The Yeovil Show is an annual fair in southwest England that, if you're American, is a whole lot like one of the county fairs that happen every year across the United States. There are sheep, and dog agility contests, and a hot air balloon, and food, lots of food. There are also food competitions, such as those that honor the best cheddars—Yeovil is just an hour from the village of Cheddar.
This year's competition, which took place this past weekend, saw a lot of cheeses win prizes; the cheddars are judged based on age, since the longer cheddar ages, the sharper it is. But only one took home best-in-show, a vintage cheddar made by Wyke Farms. It was promptly stolen on Saturday night, along with another winning Wyke cheddar.
“They left all the other cheeses and just took ours,” the Wyke cheesemaker Rich Clothier told The Guardian. “It’s disappointing ... It took around a year-and-a-half to make those cheeses. They are among the best we have ever produced.”
The cheeses are said to be worth around £800, or about $1,000, and the theft would have been been no mean task. Clothier compared it to carrying a "bag of sand," owing to their size and weight.
Do you know where the cheeses are? You should speak up. Clothier is offering a £500 reward for information leading to their safe return. The third-generation cheesemaker misses his prize-winning bricks.
“These cheeses could be considered masterpieces," Clothier told The Guardian. "It’s a bit like having a valuable painting stolen."
On Monday, Steve, a bumbling robot rent-a-cop made headlines when he accidentally drowned himself in a fountain, to the delight of internet citizens. Now, Steve's got his own memorial, located, appropriately, on his former charging pad.
This is the memorial for Steve the drowned security robot outside our office on his charging pad. The future is weird. pic.twitter.com/Pb7KLay1VO
Steve resided at the Washington Harbour office complex in Washington D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood, where the charging station has been nearly covered in flowers, kleenex, and images from the robot’s brief career. The automated sentry, a five-foot-tall, rolling cone formally known as a Knightscope K5, was just a few days old and was still learning its patrol route when it accidentally drove into a nearby fountain.
A replacement for Steve is to arrive in a few weeks, a company official told The New York Times, at which point the internet will (probably) have moved on. His life was all too brief.
Disneyland operates every day of the year, from 8:00 a.m. until midnight. The almost-always open gates are a point of pride for the theme park. It took a presidential assassination to force the park to close early for the first time in history in 1963. But the second instance was a bit more head-scratching. On August 6, 1970, Disneyland abruptly shut down about five hours early. Around 30,000 visitors were kicked out of the park, and it wasn’t due to a national crisis. The motivating factor was a group of about 300 young “Yippies,” who entered the park with grand plans of capturing Tom Sawyer Island, liberating Minnie Mouse, and cooking Porky Pig.
Yippies were not quite hippies, but definitely not yuppies, either. The nickname referred to members of the Youth International Party, a political organization started by Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman in 1967. Rubin was a graduate student turned activist who had unsuccessfully run for mayor of Berkeley on a radical left platform. Hoffman was a psychologist turned activist who was involved with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Their Yippies were anti-war, anti-capitalism, and anti-establishment. They were known for their theatrical stunts, which generated tons of media coverage. There was the incident at the New York Stock Exchange, when Hoffman and roughly a dozen followers marched into the visitors’ gallery and began throwing dollar bills onto the trading floor. There was also the time they nominated Pigasus, a 145-pound pig, for president at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. In many ways, a splashy demonstration at the number one destination for wholesome family fun made perfect sense for the Yippies. Except the Disneyland invasion didn’t exactly go according to plan.
The date the Yippies chose for their demonstration was significant: August 6, 1970 marked the 25th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. The activists planned to use their time protesting the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Why specifically did they chose Disneyland for this? It was the perfect location for several reasons. For one, the Yippies took issue with a major park sponsor. Bank of America was doubly offensive to the Yippies—it wasn't just a big, obvious symbol of capitalism but also, in their minds, a virtual sponsor of the Vietnam War. According to David Koenig’s Mouse Tales: A Behind-the-Ears Look at Disneyland, the protest organizers singled out Bank of America in a press release for “financ[ing] war machines.” This was a somewhat popular belief among radicals. In March of 1970, the underground newspaper The Berkeley Tribe ran an “Open Letter From the Revolutionary Movement to the Bank of America.” It accused the corporation of “raping the underdeveloped world” through affiliations with the defense contractors Litton Industries and McDonnell Douglas. The letter was itself a response to the criticism young radicals received after a group of students burned down a Bank of America branch in Isla Vista.
But the Yippies also had a contentious history with the park. At the time, Disneyland had recently relaxed its policy toward long-haired guests. The park maintained a strict dress code for employees that barred men from sporting mustaches, beards, or long hair. Unofficially, it applied similar standards to visitors. That’s why shaggy-haired Roger McGuinn, the founder of rock band The Byrds, was turned away in 1964. But the staff was now welcoming long-haired types into Disneyland. The opportunity was, presumably, too good to pass up.
(On a more basic level, the Yippies delighted in debasing Disney iconography. Just consider the infamous cartoon “Disneyland Memorial Orgy,” which depicts Tinkerbell stripping for Pinocchio and Peter Pan. It was commissioned by prominent Yippie and The Realist editor Paul Krassner.)
In the lead-up to the so-called “International Pow Wow Day,” organizers mounted an impressive publicity campaign. The Yippies distributed stacks of flyers and got several different iterations printed in underground newspapers. One such flyer, which appeared in the The Berkeley Tribe in late July, featured Mickey Mouse waving a top hat and a machine gun. But the most oft-quoted flyer listed a schedule of outlandish “events” for participating Yippies. As Koenig recounts, it included a “Black Panther Hot Breakfast” at 9 a.m. at Aunt Jemima’s Pancake House, a women’s liberation “rally to liberate Minnie Mouse in front of Fantasyland” at noon, a “mid-day feast” barbecue of Porky Pig (who is not even a Disney character), and a late afternoon infiltration of Tom Sawyer Island. “Declaring a free state, brothers and sisters will then have a smoke-in and festival,” the flyer read. “Get it over on Disneyland, August 6. YIPPIE!”
The police soon caught wind of this coming attraction. They took the yippie threat, in hindsight, far too seriously. Since the Yippies were talking a big game—the Berkeley Tribe flyer speculated that “up to 100,000 dope-crazed, bizarro Yippies and Yippie-symps” would descend on Disneyland that day—the local police made contingency plans with the park officials for several thousand disruptive guests. The Disneyland staff would keep an eye out for troublemakers; a few managers would even walk the park undercover. A large police presence would stand just outside the park, not entering unless called upon.
When August 6 arrived, it wasn’t the debilitating scene everyone expected. A few hundred Yippies filtered in throughout the day, but they were barely organized and, for a while, totally harmless. No Black Panthers showed up for shortstacks. Minnie Mouse remained firmly in the patriarchy’s clutches. But at some point, the scattered group began experimenting. They cursed and chanted, “Ho-ho Ho Chi Minh, Ho Chi Minh is gonna win!” They also smoked a lot of pot. Then, they finally attempted to check an item off their “schedule”: the infiltration of Tom Sawyer Island.
After disembarking from the rafts to the island, the Yippies claimed the space for their own. Their Viet Cong flag came out, as did the blunts and calls to “free Charlie Manson,” by Koenig’s account. Park security frantically halted rafts to the island, trying to shield tourists from the Yippie menace. But they still didn’t call in the police. Not until the Yippies decided to march down Main Street, straight towards Bank of America.
The Yippies returned to Main Street with a new boldness. They tore bunting off the fake City Hall, raised their “marijuana flag,” and started getting confrontational. Eventually, fights broke out between the Yippies and less-radical tourists, which is when the riot police stormed in. OC Weeklyputs their numbers at over 100, and those were just the cops who entered the park. There were another 300 waiting just outside to greet the fleeing Yippies. Once the police had broken up the fights, Disneyland officials closed the park early, sending all visitors home. After they were ushered past the gates, a rogue group of Yippies attempted to keep the protest going by taking over the Disneyland Hotel, to no avail. None of them were seriously injured, but 23 were arrested on charges ranging from disturbing the peace to drug possession.
The International Pow Wow Day received ample media attention. But like so many other Yippie events, it did not have a measurable impact on their target. Disneyland’s offending sponsors stayed put and families continued pouring in. (Charles Manson also remained in jail.) But the Yippies' bizarre stand that day did provide an amusing chapter in Disney lore—even if they never did cook Porky Pig.
It was a Sunday evening in February when residents of three counties in Northern California were ordered to evacuate their homes in the Feather River Basin. After heavy rainstorms doused the region, the Oroville Reservoir was at capacity, and excess water was sent out over the primary spillway and down the Feather River. Soon, dam operators with the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) noticed a crater had formed in the spillway. The Oroville Dam, the tallest in the United States at 770 feet, was stable, but the spillway was an important part of the reservoir’s flood control system. Soon, the bottom half of the concrete chute had crumbled, sending debris into the river and forcing the DWR to use another, emergency spillway for the first time. But the massive flows eroded that earthen path as well. If the erosion had continued and undermined the concrete lip of the spillway, a massive flood would have swept down the river into the valley below—a 30-foot wave of destruction.
So 188,000 people evacuated the valley. Fortunately, the hillside and spillways held, and towns such as Oroville and Thermalito were spared. Now DWR is fast-tracking repairs to the new spillway so at least two-thirds of it will be complete by November 2017, when the winter storm season starts. But officials want to make sure they get it right, so they've turned to scientists for help. A Utah State University team was called in—and proceeded to build a massive model of the spillway, 1/50 the size of the original.
The Utah Water Research Laboratory at Utah State University has been building models like this since 1965. "Over the years, we've built dozens and dozens of scale models of dams and their associated spillways," says Michael Johnson, one of the chief engineers there. Sometimes those scale models are replicas of intact dams, and sometimes they’re designed to replicate a failure, such as the one at Oroville. "Sometimes we get called in before a structure's built, which is the ideal. People can understand what to expect with their design, or maybe make design refinements." The models allow Johnson and his team to test new designs and identify potential problems with existing designs. "The model tells us very quickly if there's something that needs to be looked at a little closer."
The models are made from wood, acrylic, mortar, and steel, based on construction drawings and, in the case of Oroville, laser scanning data from the damaged spillway. A team of 15 people spent 40 days building the spillway model, which is one of the largest in the lab's history. Once built, the team tests its strength under different scenarios. About 150,000 gallons of water are recirculated through a pump system that can simulate what's known as the “probable maximum flood”—essentially the biggest flood the spillway could ever experience, under the most extreme conditions. Probably, the probable maximum flood will never happen, but it's not impossible. It’s a worst-case scenario that the new spillway must be designed to manage. Oroville's old and new spillways, and the gate system that regulates the flow of water, have been designed to withstand a probable maximum flood of water flowing at a rate of about 300,000 cubic feet per second, or three times the average flow over Niagara Falls. "With our model," says Johnson, "we've demonstrated the gate structure has the capacity to pass that." The models also allow Johnson's team to test new technologies that can improve dam safety, such as aerators, which mix air into the water to prevent various, surprisingly strong forces that appear in masses of flowing water.
Investigators still aren't exactly sure what caused the spillway to fail in February. Johnson's team is only looking at potential repairs, so a separate team of independent investigators has been appointed by DWR. A preliminary report suggests that insufficient drainage, corrosion on rebar, and variability in the spillway's concrete are potential contributors to the problems. The final report is expected this fall, around the time the first repairs wrap up.
"Everything so far that has been proposed has performed very well," says Johnson. That's good news for the engineers and construction teams who are rushing to complete the new $275 million spillway. "It's such an important component of the infrastructure in California." Water that passes through the Oroville Dam and spillway irrigates crops in some of the most productive farmland in the country, and provides drinking water to parched Southern California. Johnson says that's why it's so important repairs are done right. "It's a pretty critical piece of infrastructure to the whole country, really."
After an ancient carving of a horse appeared on a hill three millennia ago, giant white horses became a symbol of England's southeastern region. Dozens of horse-shaped geoglyphs—massive figures made by cutting into a hillside to reveal the layers of chalk beneath—were created over the years. Many of these enormous equines still exist today, though the exact origins of the trend remain mysterious.
Most of these gigantic archaeological artworks are located in the country’s southeastern areas because of the breadth of chalk downland, or hills, that stretch across the region. The white geoglyphs stand in stark contrast to the verdant landscapes they dominate—so much so, they often had to be covered or camouflaged during World War II so the German Air Force couldn’t use them as location markers to aid navigation.
The chalk horses became so prominent they inspired Morris Marples, a mid-20th century author, to coin the term “leucippotomy” to describe the specialized art of carving white horses into hillsides. Britain currently has 16 known white hill horses, but it once had many more that were lost to years of neglect that caused their once-prominent profiles to fade from sight.
The Uffington White Horse, England’s oldest geoglyph, is 3,000 years old. It’s in the area where Saint George allegedly slew his allegorical dragon and is by far the most remarkable site of the 16. The 360-foot long figure was a well-established geological feature long before it first popped up in an 11th century historical reference. After nearby silt was dated in 1990, researchers discovered the ancient horse was originally cut during the Bronze Age.
Britain's next known white horse didn’t make its enigmatic entrance onto the English hillsides until the 18th century. Like the Uffington White Horse, the Westbury White Horse's origin is a mystery. One theory is that the figure was carved to commemorate King Alfred’s victory at the Battle of Ethandun, which most likely took place in a nearby location in the year 878. Others think the chalk creature was created to display loyalty to the House of Hanover, as a white horse was the heraldic symbol of this 18th-century royal family.
The Westbury White Horse spurred the creation of other similar figures, such as the Cherhill White Horse. This sedimentary steed was carved into a hillside near Calne in 1780 at the behest of Dr. Christopher Alsop, a “mad doctor” who used a megaphone to call his commands from a distance. During the 19th century, the horse sported an eye made from upside down glass bottles until souvenir hunters snatched the unusual ocular. The geoglyph’s current eye is made of stone and unfortunately no longer gleams in the sun.
Just one of the 16 known hill horses actually has a rider. The Osmington White Horse is the only example to feature both leucippotomy and gigantotomy, the art of carving giant hillside humans. The massive mount was created in 1808 to commemorate King George III, who frequently visited the region. However, legend says the king was offended by the larger-than-life figure of him riding out of town, as he took it as a sign that the villagers were asking him to leave and never return. In 2011, pranksters adorned the horse with a unicorn-style horn made of plastic sheeting.
Maintaining the country’s scattered herd of chalk horses is no easy task. The figures need to be scoured regularly to prevent the surrounding vegetation from erasing them from view. Up until the 19th century, the ancient Uffington White Horse was maintained via festivals that drew crowds from multiple nearby villages. Now, various trusts and local groups are responsible for preserving the horses.
For some areas, it’s worth the effort. The county of Wiltshire boasts the highest density of equine geoglyphs and has since adopted the white horse as one of its beloved symbols. Some of the white horses even make cameos in music videos and television shows.
At an excavation near Rosh Ha-Ayin, an Israeli city not far from Tel Aviv, on the border with the West Bank, a team of archaeologists and students have discovered an impressive, large ancient reservoir, reports The Jerusalem Post.
The reservoir was likely created towards the end of the Iron Age, perhaps in the early 7th century B.C., according to the Israel Antiquities Authority. The reservoir is 20 meters long and, in places, 4 meters deep.* In the winter, rains would fill this cavernous space, storing water for use in drier times.
At the entrance to the reservoir, the team found engravings on the wall. There were crosses, vegetable motifs, and human figures, seven in all.
There’s also evidence that there were once structures above the reservoir; the IAA believes, though, that long after these buildings were abandoned, the reservoir was still in use, for hundreds of years.
Correction: These dimensions should be in meters, not miles, as originally written.
Parts of Estonia will soon be between six and nine-and-a-half inches taller after the country said this week that they will stop using a Russian standard for sea level and change to the system used across Western Europe.
The Russian system measures sea level from a tide gauge called Kronstadt in St. Petersburg, while the European system is based on the Amsterdam Ordnance Datum, a gauge that has its origins in the 17th century.
The difference between the two measurements can be nearly a foot, so official elevations across Estonia will have to be changed when the switchover goes into effect on New Year's Day in 2018.
One positive effect of the change is that construction projects that cross the border with Latvia, which already uses the European system, will no longer require conversions. In addition, places such as Suur-Munamägi, Estonia's highest point, will gain around 8 inches, making it 1,041 feet high. (Estonia, like the rest of the Baltic states, is one of the flattest countries in the world.) The change will also coincide with the 100th anniversary of Estonia's declaration of independence.
“The Baltic elevation system of 1977 is obsolete," an official told the national broadcaster EER, referring to the year it was formalized, "and then there’s the wish to be in one and the same system with Europe."
Experimental aircraft aren't an unusual sight over the Mojave Desert in Southern California. NASA, and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics before it, have been pushing the aeronautical envelope at the Edwards Air Force Base since 1946. Now, thanks to a bunch of archival footage just posted to YouTube, you can see some important moments in space and aviation history for yourself.
NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center will post about 500 video clips in all, The Verge reports, but so far there are only about 300 available. The videos were previously only available through the Dryden Aircraft Movie Collection (Armstrong was called Dryden before 2014), but now you can take in high-speed experimental aircraft from the 1950s, watch vortices created by an L-1011 airliner after it flies through smoke plumes, or see a SR-71 Blackbird refuel in flight.
Some important technologies have been developed and tested at the Armstrong Flight Research Center. Winglets, the upturned wingtips seen on commercial aircraft today, were first tested on a KC-135 Stratotanker at Armstrong in 1979. NASA also developed planes that broke the sound barrier, including the X-15, X-24, and X-43. Check out a few choice and historic selections from the archive below.
The X-43A set the record for fastest aircraft back in 2004 when it reached Mach 9.6, close to 7,000 miles per hour. The plane ran on rocket fuel, was unmanned, and launched from a B-52.
If you're terrified of flying, this might be a good video to skip. In 1984, NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration teamed up to see if they could find a fuel formula that wouldn't catch a whole jetliner on fire in case of a crash. They crashed a Boeing 720 full of fuel and test dummies to see what would happen. The fireball took over an hour to put out (fair to call the experimental fuel a failure), but they also got data that helped them develop planes that are a lot safer for passengers.
The first orbital space shuttle flight launched on April 12, 1981, and landed at Edwards Air Force Base two days later. Known as Columbia, the STS-1 launch was purely an experimental run of the new craft, and carried just two crew members.
The bees arrived during a wedding. They entered the house in a swarm, burrowing themselves into the furniture. But they came on a joyous day, and the owner of the home, Yongfu Li, decided they were a good omen. He let them stay.
Twelve years later, the bees still actively live alongside Li and his family in their home in the city of Guanghan in China’s Sichuan province.
Three times a year, the family harvests the honey that the bees produce. Each time, Li claims they package around 11 pounds worth, sold at roughly $15/lb. It isn't much of a payoff, but the translated Pear video does not log any of the family's complaints about their longtime housemates.
Video Wonders are audiovisual offerings that delight, inspire, and entertain. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
On the evening of December 7, 1981, Dianne Melnychuk, serials librarian at the Haas Library at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, noticed an unfamiliar gray-haired man of early middle age lingering around the card catalog near her desk. He had attempted to appear inconspicuous by way of nondescript, almost slovenly dress, but at almost six-and-a-half feet tall, with a 225-pound frame, he stood out.
Something about him rang a bell. Melnychuk discreetly followed him up to the sixth level of the stacks, and carefully observed him from the end of a row of shelving. In spite of the glasses he wore that evening, his face clicked in her memory.
A few months earlier, a photo of this man, who went by the name James Richard Shinn, had appeared in an article published in Library Journal. Patricia Sacks, director of the Muhlenberg and Cedar Crest College Libraries, had shared the article with her staff with an accompanying memo: “Take a good look at the face,” she wrote, “and, more importantly, keep your eye on strangers whose behavior may be a tipoff.”
James Richard Shinn was a master book thief. Using expert techniques and fraudulent documents, he would ultimately pillage world-class libraries to the tune of half a million dollars or more. A Philadelphia detective once called him “the most fascinating, best, smartest crook I ever encountered.” And yet, despite the audacity of his approach and the widespread effects of his crimes, Shinn has been relegated to a footnote in book history.
On that December evening, Melnychuk returned to her desk and waited to see if Shinn would approach. Possibly alerted by her inspection, however, he descended from the stacks abruptly and left the building. She reported the sighting to Sacks, who alerted campus security and the Allentown office of the FBI.
Shinn was not deterred. Just over a week later, on the evening of December 16, librarian Dennis Phillips spotted him entering Haas Library from his vantage point at the reference desk. Shinn again headed for the stacks, and Phillips called campus security. The security chief and two officers arrived, and the police and FBI were alerted. The security officers escorted Shinn to a library office where they began to question him. Shinn fumbled in his pocket for cigarettes and asked if he could smoke; as the distracted officers sought to find an ashtray, Shinn bolted out of the office and the library and disappeared. Beneath his chair, dropped as he reached for his cigarettes, were an Illinois driver’s license with his photograph and alias and a receipt for the local motel in which he was staying. Police and FBI agents staked out the Park Manor Motel in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and arrested Shinn upon his arrival at 11 p.m. His wife, Lola, was questioned but not detained.
Shinn’s motel room contained 26 stolen books and a file full of inventory cards for another 154 volumes. He was well-educated in book history, restoration and binding, and the tools of his trade filled the room: color-stained cloths and Q-tips with jars of shoe polish, used to color-match and conceal library markings on book spines. A folder of facsimile title pages, used as replacements when a book’s true title page was stamped or contained other identifying marks. All were designed to remove libraries' marks and render the stolen works unidentifiable and thus saleable to unsuspecting book dealers and collectors. Additionally, Shinn’s tool kit included stolen license plates, false ID papers, manuals for safecracking and disarming alarms (as well as a guide titled “How to Disappear and Live Freely”), and a 32-caliber pistol.
Shinn had been busy: his photograph had appeared in Library Journal in the first place because in April 1981, he had been spotted in Oberlin College’s Mudd Learning Center passing a metal detector over books and placing volumes into a briefcase. William A. Moffett, the College’s library director, asked Shinn for identification, and when he failed to produce any, Moffett called campus security and the local police. A search of Shinn’s room at the Oberlin Inn uncovered 63 books belonging to Oberlin, four from the University of Pennsylvania, and six from the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia; the cumulative value of this cache was approximately $30,000. Shinn was charged with five counts of shipping and receiving stolen property, and when released on $40,000 bail on April 29, had promptly disappeared.
Shinn spent the night of December 16, 1981 in the Lehigh County Jail, was arraigned, held on $100,000 bail, and transferred to Philadelphia on charges filed by the University of Pennsylvania and the Lutheran Seminary related to the books found in the Oberlin cache.
Born James Richard Coffman on October 25, 1936 in Indiana, Shinn was on the move early—he was picked up as a runaway in Los Angeles at the age of 16 and returned home to Muncie, Indiana. Through his thirties and early forties, Shinn accumulated a record of burglaries and armed robberies that focused more and more on antiques and rare books. In 1972 he was arrested in California for a home burglary of statues and jewelry; the same year, he held up an Illinois antiques dealer for items amounting to $30,000. In 1973, Shinn was arrested in Philadelphia in possession of $300,000 worth of rare stamps. In successive years, he increased his connections with legitimate book dealers as he conned them into shipping him merchandise for which he never intended to pay. Under the names of “Charles W. Baker” and “Richard V. Allen,” Shinn moved in the rare-book trade, issuing mail-order catalogs of stolen material and frequenting antiquarian book fairs, dealing only in cash.
By the time of his Bethlehem arrest on December 16, 1981, he was wanted in California, Ohio, and Pennsylvania on charges of theft from academic libraries. Gene Caulden, one of the Philadelphia major crimes detectives who spoke at length with Shinn in 1973 and again in 1981-82, said of him in a Los Angeles Times article: “He speaks quietly and is controlled. He’s gentle and never raises his voice. He has rumpled white hair and wears suspenders. His shirt tail is usually hanging out and he’s always sloppy, kind of a rustic look like a professor … He’s low key. And he never carries identification. That way, even if he’s stopped, they figure he’s just a sloppy bum stealing a book.”
Shinn based his home and operations in St. Louis, Missouri, but lived on the road, moving with Lola from motel to motel. “Our lives would make a good novel,” she told a Bethlehem Globe-Times reporter shortly after Shinn’s arrest in December 1981. “In fact, I think it would take two novels to write all about it.” For six weeks prior to the arrest, they had been living in area motels, where she had joined him for the first time since he had jumped bail in Ohio in April. Lola would watch soap operas all day, while her husband visited local college libraries, because “Jim likes to read.” She was indignant about the $100,000 bail; “It’s not like Jim hurt anyone or did anything violent. What’s so wrong about going into a library and taking books off the shelves? People take books from libraries all the time.”
Far from casual, James Shinn’s approach was premeditated. It is believed that he would compile a “want list” of valuable books by reading library journals to find titles of value. Next, he would scan the National Union Catalog to determine which libraries held the desired items. He made an extensive study of library security techniques that allowed him to accumulate tools and tricks to avoid them. And he rarely bothered with a book valued under $300.
A month after Shinn’s arrest at the Bethlehem motel, the FBI received a call from a local man who rented storage lockers; he had spotted Shinn’s face on the news and recognized him as a customer. On January 15, 1982, 16 footlockers containing over 400 books were seized from the Bethlehem storage unit. The trunks had apparently been shipped from “Charles W. Baker” in Rantoul, Illinois to “Charles W. Baker” in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Patricia Sacks, already working with her staff to identify and return the 26 volumes found in Shinn’s motel room, was asked to help; over the next two years, she and her staff dedicated over 500 hours to the identification and return of the stolen materials—including the 12 volumes stolen from Muhlenberg.
Only 20 to 30 percent of the volumes still contained library markings, but over time it was determined that the books originated from UCLA, Princeton, the University of Michigan, Stanford, Lehigh, Carnegie-Mellon, Haverford, Bryn Mawr, Johns Hopkins, and other institutions across the country. The cache was valued anywhere between $100,000 and $500,000. Shinn’s “collecting” tastes centered around 18th- and 19th-century travel books and illustrated volumes on natural history whose plates could be extracted and sold individually—virtually untraceably.
On February 24, 1982, Shinn was indicted on two criminal counts of interstate transportation and receipt of stolen property—not on charges of library theft—and he ultimately pled guilty on July 20. He received the maximum sentence of two 10-year terms to be served consecutively. Within a few months, after a promise of immunity, he revealed another cache of books stored near St. Louis, which also needed identification.
“We as a profession are indebted to Shinn,” said Oberlin’s William Moffett, addressing a gathering of the American Library Association at the time of Shinn’s guilty plea. “He has demonstrated the vulnerability of the academic libraries—and it was a lesson we needed.” Thefts, difficult to discover unless a specific book was requested and found missing, were often not reported for fear that a library’s weaknesses would be exposed and its staff would be deemed incompetent. “Each of us must combat the innocence, ignorance, complacency, and indifference that block us from pursuing meaningful and effective measures to prevent library theft,” advocated Pat Sacks in a 1983 lecture. Locking windows, alarming access points, strengthening electronic detection equipment, and restricting access to rare materials all comprised a multi-faceted approach.
On April 27, 1982, Pennsylvania Governor Dick Thornburgh signed into law the Archives, Library, and Museum Protection Act, which finally made library theft a criminal offense in Pennsylvania. A third offense is considered a felony, regardless of the value of the material stolen. In September 1983, the “Oberlin Conference on Theft” welcomed representatives from leading research libraries, the FBI, the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America, and members of the United States Judiciary Committee and the Canadian government back to the scene of one of James Shinn’s arrests. Its goal included drafting model legislation for states and the federal government to declare books and manuscripts as pieces of national heritage with stronger legal protections against their theft.
James Shinn was paroled on August 8, 1995, and appears to have lived quietly until his death in 2005. Deemed by William Moffett “the most active professional book thief in the history of America,” Shinn raised the stakes of both library security and library theft. Because of his work on the Shinn case, Moffett discovered a calling in tracking bibliomanes; he became a leading voice in protection and detection until his death 25 years later. On the other hand, Shinn’s crimes and reputation (his total library thefts are estimated to have neared a million dollars) goaded and inspired bibliomaniac Stephen Blumberg, who in 1990 was arrested in possession of almost 24,000 stolen rare books and manuscripts, worth over $5 million. Blumberg considered himself a collector, a book-lover. When interviewed by Nicholas A. Basbanes for his book A Gentle Madness, Blumberg claimed to be “fascinated...like a moth being drawn to a flame. I was fascinated by Shinn’s undoing, but I didn’t admire him. I thought he violated the books. He was in it for the money.” A questionable ethical distinction, to be sure.
In 1864, Lydia Bixby received a letter. It offered condolences on the loss of her five sons in the Civil War, and was signed "A. Lincoln." There's debate over what happened to the original (some stories say she immediately burned it), but a copy was sent to the Boston Evening Transcript newspaper, where it was printed in full. Despite the signature, the true authorship of the famed, heartfelt letter is as unknown as the fate of the original. It has been said that Lincoln himself wrote it, but some scholars believe the words came from his secretary, John Hay. A new analysis, using a technique known as n-gram tracing, suggests that they're right.
N-gram tracing is a text analysis technique that examines the frequency of specific sequences of words or letters in a piece of writing to identify the author. This technique was used back in 2013 to confirm that Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling had also written a mystery novel under the pen name Robert Galbraith. Writings by both Lincoln and Hay were analyzed for their inherent patterns, which were then compared to the Bixby letter. The program identifies Hay as the author. The team of British researchers will present their findings next week at a linguistics conference.
Despite the letter's brevity, controversial origins, and factual errors (at least two of her sons survived the war)—as well as rumors of Bixby's Confederate sympathies—it's considered one of Lincoln's most famous writings. The letter was featured in the movie Saving Private Ryan, and George W. Bush read it at a ceremony on the tenth anniversary of September 11. "I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement," the letter concludes, "and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom."
— SurfersAgainstSewage (@sascampaigns) July 20, 2017
The ship was built on a Cornish beach as part of a campaign by activist organization Surfers Against Sewage to raise awareness about plastic waste in our oceans. It was created using thousands of single-use, disposable plastic bottles that were collected after they washed up along the British coastline. The craft, which is meant to be seen, not sailed, weighs multiple tons and comes complete with faux cannons and a satellite dish.
And while many have immediately taken to dubbing the installation “Boaty McBottleface,” it's real name the “Waste Warship.” For now, there aren't any plans to send the plastic dreadnaught out into open waters, since the last thing the ocean needs is more trash in it. Even if its intentions are good.
Archaeologists said Wednesday that they have evidence that humans were in Australia around 65,000 years ago, or about 18,000 years earlier than previous evidence showed. These humans, who made and left a variety of stone tools excavated from a rock shelter called Madjedbebe in northwest Australia, would have been among the first to leave Africa, where modern humans originated before migrating across the globe.
Why Australia? Sixty-five thousand years ago was the middle of a glacial period. The path to Australia, across the Middle East, through India and Southeast Asia, would have been a temperate alternative to exploring frosty Western Europe.
It still wasn't an easy journey, and not all of it was on foot. As the Sydney Morning Herald reports, "The discovery also confirms that Australian Aborigines undertook the first major maritime migration in the world—they had to sail a minimum of [55 miles] across open sea to reach their destination whatever route they took in their long journey out of Africa."
They might have made that crossing through the waters pictured above. At the top there is Timor, and at the bottom the northern tip of Western Australia. At the time of this early migration, sea level was low, since a lot of water was tied up in glaciers. So it may not have been very far from the island of Timor to Sahul, the landmass that included Australia and New Guinea, as seen below.
Fifty-five miles may not sound like a lot, compared to a journey that covered thousands, but imagine setting off in a prehistoric boat, perhaps seeing only the horizon and open water, and thinking that you'll probably die, but then doing it anyway.
It’s been nearly 20 years since Hong Kong’s Kai Tak International Airport closed, but its unique, notorious landing approach is still very much alive in the memory of those who experienced it. “Kai Tak was one of the last major airports in the world where you really had to rely on basic flying skills—‘stick and rudder’—and we were all a bit sad when it closed," says Captain Dave Newbery, who flew into the airport for four years with Cathay Pacific before the runways were shut down in 1998.
Kai Tak was built in 1925 on reclaimed land in Kowloon Bay, opposite Hong Kong Island. Its location was unusual: It sat in a bowl, surrounded by mountains and water—and later studded with apartment blocks. In the early years, it was used by a flying club and as a military airfield but, after WWII, it became a base for the local airline Cathay Pacific. In 1958, as demands on the airport increased, a new runway was built: Runway 13/31. It jutted out into Victoria Harbor, and it was that descent that earned the nickname “Kai Tak Heart Attack.”
An aircraft with clearance to land on Runway 13/31 began its approach across Victoria Harbor, home to one of the world’s busiest ports, and densely populated Kowloon. Upon sighting “Checkerboard Hill”—an orange-and-white painted marker above a park—the pilot veered right. This low-altitude, 47-degree turn took place at nearly 200 miles per hour, just two nautical miles from the runway. From there, the aircraft shot over apartment buildings and bustling streets—in addition to plane-spotters on the roof of Kai Tak's parking garage, before the wheels touched finally touched down, probably with an audible sigh of relief.
“We practised the approach in the simulator, but it didn't really replicate the real thing,” says Newbery. “It was a question of seeing how other people did it and ‘having a go’ yourself—with the odd word of guidance from the captain.” But an additional consideration was weather. Typhoon season lasts from May to November in Hong Kong, and added even more complexity to the landing.
“In good weather with a light wind, the approach was fairly easy to manage, once you got the hang, but with the unpredictable winds and rain in bad weather or during a typhoon, it could be a real handful.” Newbery recalls a particularly memorable landing: “I was flying into Kai Tak with my wife on the jumpseat. The weather was pretty awful, and halfway through the turn onto finals, a vicious rainstorm came across the airfield and I totally lost sight of the runway. I had to execute a missed approach, which was quite hard work.”
Given these conditions, Kai Tak’s 73 years of operation did involve accidents, some fatal. One of the last, which remarkably involved only minor injuries, was in 1993, when a China Airlines Boeing 747 landed during a typhoon. Amid strong crosswinds, the aircraft overshot the runway and both the nose and wing ended up in the harbor. Despite the dangers, Runway 13/31 became the busiest single runway in the world, with 36 landings and take-offs per hour.
Departures from Runway 13/31 had their own challenges. For starters, it was short, and, once airborne, the aircraft had to turn sharply to avoid Beacon Hill and Lion Rock, two vertiginous mountains rising to around 1600 feet.
From the 1980s on, Kai Tak’s capacity began to be stretched. The city was growing and the airport couldn't keep pace. A gleaming new airport at Chep Lap Kok on Lantau Island, much farther from the city, opened in 1998. Since its retirement, Kai Tak has been used as a retail development and recreation facility. But even now, the memory of Kai Tak landings linger. And, while Chep Lap Kok is safer, Newbery says, “Kai Tak was special!”
Below, Atlas Obscura has compiled images from Kai Tak's history.
Somewhere out there in the big wide universe, every fundamental particle has a twin with an opposite charge, its antiparticle. An electron has a positron, a proton has an antiproton, and so forth. Under the right conditions, these particle pairs can destroy each other. But 80 years ago the physicist Ettore Majorana predicted that certain types of particles, in the fermion class, could be their own antiparticles—a sort of high physics yin/yang pairing.
Now a team of scientists at UCLA and Stanford have for the first time observed these special particles, known as Majorana fermions.
Using “exotic materials,” according to Science Daily, the scientists created an experiment in which particles would moving along a one-dimensional path in one direction. Using a magnet, they were able to make the particles change direction. At certain points in that cycle, when the particles switched directions, these Majorana particle emerged.
These lab-grown particles could contribute to advances in quantum computing, but they were created under very specific conditions. “It’s very unlikely that they occur out in the universe, although who are we to say?” one scientist who’s studying these particles said. But scientists still think it’s possible that some neutrinos could also be their own antiparticles, which would mean that these strange phenomena of physics, the Majorana particles, were everywhere.
Abby Noland's years of experience working in libraries prepared her for anything. So when she found artillery shells in a closet on her first day of work at the Gleason Public Library in Massachusetts, she did not panic. She calmly called the police. She later told The Boston Globe, "I’ve been a director of libraries for a long time, and this kind of strange stuff just happens."
The artillery shells were left in a bin at the bottom of her new closet. On the bin was a note that an expert had inspected the contents and decided they might be live.
Two hours after local police responded, the State Police Bomb Squad arrived. They agreed with the inspector—the shells were in fact live. To prevent a catastrophe, they brought them to a sand dune behind the Department of Public Works building, and detonated them.
Later, the Gleason Public Library concluded that the munitions dated to the Civil War and had been donated to the town of Carlisle, where the Gleason Public Library resides, in 1916. But they never received a permanent home, and their existence had been forgotten.
Through it all, Noland maintained her sense of humor. After the incident, she joked to her new coworkers: “If you want to get rid of me, there are more subtle ways.”
Salvador Dalí, the surrealist artist, had a beautiful moustache, which you can see in the photo of him above. He apparently still has it, even though he died in 1989.
“His moustache is still intact, [like clock hands at] 10 past 10, just as he liked it," Narcís Bardalet, an embalmer who participated in the recent exhumation of Dalí's body, told a Catalan radio station, according to The Guardian. "It's a miracle."
Dalí's body, which had been laid to rest at a crypt in a Dalí-designed museum in his hometown of Figueres, Catalonia, was exhumed this week to determine whether a fortune-teller is Dalí's biological daughter.
DNA results from his body aren't expected for another month or two, though Bardalet said that getting the samples was hard enough, in part because Dalí's body had stiffened, "like wood." Exhumers used an electric saw to take bone samples. They also collected hair and fingernail samples.
The moustache, though, stayed.
“The moustache is still there and will be for centuries,” Bardalet said.
After more than three years and countless man-hours spent searching, the fate of Malaysian Airlines flight 370, which disappeared in 2014, remains a mystery. In their fruitless search for the plane, crews have found shipwrecks and pieces of debris, and have collected an impressive amount of data on the terrain of the seafloor around Australia. Now some of that data is available online, thanks to the Australian government's geosciences agency.
Geoscience Australia has released the results of the first phase of the search, a bathymetric survey. Bathymetric surveys map the seafloor using sonar to determine the depth, and provide scientists (and now you) with the topography of the hidden ground below. Backscatter data was also collected, which describes the hardness of the seafloor based on the strength of the sonar signal that bounces back to the surveying ship. This data wasn't collected to look for debris exactly, but rather to provide with a map of the seafloor that was the target of the search.
The second batch of data will be released sometime in 2018, and is a more detailed bathymetric survey conducted by underwater sensors towed behind boats. Manmade objects aren't visible in the surveys available now because the resolution is too low, but the data due out next year should be clear enough to show something as small as a 44-gallon drum on the ocean floor. Until that batch is released, you can explore the bottom of the Indian Ocean using an interactive map, or even download the data to analyze yourself.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
It’s not easy to come up with a product that’s built around a completely, utterly unique design. Especially involving a topic as unflattering as cleaning a toilet.
But in the early 1980s, a Swiss man named Walter Düring had such a moment. His company, Düring AG, had made a name for itself with the concept of decalcification, based on a formula his mother, Maria, came up with. But it was in the early 1980s that the firm had come up with something truly successful on a mainstream stage: A uniquely shaped nozzle that could spray decalcifiers into obscure crevices.
That tool, known as Toilet Duck, or WC-Ente, was basically perfect for its task. Designed to hit spots of the toilet bowl not easily reachable through scrubbing or even spraying alone, the brand gained a lot of attention starting in the 1990s for its unusual design, which, like the plastic lemon, was a product that was all design.
“The appropriately named Toilet Duck broke ranks with the conventionally bottled toilet-cleaning products by proclaiming, through the pack shape alone, its ease of use for the intended purpose,” author Bill Stewart wrote in his 1995 book Packaging as an Effective Marketing Tool. “There was little doubt in the minds of shoppers that the pack would perform better than conventional containers.“
But there was one major difference: The duck design, which is now owned by S.C. Johnson, was clearly something brand new, that hadn’t been invented before. As such, the container received a U.S. patent in 1984. The patent makes clear that the design required some thoughtful engineering work to do its job:
By means of this construction, it is possible to spray a liquid stream from the supply retained in the smaller chamber in any desired direction, independently of the volume remaining available in the larger chamber of the bottle as long as there is liquid in the smaller chamber. Since the bottle takes up only a small height in its horizontal position, the stream hits spots which are unaccessible to bottles held in an upright position. Furthermore, it is possible to produce the bottle in common bottle manufacturing machines once the blow mold has been adapted, whereby the greater difficulties and additional working steps caused by sharply angled nozzles are avoided.
Most people wouldn’t look at the toilet as a potential hotbed of innovation—we go out of our way to hide our use of ‘em, despite the fact that everyone knows that everyone uses them.
But the person who does see the innovation potential is the one who gets to file the patent, of course. Maybe we need to be willing to find a little more toilet inspiration—hey, you never know, you could come up with the next Toilet Duck.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
Not every search for buried treasure is an Indiana Jones-style tale of harrowing danger and swashbuckling adventure. For the small but dedicated cadre of so-called "armchair treasure hunters" around the world, discovering hidden riches is more a matter of solving complex puzzles.
In its simplest terms, an armchair treasure hunt is a generally small-stakes search for a prize that has been purposefully hidden somewhere out in the world. The key is that they're meant to be solved by regular people. “An armchair treasure hunt is one that you can solve at home and then go out and find the prize,” says Jenny Kile, an amateur treasure hunter and creator of the armchair treasure hunting site Mysterious Writings. Kile, along with her family, have been participating in armchair treasure hunts across the U.S. since 2004. "It has to be solvable. You have to believe that you can solve it yourself."
A typical armchair treasure hunt usually begins with a book. “Masquarade was really the first one,” says Kile. Masquarade is a short, 32-page picture book by the author and illustrator Kit Williams, released in 1979. The book tells the story of a rabbit, Jack Hare, who loses his treasure, and at the end, the reader is encouraged to try and find it. The trick with Masquarade was that the treasure was real. As part of the release of the book, Williams buried an 18-carat gold rabbit pendant in a particular spot in England, and let it be known that the location could be found within the text and images of Masquarade. The complex solution involved drawing lines from the fingers and eyes of characters in the book. Those lines would connect with letters, and those letters would then spell out the location of the golden hare: a spot marked by the shadow of a cross at noon.
While the search for the Masquarade treasure eventually ended in a scandal—the person who found the prize was revealed to have had an inside source—it kickstarted a minor treasure hunting craze. People were digging up lawns and public spaces looking for the golden hare, and other authors began dreaming up similar books for this tiny new sub-genre. The book’s popularity birthed armchair treasure hunting as it’s known today.
Since Masquarade, a number of titles have been released in the treasure-hunt genre, with prizes ranging from life-changing to day-making. Among the more notable titles, there's The Secret, a high fantasy–themed puzzle book from 1982 that was meant to lead to 12 keys, which could be redeemed for jewels. Only two of the keys were ever found, and people are still looking for the others to this day. Byron Preiss, the original author and person who hid the prizes, passed away in 2005, so the exact location of the remaining prizes is likely lost.
There's also A Treasure’s Trove, a 2005 fairy tale puzzle book that hid the location of 14 artifacts which could be redeemed for a million dollars in jewels, collectively. It was this puzzle that first got Kile interested in the pastime. “My sister got me that book, and I’ve been hooked ever since,” she says. Kile even got within a hair’s breadth of finding one of the prizes herself. “We went there the morning it was found and walked right past the tree. It was the first one ever found so we didn’t know that they were hidden in knotholes,” she says. She and her family went looking for a second of the book’s treasures, but after deducing the location, all they found was a little token, and a note that said someone had found the treasure, just two hours previous.
Likely the most active amateur treasure hunt today is the search for the treasure of Forrest Fenn. Supposedly worth somewhere near $1 million, the Fenn treasure is said to have been buried around 2010 by the eccentric former art dealer after he was diagnosed with cancer. He hid clues to the location of the treasure in his memoir, The Thrill of the Chase. The hunt has proven so popular that there have been a handful of books written on the hunt itself, but its popularity has also highlighted the dangers of the hobby. Two people have died while searching for Fenn’s treasure, leading police to call for him to reveal the location of the prizes, and still others to claim that the whole thing is little more than a dangerous hoax.
Kile, who has whole sections of her website devoted to Fenn’s treasure, believes that it is real. “Forrest Fenn’s is the ultimate right now,” she says. “Because it’s such a great prize, and because it’s such a beautiful area, it just inspires you to get out and explore.”
Not all hunts are as dramatic as Forrest Fenn's, nor as high stakes. Kile points to the “Breakfast Tea & Bourbon” hunt based on the book of the same name, which contains clues that led to a $50,000 prize. Kile herself went searching for it a couple of times, but the treasure was safely discovered earlier this month. She also cites a U.K.-based quest rooted in the children’s book The Oracle: Lost in Time, which is said to lead to a prize worth at least £5,000. The treasure hunter message board Tweleve.org contains threads on many more hunts, new and old, going on all the time. There is also an active armchair treasure hunt community in the U.K., the Armchair Treasure Hunt Club.
The armchair hunts that Kile creates lead to smaller prizes, in the hundreds of dollars. For her, and for many other passionate armchair treasure hunters, the thrill is in the experience of the hunt, not just in the prospect of finding something that's worth a lot of money. “My motive is to get [readers] interested in the website, and let them know of all the mysteries and adventures that they could go after.”
