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Staging Shakespeare in Shipping Containers

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William Shakespeare has been dead for 401 years. While this would be enough to keep most people out of the news, the Bard has a way of insinuating himself into just about everything. He plays the lead in political controversies. People recast his life as a television show filled with 16th-century rap battles. His works get molded around whatever genre is currently in vogue: The Taming of the Shrew as a '90s teen romp; Hamlet as a lion-based animated musical.

When Angus Vail—a music and art space manager—thinks about revitalizing Shakespeare, though, he doesn't focus on the "who" or the "what" so much as the "where." The soul of those immortal plays, Vail thinks, is best expressed in the first environment where they were ever shown: an open-air theater, where you can get rained, spat, or spilled on, and the audience and the players are practically close enough to touch.

His current project, the Container Globe, aims to bring back this age-old theatrical experience, but using a material and location Shakespeare likely wouldn't recognize: a bunch of recycled shipping containers, stacked on top of each other in an empty lot in Detroit.

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Like most people, Vail was introduced to Shakespeare sometime around middle school, when his teacher had the class listen to Antony and Cleopatra on a vinyl record. "I was bored to tears," he says. He didn't really get into it until years later, in the 1980s, when he was living in London and began frequenting the Royal Shakespeare Company's standby line. "You'd pay five quid, and go in and see Jeremy Irons, or Anthony Hopkins," Vail says. "I became a bit of a Shakespeare geek."

After 1997, he switched his patronage to London's newly opened Globe: a scaled-down reconstruction of the original Globe Theater, where many of Shakespeare's plays premiered, and where his theatrical company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, kept residence. The new Globe, like the old, is open-air, with little separation between the players and the audience, or between both and the outside world. A pigeon, Vail says, once strutted and fretted across the stage right in time with Macbeth's Act V soliloquy. A real storm sometimes cameos in The Tempest.

Something clicked. "Seeing Shakespeare in the Globe is really different," he says. "You don't do Hamlet standing on a stage, going 'To be or not to be?' out into the darkness … the audience becomes almost part of the action." A high-energy show at the new Globe might have 600 people right up near the stage, drinking beer and guffawing at the actors, not unlike the 17th-century "groundlings" who paid a penny to stand in the yard of the original theater and shout during the swordfights.

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"It becomes chaotic," Vail says. "More alive, more interactive, more visceral, more kick-in-the-balls. I was saying, 'Holy shit! This is like punk rock.' You'll never see the same performance twice."

Around 2012, this parallel inspired Vail—who loves punk almost as much as he does Shakespeare—to start working on bringing a Globe-style theater to the United States. (The punk thing has also trickled heavily into the branding efforts. When Vail gave a TEDx Talk about the Container Globe last year, he wore a Ramones-esque t-shirt, with the band member’s names replaced by “HAMLET,” “LEAR,” “MACBETH,” and “OTHELLO.”) He's chosen a spot in Detroit's Highland Park, citing the city's industrial history, economic recovery efforts, and current artistic renaissance.

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Vail knows that neither of his goals—to make Shakespeare relevant to the modern era, and to build a public space out of shipping containers—is particularly unique. But the combination, he insists, is less zeitgeisty than it is serendipitous. The stage of the original Globe theater was 42 feet long, and a standard large shipping container is 40 feet.

Meanwhile, a smaller shipping container is 20 feet long, the right size for a seating gallery. Because the dimensions work out, building the theater simply involves arranging larger and smaller containers in various stacks, like building blocks. "It just happened to work out that way," Vail says. "The container gods have deemed it so."

Right now, the project team is in the process of fabricating the containers. Actual building will commence this spring, followed, hopefully, by the first performances. As planning and prototyping continues, he says, other coincidences have emerged: the corrugated surfaces of the containers, it turns out, are good at both reflecting and diffusing sound, enviable acoustic properties for a theater. The original Globe was built with timber rescued from another theater; the Container Globe will incorporate used containers, transformed for their new lives by local artist Ferrous Wolf.

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Containers also offer some advantages that the original and new Globes lack, Vail says. Compared to other building materials, they're are fairly inexpensive, savings that the theater can then pass on to customers. (The cheapest seats will be, of course, right up in the front.) Their modularity allows for physical reconfiguration and portability, something Vail hopes to explore if, as he plans, he ends up building more Container Globes in more cities.

Their aesthetic also strikes him as more neutral, allowing for various types of performance. "We can have it lit one way and it'll be a crazy Thunderdome, like Mad Max," he says. "We can light it another way and have it look much more classical." Other theaters, he says, are less chameleonic: "It's very hard to do a death metal show in a wooden Globe." Perhaps that's reason enough to build a new one.


A Woodpecker Has Been Attacking Car Mirrors in Snellville, Georgia

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The town of Snellville, Georgia, has lately been suffering a small and specific crime wave: someone has been shattering the side mirrors of people's cars.

After about two dozen people reported damage, police sent extra patrols out to the neighborhood. But the real culprit was soon revealed: it was a hyped-up pileated woodpecker, attacking mirrors because he thought his reflections were rival birds.

In one of the greatest news reports this author has been fortunate enough to come across, Channel 2 Action News's Steve Gehlbach got out on the scene and talked to a couple of victims.

One of them, John Hancock, had blamed the dings all over his wife's car on neighborhood kids with BB guns. He seemed charmed by the real culprit, calling him "a beautiful bird."

Another, Kevin Morrisey, found the side mirror of his Explorer smashed. His responses, he recalls, included "son of a biscuit" and, when the vandal was unmasked, "my God, I got taken in by a woodpecker."

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As Gehlbach points out, the pileated woodpecker is a federally protected species under the U.S. Migratory Bird Act, so legally, no vengeance may be wrought. Instead, community members have been wrapping their side mirrors in plastic bags, so that they look less like other woodpeckers and more like boring objects. (As mentioned earlier, they have also been complimenting the bird.)

But if the woodpecker wants to keep hanging out in Snellville anyway, who can blame him? The people there seem great.

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

The Giant Frog Farms of the 1930s Were a Giant Failure

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The American Frog Canning Company had a pitch for people struggling to make a living in the 1930s, when jobs were scarce and money tight. The company promised a good market and a steady source of income. It was simple enough, the company promised. All you need is a small pond and a few pairs of “breeders” in order to …

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Frog farming was “perhaps America’s most needed, yet least developed industry,” wrote Albert Broel, founder of the American Frog Canning Company and author of Frog Raising for Pleasure and Profit. With wild populations dwindling, the demand for frog meat was greater than its supply. The market for it had the potential to grow as exponentially as a new stock of frogs could.

Those few pairs of breeders, Broel explained, would produce tens of thousands of tadpoles, and it would take just this one generation to provide a frog farmer with a ready crop. At $5 a dozen (about $100 in today’s dollars), frogs could turn into a fortune. And people leapt at the opportunity. They wrote to Broel for copies of his frog-raising handbook, paid for a full course of frog-based learning, and ordered their breeders to start their own farms.

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From his base outside of New Orleans, Broel became America’s leading frog canner and promoter of frog culture. In one family portrait, he stands, stout and round-headed, on his cannery’s steps, in a well-tailored white suit. On the step below is his notably taller wife, and the couple is proudly flanked by two white statues of giant frogs, which reportedly had light-up eyes that blinked red in the night.

“I think his story is absolutely amazing,” says his daughter, Bonnie Broel, who keeps a collection of frog memorabilia in her Victorian mansion in New Orleans. “He came to this country and started a brand new business that no one had ever heard of, with nothing.”

Broel was a canny survivor, a descendant of Eastern European nobility, a practitioner of holistic medicine, a real-estate investor, and one of the few people who ever managed to make money from frogs. Because, while starting a frog farm was easy enough, raising frogs to market means fighting nature—and losing.

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According to the story he told, Albert Broel started his frog business because of his mother. In one version, she had stomach trouble as a young woman. In another she stopped eating meat at 80, doctor’s orders. “As far back as I can remember, my mother used to say: —‘Son, if you want to make a success in life—Raise Frogs,” Broel wrote.

It wasn’t his first choice of profession. After settling in Detroit with a degree in naprapathy, a holistic wellness field focused on connective tissues, Broel opened a medical practice, married, and bought an apartment building. After being chased out of the medical profession for operating without a proper license, he followed his mother's apocryphal advice. He started growing frogs at a large scale, on a 100-acre farm in Ohio, and experimenting with canning frog meat. With the money he made, in 1933 he moved his family to Louisiana, in search of a better climate for frog farming.

Soon, his business there was growing so rapidly that, he wrote, "my own frog farm and the supply of wild frogs brought in by hunters could not possibly keep the plant in operation." He started running ads, like the one above, and soon frogs were being delivered to the factory from all over the country.

Broel was on the leading edge of what The New Yorker once called“the frog-farm craze of the thirties.” Newspapers across the country mentioned of the numerous letters they’d received asking for more information about raising frogs, and shared stories about frog entrepreneurs, from “society women” in Tennessee to a Japanese frog-raiser in Los Angeles. After Louisiana, Florida had perhaps the next most ambitious frog-farming operations. One, Southern Industries Inc., offered shares to northern investors in order to expand more quickly.

Among all these frog-minded people, Broel was a giant, “the nation’s largest individual producer of frog legs,” the Central Press reported, and a genius promoter of his product. He canned frog legs and “frog à la king,” and dreamed up recipes for Giant Frog Gumbo, American Giant Bullfrog Pie, Barbecued Giant Bullfrog Sandwiches, Giant Bullfrog Omelet, Giant Bullfrog Pineapple Salad, and more.

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As the craze grew, though, so did skepticism about the frog business. The industry, the Los Angeles Times wrote, was “somewhat ephemeral.” A Midwest paper compared it to rabbit farming, another get-rich-quick scheme meant to harness the reproductive potential of small food animals. In 1933, the USDA released a bulletin on frog farming that warned, “Within the past fifteen years the bureau has received thousands of inquiries concerning frog raising, but to the present time it has heard of only about three persons or institutions claiming any degree of success.”

That was a far cry from what Broel’s ads and other promotions promised, and in the mid-1930s, the U.S. Postal Service indicted him for mail fraud. “Frog Breeders Leap with Cash,” one newspaper gleefully reported. Broel and a partner had “hopped to New Orleans,” as another reporter put it, after cashing $15,000 worth of checks for instructional brochures.

One of the most egregious claims he’d published was that in 13 years, a man could make $360 billion growing frogs. “I assume it is needless to tell you that I made no such statement,” Broel wrote to one Ohio paper. Someone else had made the calculation, and Broel hadn’t meant to endorse its truth. It was “simply published as I publish all other things of interest to people engage in the frog business,” he wrote. “I think you will agree with me that such a statement is so ridiculous upon its face that it could not seriously influence the judgment of anyone deliberating as to whether or not he should engage in frog raising.”

But people had bought into the hype. Around the same time, one of the other frog-farm success stories, Southern Industries, was facing lawsuits from its investors, who had been promised big returns. After one year, they had still received no money, and demanded to know “why they had received no dividends on their investment in pairs of frogs.”

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One of the major points Broel made in his case for frog farming is that frogs are delicious. In the wild, “everyone” wants to eat frogs, he wrote: snakes, birds, lizards, fish, even hedgehogs. And that intense pressure from predators is the reason for their incredible rates of procreation. A single frog has to lay 10,000 to 20,000 eggs just to have a few of its offspring survive. Tadpoles are born to be disposable.

That’s one of the first problems facing a frog farmer. Most of those potentially profitable, would-be frogs die before reaching marketable size. Fungal diseases can wipe out thousands of frogs in a single season. And as the frogs grow, they have to be protected from hungry predators of all kinds—starting with their own parents. If frog farmers don’t whisk tadpoles away to separate ponds, hungry adult frogs will make meals of them.

Frogs eat a lot, and yet another challenge is keeping adult frogs fed. It takes about one pound of food to grow one-third of a pound of frog meat. Frogs have only one requirement for their meals, but it's one that makes keeping them on farms very hard. Whatever they eat, whether insects, tiny crabs, or crawfish, has to be moving. “Production of live feed becomes a full-time activity in any frog farming operation,” one government pamphlet warns.

All this work has to go on for years before a frog farmer sees any profit. Whereas chickens, for example, can be raised and slaughtered in months, bullfrogs take two to three years to reach marketable size.

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Even Broel didn’t depend on farmed frogs to feed his canning business. “We buy frogs!” announced a sign outside the company headquarters. Many of his suppliers weren’t farmers at all, but frog hunters who waded into the swamps of Louisiana, where it could be possible to catch 100 frogs in a few hours.

Frog hunting was so popular that the state’s population of wild frogs was declining, though. In his book, Broel used this as a selling point for potential frog farmers, but ultimately it proved the demise of his business. By the end of the 1930s, Louisiana had passed a law restricting the hunting of frogs in the high season, April and May. Cut off from a supply of wild frogs—a void that farming could not fill—Broel shut his canning company down.

“That’s really what put Daddy out of business,” says Bonnie Broel. “I know that he was not able to get enough frogs to maintain the business, even with the demand there was for it.”

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The American dream of frog farming didn’t die with the craze of the 1930s, though. Even after shutting down the canning factory, Broel kept selling “breeder” frogs. He didn’t grow them anymore, says Bonnie Broel, but rather worked more as a frog middleman.

“We knew if there were brown bags in the fridge, there were frogs in there,” kept in a state of hibernation, she says. “If I couldn’t take a bath, there were frogs in the bathtub, and he would be feeding them live goldfish.”

Decades later, during the 1970s and ’80s, the back-to-the-land movement bred another generation of would-be frog farmers, led by Leonard Slabaugh, owner of Missouri’s Slabaugh Frog Farms. “Supermarket chains and wholesale outlets buy 'em in enormous quantities. Big restaurants want 'em shipped out on ice. People come by here and pick 'em up by the buckets full,” Slabaugh told a reporter for Mother Earth News.“Why, the market is growing continuously all the time.”

Among all the misleading hype of frog farming, this was a core truth. All over the world, people love to eat frogs, and by the end of the last decade, the international market in frog meat was worth about $40 million.

Starting the 1980s, frog farming started growing in Europe, Brazil, and Southeast Asia. Research has improved techniques for raising frogs in artificial ponds, keeping them disease-free, and even convincing them to eat feed pellets or dead insects. (These techniques often involve mechanical swishing of dead insects in water, so that they appear alive.)

And yet, most frog meat sold around the world today still comes from wild populations, which are being hunted down at alarming rates. By 1980, France had so few frogs left that it banned commercial harvesting altogether. After that, India and Bangladesh became the main sources of frog meat for export—until the populations there shrank and new regulations grew.

Now Indonesia is one of the world’s main suppliers of frog meat, and scientists suspect the population there is in danger, too. One recent study found that out of more than 200 samples of commercially available frog meat, only one matched the frog species listed on the label, a commonly sold species, indicating that perhaps this species' populations had crashed and hunters had moved on to others.

Another group of scientists found that about 200 million frogs are being exported each year, predominantly from Indonesia and China to the European Union and the United States. Factoring in local consumption, a rough estimate puts the number of frogs being taken from the wild each year at around a billion.

As India and Bangladesh discovered, this scale of harvesting leads to larger ecological impacts. Take away frogs’ enormous appetite for live insects, and bug populations boom. Those two countries restricted frog hunting in part because they foresaw a pest problem of plague-like proportions.

“If you look at frogs as a commodity, their dollar value is pretty small,” says Ian Warkentin, one of the biologists who has studied frog markets. “But if you look at the ecological role they are playing, to financially replace all those creatures that are eating insects, it has value that’s way beyond its commercial potential.”

Commercial farming always involves a type of artifice, since it tries to corral and improve upon the foods found out in the wild world. Successful crops are not necessarily the tastiest or the most desirable, but are often the plants and animals that bend most readily to our will, at a profit. Frogs have resisted that sort of control, but our taste for them is strong enough that we still go after them. If anyone does eventually figure out an efficient new way to raise giant frogs for pleasure and profit, perhaps they will finally claim the fortune that Broel imagined.

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Found: The Oldest Astrolabe Ever Discovered

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When shipwreck hunter David L. Mearns and his colleagues found a wide bronze disk at a site off the coast of Oman, they knew they had found a special object. The ship had sunk in 1503, and the disc “was like nothing else we had seen,” Mearns told NPR.

They suspected it might be an astrolabe, a navigational tool used by sailors in Europe’s Age of Exploration to find their way at sea.

To be sure, they had to enlist the help of a university professor who had access to high-powered scanning technology. When Professor Mark Williams of the University of Warwick scanned the disc, he found evidence of small, evenly spaced markings on the edge of the disc, which would have been used to measure the height of the sun and calculate a ship’s location.

Examples of astrolabes are rare; this one, the BBC reports, is only the 108th ever catalogued. This new finding also makes it the oldest astrolabe ever found.

The ship that Mearns and colleagues were exploring was part of Vasco da Gama’s fleet, left under command of an uncle in the waters near Oman on the way home from an expedition to India. The astrolabe had the seal of King Don Manuel I on it, who ascended to the Portuguese throne in 1495, and the ship left home in 1502, putting the astrolabe’s creation date somewhere around the year 1500.

Watch Very Old Jellyfish Glide Beneath the Arctic Ice

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Four feet of ice sits atop the Chukchi Sea, several miles from Point Barrow, Alaska. On top, polar bears gambol and walruses loll. What happens beneath the sheet is far more mysterious.

To investigate the goings-on in this underwater realm, Andy Juhl, from Columbia University's Earth Institute, drilled holes into the ice to insert a small unmanned vehicle carrying a video camera. Over several years, the footage has shown lots of algae, amphipods, and the occasional fish—and also creepy, majestic jellyfish, contracting, expanding, and drifting their way through the teal sea.

It's hard to get a sense of scale from the video above, but these Chrysaora melanaster jellyfish seen around two minutes into the video is several feet long, with foot-long tentacles trailing below it. This was a surprise, as almost all jellyfish live a few months or less. To become this large, these cnidarians might be several years old—positively ancient in jellyfish terms.

The water they float and feed in is punishingly cold, around 28 degrees Fahrenheit. That chilly Arctic water might be good for their survival, Juhl said in a blog post. When it's very cold, everything slows down, including the jellyfish's metabolism, and the ice could shield them from the perils of winter storms. "Life under sea ice is like living in a refrigerator," he said. It makes everything last longer.

Found: A Bearded Seal Lounging on an Alaskan Airport Runway

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The Wiley Post-Will Rogers Memorial Airport in Utqiaġvik, Alaska, is the northernmost airport in the United States. It's been getting a lot of snow lately, and employees of the state's Department of Transportation & Public Facilities, or DOTPF, have had their hands full cleaning up the runways.

This past Monday afternoon, October 23, the DOTPF finished up a job, and headed back to the airport shop to regroup. But almost immediately, they got a call from flight services asking them to come back. Had they missed a spot? Not exactly:

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That, if you can't tell, is a bearded seal—in Inuit, an ugjuk, an oogrook, or variations thereof. "500 lb Oogruk sitting on my runway," Scott Babcock, the DOTPF employee who snapped the above photo, wrote on Facebook. "Most peculiar." (Later estimates put it at about 450 pounds—still impressive.)

Alaska has 282 land-based airports, far and away the most of any state. As such, "runways are really just part of the landscape," says Meadow Bailey, the DOTPF's Communications Director. "We end up having a lot of wildlife... we deal with musk oxen, lots of birds, caribou, [and] polar bears."

Seals, though, rarely visit. "It's a unique situation," Bailey says. "All of the staff that I've talked to, no one remembers seeing a seal on the runway [before this]." No one is quite sure why it chose to come, although its tracks revealed that it traveled about a mile on land, taking a roundabout route from the nearby Chukchi Sea.

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The DOTPF called Animal Control, who brought a pickup truck. When that didn't seem like the right tool, they left for a bit and returned again, this time with a sled and a snow machine. "They were able to take the sled onto the runway, and roll the seal onto the sled," says Bailey. "They didn't have to tranquilize it or anything like that." (Bailey wasn't sure what happened to it after that, but we've contacted various authorities and will update as soon as we know where it ended up.)

And so the runway was clear once again. Everyone went back to their business, Bailey says. "It didn't hold up any flights."

But, she adds, people have been making a lot of jokes. One of her favorites: "No flights will depart without a seal of approval."

The Video Game That Asks You to Ponder the Meaning of Soup

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The year is 2078. You are a humble server, tasked with beaming soups to the hungry humans upstairs. Rather than cook, your job is to decide what counts as soup, because your soup is cooked by aliens, and they are getting confused. Batteries swimming in a thick liquid—is that soup? What about mussels and a pile of rocks served with an ice cream scooper?

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This is the entire premise of the interactive game Something Something Soup Something. If you hit the “soup” button, your soup will be beamed upstairs. If you press “not soup,” the substance will be whisked into a dumpster. Yet this seemingly simple task quickly becomes a series of philosophical quandaries.

Something Something Soup Something’s creator, Dr. Stefano Gualeni, is a philosopher and video game designer at the University of Malta. He describes the game as a kind of “thought experiment” inspired by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose work delved into the discrepancies of language. According to the website, the game is “designed to reveal, through its gameplay, that even a familiar, ordinary concept like ‘soup’ is vague, shifting, and impossible to define exhaustively.”

To create the game, Gualeni and two other designers assembled focus groups in several countries to identify which properties people associate with soup. Is soup defined by being served in a bowl? Is soup defined by how thick the liquid is? How do people’s definitions vary from country to country?

Gualeni found that people’s definitions became nebulous when, say, a frozen liquid entered the mix. People also struggled when they discussed soup served with a straw. It begs the question: Does a soup have to be eaten with a spoon? Chopsticks often accompany ramen, after all. And what about one of the options the game presents: a foamy liquid with mussels served in a hat with a fork? Do soup ingredients have to be edible? At some point, it’s impossible to say. Even dictionary definitions okay cases ranging from liquid foods to heavy fogs and “unfortunate predicaments.”

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At the end of the game, players can read about their philosophy of soup, as revealed by their choices in the game. According to mine, I believe that soup can be a solid or a liquid, that it can be served in anything, and that it may contain inedible components. Which precisely proves the point of Something Something Soup Something: Soup can be anything, everything, and nothing all at once.

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Why Wartime England Thought Carrots Could Give You Night Vision

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Children have long been urged to eat carrots in order to improve their vision. But a carrot-filled diet won’t get you 20/20 vision or help you see in the dark. That idea is a legacy of World War II, when the British government—aided and abetted by Walt Disney—told Britons that eating carrots could sharpen their eyesight and help win the war. The message resonated beyond its borders, and it’s still persuasive today.

There is a link between carrots and eyesight. Carrots contain beta-carotene, which helps produce the purportedly eye-boosting Vitamin A. However, it doesn’t actually sharpen eyesight. What Vitamin A can do is cure night blindness, a disorder that makes it difficult to see in low light. Although night blindness is sometimes caused by cataracts, in cases where it’s caused by Vitamin A deficiency, carrots are one way to save the day.

During World War II, Great Britain had good reason to be concerned about night blindness. To foil raids by German bombers, who targeted the lights of towns and cities, England went almost totally dark at night. The blackout lasted from 1939 to 1945, and the lack of light caused accidents. In the first month of the war alone, the blackout likely caused 1,130 road deaths.

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On December 22, 1940, the British Ministry of Agriculture released a statement urging the populace to eat carrots. “If we included a sufficient quantity of carrots in our diet,” the statement read, “we should overcome the fairly prevalent malady of blackout blindness.”

But the government had another motivation in pushing carrots: Great Britain faced food shortages due to wartime rationing, and carrots were plentiful and cheap. This led government agencies to tout them as having eye-strengthening powers as part of widespread campaigns aimed at getting the British public to eat carrots.

Radio spots and film reels humorously extolled carrots. Grim posters plastered around cities implied that only by eating carrots could people dodge darkened cars. Britain’s Ministry of Food even published pamphlets with recipes such as carrot fudge and carrot croquettes, while proclaiming the vegetable could help people “see better in the blackout.”

The government made so much noise about carrots that it was news in the United States and elsewhere. “Lord Woolton, who is trying to wean the British away from cabbage and brussels sprouts, is plugging carrots,” Raymond Daniell, the New York Times’ London bureau chief wrote in an article about blackout survival techniques. “To hear him talk, they contain enough Vitamin A to make moles see in a coal mine.” That Lord Woolton, the peer heading the Ministry of Food, was known to say, “A carrot a day keeps the blackout at bay.”

Portraying carrots as a night vision-enhancing superfood had another benefit—hiding a secretive English radar technology from the Nazis. To stymie Germany’s night-time bombing raids, the Royal Air Force pioneered the Airborne Interception (AI) radar. Britain already had a land-based system of radar towers along the coast. But the AI radar could be mounted to planes and detect German bombers from the air.

To keep the new tech secret, “night fighters” were publicized as having night vision spectacular enough to spot enemy planes in the dark. Officials began telling reporters this ability was supplemented by a carrot-rich diet.

The most successful night fighter became a sensation. The media lauded John “Cat’s Eyes” Cunningham for his ability to spot Luftwaffe bombers at night. But even his cool nickname was misdirection. While the Air Ministry claimed a diet of carrots was responsible for his spectacular shooting prowess, his accuracy was in a large part due to the AI Mark IV.

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Tales of Cunningham’s prowess spread to the United States. On December 7, 1941, a Washington Post article gushed about Cunningham, describing him as “[25] years old, blond, [and] handsome enough to make a couple of movie stars worry about their jobs.” The article added that Cunningham’s diet would motivate parents in Great Britain and “across the Atlantic” to feed their children carrots. (Cunningham himself disliked the “Cat’s Eye” nickname and the limelight.)

The Ministry of Food’s propaganda reached the United States, too. As Americans prepared for potential blackouts, they looked to Great Britain for inspiration. “England grows a lot of carrots, and it’s on them that she largely relies to prevent her people from bumping into lampposts, automobiles, and each other,” the New York Timesreported on January 25, 1942. The Times also included a Ministry of Food recipe for carrot and potato pancakes as part of a vitamin-A rich “Diet for Blackouts.”

Meanwhile, England developed “Dr. Carrot,” a cheerful cartoon carrot with a top hat and a medicine bag emblazoned with “VIT-A.” Lord Woolton even roped Walt Disney into the carrot-lauding game. When Woolton sent Disney a telegram asking for more carroty mascots, Disney immediately had one of his artists whip up the Carrot Family: Carroty George, Pop Carrot, and Clara Carrot. Printed on newspaper inserts and event posters, the Carrot Family was “food propaganda,” often accompanied by recipes.

The Germans were probably never fooled by the carrot trick, and the ruse was rendered moot when Germany developed its own AI system. But for years, Britons and Americans were bombarded with carrot propaganda and publicity surrounding British flying aces and their carrot-filled diets. Cunningham and Carroty George may be hazy memories, but their message endures. Though born of wartime necessity, the concept of carrots’ eye-strengthening qualities has grown deep roots.

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The Saga of a Long-Lost 15th-Century Illuminated Prayer Book

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One day in 2012, Paul Espinosa, the rare books assistant at the George Peabody Library at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, opened a package that had been delivered to the library's mailbox. Inside was a long-lost 15th-century illuminated prayer book.

The manuscript is one of the rare examples of vernacular spirituality—meaning it was for personal use, not in a church—from early Renaissance Germany. Known as the Prayer Book of Hans Luneborch, in Low German, for the man who had commissioned it in 1492, the book had been donated to the Peabody in 1909 by Michael Jenkins, a Baltimore railway and banking magnate and avid European art collector. But sometime between then and the 1970s it had disappeared. Many academics attempted to locate the book, but James Marrow, now Professor Emeritus of Northern Renaissance Art at Princeton University, led the hunt.

In 1962 Marrow, then a graduate student at Columbia University, was researching Dutch illuminated manuscripts and was combing through the Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada, published in the late 1930s. According to the census, the Luneborch Prayer Book, containing 44 illuminated pages, was at the Peabody.

“Forty-four illuminations is an extraordinary number for a book dating from that period, and the fact that it was written in ‘Low German’ got me wondering if it wasn’t a Dutch manuscript,” Marrow says, because 15th-century Dutch writing was sometimes catalogued as “Low German.” “I was really curious to take a look at it myself and find out.”

He reached out to the Peabody, but they couldn't locate the manuscript. For the next 10 years, Marrow went on with his research, and kept looking for the Luneborch. In the late 1960s, he studied with Dorothy Miner, a curator at the Walters Art Museum, across the road from the Peabody. “Oh dear,” he remembers her saying, "that manuscript is missing and nobody can find it.”

By 1970, after a few more inquiries from academics, the Peabody wrote off the Luneborch manuscript as “lost.” Marrow thinks it had been stolen. “Maybe by someone who knew the premises, someone who worked there,” he says. “In my experience with archives that is what usually happens. But we don’t know for sure.”

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And that is the way it stayed for 40 years, until Espinosa opened a package, postmarked “Bel Air, Md.” and addressed to the Peabody, but without a return address. Marrow’s operating theory is that someone from the thief’s family found it and decided to return it to its rightful place. “That is an option, but again we don’t know. What’s weird is that for 40 years there is no record of anyone trying to sell the book.”

Stacey Lambrow, an intern who was working at the Peabody at the time, was put in charge of finding out more about the box’s contents, since it wasn’t clear just what manuscript it contained at first. Suspecting it could be the Luneborch, she turned to Marrow, and shared a few scanned pages.

“I recall looking at the scans and going, ‘Wow.’ That was the Luneborch Prayer Book,” he says. “But not only that. Its gorgeous illuminations were made by a Dutch artist that I knew really well, so in a way I was half-right, it was kind of Dutch after all.”

The Dutch artists in questions are known the Masters of Dark Eyes, one of the most prolific groups of illuminators from Renaissance Holland, known for the dark, heavy shadows round the eyes of their figures. “What comes out of it is the sense of individual psychological presence within the individual faces of the characters, which is a rather innovative and difficult to achieve effect,” says Earle Havens, Nancy H. Hall Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at John Hopkins. Havens selected the Luneborch manuscript as part of Bibliomania, an exhibition on rare books currently at the Peabody.

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As a student of Northern European Renaissance, Marrow has traveled extensively through the region, and knew the exact place where the manuscript came from: Lübeck, in northern Germany, which in the 15th century was the most important harbor of the Hanseatic League, a trading bloc that stretched from the Baltic to the North Sea.

So beyond its indisputable value as a work of art, the book indicates that a German, Hans Luneborch, had appointed a Dutch master to illustrate his personal prayer book, which was news to art historians. “At the time, German and and Dutch cities were competing, and so far we did not have much evidence of illumination art trade between them,” Marrow says. Even though Lübeck was the most important trading harbor at the time, more important than Amsterdam, the Dutch still claimed primacy over illuminations.

Marrow, with an expert in Low German and a local historian from Lübeck, is now tracking the rest of the manuscript’s history. Though it was probably in family hands, most of it’s earlier history is as much a mystery as its whereabouts for most of the 20th century. “What’s amazing about this manuscript, beyond the fact that it dates from 500 years back, is that it had such a unique history,” says Marrow. “It was found and then lost and eventually turned up in the right place at the right time.”

Found: A Comet on a Weird, Wild Swoop Around the Sun

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Earlier this month, astronomers working with the PanSTARRS 1 telescope, mounted on a volcano in Maui, observed a comet on a path unlike any observed before. Normally, comets orbit the sun; this one dove into the plane of our solar system at a nearly perpendicular angle, swooped around the sun at 57,600 mph, and headed back out into space.

You can see what that looks like in this nifty image made by Tony Dunn (and found via Popular Mechanics):

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Based on its behavior so far, this comet is never coming back to the neighborhood. This is the last we’ll see of Comet C/2017 U1.

The implication of these observations is pretty astounding. “Unless there are serious problems with much of the astronomy listed below,” the astronomers wrote, “...this object may be the first clear case of an interstellar comet”—a comet that came for a visit from outside our own solar system.

The original observations of the comet were collected over six days, and it’s not possible to say for sure exactly where the comet came from yet. “Further observations of this object are very much desired,” the scientists write. Telescopes all over the world are now trying to get a glimpse of this strange and unusual comet before it hightails it out of here forever.

This Skull May Have Belonged to the Earliest Known Tsunami Victim

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A skull fragment once thought to belong to a 140,000-year-old human ancestor may, in fact, be considerably younger, at just 6,000 years old—and also the oldest known tsunami victim, according to an article published yesterday in the journal PLOS ONE.

When Australian geologist Paul Hossfeld found an ancient-looking hominin skull in Aitape, Papua New Guinea, in 1929, he believed it to be from Homo erectus. The mistake entered into discussions about the origins of humans in Australasia, but that caused researchers to overlook exactly where it had been found. Radiocarbon dating settled the matter and placed the skull at just 6,000 years ago (meaning it came from a modern human). An international group of researchers, led by James Goff of the University of New South Wales, then began to look more closely at its context: "a coastal mangrove swamp inundated from a shallow sea." Researchers say the place where it was found was likely a tsunami deposit, which could make that the skull had come from the oldest known tsunami victim in the world.

The verdant island of New Guinea (split between two Indonesian provinces and Papua New Guinea) sits on top of a snarl of tectonic microplates, resulting in a constellation of volcanoes around its shore, the occasional earthquake, and at least seven locally significant tsunamis on its northern coast in the past 110 years. Most recently, in 1998, towering waves of nearly 50 feet battered the shores, and came as far as three miles inland. More than 2,000 people were killed.

In 2014, Goff and his team returned to the site where Hossfeld had found the skull. They followed his notes to a nearby river-cut cliff, reported the New York Times, where they took samples from the sediment layer. Analysis shows a strong similarity to sediment from sites affected by the 1998 disaster. Despite being nearly 6,000 years apart, sediments from both sites had similar grain size and composition—a geochemical signal match. Fossilized deep sea phytoplankton was another clue that, at some point, ocean water had inundated the area. There was one clear conclusion, Goff told the Times. "Yes, this was a tsunami. And yes, this is most probably a tsunami victim, and he or she is the oldest one we know.”

While people have lived along New Guinea's northern coast for about 35,000 years, not much is known about their lives before 2,000 years ago. The skull gives a few clues. People were likely taking advantage of newly forming lagoons in the area, and contended with the raging tectonic and volcanic activity. The journal adds, "Plate tectonics, geomorphology, and environmental change have likely had a powerful role to play in guiding human settlement and culture in northern Papua New Guinea."

The biggest takeaway, John Terrell, Regenstein Curator of Pacific Anthropology at the Field Museum in Chicago told Newsweek, should be about the risks of living with rising sea levels. "If we are right about how this person had died thousands of years ago," he said, "we have dramatic proof that living by the sea isn't always a life of beautiful golden sunsets and great surfing conditions."

The U.S. Senate Has Been Using the Same Ivory Gavels for Over 200 Years

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When things get unruly in a courtroom, the judge can grab his gavel and start hammering on the podium to get everyone’s attention and restore order. It's not so terribly different in the United States Senate, where they’ve been using the same ivory gavels in their attempts to bring order for over 200 years.

The U.S. Senate has a number of hidden traditions (we see you, candy desk) and historic artifacts that have been in use for generations, but perhaps none symbolizes the body’s adherence to its own past more than the senate gavels. While the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives generally uses a traditional mallet-style gavel, often comically over-sized and prone to breaking, the leaders of the Senate floor have only ever used one of two hourglass-shaped mauls since the assembly began in the 1700s.

No one is quite sure of the exact origins of the first Senate gavel. “Many of the tools that the Senate uses have long been considered just that. Tools of the legislative process,” says Miranda Smith, current Curator of the United States Senate. “At the time that they were acquired, nobody ever thought that they would be such prized possessions or that there would be such intrigue to them. We haven’t yet found that golden nugget of information. We have a lot of leads, but none of them are on a record.” Smith adds that traditionally it's believed that the original ivory gavel, or one just like it, has been used since the Senate’s first meeting in 1789.

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The original gavel, which measures two-and-a-half inches tall, was used through the 19th century and well into the 20th century. According to the Senate website, the old ivory nub had begun to fall apart by the 1940s, after over a century of use. Then in 1952, the original gavel was reinforced with silver plates affixed to both ends. But even with the extra support, the gavel was in trouble.

Just two years after the silver pieces were added, it finally broke for good. It was during a late-night debate on whether or not to allow the commercial use of nuclear power. Then-Vice President Richard Nixon took hold of the gavel to call the room to order. Slamming it down, a large chunk of the ivory hammer chipped off, although the breakage likely had more to do with wear and age than any over-exuberance on Nixon’s part. “He just happened to be the person who was holding it,” says Smith. “It could have been anybody.”

In an attempt to salvage the historic gavel, the broken chunk was screwed back on, but the gavel was no longer fit for government work, and the hunt for a replacement began. According to a New York Times article from 1982, it was Nixon himself who went searching for a suitable piece of ivory that could replace the one that had broken in his hand. After a few (no doubt unruly) gavel-less months, the Vice President of India, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, presented the assembly with a replacement ivory gavel that looked nearly identical to the original save for a decorative floral collar etched around the pinched middle. He said that he hoped it would lead to debate “with freedom from passion and prejudice.”

Both gavels are kept together in a velvet-lined mahogany box that is brought out of its protected storage spot every day that the Senate is in session. “The pages are responsible for carrying them from their secure overnight location to the Senate chamber,” says Smith. The gavel box is placed on the leader’s rostrum, both a museum piece and an actively used tool.

The 1954 gavel is still the knocker that is used today to quiet arguing politicians, and it seems like it will continue to be used well into the future. “It certainly has shown wear by being handled and used, that’s part of its allure and its significance,” says Smith. “But it has not shown any evidence of failure or cracking.” No doubt at least some members of the Senate, over the course of its long history, have wished the same could be said about the legislative process.

How Climate Change Affects Cartography

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The maps in National Geographic’s 10th edition of its Atlas of the World, released in 2014, were similar to those in 50 years’ worth of previous editions, from the familiar outlines of continents to Nat Geo’s patented font.

But there was an important difference—the shape of the Arctic.

Using data from NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center, Nat Geo remapped the area in 2013 to show how the Arctic’s ice sheet had receded. The change was so extensive that President Barack Obama mentioned it in a speech on global warming. But as soon as the cartographers had finished drawing, their map was already out of date.

“The sea ice changes monthly and daily so it’s very hard to capture it in one static image,” explains Rosemary Wardley, a senior GIS cartographer at National Geographic Maps, and part of the world atlas team.

To capture this state of change, Nat Geo has attempted to portray the Arctic “a little differently” in its recent visual atlas, presenting data about the state of the sea ice over time and during different seasons. The ice has a more “physical look” and a less “solid, white feel.” “We wanted to make sure the user could see the multiyear ice [ice that survives more than one melting season] and that while it’s something solid, it is changing,” says Wardley.

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It is often political changes—new countries, names and borders—that prompt the redrawing of maps of the world. Governments and international bodies confirm these details to mappers. But when physical features change, “there’s more wiggle room,” says Wardley. “There’s no authority on how the world is changing.”

The scale of climate change makes representing it difficult, too.It’s not on a human scale, it’s on more of a geologic scale that’s difficult for the layperson to take in,” says Wardley.

For mapmakers, capturing something that can change the world’s physical features so rapidly is a challenge.

“The vision of maps as static and hung on the wall collecting dust is ingrained in our culture because that’s how we’ve treated maps for hundreds of years,” says Alastair Bonnett, professor of social geography at Newcastle University in England, and author of Beyond the Map.

“It’s difficult for us to move to the new world where not only is the planet changing fast but maps are struggling to keep up. But change we must.”

In an effort to tackle this and buoyed by advances in digital mapping tools, groups such as MapAction and Humanitarian OpenStreetMap (HOT) are changing what maps can look like, how they can be used, and who can make them.

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HOT “activates” on-the-ground and remote mappers to help countries and humanitarian organizations prepare for and respond to natural disasters. A mapper online may be presented with a single square of satellite imagery and be asked to draw over any roads or buildings. This information is used to create and update a digital map, which can then be used by aid agencies or emergency responders, for example.

“Mapping, which was historically thought of as this technical, highly-skilled thing, becomes something that’s just drawing and saying we need just these two things to enable humanitarian work,” says Rebecca Firth, HOT’s community partnerships manager.

The organization’s efforts have recently focused on mapping five concurrent disasters, from hurricanes in the Caribbean to flooding in South Asia, attracting more than 4,800 volunteers. These rapidly updating maps show the effects of extreme weather and climate change on people and populations. Firth says there has been a rise in requests for “vulnerability and exposure mapping” in the past 12 months, too, as more of the world’s population experiences climate-change risk.

Collaboration and digital tools may help mapping overcome the struggle to keep up with a changing climate. Drone imagery recently allowed HOT to provide same-day updates to maps after landslides in Colombia, removing the wait for a government program to remap the area or for Google to update its images.

Yet, in the push to be up-to-the-minute to cover the effects of climate change, older maps should not be discarded. Wardley’s team used the updated 10th edition of the Nat Geo atlas as an opportunity to compare how the world map had been drawn over the last 50 years. A gif on National Geographic’s website shows a swathe of pale blue water eventually eclipsing the north and north-west portion of the Arctic ice, the blue font of the words “Arctic Ocean” fading into the background.

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At Covehithe in Suffolk, England, the coastline is disappearing by meters each year. Bonnett says he realized he was looking out from the low clifftop onto where Doggerland, an ancient piece of land which joined the UK to northern Europe, would have been. The country of Doggerland was once home to Stone Age settlers, but was lost beneath a rising North Sea after global warming following the last ice age some 12,000 years ago.

“We are joining or becoming connected with previous generations who have witnessed great climate change and the disappearance of their land,” he says. “There’s a sense that climate change can make us think about our relationship to people from distant generations who also had to experience sudden and dramatic climate change, though not humanly caused.”

By 2050, an estimated 66 percent of the world’s population will live in cities, driven in part by climate change, such as extreme flooding or drought in rural areas. Expanding cities are at increased risk from the effects of climate change, as mapped by the European Environment Agency. They also require new maps to help us understand them.

“We live in layers stacked up. A 3D map is hard to navigate partly because we are so used to maps being flat,” says Bonnett. “It’s not just a question of physical changes and data changes, but of us trying to get our heads around new dimensions in mapping.”

The Oldest Treasures From 12 Great Libraries

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When you start to think about the oldest books that a library might hold, there are any number of rabbit holes you can fall down. What’s the oldest book in any particular city? What’s the oldest book in the world? Well, what do you mean by "book"? The oldest written text? The oldest manuscript? The oldest printed material? The oldest bound book?

Librarians take these kinds of questions very seriously, so when Atlas Obscura contacted some of our favorite libraries to ask about the oldest books in their collections, we were treated to a wealth of information about the treasures they hold.

The New York Public Library, for instance, has not only cuneiform tablets and ninth-century gospels, but also a Gutenberg Bible and a copy of The Bay Psalm Book, one of the oldest books printed in America. In addition to its own cuneiform tablets and Gutenberg Bible, the Library of Congress holds one of the oldest examples of printing in the world, passages from a Buddhist sutra, printed in A.D. 770, as well as a medieval manuscript from 1150, delightfully titled Exposicio Mistica Super Exod.

In the history of writing, bound books as we know them today arrive fairly late, so there are no actual "books" on this list. Instead, this is a wondrous collection of illuminated manuscripts, papyrus scrolls, and clay tablets. Some of these items you can even see in person, if you pay a visit.

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New York Academy of Medicine

Apicius, De re culinaria

Created: A.D. 830, Germany

Synopsis: The earliest surviving cookbook in the West, this Latin manuscript contains recipes that date all the way back to the fourth century B.C. These were recipes meant for average Roman households, although they included non-native spices that would have had to travel far to reach the Mediterranean. Some of the highlights, according to the library, are “roast lamb with coriander, deep-fried honey fritters, and cucumber with mint dressing.”

Provenance: The manuscript was originally created in a German monastery in the ninth century. It was later held in Rome and then Paris, where it was sold in 1824 to noted bibliomaniac Sir Thomas Phillipps. From Phillips, it went to Margaret Barclay Wilson, a teacher and librarian, who donated her extensive collection of cookbooks and medicinal recipe books to the New York Academy of Medicine in 1929.

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The College of Physicians of Philadelphia

Constantinus Africanus, Viaticum

Created: No later than 1244, Italy

Synopsis: In the 10th century A.D., Ibn al-Jazzar, an Muslim physician, wrote a book titled Provisions for the Traveler and the Nourishment of the Settled, a compendium of the medical knowledge of the day, which focused on the interaction of humours and elements in the human body. A few decades later, Constantinus traveled from North Africa to a monastery in southern Italy, where he adapted and translated Ibn al-Jazzar’s work into Latin.

Provenance: A reader in 1429 made notes in the margins. By the 16th or 17th century the book had a new and still unidentified owner, who added chapter titles. It later passed through the hands of booksellers in Lugano, Switzerland, to the College of Physicians library.

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Bodleian Library

Ash-Preserved Papyrus

Created: Before A.D. 79, Herculaneum, Italy

Synopsis: When Mt. Vesuvius erupted in the first century A.D., it covered the town of Herculaneum in ash, gas, and other volcanic material that preserved organic matter for hundreds of years. These carbonized papyrus scrolls came from the town’s library. Archaeologists have struggled to find a way to read the damaged scrolls, so there’s little known about their contents—though progress is being made with advanced imaging techniques.

Provenance: These scrolls were discovered in Herculaneum in 1750s. In 1810, George, Prince of Wales, received 18 of them and presented four to the library in Oxford as a gift.

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St. Catherine’s Monastery

Codex Sinaiticus

Created: A.D. 330–60, possibly Rome, Italy

Synopsis: A handwritten version of a Greek Bible, the codex is one of the oldest copies known today, and the oldest surviving version of the complete New Testament.

Provenance: The codex was kept in St. Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt before the wider scholarly world came to know about it in 1844, when a scholar removed 43 folios from the monastery library. Parts of the codex are now kept at four different libraries, but St. Catherine’s still holds a small fraction of the work—12 pages and 24 fragments.

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Chicago Botanic Garden

Theophrastus, Historia Plantarum

Created: 1483, Treviso, Italy

Synopsis: Back in the third century B.C., Theophrastus, one of the first botanists of the Western world, set out to catalogue the the plants of ancient Greece and created the first known classifications of plants in his part of the world. He covered a range of trees, shurbs, dwarf shrubs, and herbs and examined how they grew and were used in his own time.

Provenance: This Latin translation of the original text was printed in northeast Italy in the 15th century, making it an incunable, or a printed book that predates 1501. In 1664, the then-owner added a title page and doodles that Leora Siegel, the library’s senior director, describes as “a woman’s anatomy, but poorly done.” In the early 20th century, it was owned by an orchid specialist who donated it to the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. The Botanic Garden purchased the society’s rare book collection in 2002.

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American Museum of Natural History

Albertus Magnus, De animalibus

Created: 1495, Venice, Italy

Synopsis: Albertus Magnus spent his life studying and commenting on the works of Aristotle. Without his work, much less knowledge of the Greek philosopher would have made it to future generations of scholars. Albertus, who died in 1280 and was later canonized, wrote widely about the scientific and natural worlds. This volume collects his work on the animal kingdom.

Provenance: By the 19th century, the book had entered the holdings of the collection now named the Berlin State Library. The natural history museum in New York bought the book in 1923 from Paul Gottschalk, a German book dealer.

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Library of Congress

Cuneiform Accounting Tablets

Created: 2050 B.C., Sumeria

Synopsis: The Library of Congress’ oldest written material dates far back, beyond the founding of this nation, to more than 4,000 years ago. The collection of cuneiform tablets dates back to the reign of Gudea of Lagash, in the 2100s B.C. The tablets recorded bills of sale, receipts, ledgers, and other accounting tasks.

Provenance: In 1929, Kirkor Minassian, a deal of Islamic and Near Eastern art, visited the library and was inspired to send a suite of gifts, which included these tablets.

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Folger Shakespeare Library

Magna Carta

Created: Compiled 1325, England

Synopsis: The Magna Carta was the first English statute, but it wasn't given that name until after 1217, when it started being issued along with the Charter of Forests. To distinguish the original statutes from the forestry code, they were given the name the Great Charter, or the Magna Carta. This copy is in Anglo-Norman, translated from Latin.

Provenance: A note in one leaf indicates that the book was given as a gift in 1821. Henry Clay Folger acquired it from an “E. Williams of Hove” in 1922.

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Boston Athenaeum

Egyptian Artifact Album

Created: circa 1500 B.C., Thebes, Egypt

Synopsis: This book isn’t exactly the oldest book in the Athenaeum’s collection. It was bound in the 1910s and is “more an album of archaeological artifacts than a rare book in the traditional sense,” the library writes. It contains three shrine hangings describing the worship of the goddess Hathor, and a series of inscribed mummy bandages, which are some of the oldest examples of painting on cloth.

Provenance: The artifacts were discovered in 1905 by archaeologist Robert de Rustafjaell, and a bindery in London collected them into a book sometime between 1913 and 1916. The library bought the album that year in Boston, from Goodspeed’s Book Shop.

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Austrian National Library

Book of the Dead

Created: 15 century B.C., Egypt

Synopsis: Sesostris was a cattle counter and writer in ancient Egypt, and he was well-off enough to own his own copy of the Book of the Dead. In contrast with its name, the book is actually a papyrus scroll, 20-foot long, that contains magical spells to help the recently deceased make their way to the afterlife.

Provenance: The Court Library, the predecessor to the National Library, acquired the papyrus collection of Archduke Rainer in 1899.

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New York Public Library

Landévennec Gospels

Created: Circa ninth century, Brittany, France

Synopsis: Like the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library’s oldest written material is a collection of cuneiform tablets. Its oldest manuscript, however, is a ninth-century copy of the Gospels, made in a French monastery, but showing Celtic influence in its imagery.

Provenance: The manuscript once belonged to the Marquis of Blandford, fifth Duke of Marlborough. It was later owned by Sir Thomas Phillipps (who also owned the New York Academy of Medicine's copy of Apicius's De re culinaria), who passed it to his grandson, FitzRoy Fenwick. A.S.W. Rosenbach bought it in 1926, and its last private owner was one Edward S. Harkness, who donated it to the library as part of a larger gift.

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Free Library of Philadelphia

Aldhelm, De Virginitate

Created: Circa 899, England

Synopsis: The oldest written items at the Free Library of Philadelphia are a set of cuneiform tablets—a common theme—but its oldest manuscript is a prose version of De Virginitate, About Virginity. Aldhelm, the Abbot of Malmesbury and Bishop of Sherborne, had written this treatise about early virgin martyrs, the value of purity, and its relationship to Christian virtue. This later Latin edition was written in an Anglo-Saxon script.

Provenance: R. Contan gave this book to a new owner in March, 1855. J.F. Lewis acquired it in 1914, before it went to the library.

Destroyed by Fire in 1849, Canada's First Parliament Building Gives up Its Secrets

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The story of the building that housed Canada’s first provincial parliament is one of political turmoil, fire—and odor management.

The structure was originally built between 1832 and 1834 to host the city’s first indoor market. St. Anne's Market, as it was known, was also one of the first public structures in North America with an enclosed sewer beneath it. “Back in the mid-1800s, Montreal’s rapid population growth was putting pressure on the nearby Saint Pierre River, which basically became an open-sky sewage,” says Hendrik Van Gijseghem, Archaeology Project Manager at Montreal Pointe-à-Callière Museum, which has been leading archaeological investigations at the site of the parliament building over the last several years.

Concerns about health risks from the river—at the time the miasma theory, which posited that diseases such as cholera could be carried by “bad air,” held sway—led Montreal’s government to channel part of the river into a collector sewer under the new, 330-foot-long Georgian building. “It was, at the time, an extraordinary feat of civil engineering,” says Van Gijseghem.

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After 10 years as a produce market, the building was converted to host the Province of Canada’s first unified parliament, in 1844. Five years later, on the night of April 25, 1849, it burned to the ground.

At the time, politics there were dominated by fierce debate over whether Canada was to be autonomous or remain a British colony. It was as polarized as could be, and following the passage of a controversial piece of legislation, loyalist rioters burned the building down.

A new market was built at the site after the fire, but it was destroyed in 1901 and later turned into a parking lot, though the sewer remained functional until 1989. This infrastructure kept the site sealed and undisturbed for decades. Archaeologists started to unearth the site once the sewer was closed off, but the big finds came starting in 2011, when a team led by Louise Pothier, an archaeologist and curator at the Pointe-à-Callière Museum, discovered the “spectacularly well preserved” foundations of the building, along with a trove of artifacts from its last moments as the seat of Canada’s provincial government.

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“Urban archeology usually deals with trash, objects that appear in a scattered way after they have been thrown away,” says Van Gijseghem. “In this case objects were left in their context of use, because people had to leave quickly during a fire.” The unusual fate of the building—burned then sealed away, created the “perfect archaeological conditions.”

The collection of artifacts includes tobacco pipes, liquor bottles, glasses, and oyster shells. Other notable discoveries are dozens of burned books that were, counterintuitively, preserved by the fire, carbonized like scrolls found in Herculaneum after the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in A.D. 79.

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Two very rare sealing stamps also survived, one from the legislative assembly and one from the council library. The stamp that bears the seal of the legislative assembly is so far the only known surviving example. What’s particularly exciting about this find is that Pothier and her team also found, on an online auction site, a letter bearing the seal that had been sent to Britain just a week before the fire. “It was a really magical moment,” says Van Gijseghem. “I was sitting by my computer, holding the stamp in one hand and looking at a screen displaying a letter that had been sealed with that same seal 170 years ago.”

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Though it’s known that the fire was caused by rioters, its exact cause is a mystery. The fact that these items were left probably exactly where they had been used suggests the fire was “quick and violent.” Historical accounts of the igniting incident vary. One theory is that it was accidental, caused by a thrown brick that knocked over a gas lamp. But last summer, Montreal’s Grey Nuns, housed across the street from the site, examined their archives and found a previously undisclosed account of that night that mentions “maniacal mobs, armed with sticks and torches, purposefully setting fire to all corners of the building, even adding accelerant and fuel.” But there are enough contradictions in the various accounts to make the exact events hard to pin down.

Another group of finds, and perhaps the most unexpected, has to do with the reasons for the construction of the building's sewer in the first place—fighting odors.

Van Gijseghem calls it a “fantastic collection of Victorian-era sumptuosity,” including personal hygiene items. “We found soap dishes, toothbrushes, balm, perfume containers, shoe polish, all of which we did not expect, as it was mostly men who used the premises,” he says. These finds suggest that lawmakers spent a lot of time in parliament and had to freshen up from time to time.

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They also show that upper-middle-class Victorians were very concerned about odors, and this, as much as its central place in Canadian history, thematically defines the building. “First it gets built out of worries of bad odor causing disease, then we find all of these hygienic products, it actually got us wonder about the actual smell of the building back then. After all, it was built on top of a sewer,” says Van Gijseghem. “But we haven’t found any written account. For now, it’s only pure speculation.” Smell, it turns out, is a powerful trigger for memory.


The DIY Carvings Designed to Deter 17th-Century Witches

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Daisy chain circles and “V” carvings hidden in the nooks and crannies of historic homes and properties across the United Kingdom, once thought to be carpenter’s symbols, hint at Tudor superstition and folklore.

Apotropaic marks, or witches’ marks, have been found in various properties throughout the UK—from Wookey Hole Caves in Somerset, to Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-Upon-Avon, to even the Tower of London. Most of the carvings appear in buildings constructed between the 16th and 18th centuries.

The “apotropaic” terminology comes from the Greek term “apotropaios,” meaning “averting evil.” Witches or their evil conjured spirits were thought to attempt to enter homes via doorways, hearths, and windows, and hide in shadows made by the nooks and crannies of the house. It was believed that once they had entered the property, witches and evil spirits would want to attack the inhabitants, or ruin the most valuable possessions of the owner. Tudor proprietors took a proactive approach to the issue, and carved the apotropaic marks near where items of value were stored.

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“Ritual marks were cut, scratched or carved into our ancestors’ homes and churches in the hope of making the world a safer, less hostile place,” said Duncan Wilson, Chief Executive of Historic England, last year. “They were such a common part of everyday life that they were unremarkable and because they are easy to overlook, the recorded evidence we hold about where they appear and what form they take is thin.”

The most popular witches' mark features a series of intertwining daisies in a wheel design, also known as a hexafoil. The linking design was intended to entice the malevolent spirit and trap them in an infinite loop, thus preventing them from progressing any further into the property. Alternatively, Tudor homeowners would also call upon the supreme divine power of the Virgin Mary for protection, carving Marian symbols such as the letters AM for “Ave Maria,” M for “Mary,” or VV for “Virgin of Virgins.”

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Belief in witchcraft dates back to ancient Babylon, and has appeared in texts from the Greeks and Romans. But the conventional stereotype of witches as female figures consorting in dark magic did not emerge until approximately the 15th century in Europe. Before then, in medieval England, folklore concerning good and bad spirits that could affect seasons and running of a household coexisted with the newly introduced religion of Christianity. “White witches,” or “cunning folk” as they were known, were believed to assist in intervening with these spirits for the good of the people, as well as other practices, such as medicine. On counterbalance, it was also believed there were those who would call on their powers for malevolent reasons, such as necromancy.

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As Christianity took root in local and countrywide governance, church authorities focused on eradicating pagan beliefs, and the link between the dark magic of demonic conjuring and pacts with the devil, and witchcraft as we know it today, emerged.

Witches’ marks have been found in confined, shadowy areas of properties. Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-Upon-Avon, which later became a pub, had a hexafoil placed where they stored the beer. At Knole House, a Jacobean estate in the southeast English county of Kent, carvings were found on the roof beams and floorboards. The marks were dated using dendrochronology to 1606—only months after the Gunpowder Plot, an assassination attempt by the Catholic Guy Fawkes against the Protestant King James I. During this time, accusations of witchcraft and demonic forces permeated throughout society, and witch trials were rife. The Pendle witch trials of 1612, for example, saw eight women and two men sent to the gallows.

Official legislation against the practice of witchcraft did not start in earnest in the UK until the 16th century, when Henry VIII introduced the Witchcraft Act 1542. In comparison to the rest of Europe, where witch hunts had started as early as the 12th century, the UK was a latecomer to penalizing witchcraft. As religious tensions and social upheaval continued throughout the 1500s and into the 1600s, however, the belief in witchcraft and the subsequent persecutions intensified. In fact, King James I became so interested in witchcraft he wrote a book on the topic, Daemonologie, in 1597. In 1604, he broadened Elizabeth I’s Witchcraft Act to include the penalty of death without the benefit of clergy to anyone found guilty of communing with evil spirits.

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The practice of carving apotropaic marks persisted in the last centuries during times of social change, as evidenced by the carving of these symbols into historic buildings in Australia by British settlers in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Given that apotropaic marks were verbally passed down throughout the centuries as folklore and symbols of protection, and were seen as such an everyday feature of households, little has been recorded or researched on the subject.

In an attempt to rectify this, Historic England launched a public appeal on Halloween 2016 to encourage members of the public to search for apotropaic marks in their houses or local historic buildings. The results were overwhelming, with hundreds of new submissions sent.

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Soon Historic England hopes to release a report detailing the most surprising examples from their 2016 appeal, and with more records it is hoped more information can be unearthed on these enigmatic symbols.

“Witches’ marks are a physical reminder of how our ancestors saw the world,” said Historic England’s Duncan Wilson last year. “They really fire the imagination and can teach us about previously held beliefs and common rituals.”

The Long, Strange History of People Filing Flying Saucer Patents

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

Early in the summer of 1947, an amateur pilot from Idaho named Kenneth Arnold spotted something in the Washington skies that kind of blew his mind.

Despite the skies being clear that day, he saw a series of nine flashes of horizontal light. He landed, told others what he saw, and his story spread through the popular consciousness, taking on a life on its own, as well as a name—the flying saucer.

Two weeks later, a much more famous incident in Roswell, New Mexico, involving a weather balloon (if you believe what the government tells you), further cemented the idea of the flying saucer in the public consciousness.

Not long after, hobbyists of all kinds suddenly felt inspired make their own—and they’ve been flooding the patent offices globally ever since.

But the guy who got to the U.S. Patent Office first, surprisingly, wasn’t actually inspired by the popular perception of the UFO at all. He had the idea, in fact, years before Kenneth Arnold took his fateful flight.

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The Dutch painter and sculpture artist Alexander Weygers, who grew up in the Dutch East Indies—now Indonesia—and spent most of his adult life in the U.S., was something of a 20th-century Leonardo da Vinci. He had both an engineering and artistic background, and his work spanned sculpture, illustrations, photography, and many other fields.

In 1927, he conceptualized a device that predicted the infatuation with flying saucers before they even had that name. And as an engineer, he did so with a practical eye toward the failings of the device he hoped to replace.

“Helicopters are vulnerable,” he said in an interview with UPI in 1985. “People were being killed in them during the 1920s. They go down like a brick. The saucer became the logical answer.”

His creativity was driven by tragedy. In 1928, his wife died during childbirth, as did his son. The painful incident ended up pushing him closer to art, with the losses inspiring some of his most notable sculptures.

A similar tragedy—the capture of his family, still in the Dutch East Indies, by Japanese forces during World War II—pushed him in the early 1940s to complete his saucer project, which he had first started in the 1920s. He called the device a “Discopter.”

The idea was inspired not by spaceships or science fiction, but by a practical desire to create a vehicle that could be used to rescue people in incidents not unlike the one that faced his family members. His frame of reference was his own prior work.

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He filed for a patent in 1944, and that patent was granted the next year. A key passage from that patent:

To a helicopter, a craft constructed on the principles of my invention bears a superficial resemblance in that both types are sustained by at least one horizontal rotor. From this point on, however, all similarity between the two types of flying craft ends. A craft embodying my invention is distinguished from a helicopter in that the rotor or rotors in my craft are enclosed within a substantially vertical tunnel, the rotor regarded as a whole is mainshaftless and the external form of the craft is not very different from the familiar discus of the athlete, in common with which the craft enjoys certain aerodynamic advantages characteristic of the passage of the discus thru the air. Not only the rotors and power plant compartments but all of the usual moving and fixed protruding parts, present in both airplanes and helicopters, such as stabilizing and directing means and otherwise, are entirely enclosed within the strikingly simple and cleanly streamlined contour line of the craft when regarded from exteriorly thereof in any elevation view, thereby concealing from the casual view such parts.

Alexander Weygers wasn’t trying to invent the flying saucer. He was trying to reinvent the helicopter, along with aviation in general, so that it could be used more practically. (It should be noted that the device was never built.)

But the existence of everything that came afterwards meant that his name would forever be associated with futurism and science fiction, elements that didn’t actually inspire his invention.

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Soon after the flying saucer hit the public consciousness in the late 1940s, people noticed what Weygers had done. A 1950 article in the Allentown, Pennsylvania, Morning Call, dedicated column space to a dentist named Dr. Harold T. Frendt, who used the existence of the patent to argue against the existence of aliens. Frendt suggested that the patents were being used to create these saucers, despite his only evidence being Weygers’ patent.

“They should be operated at high altitudes instead of exposing them for observation to the general public and the pro-communistically inclined, and thereby stimulating a trend of foolish speculation,” Frendt told the newspaper at the time.

Frendt’s statement is ironic, because he’s also speculating. There probably was no flying saucer.

While Weygers was certainly first, the folks that followed him clearly were inspired by whatever happened in Washington and New Mexico back in 1947, perhaps with a little touch of H.G. Wells in the mix as well.

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As soon as there was a popular “spark,” the inspiration that had us looking up in the sky and wondering what if, the saucer was everywhere. It’s been keeping patent offices around the world busy ever since—first, with a spate of flying saucer toys in the early 1950s that looked like frisbees, and soon, in the form of aircraft clearly inspired by flying saucers, like this 1953 design and this helicopter/flying saucer hybrid.

Buried in the USPTO’s many classifications for airplanes and helicopters is the indexing code “B64C 39/001,” which represents “flying vehicles characterised by sustainment without aerodynamic lift, often flying disks having a UFO-shape.” Yes, USPTO got so many patent applications for flying saucers that it earned its own classification.

So how many flying saucer patents are we talking about? According to Google Patents, around 192 items in this specific classification are listed as being produced in the U.S., with three particular surges in their creation—an initial jump in the years between 1953 and 1956, a second wind between 1965 and 1971, and an unusually dramatic surge in such inventions between the years 2001 and 2004. USPTO handled 37 flying saucer-related patents during that particularly busy time in U.S. diplomatic history.

There’s a lot to look at, and it’s entirely possible that due to the complexity of the patent system, this doesn’t cover everything. Fortunately, someone with a pseudonym and apparently a large amount of time already did a huge amount of curation for you.

Earlier this year, an Internet Archive user named Superboy collected more than 100 flying saucer patent filings spanning the past 75 years or so. It took the user over three months to gather the documents from the U.S. patent offices and other patent offices globally, and is split up over two pages.

(Superboy helpfully noted that the documents prove “that humans have obtained and incorporated flying saucers for personal and secret use.”)

Some of the patents look like massive frisbees; others like tiny, squat planets; and others still look like they’ve taken clear inspiration from movies set in space. (And of course, Weygers’ groundbreaking craft made the list. It had to.)

Most patents were credited to individuals, with a handful of companies involved.

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The weirdest such applications—though eventually withdrawn—came from a man named John Quincy St. Clair. People have been wondering about St. Clair for years. During the 2000s, he filed for for dozens of patents for all sorts of bizarre things. (It should be noted that filing for a patent isn’t cheap, even if it’s withdrawn.) Among his greatest hits: a “magnetic vortex wormhole generator” and a “walking through walls training system,” which comes complete with instructions on how to print the “training system” using a home printer.

One of his applications, from 2006, was for something called a “photon spacecraft.”“This invention is a spacecraft propulsion system that employs photon particles to generate a field of negative energy in order to produce lift on the hull,” he wrote.

Of course, not every flying saucer patent has been produced by a hobbyist, an eccentric inventor, or an engineer who turned tragedy into creativity.

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Some of the largest companies in the world have occasionally taken interest in the flying saucer idea. In 2014, for example, Airbus invented a device that has a lot in common with the modern flying saucer, but also looks like a stealth fighter jet with a donut in the middle.

As CNBC reported at the time, it wasn’t intended for either outer space or the military—it was a reinvention of the passenger jet that was intended to help reduce cabin pressure. And there’s a good chance we’ll never even see it.

“It’s just one of many ideas,” a company spokesman told Fortune. “It doesn’t mean that we’re going to be working on making it a reality.”

That actually sounds somewhat sedated compared to an attempt by the British Rail to patent a spacecraft that relied on “controlled thermonuclear fusion reaction.”

And of course, the future may have room for a flying saucer—or at least a flying car—yet. As Bloomberg Businessweek reported last year, Google co-founder Larry Page has been investing in the idea of flying cars for years through his startups Zee.Aero and Kitty Hawk, with Weygers cited as an early inspiration for what could come next.

Earlier this year, Kitty Hawk released a video for a product that, if you squint hard enough, shares a lineage with what Weygers did way back when, with maybe inspiration from all the things that have come along since.

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

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Found: A Schoolgirl's Autograph Book From the 1930s

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Keith Maynard is drawn to artifacts of the past. A mechanic by trade, he buys and sell antiques on the side. While living in a small town in Alberta, Canada, a few years back, he went to a large yard sale, hosted by a group of families, and spied a small, old book.

“It just appealed to me as soon as I saw it,” he says. “When I saw the date, even before I read it, I knew I would buy it.”

Inside, the book contains messages, poems, and sketches—it was an old autograph book, a popular keepsake in the past. The earliest message was dated October 18, 1929, a birthday message. The entries ran to 1936.

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The book seemed to belong to a girl named Hilda, who went to Regina’s Connaught elementary school. An aunt had given her the book as a gift, and it was filled with mementos from her friends and family.

Maynard always intended to find the original owner of the book, but, as he says, “Life takes over.” In the past few months, he started to search in earnest for Hilda, whose last name was not in the book. The elementary school had no record of her, as students’ records are routinely destroyed after a few decades. He tried posting the item on Facebook, with no luck. Finally, he went to CBC Radio with the story.

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Within 24 hours, he had a potential match. A man named George Beckett got in touch and told Maynard about his sister Hilda, who had gone to the same school, at the same time. They’re planning to meet soon to compare a note from the book, written by Hilda’s mother, with a handwriting sample of Beckett’s mother. “It’s pretty neat that I have found him and found him so fast,” says Maynard.

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Victorian Culinary Trading Cards Are a Feast for the Eyes

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In 1983, Nach Waxman sought to stock his new bookstore, Kitchen Arts & Letters, with curiosities that weren’t cookbooks. He soon discovered Victorian-era advertisements known as trading cards. “I thought it would be a really interesting item to have in the store,” he says. “They’re attractive images and they’re small, so people could frame them, put them in their room, and put them on their kitchen walls.” The one problem? People weren’t buying them. Only one person was sold: Waxman. “I was hooked,” he laughs.

Before collectors clamored over baseball cards, Victorians couldn’t get enough of trading cards. The middle and upper class had a penchant for collecting the cards, which often came packaged with the products they advertised, and pasting them into scrapbooks. The name “trading cards” is thought to come from the phenomenon of collectors exchanging these cards, which advertised baking powder, Heinz tomato soup, and everything imaginable with images of chefs emerging from giant pickles and poetry-spouting pigs.

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Today, antique trade card dealers often excavate the cards from old scrapbooks and sell them to aficionados like Waxman. “They’ve been up in somebody’s attic and not on very good paper, and what [the dealers] do is they lovingly soak the cards off, because some of them were glued in,” Waxman explains. “They soak the cards off the pages and press them flat, and do other things to make sure that they don’t lose their color.”

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In 2015, Waxman gifted his cadre of trade cards to Cornell University, his alma mater. A new exhibition at Cornell Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections features around 6,500 trading cards, all of which depict the idiosyncrasy of the Victorian era. “The only word I can use for this collection is that it sprawls,” Waxman says. Part of that sprawl includes hordes of “medicinal” foods and drinks, which claimed to cure ailments ranging from drunkenness to diphtheria. The card for Hires Root Beer, depicted here, swore that it “purifies the blood.”

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The trade cards are hardly limited to health, though. For these emerging leisure classes, they also offered the promise of mobility, such as this Pabst beer ad depicting “luxury on the high seas.”

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Victorians loved highbrow culture, too. So advertisers liberally borrowed from artists, poets, and literary works. Which is why the face of Rembrandt, who died in 1669, graced a trade card for Enterprise Baking Powder.

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One remarkable technological advancement contributed to trade cards’ popularity: color printing. You see this in the advertisement for Dr. Buckland’s Scotch Oats Essence, which promises to cure drunkenness, paralysis, opium habit, sciatica, ovarian neuralgia, and epilepsy. In addition to claiming it’s a cure-all, the trade card incentivizes customers to send in a label from the package to receive a print “beautifully done in 15 colors” of the actress Lillian Russell. “They were colorful in a time when color printing was actually rather scarce,” Waxman says. “I mean, you couldn’t open up a copy of the Ladies’ Home Journal and find color ads. At most, they were two color.”

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Ironically, trade cards fell out of fashion when magazines started printing color advertisements. Another kind of trade card—baseball cards—soon usurped their popularity, too. “As the interest in trade cards declined, the collecting fad diminished,” Waxman says. “It’s funny, they practically disappeared from sight.” Trade cards may have vanished altogether had it not been for the bubble gum business. “The only way that people even had a sense that there were such things as trade cards is because bubblegum manufacturers continued to put baseball players into their packages,” he says.

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The Cornell University Library is displaying more of Waxman's cards in an online exhibition. As you browse, try imaging which items that you've collected could end up in a museum one day.

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A Ghostly Portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots, Was Hidden for Centuries

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There are few contemporary portraits of Mary, Queen of Scots. Implicated in both her husband’s murder and a plot to murder her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I, she was a controversial royal, to say the least.

That makes a previously unknown, almost ghostly portrait of the executed queen, a historic find.

While examining a set of paintings by two Dutch artists working in Scotland, conservator Caroline Rae discovered the white lines of a woman’s portrait beneath a painting of a Scottish nobleman. Rae was using X-ray photography to investigate the techniques of the artists Adrian Vanson and Adam de Colone. The hidden portrait came as a surprise.

The queen, Mary Stuart, was kept in captivity in England starting in 1568, after she was forced to abdicate the Scottish throne. She retained some popularity among her Catholic supporters, and the portrait was likely commissioned by a high-ranking Scottish Catholic, The Independent reports.

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Adrian Vanson started working on the portrait around 1586 and had made progress on her face, hat, and neck before abandoning the work. He wouldn’t have been working from life, but more likely from a couple of miniatures created of her not long before. Mary was executed in 1587 for plotting against Queen Elizabeth’s life, and given the political climate, the person who commissioned the work seems to have thought better of it.

In 1588, Vanson painted over the original portrait and transformed it into a portrait of a Scottish nobleman, Sir John Maitland, chancellor to the Scottish king. But elements of the original portrait remained: Mary’s unfinished dress became his doublet, and her right hand was made more masculine and incorporated into the new work. For centuries, no one suspected the lost work was hiding underneath this portrait, until the X-ray revealed Mary beneath.

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