid, his love for painting morphed into a fascination with furniture design. Since the age of 23, he has worked as a plumber, but the creativity still burns: he has catapulted himself into numerous do-it-yourself projects, including the specially designed studio.

The studio is sparse: only a desk, a chair, a lamp, a blanket, and a shelf lined with photos are visible. In the video, Abellanas reads a book as a train goes by.

Nestled into the underside of the bridge, the floor of the study moves via hand-crank, transporting Abellanas from one end of the bridge to another. Memories of childhood crawl spaces—like hiding under the kitchen table—inspired the design.

Video Wonders are audiovisual offerings that delight, inspire, and entertain. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.

On Saturday, July 15, at a music festival in Joensuu, Finland, about 230 miles northeast of Helsinki, a bunch of people, naked save for matching green swim caps, walked into a lake.

Organizers of the mass skinny dip had hoped for 1,000 participants—a nice, round number that would look great in headlines and record books—but in the end counted only 789. That is still good enough, they said, to set a new world record for the largest collective act of swimming while naked. But not by much. If confirmed by Guinness World Records, the dip will have surpassed a 2015 mass skinny dip in Australia by just three people.

Warning: The following video, as you might've guessed, contains some nudity and may not be suitable for viewing at work.

Two prior attempts in Finland to break the record fell far short, and cloudy weather made setting the record this time far from certain. But, as Finnish national broadcaster YLE reported, organizers got a lucky break.

"Even though the festival was sold out on Saturday, shortly before the mass dip in the cold water was scheduled, things didn't look good. Just a few hundred people were starting to undress," the broadcaster reported. "But then fate intervened: the sun came out and encouraged more of the crowd to strip."

Once in, the proud bathers spontaneously broke out in a rendition of the Finnish national anthem.

"Oh our land, Finland, land of our birth, rings out the golden word!"

Less than 100 miles from Havana, the Zapata Swamp is the last redoubt of the critically endangered Cuban crocodile. About 3,000 individuals live in the wild, confined to about 300 square miles in the Zapata Swamp and the nearby Isle of Youth. But at the beginning of June, that population grew by 10, thanks to a reintroduction from a Cuban breeding facility.

This is the second release of captive-bred crocodiles—100 were released in early 2016 from the same facility. Their new home is a region of the swamp set aside as a wildlife refuge, where, critically, there are no American crocodiles to be found. The two greatest threats to the Cuban crocodile are hunting and hybridization with their American cousins. While American crocodiles prefer salt water and Cubans freshwater, development and shrinking habitat are forcing the two species to interact and hybridize. Too much hybridization and the less numerous Cuban crocodile would cease to exist as an independent species.

The captive breeding population in Cuba does have a few hybrid individuals, but a genetically pure population at the Bronx Zoo in New York offers conservation groups a backup plan, should their genes be needed.

NASA’s rover Curiosity is still alive and well in the Gale Crater, just south of Mars’ equator. Meanwhile, on Earth, the team of scientists who designed the robot’s weather station, known as the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS), have decided to become the world’s first Martian weathermen.

Jorge Pla-García, the group’s meteorologist, likes the term. “When we send a human to Mars, we could include a section in the news,” he says.

Pla-García works at the Spanish National Center of Astrobiology, which is associated with NASA. Now, along with other two researchers, he has decided to publish a periodical weather report in layman terms. The other two weathermen are Antonio Molina, who inputs geological data, and Javier Gómez Elvira, who processes the data for mainstream consumption.

To make the weather report more appealing to the general public, the team has made a point of including comparisons with Earthly weather phenomena. In their first report, released on March 15, they compared the Gale Crater winds with the Chinook air streams in the Rocky Mountains of North America. Their second report, released on July 11, discusses the strong whirlwinds known as Dust Devils.

“We do it because it’s the public’s right,” says Pla-García. “They fund us with their taxes, so they deserve to know what their money is being spent on!”

In their second report, the team highlights the start of summer in the Gale Crater. It’s also the end of the dusty season in the Martian southern hemisphere. During the spring, solar radiation warmed the air closer to the ground and lifted the particles, but now it’s “crystal clear time,” says Pla-García.

This month, as in the one before, atmospheric pressure is on its way down. It’s a typical feature of the Red Planet’s summertime, as the atmosphere’s main gas, carbon dioxide, progressively freezes over the Southern Polar Cap.As usual, Martian temperatures have stayed under 0ºC for the whole month, and they shouldn’t be expected to get higher any time soon.

The Red Planet is colder than people think. A few years ago, NASA reported temperatures up to 30ºC (86 ºF) at the planet’s equator. However, according to the REMS team, that was an instrumental error the American agency hasn’t corrected. “It was taken by an engineering thermometer used to control a camera,” says Pla-García. “It wasn’t in contact with the environment. The actual maximum we’ve ever registered is 3ºC (37.4 ºF), and 99 percent of the time, it’s below 0ºC.”

The process of compiling the Martian weather report starts with the data the team downloads from REMS’ sensors. It’s data anyone can access through an app (available on Google Play and Apple App Store), but that doesn’t make the reports useless. With the app, you can see the conditions on the Gale Crater. With the reports, though, you get to understand Martian weather more broadly.

“We can get a lot of information from REMS, but that doesn’t really tell us the whole story,” says Pla-García. “We need a network of stations. That’s our problem, and that’s why we insist NASA to send more sensors to other areas of the planet. We need the context.”

To cover for the lack of stations, they use a computer model designed by American professor Scot Rafkin, who is the Assistant Director of the Planetary Atmospheres and Surfaces Department of Space Studies at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. The team simulates what’s going on in and around the Gale Crater. They compare the model and REMS’ real information to make sure the model is accurate. And it is, so they assume it’s also right for the context.

“Hey! I’m here to get the dildo!” shouts Pla-García merrily, as he enters one of the engineering labs. The device (which is indeed quite phallic) is a replica the team used to test-drive REMS before the real one went roaming on Mars. It measures UV radiation, pressure and wind speed. The one in Mars also has sensors to collect ground and air temperatures.

The 12 members on Jorge’s team take turns to keep watch, making sure the device’s abilities are squeezed to the maximum before it inevitably dies off. Pla-García says it gives him goosebumps to think he’s operating a device in another planet, but that collecting data is the hardest, most daunting part of his job.

“We used to be on watch on Martian time,” says Pla-García. “And a Martian day is 24 hours and 39 minutes long, so our work schedule was different every day. That included weekends, New Year’s Eve, Thanksgiving, you name it.”

Fortunately for them, they’re now on a more steady Pacific Time schedule.

While Jorge leaves the military base where the Center is located, he explains the point of it all. His team is trying to answer the million-dollar questions: How did life on Earth begin, and is there life out there? And he’s excited about the future.

The weather conditions in Mars are so inhospitable that the team, which has a lab devoted to researching extremophiles—organisms that thrive in extreme environments—is skeptical about finding any signs of life on its surface. Solar radiation and perchlorate compounds don’t even allow for fossils, if there was any to be found.

But underground the conditions are better. The next European Space Agency rover, ExoMars 2020 is expected to incorporate a two-meter-deep drill. “I pray every day so it gets there soon and everything works well,” says Pla-Garcia. “We may have some big news then.”

Down in the depths of the Gulf of Mexico, there are cold seeps, deep on the ocean floor, that are home to various kinds of tube worms. (A tube worm, for what it’s worth, is fairly a broad category—a wormy invertebrate that anchors itself someplace underwater and builds a nice, mineral tube for itself.)

A couple of these tube worms, namely Lamellibrachia luymesi and Seepiophila jonesi, have long life spans, much longer than creatures of their size are supposed to have. But there’s a third species of tube worm in the area about which little is known, Escarpia laminata, first identified in 1985. A team of scientists decided to learn more about this mysterious tube worm and wondered if it also lived an unusually long time.

What they found, as they report in The Science of Nature, is that Escapardia laminata can grow even older than its counterparts—some individuals might even reach 300 years old. In other words, a tube worm that’s alive right now is likely going to outlive all of us.

The team came to this conclusion by studying 356 tube worms and measuring how much they grew. With that data, as well as observations about the death and birth rates of the species, they used an age-prediction model developed for other tube worms to estimate just how long these tube worms could be around. Generally, they found these tube worms could live 100 to 200 years, but the largest of them could live 300 years.

Escapardia laminata lives so long partially because they live in such a safe place. It’s relatively rare for a tube worm living deep in the Gulf of Mexico, at least three-fifths of a mile or so down, to encounter a threat that kills them. So why not just keep living? The evidence in this new study, its authors say, supports that theory that, in absence of threats and high rates of death, evolution selects for the members of the species who live the longest. Eventually you get 300 year old tube worms.

Tube worms are not the longest lived creatures in the sea, though. The marine clam Arctica islandica is thought to be able to live more than 500 years. The longest animal, in length, is also thought to be a sea creature—the bootlace worm, which is grossly long. Oceans! There’s a lot of weird stuff that happens there.

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

For centuries, the average home had windows, but not necessarily glass covering those windows—in part, because glass was really expensive at first, and the flat pane variety that we’re used to didn’t even exist.

But as glass evolved as part of the 20th-century home, it suddenly became important to keep those panes of glass clean. And that meant there was an opportunity for the Philip W. Drackett Company to come about and make it easy.

That manufacturer’s product? Windex, of course, which was invented in 1933 and, 69 years later, famously called a wonder drug in My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

“My dad believed in two things: That Greeks should educate non Greeks about being Greek and every ailment from psoriasis to poison ivy can be cured with Windex,” Nia Vardalos’ character says in the movie. People these days, meanwhile, have taken to "drinking" it for YouTube views, highlighting that, somewhere along the way, Windex became something more than simply a way to keep our windows clean. (For the record, we don’t recommend using Windex as a treatment for anything, other than dirty windows.)

It was the Drackett Company that started it all, in a time when new consumer chemicals were being rolled out at a rapid pace. Indeed, the 1933 invention of Windex wasn’t even the first major innovation to come from Drackett—that was Drano, the powdery lye-and-aluminum-and-dyed-salt solution that came about in the early 1920s. That once-a-week drain concoction was invented by Philip and his son, Harry. (The elder Drackett died just a few years later, in 1927.)

The company succeeded in consumer products after expanding from its roots as a maker of industrial chemicals. That can be a tough jump to make, but the company was able to pull it off in no small part thanks to smart marketing—formulated by Sally Drackett, Philip’s wife, who came up with the name and the symbol over the ā, to ensure proper pronunciation.

A decade after finding its footing in the consumer market, Harry followed up by coming up with household window cleaner—something that proved a winner for the company. Like his dad, Harry looked at consumer trends of the era: Like indoor plumbing’s growth immediately after World War I, windows were having a moment in the Great Depression era. Cars used them, obviously, and they were becoming a common part of homes.

But it was not necessarily a good moment for a new window cleaner—at least on the surface.

“[T]he timing seemingly could not have been worse,” Cincinnati Post reporter Barry M. Horseman wrote in 1999. “It was the depth of the Depression, when clean windows were the least of many American families' concerns. This was a marketing nightmare compounded by having to compete not just with other similar products but with ‘free’ water.”

Still, Windex, quickly found a place for its product in homes, after first being marketed to car owners, eventually becoming an arguably bigger hit than Drano, which is saying a lot.

Part of Windex's surge in popularity, in fact, might have been, in its packaging, since another innovation Drackett deserves credit for is popularizing a container type for not-safe-to-drink chemical, one which you'd recognize: the plastic spray bottle.

The weird thing about Drackett was that Windex and Drano were not the only things going on with the company at the time. The firm had a relationship with Henry Ford, who was fascinated by the manufacturing potential of soybeans.

Ford worked closely with George Washington Carver on this endeavor, with the duo hoping to use their smarts in agriculture and manufacturing (along with Ford’s massive soy fields) to help create items that would eventually forge new industries by killing two birds with one soybean.

Most notably, this led to the creation of the “Soybean car,” a device that was made almost entirely with naturally-occurring plastics derived from soy, hemp, and other versatile plants. It was a weird idea.

The car turned out to be a bit of a bust, but their experimenting did help Drackett move into plastics, and, eventually, the spray bottle.

Over the years, Drackett sold its sprayers in a variety of styles, including a metal nozzle that you press down on. One early plastic model was reminiscent of the sprayers on bottles of the modern sore throat medicine Chloraseptic. Early on—out of a mixture of necessity due to the fragile nature of early plastics, and to encourage re-use—the company even sold Windex sprayers separately, rather than including them with the solution.

During this same period, Drackett had built a reputation for experimenting with soy-based plastics, which likely helped inspire much of the company’s work on its spray bottle designs, even if much of that soy-based plastic never actually made it to market.

But, eventually, Drackett moved away from soybeans entirely, in part because the sector was pushing them toward food production rather than industrial uses. (Nearby Worthington, Ohio, noted for its influence on meat analogues, was among those that pushed Drackett to use their formidable soy resources for making veggie food.) But the move toward plastics in general stuck—with the company continuing to improve its spray-bottle designs.

Drackett was eventually bought out by larger companies, and its brands are now a part of S. C. Johnson & Son. But the efforts the company put into spray bottles drove the cleaning industry forward, and presaged a solution for cleaning supplies that proved especially effective: The gun-style trigger sprayer, an invention of Japan’s Tetsuya Tada in the late 1950s, which quickly took over the cleaning supplies aisle of the grocery store. Windex headed in that general direction, itself, moving toward its now-standard design by the ‘70s.

Tada, who died in 2015, was heartfelt about the effect that his engineering work had on the broader world.

“I firmly believe that all of this is making a humble but significant contribution to the current protection of the ozone layer, which is so essential to all life on our planet including, of course, mankind,” Tara wrote on the website for his company, Canyon Corporation.

It’s a quiet innovation—certainly, we don’t talk about it much—but it probably did in fact change the world for the better.

Of course, Windex isn’t the only window-cleaning device that cleans up our view of the outside world.

The squeegee has, in one form or another, existed for a couple hundred years—but not necessarily for glass. At first, in fact, it had something of a nautical association. One of the earliest literary references, in fact, comes from an icon of the sea: Author Herman Melville.

“Finally, a grand flooding takes place, and the decks are remorselessly thrashed with dry swabs, after which an extraordinary implement—a sort of leathern hoe called a ‘squilgee’ is used to scrape and squeeze the last dribblings of water from the planks,“ Melville wrote in 1850’s White-jacket: or, The world in a man-of-war, a novel published just a year before his 1851 masterwork Moby Dick. "Concerning this ‘squilgee,’ I think something of drawing up a memoir, and reading it before the Academy of Arts and Sciences. It is a most curious affair.”

(In case you’re wondering why he said "squilgee” instead of “squeegee,” World Wide Words notes that the word competed with “squeegee” for decades as the one most commonly used, although “squeegee” was first. Much as in Melville’s reference, it was initially used in a nautical context.)

Slowly but surely, however, the squeegee became most commonly associated with glass in two specific ways: With window-washers on vehicles, and with the large, flat rubberized cleaners used on windows, especially for high rises.

The modern form of the device came about in 1936, when Italian immigrant Ettore Steccone filed a patent for a single-blade squeegee, a device that improved upon professional window-washing tools significantly.

“The main object of the present invention is to provide a Squeegee that is operative to remove liquids and dirt efficiently, within a wide range of angles and a wide range of pressures,” the patent filing stated.

Ettore, a company founded by Steccone and still active to this day, is held up as the gold standard of squeegee-based window washing.

Window cleaning is kind of a dull job, even with tools like Windex and squeegees to simplify things. And even if you work on a skyscraper—inside or out.

But sometimes, the basic window cleaning tools represent more than that. Sometimes, window cleaning can even save the day.

A fairly dramatic example of this is the squeegee that helped a group of six men get out of an elevator at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Jan Demczur and five other men were stuck in an elevator that had stalled at the 50th floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower. They were able to pry the elevator doors open, but as they were on an express elevator, there was no entrance on the other side—they would have to make one.

They had no proper tool to help with this, but Demczur had a squeegee. For an hour and a half, the men used its brass handle to cut through the wall, making it out of the elevator with only minutes to spare.

The handle is now in the 9/11 collection at the National Museum of American History, and Demczur later appeared on the cover of American Window Cleaner magazine, with Demczur portrayed in a superhero costume.

On a dark day, it was a shining moment for a fundamental tool—even if, in that moment, there were no windows to be seen.

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

In May 2016, a young couple took a spin around Los Angeles in a very unusual mode of transportation: a motorized papasan chair. The two can definitely boast one of the more creative repurposings of this dorm-room go-to, which, when not otherwise transformed into garden planters, solar cookers, or pedicabs, ends up in so many garage sales, Craigslist ads, or dusty corners as the domain of domestic cats.

But how did this cushioned recliner, rounded from rattan and angled atop a matching cylindrical base, find its way into our homes in the first place?

Type papasan.com in your address bar and your browser will redirect you to the website of Pier 1 Imports. The papasan, sometimes called a bowl chair or moon chair, has long been synonymous with the exotic furniture retailer, which sells hundreds of thousands of them each year at its more than 1,000 locations. And the company’s history offers up some clues to the rise of this first-apartment fixture.

According to the International Directory of Company Histories, furniture salesman William Amthor started liquidating extra rattan furniture he had in 1958 at a warehouse—Cost Plus, which grew into Pier 1’s main rival, World Market—along Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. Inspired by the business, Charles Tandy and Luther Henderson of the Tandy Corporation, later RadioShack, gave Amthor a loan to open a retail shop under the name Cost Plus in 1962 in neighboring San Mateo. By 1966, their operation was renamed Pier 1, importing inexpensive goods from around the world, especially Asia, and marking them up. The resale cost, however, was still cheaper than other American and European furniture at the time, attracting budget-conscious baby boomers looking to furnish their first homes with the hippie chic of “beanbag chairs, love beads, and incense,” as the Pier 1 website tells it.

While Pier 1’s wares may have originally had a countercultural appeal, its signature papasan chair appears to owe its debut to the object of so much countercultural protest: the Vietnam War. Talking to Julie Moran Alterio in N.Y.’s Journal News in 2002, former Pier 1 CEO Martin Girouard said he introduced the papasan shortly after he joined the company in 1975, having noticed a smaller version of the chair when serving in Vietnam. Misty Otto, a former public relations manager for the company, echoed Girouard. Speaking with Georgetown professor Jordan Sand for his 2013 article, “Tropical Furniture and Bodily Comportment in Colonial Asia,” she indicated, as Sand puts it, that “papasan chairs became popular in the United States after American G.I.s sent to Vietnam found them in Thailand and shipped them home,” a practice other vets have noted online. However, Martin Bureau, a Canadian regional manager for Pier 1, mentioned in 2008 that the company has stocked the chair since 1962, just before the U.S. began escalating troop numbers in Vietnam but over a decade before Girouard claimed its introduction.

Despite its own inconsistent claims, Pier 1 may well have begun selling the papasan in 1962—but its popularity, owing to a Girouard push and G.I.’s greater familiarity with the chair, took off in the mid-1970s.

Some of the earliest evidence for the term papasan chair indeed points to the Vietnam War era, though not quite in Thailand. A 1977 edition of the MAC Flyer, issued by the Military Airlift Command Safety Office, features an installment of Major C.R. Terror, a fictional pilot and his misfit crew whose antics were meant as cautionary, if comic, tales. At a loss for what to get his wife for Christmas, C.R. says: “She’s got that wombat skin coat I brought her back from Athens, the Honda Gold Wing from Tokyo, candlesticks from Bangkok, a giant brass table from Iran, two camel saddles from Turkey, a pair of elephants from Saigon, and a papasan chair from Clark.” (His copilot replies: “Sounds like her apartment must be decorated in ‘contemporary military.’”)

Clark ostensibly refers to the Clark Air Base in Central Luzon, Philippines, now the Clark Freeport Zone. The U.S. has long had a presence in the country, from occupying it after the Spanish-American War to liberating it from Japan in World War II. And during the Vietnam War, Clark Air Base served as a strategic hub for the U.S. Air Force.

Three years before C.R.’s Christmas dilemma, the Central Luzon Regional Agricultural, Commercial, and Industrial Fair published an advertisement for a papasan chair in its 1974 English-language yearbook, suggesting both the item and term were already familiar in the region. But papasan is not a word native to the Philippines. It is a Japanese term for a father or male elder. (Papa is an earlier borrowing from English, while san is an honorific suffix.) U.S. soldiers picked up papasan and mamasan during World War II and spread them throughout the Asia Pacific. Mamasan soon became slang for a madam of a brothel and, come the Vietnam War, papasan was referring to a pimp.

Did American GIs first encounter the luxurious chair amid some of the notorious red-light R & R during the Vietnam War and so dub it the papasan? Professor Sand speculates that the term, as well as the seat’s commodious size and playful form, may well “evoke the sensibilities of a culture of sexual license (and licensed sex), one of the legacies of the free-spending and fraternizing behavior of the military men who were the instruments of U.S. empire in Asia.”

As for the chair itself, its origins in Asia-Pacific culture may be more innocent. South of Luzon is Mindanao, the third major island of the Philippines. There, a woman named Antonette, now living in Dublin, Ireland, remembers the papasan chair—a term she only knew in her native Bisaya as ratan and a chair she didn’t realize existed outside her homeland—as a very typical item in the Filipino homes of her late ‘70s, early ‘80s childhood. Her family had a cushioned one, whose sturdy frame was passed down from her grandfather. “It was in the corner of the veranda. My sisters and I would always fight over who got to sit in it because it’s very relaxing.”

East Asian cultures are not historically chair-sitting, with rattan-based chairs—cool and comfortable in tropical climes, as Antonette noted—becoming especially popular, and increasingly ornate, among Western colonists in the 19th century. Artisans may have specially crafted rattan seating to appeal to Western lifestyles, but Western lifestyles, in turn, variously compelled some East Asian peoples to switch from floor to chair. And at some point in the 20th century, a simple prototype of the papasan—featuring its distinctive ring but much smaller, un-cushioned, and attached to legs—emerges in local rattan vernacular throughout the Asia Pacific.

Jordan Sand says over Skype he came across such a potential precursor to the papasan on a trip to Thailand, perhaps like the smaller version Girouard introduced to Pier 1. And over a Facebook chat, a Malaysian woman, Linda P., recalls a papasan-like chair growing up in her native Malacca. The term papasan was new to her, but she recognized its form in the kerusi rotan bulat, literally “round cane chair.” She, along with some fellow Malaysians online, notes that it was a trend in the 1970s to shoot studio portraits of children in these smaller chairs, adding that her mother recalls families ordering them from local rattan furniture shops in the 1960s.

Which is when it seems the papasan indeed came of age: Its basket broadened, welcomed a billowy pillow, and shed legs for a stand. Sand, for one, suspects an enterprising veteran remembered or brought back a basic prototype in the 1960s, expanded it for the American consumer, and marketed it as the exotic-sounding papasan, perhaps with a wartime allusion to its “big daddy” size. Exactly where, when, and by whom the papasan chair first took its modern shape is unclear, but Pier 1 picked it up and popularized it in the U.S., helped along by the 1970s taste in experimental and bohemian design as well as growing financial and environmental pressures to avoid more expensive, consumptive plastics during the oil crisis.

By the late 1970s and 1980s, the papasan had become familiar enough in American family rooms and classified ads (Merriam-Websterfinds one in the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 1979). And it endured over the following decades as a fun, affordable, durable, and yet, for all of its remarkable shape, everyday piece of furniture—not so different, despite all the colonialism, conflict, and commercialism in between, from the same chair thousands of miles away in the mountains of Mindanao.

“It was just normal. It lasts long. It’s cheap and people there can afford it,” Antonette says. “It’s funny now looking back, how much we enjoyed it and yet how we didn’t really appreciate it. Now, it’s really nice to remember.”