Happy Independence Day weekend! As you kick back and relax to celebrate the ol' red, white, and blue, take a look at our pieces celebrating the weird and wonderful corners of America's landscape and history. From fireworks to dead eagles to Jefferson's obsession with mastodon's we are here for all of your oddly patriotic needs. Have a great weekend! 

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A photograph from the 1900 of the fortress walls and tower in Famagusta. (Photo: Travelers in the Middle East Archive)  

Unstable stones in the tower had to be removed and reinforced. The 500-year-old Venetian system of channels and cisterns were restored. New roof coverings and underground drains were built to save the castle from water damage.

All for the love of “Othello.”

A seaside citadel believed to be the fictional setting of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy had been in slow decline in northern Cyprus for decades. But after a year-long makeover, the tower reopened to visitors this week, with a performance by actors from both sides of the ethnically divided island.

The opening reception at Othello Tower in Famagusta on Thursday, July 2. (Photo: Courtesy United Nations Development Programme Partnership for the Future)

The Othello Tower sits along the walled port of Famagusta, which was a glitzy tourist magnet until 1974, when a coup backed by the government of Greece was swiftly followed by the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. Since then, the island has remained split in two, with Greek Cypriots living in the south and Turkish Cypriots in the north, separated by a United Nations-patrolled no man’s land known as the Green Line. Famagusta lies in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, an internationally shunned state that was declared in 1982 and is recognized only by Turkey.

The partition has taken its toll on Cyprus’ monuments. But as political reunification talks stalled, some Greek and Turkish Cypriot leaders joined forces in 2008 to form the Technical Committee on Cultural Heritage. Together, they identified about 2,800 culturally significant sites across the island and secured funding from the European Union to perform emergency conservation work on some of the most at-risk churches, mosques, baths and other historic buildings.

Famagusta in 1900. (Photo: Travelers in the Middle East Archive) 

“After we consider that we are losing our monuments, we start to love them,” Takis Hadjidemetriou, the Greek Cypriot representative on the committee, told Atlas Obscura. “When you are going to lose something, you discover how important it is.” 

The imposing Othello Tower was first built in the 14th century by the Lusignan Kingdom, and it was strengthened by the Venetians who took control of Cyprus in 1489. The latest renovation, the first since the Cyprus was divided, cost just over 1 million Euros and was completed by a Turkish Cypriot contractor. The renovated walls of the citadel now offer a view of a shipping harbor to the immediate north and, to the south, the abandoned high-rise resorts of Varosha, the beach that attracted the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in its heyday but has turned into an off-limits military-monitored ghost town after its mostly Greek Cypriot inhabitants were forced to flee in 1974.

Othello and Desdemona on the wall of the tower. (Photo: Courtesy United Nations Development Programme Partnership for the Future) 

The tower underwent a $1 million Euro restoration over the last year. (Photo: Courtesy United Nations Development Programme Partnership for the Future)

“Apart from our hard work, the most important achievement of the committee is the establishment of trust and confidence between its members,” Ali Tuncay, Hadjidemetriou’s Turkish counterpart on the committee, said during a reopening ceremony Thursday night. “They have a common vision for the cultural heritage monuments. For us, they are not just the monuments of Muslims, Christians, Turks, Greeks, Venetians or Lusignans; they are the common heritage of humanity.”

To celebrate this weekend’s reopening of the tower, Greek and Turkish Cypriot actors staged an abridged performance of “Othello,” Shakespeare’s tragedy about a Moorish general who strangles his Venetian bride, Desdemona, after his ensign, Iago, convinces him she’s been unfaithful. It’s not exactly a play about unity, but the themes of power struggle resonated with Hadjidemetriou. 

“We had our Iagos who destroyed the country and our lives and brought a lot of misery,” Hadjidemetriou said after the play. “The message was given by tonight’s performance: A brave man so easily swayed by some conspirator with jealousy in his heart can destroy everything. We have to take our lessons from history.”

Cassio and Iago, played by Cypriot actors, in the July 2 performance. (Photo: Courtesy United Nations Development Programme Partnership for the Future) 

 The small and hidden grave of Giro. (Photo: Atlas staff)

At 9 Carlton Terrace in London sits a stately building. It’s a reserved white structure, appointed with columns within hailing distance from Buckingham Palace and St. James’s Park. But nestled among these grand offerings is a much smaller and stranger landmark that the average tourist speeds past en route to glitzier offerings.

Under a large tree, behind a fence, and next to a driveway is a tiny grave considered the only Nazi memorial in London. It’s the grave of a dog, Giro. 

The German Embassy in the early 1930s, when Giro and Leopold von Hoesch were resident. To the left of the building is where Giro is now buried. (Photo: Bundesarchiv/WikiCommons CC-BY-SA 3.0)

In 1934, when Giro died, 9 Carlton Terrace was the German Embassy. The ambassador was Leopold von Hoesch, who began serving Germany as a statesman in 1923 under the Weimar Republic. An ambassador in Paris for several years, he was transferred to London in 1932, and transitioned to serving Hitler’s regime following the Nazi takeover in 1933. He would do so until his death three years later.

Von Hoesch was well suited to the role of ambassador; he was an independently wealthy world traveler who was photographed strolling London in a sharp suit, a pocket handkerchief, a cane and a hat. One historian wrote that the “urbane and sophisticated” von Hoesch entertained a visiting Nazi dignitary with a full Gypsy band at an intimate dinner. (The dignitary was Joachim von Ribbentrop, who would take over von Hoesch’s ambassadorship following his death and hang for war crimes in 1946.) But in addition to being adept at throwing parties and getting dressed, von Hoesch was also reportedly good at the political side of his job. He was “the greatest of the German professional diplomats of the interwar period” and London was where the “sensitive and devoted man proved himself a master of his craft,” according to one scholar.

Leopold von Hoesch in London, in 1932. (Photo: Bundesarchiv/WikiCommons CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Although von Hoesch served under the Nazi regime, it is believed he was not a supporter. One news article covering his death states “friends knew that he was completely out of sympathy with most of the principles of National Socialism.” It goes on to say his movements may have been tracked by Hitler’s spies and that it was rumored he “burst into tears” upon hearing of the “actions of the government he was attempting to serve.” Yet another article recording von Hoesch’s death declared he was “immune to the contagion of the violent, swashbuckling nationalism”.

Von Hoesch was also apparently devoted to his dog, Giro. Some accounts state that the dog was a terrier, but most name the dog’s breed as Alsatian, now called a German Shepherd. His death was sudden.

German inscription on Giro's grave. (Photo: Atlas staff) 

“Giro was electrocuted by an exposed wire in 1934,” writes Hannah Velton in her book Beastly London: A History of Animals in the City, “And his headstone reads ‘Ein Treuer Begleiter!’ (A True Companion!)”

The tombstone is plain and small.

Just two years later, von Hoesch would die suddenly, too. According to one account, he died while “reading his correspondence at breakfast at the German embassy.” Another states that he was dressing in his bedroom. In both cases, heart problems were named as the cause.

He was, according to the same story that claimed Nazi machinations brought him to tears, suffering.

“The ambassador had been under considerable mental and physical strain” states the April 11, 1936 story that ran in The New York Times. Photographs from that time showed the daper man to be a “bowed and shrunken figure”.

Despite von Hoesch’s less than enthusiastic endorsement for the dictatorship, he received a full Nazi funeral. On April 15, 1936 his coffin was draped in the Nazi flag and marched through the streets of London. British dignitaries attended and followed the large procession. Nineteen cannons were fired off in Hyde Park before the coffin was loaded onto a British destroyer that would deliver von Hoesch’s body back to German shores.

Already separated by death, Giro and his master were further marooned from each other by a body of water and contentious borders. The dog’s grave remains at 9 Carlton Terrace, an odd historical remnant appropriate for its strange owner.

 
(Photo: Atlas Staff)

The remnants of Transcontinental Air Mail Route Beacon 37A, which was located atop a bluff in St. George, Utah. (Photo: Dppowell/Wikipedia)

Across the United States, from Los Angeles to New York, lies a network of mostly forgotten infrastructure, a system that was obsolete before it was ever finished—forgotten relics from the early days of powered flight. 

The early 20th century was an era of American history where Manifest Destiny seemed, well, manifest. The West had been won, and the cities blossomed. But with innovation came change and obsolescence. Trains became the prime movers of not only people and goods, but also the mail. The Pony Express proved the value of a trans-continental postal system in the United States, but the service was quickly usurped—the completion of the telegraph lines from East to West in 1861 saw it go out of business after just 18 months. 

Our modern style of mail delivery, air mail, debuted less than eight years after powered flight. In 1903, the Wright brothers launched their Flyer at Kitty Hawk in 1903. On February 17, 1911, Fred Wiseman, an amateur pilot, carried three letters from Petaluma, California, to Santa Rosa, California, 18 miles away. The very next day, Henri Pequet delivered 6,500 letters from Allahabad, in northern India, to the city of Naini, located around eight miles away.

A letter that traveled on the 1911 flight from Allahabad. (Photo: Public domain on Wikipedia)

In 1914, the first long-distance airmail delivery was achieved. Between July 16th and 18th, Maurice Guillaux carried mail 584 miles, from Melbourne to Sydney. But it wasn't until 1918 that the east coast of the US got limited aerial postal deliveries. Two years later, the nation's transcontinental air mail route, stretching from New York to San Francisco, was flown for the first time.

Air travel and aviation in general was a difficult affair during the early twentieth century. Before the development of radio navigation, the primary method of flying across the United States was to travel along the rail routes, or "following the iron compass," as they called it at the time. As the railways usually connected population centers, they became the easiest way to navigate between cities and towns. But there needed to be other options.

Part of the solution was to establish concrete arrows, painted a brilliant yellow and embedded alongside 50-foot-high lighthouses (referred to in the aviation community as beacons) that shone out a route of light across the continental United States. Measuring up to 70 feet long, the arrows pointed in the direction of the next beacon-and-arrow, and were visible from a distance of 10 miles up.

An airway beacon in St. Paul, Minnesota, built in 1929. (Photo: McGhiever on Wikipedia)

Before the beacons were put in place the mail-planes would land, and transfer their deliveries onto trains to travel overnight—reminiscent of the horse-and-rider swaps on the Pony Express. The beacons solved the problems associated with flying at night, but poor weather often led to the grounding of fleets and the mail being slowed. The beacons were, however, a huge step forward from the original approach: building huge bonfires next to airfields. ("Fatal accidents were routine" in those low-visibility times, notes the Federal Aviation Administration.)

With the development of radio navigation, the arrows and beacons started to become obsolete for the more sophisticated companies in the industry. At the same time, there was an explosion of private aircraft owners. The equipment needed for radio navigation was often out of the price range of these flyers, and also the airfields where they were landing. Most pilots did not know how to use radio navigation in that era, anyway. 
  U.S. Post Office Department map of the First Transcontinental Air Mail Route. (Image: The Cooper Collection of Aero Postal History)

The arrow-and-beacon system proved incredibly popular with pilots, because not much could go wrong with giant concrete arrows on the ground. According to the Assistant Postmaster-General of the time, as quoted in the December 1923 issue of Popular Mechanics, there was a plan to build a similar system over the Atlantic. Yet, during the Second World War, the majority of the infrastructure was torn up, to stop the beacons from being used to provide directions to enemy bomber pilots. The metal used to build the towers was then redirected toward the war effort. 

The concrete arrows, and some of the towers and sheds, still stand today. The state of Montana actually continues to use the system to help pilots navigate the rugged peaks of the region, as mountainous terrain can interfere with more sophisticated technological systems. Around nineteen of them are still in use. Here's a handy map of some of the surviving locations of these nearly-obsolete stone aviation arrowheads. 

A Panther tank in action in 1944. (Photo: Bundesarchiv Bild/Wikimedia)

In a wealthy suburb of the German city of Kiel, not far from the border with Denmark, German police found a 1943 Panther tank hidden the basement of a 70-year-old man.

The tank, once used by the Nazi army in World War II, weighs about 50 tons and is 22 feet long. The mayor of the town where it was found told a German paper that he wasn't surprised to see it: the owner "was chugging around in that thing during the snow catastrophe in 1978," he said.

It's illegal in Germany to own weapons of war and to collect Nazi memorabilia; the owner says the tank's weaponry no longer works. The police were tipped off by the Berlin squad that has been tracking down traders of Nazi art, like the horse sculptures that once stood outside Hitler's chancellery. The tank posed a particular difficulty, though: as the Independent writes, a day after the tanks was found, "Authorities were having difficulties in figuring out how to remove the tank from the premises." 

Bonus finds: One of the ships Kublai Khan sent to invade Japan, pink grasshopper, 1988 Nintendo Playstation prototype, saddest sandwich ever, WWII sunscreen

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

 
Similarly colored states mean similar baby name preferences. (All images and videos: P. Barucca, J. Rocchi, E. Marinari, G. Parisi, and F. Ricci-Tersenghi/PNAS)

Say you’re an alien trying to figure out the strange cultural brew that is the United States. You want to know how the country has changed over time—which states are similar to each other and which are different, how ideas have spread from coast to coast, whether particular regions like to stick to tradition or groove on the unique. You have a special telescope that lets you keep track of one attribute, state-by-state, and you have a hundred years to sit and look through it.

What do you set it to—political affiliation? Average income? Favorite sport?

What about number of Jennifers?

Sociologists at the Sapienza University of Rome recently published a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences which tracked baby names in the United States over more than a century. After looking at the changing popularity of Jennifers (and Cynthias, Barbaras, Patricias, Susans, and so on) in all fifty states, they’ve come out with maps that show which states have similar taste in names from year to year.

A year-by-year assessment of how state baby name preferences are related, put through a "hierarchical clustering" to make groupings more easily visible.

The maps, they suggest, don’t just show how well Lisa has fared against Linda—they hint at how the country’s cultural landscape has shifted. When you watch the colors move from a stark north/south split to a blotchy pastiche, you’re seeing what the authors describe as a “deep transformation” in the country after the Vietnam War—one that meant New York and Illinois suddenly had more Michaels in common with California than with their own neighbors. And as you notice the 21st century’s increasing variety of shades, you’re seeing tradition give way to innovation.

This is because, to sociologists, baby names aren’t just baby names—they’re a cultural trait, a behavior shared by members of a community, like greeting methods or manner of dress. Just as evolutionary biologists can tell a creature's ancestry by figuring out what traits it has in common with other species, sociologists try to measure cultural evolution by tracking the social spread of, say, the handshake.

This video shows how similarity between states' name preferences has shifted year to year. It goes well with music.

In certain situations, it can be useful to study what the authors call “neutral traits,” where making a particular choice has no overt cost or benefit. The study cited examples including “skirt lengths, pop songs, dog breeds, pottery decorations … and keywords in academic [papers].” Baby names are not only a choice-based neutral trait, they’re one that the government has been keeping reliable and extensive track of for decades, allowing for studies like this.

Of course, the world gains preference-measuring digital databases every day now, and so sociologists (and interested aliens) will have a lot more to work with in the future. Someday, maps like these might even show whether dreams travel, or what really led to the great Pizza Topping War of 2114. But for now, we’re left with Jennifer, and the secrets she imparts.

This histogram shows the relative popularity of America's top ten female names in different states in 1980.

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

Saint Coltrane (Photo: flykr/Flickr)

Musicians have a way of leaving a mark on places that often inspire intense devotion. There are the spectacular venues that have inspired album art and when a beloved musician dies, grieving fans have a tendency to create obscure and often morbidly specific memorials to remember them by. We've put together a mixtape of death sites, statues, and remembrance walls that honor everyone from Patsy Cline to Michael Jackson along with some of their famous tunes, to get you in the mood for remembrance.

 1. MARC BOLAN'S ROCK SHRINE

London, United Kingdom 

Arguably the grandfather of 1970s glam rock, Marc Bolan, usually simply grouped in with his band T. Rex, has become a rock-n-roll figure on the level of David Bowie and Mick Jagger. Tragically, Bolan died in September of 1977 when a car he was riding in slammed into a sycamore tree along a London road. The site of his death was not officially marked in the beginning, but as fans began making pilgrimage to the site, leaving small tributes, the site took on a bit of a life of it's own. Eventually a group known as the T-Rex Action Group or TAG, was able to have a bust of Bolan installed on the site along with a board for pictures and tributes. The cobbled together roadside shrine seems like a fitting tribute to a man who became famous singing about his Jeep.    

Like a jeepster for your death.  (Photo: David Dawson/Flickr)

Have you seen this man (in concert)?(Photo: David Dawson/Flickr)

 2. PATSY CLINE CRASH SITE BOULDER

Camden, Tennessee

Country music legend (like soul legend Otis Redding, below) died in a sudden plane crash. Cline was flying in a small plane from an engagement in Kansas City back to her home in Nashville on March 5th, 1963, when the craft crashed down into the Tennessee wilderness. The accident claimed the live of her manager (flying the plane), as well as fellow performers Cowboy Copas and Hawkshaw Hughes. Cline was just 30 years old. By the time she passed, her influence on country music history was set in stone, and thus was the memorial placed at the site of the crash, deep in the woods. A large boulder bears the names of Cline and the other victims of the crash, and is accompanied by a gazebo hung with information about the singer. 

Patsy Cline's boulder. (Photo: Brent Moore/Flickr)

3. OTIS REDDING MEMORIAL PLAQUE
Madison, Wiscosin

Otis Redding never  likely expected that he would meet his premature end over a lake in Wisconsin, but then again no one gets to choose. Once again flying in a private aircraft, Redding was desperately trying to fly to Madison in order to make a show commitment, despite warnings that the stormy skies might be to treacherous to navigate. Only four miles out from their destination, something catastrophic occurred and the plane careened into Lake Monona, killing all but one of the passengers, including Redding himself. Redding's body was pulled from the river and he was buried back in Macon, Georgia. However today a memorial plaque is still tucked away just off the shore of lake, letting anyone who is sitting on the dock of the bay know that a musical great met his end in those waters.

Please don't fly Otis... (Photo: Rosina Peixoto/Wikipedia)

4. MINIATURE GRACELAND
Roanoke, Virginia

Elvis is one of the most worshiped musicians of all time (for better or worse), and people have expressed their need for a little Presley in their lives via a seemingly infinite number of impersonators. But it is the rare fan that decides to remake all of Graceland in miniature on their lawn. Yet this is exactly what Kim Epperly and her husband Don set out to do almost 30 years ago. After creating a mini Graceland ,they began to expand their collection to include replicas of famous places Presley performed and other structures related to The King. Unfortunately the Epperlys got too old to continue their little obsession, and Don eventually passed away. Many of the little buildings began to moulder, thanks to fans of Elvis and Epperlys, Miniature Graceland remains a hunka' hunka' weird homage.

Little, little Graceland. (Photo: charletonlidu/Flickr)

A little Memphis church. (Photo: charletonlidu/Flickr)

5. ELLIOTT SMITH'S TRIBUTE WALL
Los Angeles, California

Troubled troubadour Elliott Smith died in October of 2003, but one of the most iconic locations from his career is as vibrant and alive today as it was when he shot the cover image for his album Figure 8. By most accounts, Smith took his own life via a number of stab wounds to the chest, although a strangely vocal group of his otherwise introspective fanbase hold out that his death was actually a homicide. Regardless of where they land on his death, fans still make the pilgrimage out to this stretch of Los Angeles wall to write personal messages and leave small tokens of their affection. The memorial wall has been cleaned a few times, but these color bars are still as vibrant.

Color bars. (Photo: Macleod/Wikipedia)    

6. MICHAEL JACKSON MEMORIAL TREE
Budapest, Hungary

Being a fan of an internationally famous musician from a different country can be hard since most pilgrimage sites for the fans tend to be located in the star's homeland. So what is a die-hard supposed to do when someone like Michael Jackson dies? How do those in Hungary mourn? Well apparently by covering a public tree with candles and pictures of the star. The Michael Jackson Memorial Tree is located in the park across from Budapest's Kempinski Hotel where fans would gather to try and catch a glimpse of the star while he was staying at the hotel. In seeming direct inverse of the glamour and fame related to Jackson in his lifetime, the tree is simply papered with stapled-on pictures and ringed with candles like it bore the image of the Virgin Mary. As Hungarian Michael Jackson shrines go, you can't beat it.

 Gotta be startin' this shrine. (Photo: Derzsi Elekes Andor/Wikipedia)

Miss you, Michael. (Photo: Ella Morton on Atlas Obscura)

7. SAINT JOHN COLTRANE AFRICAN ORTHODOX CHURCH
San Francisico, California

Sure, all of the other shrines on this list expressed their love for some musician or another, this is the only one, and maybe the only time ever, that went so far as to canonize the object of their fandom. At this San Francisco chapter of the African Orthodox Church, Coltrane and his music, especially the things recorded after his religious withdrawal from a heroin addiction. The church features artwork that places the image of Coltrane in faux-medieval religious positions, while the sermons are often accompanied by, or comprised of, free form jam sessions, or listening sessions from Coltrane's recordings. This church truly believes that his love was supreme.

Let us pray. (Photo: flykr/Flickr) 

Max Headroom himself. (Photo: Ingrid Richter/Flickr)

Hacker. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the word means “a person who secretly gains access to a computer system in order to get information, or cause damage.”

But 28 short years ago, the term hardly existed–that is, until the Max Headroom Incident. At 9:14PM on November 22, 1987, the regularly scheduled programming at WGN Chicago, a local news station in Illinois, was interrupted. The screen hissed and burped, materializing into a figure with a pallid mask bouncing around in front of a corrugated metal background.

Before the mysterious intruder could speak, however, the WGN technicians switched the signal and returned to the local news. 

The first attempt at the hack. No audio made it to broadcast.

Two hours later, at approximately 11:15PM, a scheduled broadcast of Dr. Who on Chicago-area PBS affiliate WTTW-11 was broken off. The same masked figure appeared as it had two hours before. Except this time, there was audio. For over a minute and twenty seconds, unsuspecting Chicagoans were subjected to the strange cackling and unintelligible rambling of the masked individual. He also exposed his bare buttocks, which a mysterious woman began to smack with a fly-swatter.

The first successful "hack" of a television station quickly garnered a lot of attention, kicking off a federal search for the culprits. Nearly three decades later, they still have not been found.

  The second, successful hack with audio.

The mask worn in the video was seemingly a crude representation of the titular character in the science fiction series, Max Headroom. In the show, a computer-generated television journalist–Max Headroom–reports the news from a dystopian future, where large media corporations dominate society. The corrugated metal slab in the background of the signal intrusion was an attempt at recreating Max Headroom’s retro-futuristic broadcast background.  

In 2010, Reddit user "bpoag" volunteered some information in an Ask Me Anything thread, where he put forth a theory about the unsolved television intrusion of 1987. Hailing from the suburbs of Chicago, bpoag was an avid "phreaker" as a teenager in the late 1980s. Phreaking, according to bpoag, is “the art and science of manipulating telephone networks and the systems which live on them.”

In other words, it’s a precursor to the computer hacking we know today.

Max Headroom was ubiquitous in the late 1980s. Here he is as a spokesman for New Coke. 

Bpoag (who asked Atlas Obscura to withhold his real name) was peripherally involved with a group of phreakers operating in LaGrange, a suburb of Chicago. The de-facto leaders of the group were two brothers in their early 30s, called “J” and “K” (bpoag also asked to protect their identities).

In 1987, the week before the infamous hack, the brothers warned bpoag, who was 13 at the time, that they were planning to do something “big” over the weekend. Later, they told him to tune into channel 11 on the evening of November 22nd.

According to bpoag, the actual "hack" was simple enough to pull off, and didn’t require any advanced or technical equipment beyond what an avid phreaker would already have had in his arsenal. He writes, “All that had to be done, apparently, was to provide a signal to the dish that was of a greater power than the legitimate one.”

The older brother, “J,” had "moderate to severe autism," says bpoag, but was a capable phreaker. The ramblings heard in the intrusion, including threats to Chuck Swirsky (a popular Chicago-area sportscaster), and a hummed version of the "Clutch Cargo" theme song, seemed to reflect J’s interests at the time. This is the crux of bpoag’s argument. 

When asked about the motivations for the hack, bpoag likened it to a kind of public service announcement. “It only lasted as long as it needed to get the point across: that point being that the airwaves were woefully unprotected, and easily exploitable. It's the equivalent of having your picture taken on the summit of Mt. Everest before coming back down.”

But this was 1987–a few years before the advent of the World Wide Web, and long before the concepts of trolling and hacking became known. The audiences subjected to the Max Headroom intrusion were deeply perturbed by what they saw. "I got so upset that I wanted to bust the TV set," one man told a reporter for WGN, one of the affected TV stations. 

Though the true identity of the hackers, and their motivations, are lost in time, the legacy of the Max Headroom Incident endures. Informed by the original signal intrusion on that fateful November evening, hacking has moved from the realm of merry pranksters to serious protest, and even government-sponsored terrorism, over the past 30-odd years. The Max Headroom hackers, who were likely just trying to have a bit of fun, predicted a global movement.

The high profile Anonymous group uses the Max Headroom motif in their videos, seen here in a 2010 warning to the Church of Scientology.

Needlepunch embroidery, 1946. (Photo: Courtesy The Bandy Heritage Center for Northwest Georgia) 

This is the first installment of the Other Capitals of the World, a series where we'll look beyond the typical seats of power to examine less typical centers of industry. Have a suggestion? Let us know.

If you’re standing on a carpet in a hotel or at an airport or even in a friend’s living room, then there’s a very good chance you’re standing on a carpet manufactured in, or around, Dalton, Georgia.

More than 85 percent of the carpets sold in the United States, and around 45 percent of the residential and commercial carpets found worldwide, are made within a 65-mile radius of this small city of 32,000 souls nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

In Dalton you can find the headquarters of such global carpeting behemoths as Beaulieu, Daltonian, J & J Industries. Shaw and Tandus, companies that create some 12.2 billion square feet of floor covering each year, enough to cover the entirety of Hong Kong in a thick, rich shag. So many carpet mills cluster together in Dalton that it has been known to snow blue due to the number of dye particles in the air.

Why this carpet convergence? The answer, as any Daltonian worth his weft will tell you, is due to the stitching genius of Catherine Evans Whitener, commonly referred to as Dalton’s “First Lady of Carpet.”

 
Catherine Evans Whitener, 1946. (Photo: Courtesy Crown Garden & Archives/ The Bandy Heritage Center for Northwest Georgia)

Whitener was 15 years old when she crafted a bedspread for her brother’s wedding in 1895. She had been inspired to do so by seeing a colonial coverlet at a relation’s house which had been made using the long-forgotten technique of candlewick tufting—using raised tufts of a soft cotton thread commonly used to form candle wicks. The teenage Whitener did not know how to tuft, but through painstaking experimentation she recreated the technique. Her hard work paid off. The bedspread she gave to her brother became a local, and then a national, sensation.

 "Chenille", the French word for "caterpillar", described the appearance of the rows of tufts that made the bedspread's pattern, c. 1960s. (Photo: Courtesy The Bandy Heritage Center for Northwest Georgia)  

Within days of the wedding Whitener was swamped with more orders than she could possibly fill, so she began to teach her neighbors the technique. A cottage industry was born practically overnight. At the time Dalton was a sleepy cotton mill town and the area around it largely agricultural with an impoverished white population. Tufting bedspreads offered much-needed income to these families. By 1920 over 10,000 “tufters” were working out of their own homes in the Dalton area, racing to fulfill the country’s seemingly insatiable need for bedspreads.

Worker Emma Puryear admires a rose print bedspread, 1946. (Photo: Courtesy The Bandy Heritage Center for Northwest Georgia) 

With the advent of the motorcar, tourists driving down to Florida were drawn here, and by the 1930s bedspreads stretched for miles along the side of Dalton’s Highway 41 so that it became known as “Bedspread Alley” or “Peacock Alley”, after one of the most popular designs. By the end of the decade the sheer demand had caused bedspread manufacturing to leave the tufters’ homes and move into factories.

Chenille on the "spreadline", 1946. (Photo: Courtesy The Bandy Heritage Center for Northwest Georgia)  

With the factories came fortunes. The first bedspread millionaire was Mr. B.J. Bandy of Dalton, Georgia, naturally. As such, before it became the Carpet Capital of the World, Dalton was known as the Bedspread Capital of the World.

A model in a chenille robe, c. 1960s. (Photo: Courtesy The Bandy Heritage Center for Northwest Georgia) 

It is not known why people suddenly felt the need to start covering their beds with tufted cotton blankets in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Was it due to propriety, prosperity, or some deeply buried Freudian passion? Whatever the reason the urge disappeared almost as quickly as it had arrived. As the craze faded in the 1950s, the now centralized and mechanized bedspread industry began to branch out, creating bathrobes, small rugs and tank sets (those peculiarly persistent woolly covers for toilets). But it was with the introduction of the broadloom, which allowed room-sized carpets to be created, that Dalton found its future. Why just cover a bed when you could cover an entire home? American floors were lost for decades beneath thick wall-to-wall carpeting. 

Carpet tufting machine with creel rack holding yarn cones, c. 1960s. (Photo: Courtesy The Bandy Heritage Center for Northwest Georgia) 

Historically, of course, carpet manufacturing has been located nowhere near the state of Georgia—it’s long been the preserve of Middle Eastern states, most notably Persia. Indeed the American South would seem a particularly unfriendly environment in which for carpeting to flourish considering it was the South that coined the pejorative term “carpetbagger” to describe the opportunistic Northern businessmen operating there after the Civil War

But the dyeing and finishing companies that had appeared to serve the old bedspread industry were perfectly placed to help Dalton’s new carpet manufacturers, and the introduction of petrochemical-derived synthetic fibers such as nylon and polyester made carpets both affordable and durable. Meanwhile generations of art school graduates found regular employment designing the carpets’ endlessly repeating patterns. Yet despite these changes, the technique at the core of the business remained that first practiced by Catherine Evans Whitener—the vast majority of carpet manufactured today is still tufted (as opposed to being woven or needlepunched).

 
Tufting diagram, c. 1950s. (Photo: Courtesy The Bandy Heritage Center for Northwest Georgia) 

By the 1970s, Dalton was thriving and had more millionaires per capita than any other city in the United States. Recently, however, the city has been facing some headwinds that even the Dalton-based lobbying group, the Carpet & Rug Institute (tagline “Carpet Makes the World Better”) has not been able to dispel. In the wake of the financial crash of 2008 and the subsequent housing market decline, many of the old carpeting businesses were forced to consolidate. Added to this was the relatively recent rise of solid flooring, headed by such engineered floor manufacturers as the Swedish firm Pergo, which has been making rapid incursions into homes worldwide. In the last decade carpets have been accused of causing asthma and of being generally unhygienic.

Carpet no longer feels quite as comfortable beneath our feet.

Yet the Carpet Capital of the World is still expanding its reach, albeit in unconventional ways. One of the synthetic chemicals found in many of Dalton’s carpets is perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) which is used to engender stain resistance in carpets. Unfortunately, the same characteristics that PFOA shares with carpets allows it to spread easily and endure in the environment without breaking down. It has been found in extremely high levels in Dalton’s Conasauga River, and researchers have found the chemical—which is also used in the creation of non-stick cook wear—as far afield as the Arctic. Somewhat worryingly PFOA is present in nearly every American’s bloodstream. Soon, it seems, the whole world will be carpeted in it, and then Dalton will have dominion over us all.

Sewing fringe on a throw rug, c. 1950s. (Photo: Courtesy The Bandy Heritage Center for Northwest Georgia)  

(Photo: Kris WUHS_Mom)

In 1923, William Carlos Williams wrote the short poem he is best remembered for today, "The Red Wheelbarrow": 

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

But until now, no one besides the poet himself knew who owned that wheelbarrow.

William Logan, a professor at the University of Florida, has discovered the wheelbarrow owner's identity: He was "Thaddeus Marshall, an African-American street vendor from Rutherford, N.J.," the New York Times writes.

The poem is only 16 words; Logan has written around 10,000 words about it, the Times notes. Logan tracked down hints to the wheelbarrow's origins—that it was "outside the window of an old negro's house on a backstreet," that the owner's last name was Marshall, that he was once was a fisherman in Gloucester, that he had a son named Milton. 

In an old census, there was "only one possible candidate: Thaddeus Marshall, a 69-year-old widower who lived with a son named Milton at 11 Elm Street, about nine blocks from Williams’s house," the Times writes.

Bonus finds: Birch bark cocoon with a human mummy inside, weird-looking leafhopper, baby rhino, bees

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

The Codex Gigas, captured in a stereoscopic image in 1906. (Photo: National Library of Sweden)

One book at the National Library of Sweden stands out among the rest: the Codex Gigas. Bound in wood, consisting of 620 pages that are each nearly three feet long, and weighing in at 165 pounds, it is quite a hefty tome. But it's not the size of the Codex Gigas that is its most intriguing feature. It's the devil inside.

The Codex Gigas was created during the 13th century and initially stored at the Benedictine monastery of Podlažice in what is now the Czech Republic. The manuscript contains the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, as well as an assortment of other texts that tackle everything from practical instructions for exorcisms to seventh-century grammar tips written by Isidore, the scholar-turned saint of Seville.

A single scribe hand-wrote and illustrated the entire 620 pages—a colossal undertaking that, in the National Library of Sweden's estimates, would have taken between five and 30 years to complete:

If the scribe worked for six hours a day and wrote six days a week this means that the manuscript could have taken about five years to complete. If the scribe was a monk he may only have been able to work for about three hours a day, and this means that the manuscript could have taken ten years to write. As the scribe may also have ruled the lines to guide the writing before he began to write (it probably took several hours to rule one leaf), this extends the period it took to complete the manuscript. The scribe also decorated the manuscript, so this all means that the manuscript probably took at least twenty years to finish, and could even have taken thirty.

The identity of the industrious person responsible for the manuscript has been a mystery for more than half a millenia. Such is the breadth of the feat, however, that a supernatural legend soon developed to explain the Codex's creation. According to the National Library of Sweden, talk arose of a monk who was walled up at Podlažice monastery in punishment for his wickedness. In an effort to atone, the monk resolved to write the world's biggest book in one night. To do so, he naturally required the help of the devil, with whom he is said to have made a pact. In exchange for enhanced overnight productivity, all the monk had to do was paint a full-page portrait of Beelzebub in the Codex and hand over his mortal soul. 

The demonic illustration that led to the nickname "Devil's Bible." (Photo: National Library of Sweden) 

This tall tale provides a handy–if implausible–explanation for why there is a giant illustration of the devil in the Codex Gigas, which has come to be known as the Devil's Bible. This satanic association has ushered in lots of conspiracy-enhanced conjecture regarding the manuscript's origins and purpose. But such talk is not just limited to forum threads. In 2008, National Geographic produced a 51-minute documentary devoted to, in its words, the "cursed text." It features actors dressed as medieval monks looking anxious in various dimly lit brick tunnels. 

The original Codex Gigas ended up in Sweden thanks to plundering. In the dying days of the Thirty Years' War (a series of battles waged between Protestants and Catholics between 1618 and 1648), Swedes stormed Prague and scooped up an assortment of valuable books, including the Devil's Bible. At the time, Queen Christina of Sweden had a habit of stealing books from other nations as "war booty" and using them to enhance her own country's libraries. Poland, Germany, the Baltic States and Denmark were among the places whose bookshelves she ransacked in the name of knowledge.

After being snatched from Prague and shipped back to Sweden, the Codex Gigas was kept at the royal castle in Stockholm. When fire tore through the castle in 1697, the Codex Gigas was thrown out a window to prevent it from being engulfed in flames. Though damaged by the four-story drop, it survived. "One person standing beneath the window is said to have been injured in the process," says the National Library of Sweden, evoking an amazing image that is swiftly dashed by the next sentence: "This is probably just a tall tale, but the volume was greatly damaged."

The Codex Gigas was re-bound in 1819 and its damaged leaves repaired. The restored manuscript is currently on view at the National Library of Sweden in Stockholm as part of the library's Treasures exhibit.

Page 24 R (left) and 254 R (right) of the Codex Gigas. (Photos: National Library of Sweden)

An actual-size replica of the Codex Gigas. (Photo: Michal Maňas on Wikipedia)

Freedomland brochure cover. (Photo: Mike Virgintino collection)

Freedomland U.S.A., an American history-themed amusement park in the East Bronx, was demolished 50 years ago this summer. But fond memories live on among Bronxites of a certain age, as do conspiracy theories about why the hugely popular pleasure garden lasted just five seasons, a suspiciously rapid demise.

History is the future at today’s theme parks. Whether it’s an immersive experience inside a World War I field hospital, a roller coaster whizzing through a 19^th century mineshaft, or an entire park about Russian history, contemporary rides and attractions are designed to give visitors the feeling that they are part of a story from another time and place. Freedomland U.S.A. helped to inspire this trend more than five decades ago.

Billed as the world’s largest amusement park when it opened on June 19, 1960, Freedomland was quickly nicknamed the “Disneyland of the East.” Spread across 205 acres, the park dwarfed the actual Disneyland. For weeks prior to its debut, newspapers ran fervent articles hyping Freedomland’s ability to serve 50,000 hamburgers and hot dogs per hour, its eight miles of navigable waterways for river rides, its 8,500-car parking lot, and the 5,000 original costumes worn by its historical re-enactors.

The Northwest Fur Trapper at Freedomland. (Photo: David Eppen)

The cost was just as newsworthy. “Twenty-two movie spectaculars could be produced for the investment in Freedomland,” The New York Times marveled. The $65 million price tag “is also equivalent to 195 top-budget Broadway musicals or 130 hour-long TV spectaculars.”

Twenty-five thousand people, breathless with anticipation, jammed the opening-day celebration.

They frolicked in a park layout that roughly mirrored the outline of the continental U.S., designed by Cornelius Vanderbilt Wood, an architect who led the planning team for Disneyland in the mid-1950s. Like its Californian predecessor, Freedomland was divided into seven regions: Little Ole New York, Old Chicago, the Great Plains, the Old Southwest, San Francisco, New Orleans—each with anachronistic shops on lively fake streets– and Satellite City,  a town of the future modeled on Disney’s Tomorrowland.

Among the 37 attractions were the San Francisco Earthquake, a ride that tossed and jerked riders mercilessly; full-size paddleboats on the recreated Great Lakes, a western fort with daily shootouts, canoe cruises with Oregon fur trappers, and an amphitheater for live concerts called the Moon Bowl.

The star attraction was The Great Chicago Fire, where individual gas jets ignited buildings every 15 minutes and children ran to pump the fire hoses and douse the flames with a bucket brigade. Naturally, this was before the obsession with safety took hold.

“There was a couple fires before Freedomland even opened, and they took up some of the debris and put it in Old Chicago for the Chicago Fire exhibit. They didn’t waste too much money there,” laughed Tom Casey, secretary of the East Bronx History Forum.

The Great Chicago Fire, the star attraction at Freedomland. (Photo: David Eppen)

When the park opened, all-day admission was $1 for adults, 75 cents for teenagers, and 50 cents for children. Special ticket books that included admission and access to nine attractions cost $3.50 for adults, $3.20 for juniors, and $2.50 for children. Freedomland’s first season, from June through September 1960, counted 1.5 million visitors—an impressive number, but less than the five million that owners expected.

Soon, Freedomland ran into financial and cultural obstacles. Managers hoped customer turnover throughout the day would guarantee a profit, even with the cheap ticket prices. Customers, though, knew a good deal when they saw one. “They got there at 10 o’clock and didn’t go home ‘til after the fireworks,” Casey said.

For its second season, Freedomland introduced a variety of discounts and coupons to attract more visitors, even as the base price of admission went up to $2.50 for an economy ride ticket (though the concerts in the Moon Bowl were included).

“You know the jingle, ‘Mommy, Daddy, take my hand, take me out to Freedomland.’ The second part is, ‘50 cents is all you pay, at Freedomland today,’” said Casey. “I’ve heard a lot of people remember ‘75 cents is all you pay’ or ‘2.95 is all you pay,’ because the prices kept on going up, up, up.”

But attendance continued to dwindle over the next four seasons. Lingering debt from the park’s construction and its off-season closure between October and May each year mired Freedomland in the red.

Fort Cavalry, Freedomland. (Photo: Collection of Patrick Jenkins)

The park’s squeaky-clean image didn’t help matters. Freedomland struggled to survive after President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. The event, often described as “the day the nation lost its innocence,” brought on a cultural shift that saw lighter diversions like amusement parks becoming less popular. At the same time, theme park design changed from nostalgic pleasures to thrills and chills.

“Freedomland should have opened in 1950, not 1960,” said Gregory Young, co-creator of the New York history podcast The Bowery Boys. “You’d never be able to get away with a whole section called ‘Old Chicago’ just ten years later.”

And when the park added late-night movies, more rides, and concerts by A-listers like Lesley Gore and Paul Anka to attract patrons, some of the sponsors revolted. The Benjamin Moore paint company even sued the park for $150,000 for "changing character" and becoming a hub for "commonplace and vulgar mass unrestrained teen-age entertainment," according to a 1962 article in the New York Times. The suit was dismissed as "groundless."

“Scripto Pen, insurance companies, the banks, Kodak—they wanted to make sure that it maintained this historical significance, not just pure entertainment,” Casey said. “Over the years, some vendors did decide to leave because it really didn’t live up to that original idea.”

The last straw for Freedomland was tough competition from the glitzier, Robert Moses-backed 1964-1965 World’s Fair in Queens. Freedomland declared bankruptcy on September 15, 1964, and was demolished a year later.

The Unisphere in the center of the World's Fair in Queens, which hastened the fall of Freedomland. (Photo: PLCjr/flickr)

Sadly, Freedomland was not alone: failed amusements parks were endemic in the 1960s and 1970s. Jungle Habitat, which hung on for four years, closed in 1976 after its lions and elephants attacked visitors and rampaged through the New Jersey suburbs. The owners of the Pixie Kitchen restaurant in Lincoln City, Oregon, opened Pixieland—a theme park based on the state’s pioneer history—in 1969 and shut it down in 1973. The Land of Oz in North Carolina closed in 1980 after a decade of mediocre attendance (though it re-opens once a year for a Wizard of Oz fan day). Dogpatch USA, debuting in 1968 and starring the characters of Al Capp’s comic strip Li’l Abner, failed to find an audience around its Arkansas locale and petered out in 1993. 

Briefest of all, The World of Sid and Marty Krofft, an Atlanta park featuring the Krofft’s cartoon characters, lasted six months in the summer of 1976.

New Jersey safari park Jungle Habitat, which closed in 1976 after the animals went bonkers. (Photo: David Powell/Flickr) 

But the speed of Freedomland’s destruction, and the immediate creation of the gigantic Co-Op City housing development on the site, fuels conspiracy theories today. Some fans are convinced that William Zeckendorf, a real estate mogul who owned Freedomland’s property, conspired with Cornelius Vanderbilt Wood to build federally subsidized housing on the site all along.

A news story at the park’s opening claimed its buildings “were built to last 50 years,” but historian Michael Virgintino believes that the structures were built just to prove the marshy Bronx shoreline could support multi-story apartment buildings. 

“Their goal was always, ‘let’s use the land as we can now, until a better opportunity comes along,’” said Virgintino, who maintains the Freedomland U.S.A. Facebook page. “Freedomland was doomed from the start.”

All that remains of the park is a commemorative plaque marking the where the entrance gate once stood, placed there by Virgintino and other fans in 2013. Yet its legacy lives on in the fad for history-based attractions that fail to reach their potential.

Owners had high hopes for Hard Rock Park in South Carolina, a state-of-the-art theme park based on the birth of rock n’ roll, but it closed after a single season in 2008—only to be rebranded as Freestyle Music Park, which survived just as long. “Some said it just didn’t connect with guests,” says Scott Lukas, an anthropologist who studies theme parks. “This is too bad, since it had some very innovative rides, attractions and themes.”

A view of the abandoned Wonderland park in China. (Photo: JoeInSouthernCA/flickr) 

Half-built a decade ago and demolished in 2013, Beijing’s Wonderland took its historical cues from the original Disneyland. Now Beijing Shijingshan Amusement Park wears China’s imitation-Disneyland crown. And the miniature historical landmarks of Splendid China, a theme park near Orlando that opened in 1993, shut down after a lackluster decade (its twin in Shenzen remains open for business).

None of these similarly short-lived parks have garnered the level of obsessive nostalgia that Freedomland has. Judging from the hundreds of personal memories posted to the Freedomland U.S.A. and East Bronx History Forum Facebook pages, the Bronx lost a valued piece of its identity 50 years ago.

One fan, Christopher Arena, wrote, “I was only there once, as a little boy, but I never forgot it.”

The copulatory organ of a different species of spider (Image: Journal of Insect Science/Animalparty/Wikimedia)

Do spiders enjoy sex? Up until now, scientists thought they probably did not, since their sex organs are "basically modified arms emanating from the arachnid's head," as Science Magazine puts it. But now a new study published in Biology Letters has found that those modified legs, called pedipalps, do have nervous tissue in the "palpal organ," which delivers sperm. And they think that maybe spiders feel something while mating after all.

The study looked specifically at Tasmanian cave spiders and found "several neurons" into the palpal organ. Because of where they're located, they're "likely to able to directly perceive sensory input during sperm transfer," the scientists write. 

That doesn't necessarily mean that the spiders are having sex for fun. Actually, if they feel anything at all, it could be as a way to up their game. As LiveScience explains, "females can 'choose,' in ways not entirely understood whether or not their eggs are fertilized." And the nerves in the male palpal organ may be a way of exercising control, too, by controlling "the quality and volume of their ejaculate—reserving the best secretions fro the choicest mates," Science Magazine says.

Bonus finds: pet deer, a system of five connected stars, a museum's math mistake

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

Robert Wadlow at a family picnic at Roodhouse circa 1939. (Photo: Alton Museum of History & Art)

This story was sponsored by the fine folks of Enjoy Illinois.

Robert Wadlow was born in 1918 as an unremarkably sized baby and died 22 years later, in 1940, as the world's tallest man. He was 8 feet 11.1 inches when he died. To this day, no one has been known to grow taller. 

As a kid, Wadlow could simply wear adult clothes, but as he kept growing, conveniences designed for people of average height no longer served his needs. And of all the practical problems that confronted Wadlow during his life, the ones that attracted the most attention involved his hands and his feet.

Living in western Illinois, not far up the river from St. Louis, Wadlow had reached 6 feet tall by the time he was eight years old. As a teenager, heading towards 8 feet tall, he had to duck his head through doorways. At a restaurant, he had to stretch his legs straight through to the other side of the table. By the time he was an adult, he needed a bed specially made to fit his whole body, and a giant chair to keep him comfortable.

A St. Louis event promo. (Photo: Alton Museum of History & Art)

But shoes were a particular challenge for Wadlow. He quickly outgrew the normal size chart, and newspaper reporters were fascinated both by the size of his shoes and their cost. In 1928, he wore triple E size 21 shoes that cost $30 a pair, the United Press reported. In 1931, a health columnist reported that his size 25 shoes cost $50. In 1933, he was up to size 31, at $84 a pair.

By 1936, a shoe company had signed him up as a spokesperson in exchange for keeping him in footwear: each pair of shoes, the company told the Milwaukee Sentinel, cost $200 to make, because the leather needed to be reinforced with metal.

Part of the fascination with these shoes was their incredible cost. In 1936, smack in the middle of the Great Depression, $200 was an incredible amount, about the equivalent of $3,500 today, to spend on shoes. But the shoes themselves were treated as a spectacle, too. When Wadlow traveled across the country to promote his shoe sponsor, he would sometimes leave pairs behind for people to gawk at.

One of Wadlow's very, very large shoes (Photo: Doug Coldwell/Wikimedia CC-BY-SA 3.0)

As a consequence, those shoes are some of the few of Wadlow's possessions that are still around. When he died, of an infection that started in his leg, his family took care that neither his body nor his stuff would be paraded around as curiosities. They burned most of his possessions and buried him in a huge casket, sealed in a concrete vault. Since the world's previous tallest man had arranged with his friends to sink his body into the sea, only to have it sold to an enterprising scientist for 500 British pounds, this was not an unreasonable precaution.

Wadlow's mother, in particular, "was really reluctant to make a spectacle of him," says Brian Combs, a board member of the Alton Museum of History and Art, which today has the world's largest collection of Wadlow memorabilia. The museum aims to respect that desire, by "displaying what items we have in our museum with pride and dignity," as the collection's website puts it.

There are some oddities in the museum (a 14 foot gourd with Wadlow's face painted on it, a cast of his jaw), but also some of Wadlow's possessions: eight pairs of shoes, his graduation gown, his guitar case, tennis racquet and camera.

If Wadlow's shoes attracted attention during his life, more recently, it is an ornament he wore on his finger that has become the object of fascination. To understand how big his hands were, consider this. His camera was a normal-sized camera, and the Milwaukee Sentinel reported that he used to take pictures secretly, by concealing the camera in his hand and letting the lens sneak between his giant thumb and forefinger.

From a photo taken in 1939: Wadlow's hand (Original photo: The Telegraph)

In 1939, not long before he died, Wadlow joined the local Freemason lodge and was made a masonic ring. It's widely reported that this was the largest Freemason ring ever made.

That's "very likely true," says Combs. "As far as I know it is."

At the very least, it was a very large Freemason ring—size 25. The museum has a replica, made by the same shop as the original. "We like to illustrate it with a silver piece—with a half dollar in the middle," says Combs.

Dorothy Arzner (left) and Clara Bow on the set of The Wild Party (1929). (Photo: Public domain/Wikipedia)

Type the name "Dorothy Arzner" into Netflix's search bar and you'll get zero results.

It's an odd outcome, considering Arzner, a prolific golden age film director, has 16 feature films—among the most of any woman in Hollywood, ever. She gave Katharine Hepburn one of her first starring roles. She navigated the transition from silent films to talkies with panache, inventing the boom microphone in the process. And yet, she is largely unknown today.

Born in San Francisco in 1897, Arzner attended the University of Southern California with the intention of becoming a doctor. World War I interrupted her studies, but when it was over, she decided not to go back to medical school. "I wanted to heal the sick and raise the dead instantly. I didn’t want to go through all the trouble of medicine," said Arzner, according to the book Directed by Dorothy Arzner. "So that took me into the motion picture industry."

Arzner's film career began in 1919 with a trip to the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation—the film studio that would later become Paramount Pictures—at the invitation of director William DeMille. Exploring the various departments, Arzner gauged which aspects of filmmaking held the most appeal for her.

"I remember making the observation, 'if one was going to be in the movie business, one should be a director because he was the one who told everyone else what to do,'" she said, according to What Women Want: The Complex World of Dorothy Arzner and Her Cinematic Women.

 
Dorothy Arzner in a publicity still circa 1934. (Photo: Public domain/Wikipedia)

It would take years, however, before Arzner got the chance to prove her directing chops. She began working at the studio as a script typist, tapping at a typewriter all day. Though the work was humdrum, the opportunity to read major Hollywood scripts helped hone her instincts for what made a good film. 

The short-lived stint as a script transcriber—she was a less-than-stellar typist, and lasted only three months—was followed by a solid run in the Paramount editing bay. In 1922, while editing the dramatic film Blood and Sand, about a peasant who becomes a champion bullfighter, Arzner saved money by intercutting stock footage of bullfights into the narrative. It was a shrewd move that both endeared her to the purse-string holders and helped establish her as a filmmaker with a keen eye. 

By 1927, Paramount was ready for Arzner to take the reins on a studio feature. They assigned her Fashions For Women, a silent film about a cigarette girl named Lulu who impersonates Celeste de Givray, the best-dressed model in Paris. The novelty-ridden hi-jinks—actress Esther Ralston played both roles—didn't set the world on fire, but the film gave Arzner the opportunity to put what she'd learned into practice. And there was much more to come.

In 1929, Arzner helmed one of Paramount's first talkies, The Wild Party. It was a star vehicle—and the speaking debut—for silent film it-girl Clara Bow, who, though just 24 at the time, had already appeared in over 50 dialog-free movies.

Clara Bow with Fredric March in The Wild Party. (Image: Public domain/Wikipedia)

Bow had an expressive face that the camera loved, but her Brooklyn accent and lack of experience with sound recording affected her confidence. Nervous among the microphones, the actress would glance at them during takes, ruining shots. It was in these circumstances that, according to When Women Call the Shots: The Developing Power and Influence of Women in Television and Film, Arzner “invented the boom microphone by fastening a microphone to a fishing pole, to give the stars greater flexibility.” (Arzner, however, did not patent her invention—a patent for a very similar sound-recording device was filed one year later by one Edmund H Hansen, a sound engineer at the Fox Film Corporation.)

In 1933, Arzner scored big with Christopher Strong, which featured Katharine Hepburn in her second film role ever. Arzner made a point of personally selecting Hepburn for the starring part of the strong-willed yet self-sacrificing aviator Lady Cynthia Darrington.

"I chose to have Katharine Hepburn from seeing her about the studio," Arzner said in an interview published in Cinema in 1974. "She had given a good performance in Bill of Divorcement (1932), but now she was about to be relegated to a Tarzan-type picture. I walked over to the set. She was up a tree with a leopard skin on! She had a marvelous figure; and talking to her, I felt she was the very modern type I wanted for Christopher Strong.”

 
The poster for Christopher Strong. (Photo: Fair use/Wikipedia)

In her autobiography, Me: Stories From My Life, Katharine Hepburn gave a succinct summation of her experience on Arzner's film:

"She had done many pictures. Was very good. … She wore pants. So did I. We had a great time working together. The script was a bit old-fashioned and it was not a really successful picture. Colin Clive played the man."

The New York Times review of the film was a bit more forthcoming: 

“Intelligence shines throughout this offering, not only in the unusually effective delineation of characters by the players but also in the cinematic angles. Because it is a tragic tale it may not have the strong popular appeal of those offerings which wind up with the pretty girl and the handsome young man in each other’s arms. As a study of worth-while screen work it is, however, far above mediocre shadow adventures. It is a film that can be seen several times without becoming tedious”

For The Bride Wore Red (1937), Arzner teamed up with star Joan Crawford, who played a cabaret singer who poses as an aristocrat in a fancy resort. She was sent there by a Count to test his theory that "luck of birth is all that separates the rich from the poor," and once there, she attempts to find a rich husband. The less-than-glowing New York Times review was sprinkled with back-handed compliments: “If it is anything at all, it is a woman’s picture—smoldering with its heroine’s indecision and consumed with talk of love and fashions.”

The poster for The Bride Wore Red, starring Joan Crawford. (Image: Public domain/Wikipedia)

This notion of the "woman's picture" chock-full of "love and fashions" is patronizing of course, but it was also daring to present a film like this, featuring a Svengali sending a woman into a kind of social experiment. Arzner's films managed to be edgy while still fulfilling the requirements of the Hollywood studio system.

"The films depict thwarted relationships, missed opportunities, marriage breakups, and even death," writes Donna R. Casella in What Women Want: The Complex World of Dorothy Arzner and Her Cinematic Women, "In her handling of the women's picture, then, Arzner managed to play both sides—satisfying her studio bosses with the popular, conventional love and marriage stories that studios and press could easily spin for their own ends, while challenging the thematic center of those narratives: women's expected social roles."

Which is not to say that the director's own sartorial stylings didn't have an impact. "Arzner's image offers many delights—the expensive tailoring details on her suits, her patterned ties, cufflinks, white shirts, and jodhpurs worn with boots, one leg coolly crossed over the other," writes Jane Gaines in Jump Cut. She and Katharine Hepburn may have both worn pants, but Arzner was more consistently butch.

Though Arzner never made any official statements regarding her sexuality, her forty-year relationship with choreographer Marion Morgan was no secret. Rumors that Arzner was romantically involved with Joan Crawford and Katharine Hepburn—not, to be clear, simultaneously—have never been confirmed. 

A shining example of Arzner's artistry is Dance, Girl, Dance, a 1940 film starring Lucille Ball as a bawdy burlesque dancer named Bubbles who competes for stage time and male attention against Maureen O'Hara, portraying the earnest ballerina Judy. In the words of Sophie Mayer writing for Sight & Sound, the duo spend much of the film "tiffing and dancing like a crypto-lesbian Fred and Ginger." But amid the screwball capering is a scene in which O'Hara's character, furious at being disrespected and belittled by the mostly male audience, stops dancing, walks to the front of the stage, and confronts the hecklers:

 "We'd laugh right back at the lot of you, only we're paid to let you sit there and roll your eyes and make your screamingly clever remarks. What's it for? So you can go home when the show's over, strut before your wives and sweethearts and play at being the stronger sex for a minute? I'm sure they see through you. I'm sure they see through you just like we do!"

Arzner directed her last film, First Comes Courage, until illness forced her to abandon the project in 1943, when she was in her mid-40s. Though she never returned to the Hollywood studio system, Arzner kept directing, tackling Women's Army Corps training videos during World War II and a series of Pepsi commercials in the '50s at the behest of Joan Crawford. In 1959, Arzner took up a teaching position at UCLA's film school, where her students included Francis Ford Coppola.

Dorothy Arzner died in 1979. With 16 feature directing credits to her name—and several other films for which she went uncredited—she remains the most prolific female director that Hollywood has ever seen. 

 A large tiger shark - one of the species that frequents the North Carolina coast, and a likely culprit for the bites. (Photo: Albert Kok/WikiCommons CC BY SA 3.0)

Who doesn’t love the beach? With summer, comes the wonderful feelings of sand between your toes, cool sea breezes, cocktails at sunset, and… shark attacks?

On July 4 in Surf City, North Carolina, a former Marine's Independence Day festivities were rudely interrupted when a certain toothy fish attacked, leaving the 32-year-old man with lacerations on his right arm. But this was no isolated incident. Over the past three weeks, the North Carolina coast has seen an outbreak of 8 to 12-foot-long sharks coming into contact with people. These are likely bull sharks or tiger sharks. Though no lives have been lost, two young swimmers each lost an arm after separate June 14 shark attacks around 90 miles apart on Oak Island.

What makes this past month in North Carolina such an anomaly, however, is that the yearly total for shark attacks in North Carolina in 2014 was only four—with no fatalities or serious injuries. However, as of July 8, North Carolina has seen eight shark attacks in 28 days. 

So what is going on in North Carolina? Are the sharks becoming more aggressive, or are humans doing something wrong? 

A pier at Ocean Isle beach in North Carolina. (Photo: Justin Champion/WikiCommons CC BY SA 3.0)

To put the North Carolina attacks in context, we need to look at the numbers. Shark species are threatened, and their populations are at an all time low. But in 2014, there were 52 "unprovoked" attacks in the continental United States, according to the  International Shark Attack File compiled by the University of Florida's Museum of Natural History. While that seems like a lot, of the 52 attacks, over 28 were from a single stretch of beach in New Smyrna, Florida (known as the shark attack capital of the world).

There are several dominant theories floating around about the increase in shark attacks in North Carolina. Local fishermen told the Charlotte Observer that the shark nibbles could be due to one rogue shark that has developed a taste for human flesh. The culprit is most likely the bull shark, an aggressive species, but large tiger sharks have also been seen in the vicinity of the attacks. The rogue shark theory, as seen in the classic film Jaws, is fairly unlikely. Humans are bonier and much less fatty than the sharks' preferred prey: seals. 

On July 5, George Burgess, a scientist and shark expert with the University of Florida, told NPR that the root cause of the uptick in shark bites is due to ecological and oceanographic factors. Summer started early in North Carolina this year, and the unseasonably warm temperatures, coupled with the traditional turtle hatching season, have brought numerous sharks closer to shore. School's also out, so there are groups of people fishing, surfing, and swimming in close proximity to one another.

A sunset paddle board on Wrightsville Beach, NC seems peaceful–until you see what's beneath the waves. (Photo: James Willamor/Flickr)

This is the true reason for the bites: there's just too many people in the ocean. Since 1900, the number of attacks has increased every subsequent decade. According to the International Shark Attack File, the primary academic source for human-shark interactions, this is not due to a change in the shark's behavior. 

The numerical growth in shark interactions does not necessarily mean there is an increase in the rate of shark attacks; rather, it most likely reflects the ever-increasing amount of time spent in the sea by humans, which increases the opportunities for interaction between the two affected parties.

So what we have in North Carolina is a simple statistical trap. More people swimming equals more shark bites. However, there are specific ways you can reduce your likelihood of actually being attacked. Don't swim alone at dusk or dawn, when sharks are likely to be feeding. If you see birds diving, or bait fish jumping, there's probably sharks around feeding. If you are a fisherman, don't chum the water near swimmers. And if you're really paranoid, go ahead and order the Sharkbanz electromagnetic wristband, which is already popular on the Eastern Seaboard, or this shark-deterring "invisibility wetsuit" from Australia. 

Cat and dog skeletons. Ferocious. (All images: William Chesleden's 'Osteographia, or The anatomy of the bones', Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine)

Born in 1688, William Cheselden was a prolific surgeon, and was influential in legitimizing the field as a proper medical practice. As an anatomy lecturer, he was elected into the Royal Society in 1712, where he published his first illustrated work, The Anatomy of the Human Body. Because Cheselden made the unprecedented decision to publish in the vernacular, English, and not in Latin, as was customary for scientists at the time, The Anatomy of the Human Body became a wildly popular textbook among English medical students.

Throughout a career performing surgery, Cheselden became an expert in the safe removal of both bladder stones and eye cataracts—improving survival rates for the poor souls undergoing 18th century surgery across the board. In 1733, Cheselden published Osteographia or the Anatomy of Bones, a whimsically illustrated folio depicting the skeletons of various mammals, including humans. In order to capture the images, Cheselden and his associates used a camera obscura, and then drew the images out on paper.

Though Cheselden's illustrations are incredibly accurate representations of the human skeletal system, Osteographia hails from a time when artistry was just as important a skill for scientists as mathematics. The bones are placed in fantastic positions over exotic backgrounds, but every skeleton is drawn with meticulous proportions. Below, we've selected some of the most spectacular illustrations from the Osteographia.

A human skeleton surveying the confines of its illustration, with some bony accoutrements.

 A deer prancing in fine, skeletal form.  

 If you weren't aware this was a Nile Crocodile, the pyramid in the background should help orient you. 

Bears doing what bears do best: climbing trees.

Chameleon skeleton. There's no camouflaging these bones.

A gigantic sparrow and a small bat meet for the first time. 

A large rabbit skeleton, perched on a rock.

If you didn't think that turtles are weird enough already, here's a skeletal view, from underneath the shell.

Ostrich skeleton. Just look at that neck.

Colors are powerful. You can have the blues, see red, or feel green with jealousy.

Colors can feel like perfect representation of emotions. What if it could work the other way? What if just looking at a certain color could effect your mood? And what if one special shade could even overpower you, could cause actual physical weakness in anyone who looked at it?

One scientist in the 1970s tried to answer exactly this question starting with a drunk tank in a naval prison in Seattle. The result of this study, scientific or not, are still changing wall colors and possibly moods in prisons all over the world.

Want more wonders? Check out our YouTube page, and click here to subscribe! 

The many connections of a rat Brainet. (Image: Katie Zhuang/Nicolelis Lab, Duke) 

You may remember Pinky and the Brain, the classic 1990s Steven Spielberg TV show about two laboratory mice whose “genes have been spliced,” turning them into hyper-intelligent schemers who spend every episode trying to take over the world.

It seems we’ve learned nothing from cartoons. Neuroscientists at Duke University reported this morning that they have linked the brains of not just two, but three and even four rats. The paper, published in Scientific Reports and titled "Building an organic computing device with multiple interconnected brains," describes how the technology enables the rodents to work together to “complete simple computational tasks involving pattern recognition, storage and retrieval of sensory information, and even weather forecasting.”

As if that weren’t enough, they also published a second paper, "Computing arm movements with a monkey Brainet," detailing similar experiments done with rhesus macaque monkeys.

Boring, unconnected rhesus macaque monkeys. (Photo: Yann Forget/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 4.0)

The researchers performed a series of experiments to test the animal superminds. In each case, they implanted electrical arrays in the creatures' brains, linked the group up with wires, and trained them to synchronize their neural activity. In one challenge, thirsty rats were denied water until they matched their thoughts together.

In another, a group of three connected monkeys was tasked with controlling a computer-generated avatar projected on a screen. Each monkey was responsible for moving the avatar’s arm along a particular plane, with real monkeys having to work together to help the digital monkey hit the target. “As the animals gained more experience and training in the motor task,” the authors write, “researchers found that they adapted to the challenge.”

In a third experiment, rats were given different temperature and pressure readings associated with “early evening spring thunderstorms in North Carolina.” By combining their data through the neural network, the rats outputted information that the researchers could then translate into weather predictions with, they write, “accuracy which was much higher than chance.”

These rats and monkeys are living examples of what Nicolelis and his team call “Brainets” — animal brains linked together by electrode arrays, smarter together than they ever were apart. 

A figure from the paper, showing how real monkeys worked together to control a digital monkey. (Image: Miguel A.L. Nicolelis/Scientific Reports)

"Nicolelis has already a respected track record of turning what used to be thought of as science fiction fantasies into serious applied science," Dr. Ron Frostig, a neuroscientist at University of California, Irvine who was not involved with the study, wrote in an email. "While the results of these pioneering experiments are not perfect, they serve as an harbinger for an exciting new direction in neuroscience."

The Brainet dream first took hold in 2013, when the group connected two rat brains. In the accompanying paper, also published in Scientific Reports, they describe an experiment in which they showed one rat how to feed itself by pressing one of two levers, and connected that rat’s brain to the brain of a different, untutored rat faced with the same setup. The first rat then “taught” the second rat how to get food, via thought transmission.When rat #2 made a mistake, the rats were able to telepathically clear up the confusion.

At the time, Nicolelis called this one more step toward “an organic computer,” able to solve problems without being given explicit instructions. “In theory, you could imagine that a combination of brains could provide solutions that individual brains cannot achieve by themselves,” he said.

A lonely lab rat. (Photo: Jean-Etienne Poirrier/Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0)

Dr. Nicolelis and his team are also using this research to improve their brain-machine interfaces, which let living things command artificial devices using only brain signals. These form the core of the Walk Again project, an international collaboration led by Dr. Nicolelis that seeks to help movement-impaired patients regain some of their physical autonomy.

The project most recently turned heads with their “mind-control exoskeleton,” a robot suit that allowed Juliano Pinto, a paraplegic, to perform the kickoff at last year’s Football World Cup. 

When asked what inspired the experiments, Dr. Nicolelis didn't hesitate: "Curiosity," he said.

Cats, you're officially on notice.

Illustration of a rat Brainet at work. (Image: Katie Zhuang/Nicolelis Lab, Duke)