Snake oil purchased from Amazon.com. (Photo: Ella Morton)

Buying snake oil in 2015 is surprisingly easy. A search for "snake oil" on Amazon yields 2,716 hits, many of them not liquid, but 16 oils sit under the "beauty" category alone. And that's not counting all the non-medicinal variants, like the snake oil you can buy as a "gun lubricant." ("Just a few drops of Genuine Snake-Oil-Prime and your bangstick will run like new," reads the description.)

For research purposes, I chose a modestly priced option with a suitably mysterious label. This 1-ounce bottle of snake oil meant for the skin will set you back $8.75 and with expedited shipping, an order placed on a Friday afternoon lands the small container in your mailbox less than 48 hours later.

Labeled as a "skin emollient," it smells a lot more fishy than you might imagine. On its Amazon page, the description is sparse, even though it's in both English and Spanish:"This oil feels great on your skin. Use as a hydrating formula to soften your skin." There are only four customer reviews, some of them clearly sarcastic (Yolo McSwaggins: "It has not only cleared up my acne, but it also cured my cancer and my doctor just told me that I am no longer HIV positive.") What is it supposed to do exactly? And why is it so pungent?

When I looked at the ingredients list, it all made sense. There are just two components to the recipe: cod liver oil and mineral oil. No snakes. It is basically the perfect snake oil.

 Snake oil has long been regarded, both literally and figuratively, as a product that promises the world but delivers nothing. If you're getting sold snake oil, you're getting fleeced by a huckster—whether that's a quack doctor at a traveling carnival or a shady politician canvassing for votes.

But the story of snake oil, the actual substance, is a little more complicated—there are a few glimmers of truth amid all the trickery and swindles. 

The American use of snake oil as a topical pain reliever most likely originates with Chinese immigrants who came to the United States during the 1860s to help build the Transcontinental Railway. According to NPR, “The workers would rub the oil, used for centuries in China, on their joints after a long hard day at work. The story goes that the Chinese workers began sharing the oil with some American counterparts, who marveled at the effects.”

An advertisement for St. Jacobs Oil in the 1908 Boone County Recorder. (Photo: Public Domain)

By the late 19th century, some enterprising Americans had gotten in on the snake oil selling biz, with one key difference: While the Chinese snake oil came from Chinese water snakes, the Stateside version was associated with rattlesnakes, Native Americans, and the West.

In the 1890s, a Rhode Island man named Clark Stanley began peddling his own Snake Oil Liniment. In his promotional material, Stanley, the self-dubbed “Rattlesnake King,” claimed to have learned "the secret of snake oil" from Hopi medicine men while hanging out in the wilds of Texas during the 1870s. He boasted that his oil was the “strongest and best liniment known for the cure of all pain and lameness.” Rheumatism, neuralgia, toothache, sprains, frostbite, and sore throats were among the many maladies Stanley’s snake oil claimed to relieve.

"A wonderful pain destroying compound": Clark Stanley's Snake Oil Liniment, from the late 1800s. (Photo: Nickell Snake Oil Collection/Center for Inquiry Libraries)

In the late 19th century, when heroin was sold as an over-the-counter cough suppressant, Snake Oil Liniment was one of a rash of “patent medicines”: the potions and pills, tonics and tinctures that, with their effusive ads, claimed to solve all your problems.  During this era, there were no federal regulations governing such substances, meaning sellers could make any claim they desired without having to fuss over things like clinical trials or scientific validity.

Then came the United States government’s 1906 Federal Food and Drugs Act, introduced with the aim of preventing “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of adulterated or misbranded or poisonous or deleterious foods, drugs, medicines, and liquors.” The effects of this legislation, however, weren’t immediate. It took a decade before the jig was up for Stanley. In 1916, the Bureau of Chemistry found that the Rattlesnake King’s so-called snake oil consisted “principally of a light mineral oil (petroleum product) mixed with about one percent of fatty oil (probably beef fat),” accompanied by “possibly a trace of camphor and turpentine.” Stanley was fined $20 for his fraudulent advertising.

The bottle and box for Clark Stanley snake oil. (Photo: Nickell Snake Oil Collection, Center for Inquiry Libraries)

After the introduction of the Food and Drugs Act, some snake oil vendors took an even sneakier approach to marketing that managed to evade the government restrictions. In July 1918, a monthly bulletin from the Boston Health Department reported that dodgy medicine vendor Guy C. Worner was selling snake oil at a shop on Washington Street. “The premises were duly decorated with rattlesnake skins, cages of live snakes, and other curiosities supposedly from the West,” read the bulletin, which also noted that, when conducting business, Worner “appeared in the costume of a cowboy.”

The Health Department’s analysis of Worner’s not-so-snake-ish oil showed that it contained 75 percent petroleum lubricating oil and 25 percent eucalyptol, according to the bulletin. Worner escaped any false-advertising penalties by claiming that the rattlesnake imagery used in his store displays and print ads were intended merely to boost sales of the snake skins he peddled alongside his mystery miracle oil.

(Image: Public domain)

Despite the quackery and charlatanism associated with snake oil, it's not always as blatantly ineffective as its reputation suggests—as long as the oil is extracted from the right kind of snake. The original Chinese version of snake oil does appear to have minor health benefits. Oil extracted from Chinese water snakes is rich in eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), a type of omega-3 fatty acid that has anti-inflammatory properties.

In a letter published in the Western Journal of Medicine in 1989, Dr. Richard Kunin wrote: "As a concentrated source of EPA, snake oil is a credible anti-inflammatory agent and might indeed confer therapeutic benefits. Since essential fatty acids are known to absorb transdermally, it is not far-fetched to think that inflamed skin and joints could benefit by the actual anti-inflammatory action of locally applied oil.”

And the benefits may extend further: a 2007 study published in the Journal of Nutritional Science and Vitaminology found that feeding the oil of Chinese water snakes to aged mice may improve their swimming endurance.

Even if the American products sold as rattlesnake oil did indeed contain rattlesnake oil, they would not have conferred the anti-inflammatory benefits of the Chinese version—Kunin analyzed the EPA content of oil from both red and black rattlesnakes and found that it was 0.6 and 4.1 percent EPAs respectively—as compared to the 19.6 percent of EPAs in Chinese snake oil.

Don't swallow that snake oil. (Photo: Ella Morton)

So, what of the cod liver "snake oil" available on Amazon for the low low price of $8.75? Applying it topically likely won't harm you—like Chinese water snake oil, cod liver oil is rich in EPAs. A 2000 study published in the Scandinavian Journal of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery found that cod liver oil ointment helps hasten the healing of wounds. But the main effect of rubbing this bargain snake oil on your body is rather more unpleasant. It will simply stink up the place, letting people know that your snake oil is a sham.

Fame is fickle (Photo: Christian Haugen/Flickr)

Hollywood, an entire industry dedicated to people pretending to be someone that they're not (both onscreen and off), pretty much invented the concept of "fake it 'til you make it." In this world, people have secrets, and those willing to tattle are tantalizing.

First appearing in 2010, the Twitter account @MysteryExec, purportedly penned by an anonymous Tinseltown movie executive, amassed over 16,000 followers for telling it like it is. As Mashable explains, the exec "gave every impression that he ranked in the Hollywood production ecosystem" but ranted, raved, and stood against the worst Hollywood bullshit.

Turns out, it was all a fake.

Not that MysteryExec didn't mean what he said. The real ruse was that MysteryExec was not an executive, but, as Mashable's Josh Dickey reports, simply a young writer "trying to make it in Hollywood whose prank turned into a mini-phenomenon."

This still-anonymous writer did ride his fake account to some version of making it—MysteryExec is now one of Hollywood's most well-known internet-spawned personalities. The fake-it-'til-you-make it rule, though, assumes that eventually, the faker won't have to fake anymore and will learn how to do their job. Unfortunately, "fake movie executive" is not a real job. The only way to make it here is to get out before the game is up.

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Since this is Cheat Week at Atlas Obscura, those finds will all be fake. Got a favorite hoax? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

(Photo: Wichan Kongchan/shutterstock.com)

The Gold Rush may be over, but that doesn’t mean the precious metal stopped inspiring criminal ingenuity.

In fact, the largest gold mining scam in the history of the world took place just over a decade ago, when a shady prospector used his wedding ring to fake the existence of a $6 billion mine.

The story of the greatest mining cheat of all time began in 1993 when the owner of Canadian penny-stock mining company Bre-X purchased the rights to some land in the middle of the jungles of Borneo. The plot of land, at the head of the Busang River, was bought up on the advice of geologist and explorer John Felderhof, who had previously gained a name for himself for his part in discovering a massive gold and copper mine in Papua New Guinea. Despite the fact that some, larger mining companies had explored the area previously and decided it was not a viable site, Bre-X gambled on Felderhof’s promise of an underground jackpot.

Felderhof’s interest in the site was supposedly based on core samples provided by the project manager, Filipino mining prospector, Michael de Guzman. In 1994, Guzman was producing crushed core samples that indicated Bre-X may have just purchased one of the largest gold deposits ever discovered. The initial estimates, based on the core samples, indicated that there might be over 136,000 pounds of gold buried in them thar jungles, and this was only the beginning. By 1995, the estimates had skyrocketed to over 2 million pounds, and by 1997, the estimate more than doubled reaching almost 5 million pounds of rumored gold hiding just beneath the surface of the Borneo mine. In a final estimate, given during a conference call with investors from J.P. Morgan, Felderhof just went of the deep end and suggested that there could be over 13 million pounds of gold waiting to be dug up.

The Borneo forest in Kalimantan, near where the fabled mine supposedly was. (Photo: Ruanda Agung Sugardiman/Wikipedia)

All of this based solely on de Guzman’s thousands of core samples. In the 3 or so years since the gold had been discovered, a bustling mining town had even sprung up on the site, with its own church and school.

When Bre-X first purchased the Borneo land, their stocks were selling for around 30 cents a piece, but as the tales of their insane discovery grew, their nearly worthless stock blew the roof off the market rising to around $250 a share by 1997, bringing the value of the company to what would be a staggering six billion dollars in today’s money. At the time, Lehman Brothers called the Bre-X mine, “the gold discovery of the century.”

Now they just needed to produce some gold. Which was a problem as there had never been any to begin with.

As it would turn out, de Guzman had been “salting” his core samples with gold dust, first with shavings from his own wedding ring, and later with $61,000 worth of locally panned gold. Of course other geologists, hired by some of the investors had taken a look at de Guzman’s samples and raised suspicions due to the fact that the entire cores had been crushed up, leaving nothing to verify the samples against, and that the gold fragments themselves seemed to have an unnatural shape. But de Guzman managed to talk his way through all of their misgivings, and Bre-X continued to grow on rampant speculation.

Not even. (Photo: Giorgio Monteforti/Flickr)

Around 1996, as Bre-X’s star and stock were rising, Indonesian President Suharto, took an interest in the massive windfall that had been discovered in his country. First he halted their final approval to exploit the land, stating that Bre-X was too small a firm to solely mine the area. Eventually Suharto and Bre-X worked out a deal wherein the shares of the mine would be split between Bre-X, Indonesia, and a more established mining company, Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold. Of course this meant that Freeport-Moran would need to independently verify that there was gold at the site. Oh shit.

The Suharto deal was finalized in February of 1997, and just a month later, on March 19, de Guzman was found dead in the heart of the jungle, supposedly having thrown himself from a helicopter while on the way to a meeting with Freeport. (His body was said to have been identified by a molar and a thumbprint after wild animals had ravaged the rest.)

After de Guzman's death, things went downhill startlingly fast. Just days after de Guzman’s death, Freeport reported that they had discovered no gold at the site, taking samples just over a meter from where Bre-X had drilled. The jig was up. Freeport released further findings in the ensuing months, revealing the salting scheme. The stock instantly tanked, and the $6 billion con was at an end, leaving a number of very rich people, feeling very stupid.

The true culprit of the massive Bre-X fraud is up for debate. Was Felderhof, who sold over $80,000,000 worth of his Bre-X stock just months before the reveal of the scam, the true mastermind? Were the owners of Bre-X in on the con? Or was de Guzman just fooling everyone down the line?

No one is sure, but this final portion from an on-the-ground report of the Bre-X mine that ran in Fortune magazine in 1997 is fairly telling,

There was another peculiar moment. In one of my last meetings in Jakarta with Felderhof, de Guzman walked in. I rose and slapped him on the back, congratulating him on Freeport's emerging as Bre-X's new partner. He should have been thrilled. Instead, he was stone cold. Grim. Icy. He didn't even look at me. It was clear he wanted to talk to Felderhof alone.

Bre-X folded in 2002.

John Felderhof was acquitted of insider trading in 2007.

Michael de Guzman remains deceased, although some believe he has been spotted in Canada. Others believe he was murdered.

(Photo: Alexandre17/shutterstock.com)

You know those magical moments when fates collide, uncertainties resolve into sudden, stunning clarity, and the resulting awe and gratitude you feel for the benevolent and wondrous universe can hardly be described in mere words?

It’s Ferdinando Buscema’s job to design moments like that.

Buscema is a “Magic Experience Designer”—a profession that won't be appearing as a result in a career aptitude quiz any time soon. As the job title suggests, Buscema devotes himself to creating magical experiences, both in daily life and for the corporate clients who hire him to add an element of awe to their training days and corporate retreats. Drawing on a background that combines mechanical engineering, humanistic psychology and hermetic traditions, Buscema brings magic to people’s lives, both as a performer on stage, and in more surreptitious ways.

When designing a magical experience, Buscema says his aim is to “create a space where people can transcend their idea of ‘normal’ and experience wonder.” For adults, this can be tricky. An openness to awe, according to Buscema, is something we are born with and carry as children, but tend to lose touch with as we age, the world becomes more familiar, and we are overwhelmed with information.

“Grown-ups need a trigger of sorts to activate, or to re-enter, this primal state of wonder,” he says. Magic, deftly deployed, can provide that trigger. And by following Buscema’s lead, you can create magical experiences, for yourself and those around you, every day.

Revise your definition of magic

In many cases, magic as performed on TV or on stage is ”the ego show of the egomaniac magician,” says Buscema. “It’s, ‘Look at me, how cool I am, because I can do things that you cannot fathom!’”

Ferdinando Buscema.

Such a message, says Buscema, is not empowering to the viewer. As a magic experience designer, his aim is “to make magical things happen in day-to-day life, outside of a theatrical context.” Though he does sometimes jump on stage to do card tricks for corporate clients, the performance is just one component of the immersive experiences he designs. Stunts and tricks, sparingly used, can help solidify a concept and empower those who feel its awe to seek out their own magical experiences.

“It’s almost like a kind of zen meditation: finding ways to trigger magical moments in everyday life,” says Buscema. “The world is already filled with wonder; my job is to attract your attention to it.”

Get comfortable with uncertainty

We live in an age of overabundant information in which uncertainty has become the enemy. When a question arises, the answer is a mere Google search away.

This state of affairs doesn’t leave a lot of room for mystery. But the “not-knowing zone,” as Buscema describes it, is just where you want to be if you want to experience magic.

In 1817, the Romantic poet John Keats coined the phrase “negative capability” to describe, in the words of Stephen Hebron at the British Library, “the idea that a person’s potential can be defined by what he or she does not possess–in this case a need to be clever, a determination to work everything out.” Someone who has negative capability, wrote Keats in an 1817 letter, “is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

It can be difficult to resist researching everything when the information is just a few iPhone touchscreen taps away. But if you allow yourself to remain in a state of uncertainty, says Buscema, there develops “a tension between the moment you know you do not know something, and the moment you do know something.” This liminal state is the perfect foundation for removing rationality and inducing awe.

Use trickery for good, not evil

Trickery and deception are integral parts of magic, but they don’t need to be employed in a mean-spirited way that makes people feel foolish. “The goal of magic is not to fool people,” says Buscema. “The goal of magic is to stimulate people to live life in a state of wonder.”

Buscema shies away from magic that victimizes or ridicules—not just because it’s mean, but because it’s lazy. “Dropping a bucket of water on someone’s head and laughing at them is too easy,” he says. The greater challenge is to find ways to prank people in a way that is ultimately uplifting.

Participants in Improv Everywhere's No Pants Subway Ride, adding wonder and intrigue to the daily commute. (Photo: Oh Barcelona/flickr)

In his book Amaze, co-authored with frequent collaborator and self-professed “Wonder Injector” Mariano Tomatis, Buscema cites the example of a 2005 stunt called Romantic Comedy Cab, staged by New York-based prank collective Improv Everywhere. The mission involved a man named Anthony hailing a cab and telling the driver he was trying to find a woman, Kate, he had met and fallen for the previous evening.

Anthony described how he had written down Kate’s number and the name of the restaurant where they had planned to meet on a napkin, but had lost the napkin. Anthony told the cab driver he had been walking around all night trying to find the restaurant, and couldn’t bear the idea of Kate thinking she’d been stood up.

The cab driver commiserated, dropped Anthony off at a bar, and wished him luck. Later that evening, another Improv Everywhere agent got into the same cab and told the driver about how she had met an amazing man the night before, but he had failed to arrive at their scheduled date. She was Kate. The cab driver realized the connection, drove Kate to the bar where he’d dropped off Anthony, and the two reunited with much excitement and hugging.

You could call that a trick or a prank. But the mission of Romantic Comedy Cab, and the aim of all Improv Everywhere’s stunts, is not to humiliate or ridicule. It is to engender awe by creating “scenes of chaos and joy in public places.” Sure, there is deception involved. But the deception is a necessary precursor for ultimate delight.

(Photo: Tom Roeleveld/flickr)

Writing in Amaze, Buscema and Tomatis mention a fascinating postscript to the cab story:

Reuniting the two lovers in New York, the cab driver with the African accent did not know he had been part of a fiction and sincerely felt to have contributed to the triumph of love between Anthony and Kate. Was he just deluding himself? Maybe not: on August 23rd, 2008, in fact, the two lovers got married. Such an image is the perfect symbol of what strikes us the most about magical experiences: their ability to transcend fiction and become true.

Use kindness to inspire wonder

“At the core of a random act of kindness is pure magic,” says Buscema. “Every time it happens, a moment of wonder is unleashed.”

Lately, Buscema has been conducting some magical experiments in mall parking lots. He’ll take a 50 Euro bill and place it, along with a handwritten note, under the windshield wiper of a random, humble-looking car. (“The flavor of the note,” says Buscema, “is like: ‘Someone is caring for you; you have a hidden support.’”)

Note placed, he waits. Invariably, when the driver returns, their reaction is to be suspicious, then astounded, at the discovery of the anonymous gift.

“You can make someone’s day with even $10,” says Buscema. “But it’s not the amount of money that gets the job done—it’s the message.”

(Photo: airart/shutterstock.com)

Such benevolent acts don’t fit within the standard, showy realm of “magic,” but their effect can be profound on both the recipient of the gift and the person who plants it.

“To some extent you’re sacrificing your ego,” says Buscema, but though it may come in a different form, the reward is still there. When he commits random acts of kindness, he is “creating an experience that will keep people’s minds spinning for some time, I like to think, in a fertile way. And that’s how I play my game.”

Helena Blavatsky. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

“For our part, we regard her as neither the mouthpiece of hidden seers, nor as a mere vulgar adventuress; we think that she has achieved a title to permanent remembrance as one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting imposters in history.”

With these words, published in 1885, the Cambridge-based Society for Psychical Research brought an end to a scandal that that had been brewing for years.

The imposter in question was Madame Helena Blavatsky. Born in Russia in 1831, she had, by her own account, left home at the age of 18 to wander the world. Her self-reported adventures include fighting alongside Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi; pursuing Native American magicians in Quebec; and, most pertinent to her later life, studying with mystics in remotest Tibet.

When she reappeared onto the historical record around 1870, Blavatsky quickly insinuated herself into the 19th century’s booming séance circuit. Since the late 1840s, people on both sides of the Atlantic had been flocking to mediums who claimed they could channel the spirits of the dearly departed. Then, as now, ghosts thrilled the public—even when the thrills involved were a little dubious. (The two teenaged girls who started the spiritualist craze were later accused of having produced the sound of ghosts rapping on walls by popping their toe knuckles.)

A photo of a seance taking place in 1872, in England. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

But the usual ghosts weren’t good enough for Blavatsky. In 1875, in a Manhattan drawing room, she launched a group with the grand title of the Theosophical Society. Setting ghosts aside, it would search out a higher class of supernatural beings: the “Mahatmas,” whom Blavatsky had allegedly met in Tibet.

These men, she said, could ship their souls anywhere in the world at a moment’s notice through “astral projection.” They could also ship other things—notably letters. Theosophists marveled at the projectile missives that flew through the windows of moving trains or were delivered by enigmatic turbaned men sneaking into tents at midnight. In the 1870s, instantaneous delivery of a message still felt downright miraculous.

There is, however, such a thing as too many miracles. At some point, the would-be wonderworker has to call on a friend to keep up with demand—and friends are unreliable. Enter Emma Coulomb, an old acquaintance of Blavatsky’s from Cairo. When Blavatsky moved her small band of Theosophists from New York to Bombay in 1879 (and then on to Chennai in 1880), Emma and her husband Pierre joined them as Blavatsky’s personal assistants.

Things went badly from the start. Coulomb was prickly, and didn’t much like her fellow Theosophists. The notoriously cantankerous Blavatsky, meanwhile, often turned her temper on friends and associates.

The Theosophical Society, Adyar, India, in 1890. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

We don’t know what sparked Coulomb’s betrayal. But when, in September 1884, she handed a stash of secret letters to the Madras Christian College Magazine, it spelled nothing but trouble for Blavatsky and the Theosophists. The magazine published the letters, and scandal erupted. Apparently penned by Blavatsky, these communiqués tell Emma and Pierre when and how to fabricate miracles—causing letters to coalesce from nowhere, roses to shower from ceilings, and astral heads to waft on the evening breeze.

In retrospect, the mechanics of these miracles seem achingly obvious. Once, a bumbling Theosophist opened the door to the wonder-cabinet in Blavatsky’s “Occult Room,” and a tea saucer came tumbling out to splinter on the ground. After it was placed back in the cabinet for five minutes, the saucer was miraculously restored. Later investigators pointed out that the cabinet shared a wall with Blavatsky’s bedroom; they also uncovered evidence of a secret panel (now destroyed) connecting the two. It was then further revealed that Blavatsky had recently purchased a tea set: how easy to replace the shattered saucer with its matching twin.

Blavatsky and Hindu Theosophists in India, in 1884. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

This event might seem too mundane to even warrant the word “miracle.” But, in the 1880s, investigating such things was serious business. With the new science exploding old conceptions of how the world worked, major minds wanted to make sure that the likes of Blavatsky weren’t onto something. Perhaps spirits really were real. Or perhaps, in their misguided way, they pointed to unexplained “psychical” realities as yet unknown.

Further investigations, as we have seen, led the Cambridge Society of Psychical Research to conclude otherwise. Blavatsky was a fraud, pure and simple. Her reputation never quite recovered from this pronouncement. Even so, her allure lived on, attracting followers well into the next century.

But if it’s not miracle that Blavatsky was delivering, what is it? Freethinkers had long claimed that religion per se was mostly fraudulent, a ruse cooked up by crafty priests to dupe and control the gullible masses. By the 1880s, this idea was commonplace, at least in Blavatsky’s circles. For such people, perhaps, excessively earnest religion no longer cut it. What Blavatsky delivered was faith laced with doubt—and irresistibly so. Her miracles were so hokey that you couldn’t quite believe them, but you couldn’t quite look away either. 

Some troubadour left his broken heart. (Photo: Tim Parkinson/Flickr)

Country music and cheating go together like whiskey and water.

Flip on any radio station—classic country, pop-country, alt-country, “truck-driving country”—and mixed in with the love songs and the hoedown stomps and the patriotic ballads, you’re bound to hear some poor soul walking the floor over the loss of his woman. Or some desperate soul pleading a temptress not to take her man. Or some angry soul carefully applying “a Louisville slugger to both headlights of his pretty little souped-up four-wheel drive.”

Brian Mansfield quipped on country site The Boot, “nothing is certain but death, taxes and cheating songs,” and music journalist Colin Escott once wrote that infidelity is to country music “what the blues in B-flat is to jazz.” Don’t believe the hype? The numbers don’t lie—one study of a quarter-century of popular country songs found that “cheating situations” were among the most popular of all situations, and at least one nonplussed academic attempting to sort the genre has had to close out the cheating category“because a list of extramarital sex songs could expand almost indefinitely.”

What is it about this type of music that draws all these straying and strayed-upon hearts? How far back does this tradition go? And now that so much of country comes not from the hearts of working-class heros, but from the guts of the Nashville music machine, is it in danger of being snuffed out by more palatable tunes?

The Start of the Affair

She's said it before and she'll say it again, about a million times throughout her career. Back off. (Photo: Nesster/Flickr)

Country has had cheatin’ on its mind since the genre’s inception. Although Appalachian bards had kept the songs of their European ancestors alive for centuries, strumming and picking on front porches from Texas to Tennessee, it wasn’t until the 1920s that anyone beyond the next street over took notice. The advent of portable recording technology allowed labels like Okeh and Victor to send scouts to Atlanta and Tennessee to find and record “hillbilly artists.” The Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, and other then-unknowns brought their favorite songs to the sessions, which were often held in strange places, like the Taylor-Christian Hat Factory.

Comb through any of these old recordings, and you’ll find plenty of cheatin’ strands. Many of the tunes were lifted, partially or wholesale, from old English ballads, which often dealt with faithless love. Take the 1927 Bristol Sessions, widely considered country music’s public debut: they include, sprinkled among the religious tunes and corn-shuck jigs, a surprising number of betrayals. The morbid “The Jealous Sweetheart,” by guitar duo the Johnson Brothers, tells the eerie tale of how said sweetheart stabs his girlfriend after he suspects her of cheating, while the last verse of “The Mountaineer’s Courtship,” by musical polymath Ernest Stoneman, reveals that the titular courtin’ mountaineer already has six children. Some warblers were all cheat: B.F. Shelton, a banjo player from Kentucky, recorded four songs that day, all of which end either with a nice girl leaving someone for a “low-down gamblin’ man,” or a ramblin’ boy killing his bride so he can screw around.

Why did these British folk songs—rather than the ones about Robin Hood and sea worms—resonate enough to survive so long? Country historian David Fillingim thinks it has something to do with the singers’ lot in life. Cheatin’ songs, like gospel songs or blues songs in other musical traditions, are “responses to the reality of suffering,” he writes—they're a way to express that things are unfair, without mounting any sort of political critique.

The Carter Family’s best-loved song, and the first they ever recorded, was “Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow,” a deceivingly upbeat tune in which a betrayed woman hopes to die so that her philandering fiance will weep for her under the tree. (Photo: Victor Talking Machine Co/WikiCommons Public Domain)

Indeed, caring about cheating can be its own implicit socioeconomic statement. As one character, a singer, points out in Garrison Keillor's WLT: A Radio Romance, "Cheatin' songs. That's real poor man music… A rich man hardly needs a woman at all...but when you've got nothing and not much to look forward to, then if your woman runs off and you lose the one good thing in your life, man, that just about kills you." Such tales of woe "are in effect the redneck blues," Fillingim theorizes, "the music of an oppressed people seeking to transcend but not ignore their experience."

The early songs, particularly the murder ballads, had a moralizing bent, “encouraging listeners… to remain within the safe confines of Victorian sexual norms,” Fillingim continues. As the genre evolved and people began writing their own tunes, the theme remained, even as this subtext was dropped. Take “After the Ball,” the story of a man who abandons his sweetheart when he sees her kissing another ballgoer, and a 1930 hit for Fiddlin’ John Carson. The mysterious “suitor” turns out to be the sweetheart’s brother—meaning the true villain is the narrator, who, in his distrust, has cheated himself. “Many a heart is aching, if you could read them all,” Carson caterwauls sadly over his fiddle. “Many the hopes that have vanished after the ball.” “After the Ball” is suffused with regret, but it’s not a murder ballad; it has a twist ending, but it’s not a joke. It's a cheatin' song.

Whiskey and Stepping Out

Ernest Tubb (right) with fellow musician Dave Miller. Tubb’s trademark laconic voice was the result of a tonsilectomy, which robbed him of the ability to yodel. Before that, he had basically been a wannabe Jimmie Rogers. (Photo: William P. Gottlieb/Library of Congress Public Domain)

After Prohibition was repealed in 1933, country music lost a bit of its innocence, swapping parable-ready ballrooms for rough and raucous dance halls. The honky-tonk era was a cheater’s paradise—everyone was drinking in the reopened dive bars, and rubbing up against strangers all over the increasingly urban and industrialized South. Honky-tonk’s devilish prince was Ernest Tubb, aka the Texas Troubadour, whose fluid picking and burred voice leant a certain jauntiness to his many tales of perfidy. Tubb’s biggest hit, “Walkin’ The Floor Over You,” is double-crossing you can dance to—the Troubadour sounds, at worst, mildly exasperated as he describes his can’t-sleep can’t-eat pacing-the-house symptoms, and ominously jokes that “someday you may be walking too/walking the floor is good for you.”

With "Walkin' the Floor Over You," Tubb tapped into another great cheatin' song wellspring—wordplay. "Country, with its adherence to a limited number of themes, is forced into actually surprising lyrical cleverness and inventiveness," says Charlie Hopper, a self-schooled countryphile who has been drafting songs for Nashville for years. In Figure It Out: The Linguistic Turn in Country Music, scholars Jimmie N. Rogers and Miller Williams point out country's particular love of "syllepsis," the act of using one word to mean two things—see Loretta Lynn's "While He’s Makin’ Love, I’m Makin’ Believe,” Gene Watson's "You're Out There Doing What I'm Doing Without," and Conway Twitty's "Something Strange Got Into Her Last Night."

Cheating stories, which bring along metaphor, euphemism, and comic or tragic punchlines, are particularly ripe for syllepsis—and in turn, syllepsis gives those punchlines their cornball appeal.

But cheating songs aren’t just bad puns and switcheroos. The next great bruised-heart king was Hank Williams, and he took his wounds seriously. Williams was one of the briefest-shooting, brightest-shining stars of country music, with 35 country top 10s in his 16-year career. Audiences loved him so much, the producers of the Grand Old Opry had to instate an encore cap for his performances. Most importantly for us, he was also the author, singer, and occasional embodiment of “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” the song that critic Colin Escott says “to all intents and purposes defines country music.” 

“It was Hank’s career that made cheatin’ songs a way of life," says Fillingim.

Hank's Broken Heart

Williams's late-career focus on faithlessness came from personal experience. By early 1952, an old back injury had started acting up, and his self-medication routine, which was largely alcohol- and morphine-based, quickly grew into its own problem. He was in and out of rehab, and on thin ice with friends, relatives, and audiences. Worst of all, his marriage was falling apart—his wife, Audrey Sheppard, had kicked him out of the house, and Williams feared his alcoholism had driven her into the arms of another (or several others).

In July 1952, Williams and Sheppard officially cut ties, and Williams started cutting some sad, sad songs (the batch recorded the day after the divorce was finalized “seem like pages torn from his diary,” Escott writes in Hank Williams: The Biography). A few weeks later, on the highway with his new flame, Billie Jean, Williams got to venting. “He said that someday, his ex-wife’s cheating heart would have to pay,” Don Tyler writes in Music of the Postwar Era. Immediately, Williams knew he was onto something—“so he composed the lyrics in a matter of minutes and had Billie Jean write them down” while he kept driving.

And so “Your Cheatin’ Heart” was born. Widely regarded as one of the best songs of all time, it became his second #1 hit, topping the charts for 6 weeks, and was the first country song ever inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Williams, who died a few months after the song was recorded, told his friend, “It’s the best heart song I ever wrote.”

Hank Williams, all scowls and tassels, performs in 1951. (Photo: MGM Records/WikiCommons Public Domain)

It also shot yet another dose of new life into the cheatin’ song. Though the theme was already a cliché, Escott credits Williams' "subtextual chisel and thirst for vengeance" with rejuvenating the form. For country, the American midcentury was an age of authenticity, and if you were a star, "you really seemed like you were pouring out your heart and you had lived this stuff," says Hopper. "They were drinkin’ hard; they were suicidal; they were throwin’ themselves off bridges: they were willing to be pretty grim." To the artists of this era—Williams, Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash—penning song after song about cheating was just being honest.

The Anatomy of a Cheat

In 1973, Dolly Parton released “Jolene,” which catapulted up the charts and made the 27-year-old Parton an international star. Inspired not by some sort of marriage-ending siren, but by a red-headed bank teller who wouldn’t stop flirting with her husband, the song is not so much "authentic" as a well-observed collection of details convincingly grafted onto a theme. "It's really an innocent song all around, but it sounds like a dreadful one,” Parton told NPR in 2008.

In the song, Parton pleads hurriedly for Jolene, with her “flaming locks of auburn hair,” to find some other man and leave hers alone. The song’s three minutes fly by in a rush of minor chords, keening violins, and quickened-heartbeat drums. In the years since its release, “Jolene” has cheated on Parton with dozens of artists from almost as many genres—there’s an electro-pop Jolene, a punk Jolene, and a cumbia Jolene, and as of three days ago, the song is even sleeping with network TV.

Cheating songs have a lot of moving parts. All of them have at least three characters, each of which can be the narrator or the person being addressed (if you're singing a duet, you can even combo). On top of that, you have various relationship stages, emotional tenors, and consequences. "If you were to get out a piece of legal paper and write CHEATING at the top, you could write down all the different aspects of it and probably find a song for each combination," Hopper says. Other Woman, sadly singing to cheating man pre-discovery? Check. Wannabe-cheater lustily singing to potential conquest? Check. Cheated-on man angrily singing to Other Man while filling his order at a McDonalds drive-thru? Checkeroo.

Dolly Parton onstage in 1977. (Photo: Jay Phagan/Flickr)

Those who cover, riff on, or parody "Jolene" tend to latch onto one of the many permutations made possible by its particularly complex structure, which folds itself into a few possible love triangles. Jack White imagines Jolene is his girlfriend, and that he’s begging her to lay off one of his friends. Parton herself toes the line between dignity and desperation, while Mindy Smith fully empowers the narrator and writes off Jolene as a “woman who steals stuff.” (In her cover, Miley Cyrus pretty much just keeps bein’ Miley.)

Country music has a somewhat limited palate, and adultery is one its primary colors. “To say something fresh and literal is the hardest thing,” Hopper say. But if you have a mess of variables to slot into your tried-and true story structure, it gets a little easier.

The End Of The Affair?

If you have professional songwriters, it’s easier still. Sometime in between the Dolly Parton era and today, country music became according to Hopper, "extra pop." "All the people went to Nashville, and you had this real devotion to songcraft," he says. "Before He Cheats," from 2005, was sung by Carrie Underwood, but it was written by hitmakers Chris Tompkins and Josh Kear—an arrangement that might have itself been considered cheating in the more authentically-minded midcentury, but has since become the norm. In the song, Underwood details the many horrific things her partner is probably doing while at a bar with someone who is not her—and then, in a rousing chorus, the equally horrific things she, Carrie, is doing to his car in the bar parking lot. 

Hopper says that "Before He Cheats" is a crackerjack country song, full of everything that makes the genre great—a clever structure; replay-ability; concrete details that trip off the tongue. But it also illustrates several ways in which the Nashville machine has placed new restrictions on the cheating song, which does not awaken "a commercially viable emotion for moms in minivans, who are the kind of cliche but still accurate target," Hopper says.

For one thing, it's Underwood's only one. "It's like the artists are collectors, and they want to have a representative collection of songs," Hopper explains. "Unless you're gonna be the Andy Warhol guy, you just want one Warhol on your wall. If you're [a country star], you probably do want a cheating song, but you don't want a bunch of cheating songs."

Carrie Underwood croons to Colorado Springs in 2006. (Photo: MrHairyKnuckles/Flickr)

For another, it fits into one of a narrowing list of acceptable perspectives. "Usually the women sing defiantly about being cheated on," Hopper says. "They have to be careful to not make themselves look like bad people." Men can barely sing about cheating at all anymore—"if they've been cheated on, they look weak, and if they're the predator, they look unlikeable," Hopper says.

"People say, 'Oh, the therapist who is having the baby of the guy she was counseling for drinking, that sounds like a country song,'" Hopper says. "But it actually sounds like an old country song." After a century of hanging around willow trees, honky-tonks, tear-stained floors, and bank lobbies, Nashville just isn't as willing to go there anymore. 

What are they hiding? (Photo: William Hueberger/Lisa Homa)

Everyone needs a little help to look their freshest. Celebrities have makeup artists, Instagrammers have filters, and food has food stylists: professionals who make their living making the comestibles that populate our magazine spreads, billboards, and cookbooks appear as tasty as possible. Food stylists work their magic with discerning eyes, quick hands, and, often, culinary degrees—but, as with any trade, they also have a few tricks. 

All of the food stylists I spoke to were quick to point out that, in the scheme of things, contemporary food photography includes very little fakery, and almost nothing inedible. The days of flash-roasting a turkey and painting the outside golden-brown to hide wrinkles are over, according to New York-based stylist Lisa Homa, who says clients have preferred “a very natural approach” for the past 10 years.

Seasonal veggies, reveling in their unadorned splendor. (Photo: William Heuberger/Lisa Homa) 

As a result, the most crucial part of most shoots is the shopping.

“I tell my students all the time, 'I hope you liked going on scavenger hunts as a kid,'” says TV food stylist Louise Leonard, who teaches at the International Culinary Center. “I spend the majority of my time running around to every supermarket, farmer’s market, specialty store, butcher shop, bakery, florist, [and] prop house, schlepping groceries all over the place, calling to source weird ingredients that aren’t in season, and so forth.”

Peeled eyes are crucial for the success of the shoot: “I’ll look for certain colors in apples, or I’ll pick a pear because it’s got a beautiful coloring or a beautiful shape,” says Homa. “And that’s what makes the shot.”

That’s all well and good for figs and radishes—but what about the meltier, goopier, more finicky foods? Some of those still can’t take the spotlight without a bunch of help. Here are a few comestibles that need an extra round of primping.

Herbs: Fresh to Death

Can't fool me, artfully sprinkled green stuff atop salmon atop soup. (Photo: Paul Brissman/Lisa Homa)

There’s nothing like some zesty green specks to lend a roast or stew that extra zing. But, as any indoor gardener knows, it’s difficult to keep just-cut herbs at their spriggy best. When Leonard needs hers to last, she herb-hacks by sticking the stems in water fortified with a splash of dish soap. (She also covers the leaves with wet paper towels and a plastic bag, and sets everything in a warm part of the fridge—"they will last for a few days" that way, she says.) While supertasters may not care if their cilantro is foamy, the rest of us probably wouldn’t go for it, which gives herbs a solid spot in the "fakers" category.

Drinks: Melty and Dull

That ice is real—you can tell by the white accents. But there's only one way to be sure... (Photo: Alyssa Kirsten/Lisa Homa)

Those refreshing-looking drinks making eyes at you throughout the summer, with their droplet-beaded glasses, gleaming ice cubes, and rakish garnishes? Better watch out: there’s a chance they’re carefully constructed illusions—oasis mirages in the Desert of the Real.

Although in many cases stylists will “try to do everything natural and real at first,” hot-sun holdups create a need for workarounds, like plastic ice, says Leonard. (The sparkle is added digitally post-shoot.)

And that “I’m frosty!” sweat is as artificial as a Gatorade model’s. “Mix corn syrup and water, and spritz it on a glass," says Homa. "It’ll bead up and look like condensation, and it won’t go anywhere. I’ve done that for all sorts of beer and cocktail shoots.” (This is not, of course, to say that the drinks they’re portraying should be avoided. Stay hydrated, everyone.)

Hero Products: Very Sidekick-Reliant

I can't believe it's not "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter." (Photo: Mark Laita/Lisa Homa)

The “hero product” is a variable category—it’s a catchall term for whatever is starring in a particular poster, billboard, or advertising spread. Because they’re the center of attention, most of these foodstuffs require some sort of extra oomph, whether it comes from a Photoshop brush or a ketchup syringe.

"The people that make the Big Macs for McDonalds are painstakingly sorting through buns, lettuce, sauce, meat, cheese, etcetera to find the perfect products to put together for a closeup of a Big Mac,” Leonard says. Homa remembers primping a butter substitute: “It had to have that perfect swirl on top of the tub,” she says, “so I had to take the stuff out, get it to a certain temperature, and then pipe it in just so.” Hero day is a big day—when else will your average spread get that kind of attention?

Ice Cream: The Diva of Foods

 Sometimes it's just nice to let the prima donna melt. (Photo: William Heuberger/Lisa Homa)

When it comes to photography, there is no food so finicky as ice cream. While shutterbugs in need of a quick “à la mode” can get by with clay wrapped around a styrofoam ball, ice cream-focused shoots require the real thing—which in turn requires a bank of fine-tuned freezers, buckets of dry ice, and a team of assistants led by styling professionals who sub-specialize in the frozen treat. 

"There are a couple of people who are known to do it—not many,” Homa explains. “But they can get the perfect scoop ready, put it on a card, put it in a freezer chest with dry ice, and keep it nice and hard. So they can get them ready and then bring them out when it’s time to shoot.” Afterwards, the star is either returned quickly to its frosty trailer, or devoured instantly.

Pizza: Lies, All Lies

In real life, herbs, drinks, burgers and ice cream at least vaguely look and act like their more image-conscious counterparts: your neighborhood Big Mac may not be quite so luscious as the one on TV, but it’ll still send weird sauce dripping down your chin.

Not so, alas, for pizza. A typical pizza commercial shows someone separating a slice from the pie, only to have the triangle remain attached, trailing succulent ribbons of cheese. Such imagery portrays as eminently achievable an act that can only be accomplished, in real life, by a series of elaborate, backwards-seeming tasks.

First, before the pizza is even constructed, Homa says, the naked crust is pre-sliced. Next, “the sauce is put down, and cheese is put across where the slice is coming out.” The slice is pre-pulled to create the gooey strands, she continues, “and final cheese is put on top. So when the slice is taken, it looks like they just cut it and pulled it out—but really, it was already detached.” Congratulations, pizza stylists. You had us all fooled.

As a professional football team, the Phoenix-based Arizona Rattlers fields a very talented group of cheerleaders...and one extra-talented football player: 

Okay, okay, just because he is wearing a football uniform doesn't mean he is a football player. This fabulous faker is Oscar Hernandez, a professional choreographer who has worked with, among others, the Phoenix Suns Dance Team, the Denver Nuggets Dancers and the Golden State Warrior Girls. He's pulled this stunt before, too. 

But—credit where credit is due!—there's nothing fake about those splits. 

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Since this is Cheat Week at Atlas Obscura, those finds will all be fake. Got a favorite hoax? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

An 'Astral Projection Time Travel Machine Helmet Psychotronic Technology', for $129.95. (Photo: Ebay)

The urge to travel through time is irresistible. It is, in fact, timeless: H.G. Wells' The Time Machine came out in 1895 and that was not the first literary work to raise the possibility of moving backwards in time (think: Orpheus.) But time travel did take on a new spin in the Victorian era, when scientific advancement and urbanization made it seem like anything was possible. 

People have not stopped tinkering with time. And now, thanks to the magic of the internet, you can buy a time machine...on eBay. Here are five current examples of homemade time portals. Cheating time would be the ultimate discovery, so please let us know if any of these actually work.

1. The Gold Box 

A 'magical time travel device' for $199. (Photo: Ebay)

What is it? Unclear. The description online says: "This time machine is made of a special material (secret). It has to be custom made and blessed." Seems to be a box wrapped in gold wrapping paper.

How does it work? Again, the description is vague. Inspired (or made?) by the author of Mastering Time Travel: Voyages Through Time (it retails for $200 on Amazon with the author's signature), this is a pagan/Wiccan time device. Blessings are involved. Belief is key; the eBay listing says that you shouldn't even bid if you don't believe it would work. There is a helpful FAQ about what you can do once you travel in time (check in with past lives, know the results to sporting events). "You can use this machine to view documents in another dimension, it could also function similar like the Palm Pilot on earth (sic)," the listing concludes.

Can you buy it? Yes, on both eBay and Amazon! Retails for $199. 

2. The Astral Projector

An 'Astral Projection Time Travel Machine Psychotronic Technology', for $29.95. (Photo: Ebay)

What is it? It seems to be some kind of copper-looking ring. 

How does it work? Technically not time travel as much as astral projection, this eBay seller promises that if you put this device under your pillow at night, you will be able to "project yourself anywhere in the universe at any point in time." (There is an hour-long YouTube video about astral projection embedded on the listing but it appears to be unrelated to this device.) It is, however, related to the orange helmet pictured above, a whole other way to astral project yourself to another dimension.

Can you buy it? Yes. On the cheaper side; $29.95. (The helmet runs to $199.)

3. The Robot Army

A Patent Application for 'Practical Time Machine using Dynamic Efficient Virtual and Real Robots'. (Photo: Google Patents US20090234788 A1)

What is it? This is not so much a completed time machine as a patent application for one filed in 2009. 

How does it work?  Unlike the previous time machines, this device does not lack for documentation. There are 39 pages of diagrams alone. The basic gist seemed to be that we can make robots build us a timeline of everything that has happened on Earth, and then a person can use that complete timeline, down to the nanoseconds, as a guide to go back. You can just a time on the timeline to visit and "atom manipulators" will assist you on your travels. Note that this time machine also requires 9 different inventions to work. 

Can you buy it? Sadly, no. There is no sign that it has been built.

4. Stargate Model

Or you could build your own Stargate. (Photo: Cole Vassiliou/flickr)

What is it? A painted wooden circle that you can walk through.

How does it work? Well, not technically time travel so much as interplanetary travel. But the space/time continuum is disrupted. From the 1994 film by Roland Emmerlich comes the Stargate portal. The basic gist is that this is a metal ring that has a complement on another planet, so you can step through and be somewhere else. 

Can you buy it? No, but you you can probably make it.

5. The Public Transport Time Machine

Or just get creative. (Photo: Robin Corps/flickr)

 

What is it? Elevator doors in a car park in England.

 

How does it work? Get in the elevator, go to another time period, mechanics unknown. 

 

Can you buy it? No. But you can visit. It's in Wokingham, England.

One of the tunnels from Project Riese. (Photo: Chmee2/Wikipedia)

This week, a pair of amateur treasure hunters claimed to have discovered a lost train packed with ill-gotten Nazi gold near the Polish city of Walbrzych.

But like all good potential scam artists, they are demanding to be paid before they reveal the location.

Their claim seems to be based on the legend of a loot-stuffed locomotive that was trying to escape Poland at the end of the war, as forces from the Soviet Union began pushing out the Nazis. As CNBC tells it, this mythical train was said to have left from the city of Wroclaw (then Breslau) in 1945 before getting trapped in a secret Nazi rail tunnel somewhere near Ksiaz Castle.

The Guardian is reporting that the pair claim to have used “ground-penetrating georadar technology” to locate the train, a nearly 500-foot long jackpot of Nazi riches worth well over a million dollars, including gold, gems, weaponry, and equipment. Now all they want, in order to reveal the location of the find is a promise to 10 percent of the value of the goods.

Not Nazi gold. (Photo: Agnico-Eagle/Wikipedia)

However questionable the find might be, it is not entirely without merit. While the area around Walbrzych was under German control, the Nazis began construction of a series of mysterious tunnels under the name, Project Riese (German for “Giant”). The Nazis fled the area before the project was finished, and the true purpose of the tunnels is still a mystery, but an undiscovered section of these tunnels could most certainly hold a hidden train car.

Only time will tell whether the two mystery men (who are insisting on remaining anonymous, contacting authorities via a third-party) really struck hidden gold, but their motives seem more than a little suspect. In the meantime, local police, firefighters, and military are convening to discuss how to proceed safely. Even if it turns out that the gold is real, to paraphrase, it belongs in a museum.     

(Photo: Artem Samokhvalov/shutterstock.com)

You're walking around the city with a group of friends. It's 7 p.m., and you all have a similar urge to fill your stomachs with fish tacos and strong margaritas. 

How do you decide which restaurant in which to park your derrieres and spend your hard-earned cash for a couple hours? Search reviews on Yelp or Google Reviews, of course.

In 2015, word-of-mouth reviews have gone viral. We're more likely to trust a complete stranger's favorable or unfavorable recommendation for restaurants, stores, products, and even dental hygienists, than our own instincts. If 100 random people review a meal, and it still has four stars, surely it's bound to be pretty decent. 

Or is it?

Online reviews are a serious driver of business. According to Bloomberg, favorable Yelp reviews can directly lead to a five to nine percent increase in revenue. More than that, over 90 percent of survey respondents in a Dimensional Research study indicated that their purchasing decisions were influenced by positive reviews. A 2012 Cornell University study found that, after a one-star increase in a hotel's overall review score, that hotel could raise its room rate by 11 percent and wouldn't scare away any new customers. 

And online reviews are a serious business unto themselves. Yelp, probably the best known of the online review aggregators, has a market cap of $1.82 billion. Trip Advisor, the preferred travel agency for denizens of the internet, has a market cap of $10.91 billion. 

So it's certainly not chump change. But just how trustworthy are random strangers on the internet?

Surprise, surprise: not very. According to a 2013 study from the Harvard Business School (pdf), up to 16 percent of the Yelp reviews in the Boston area are fake. Totally, completely, fake.

Apart from getting into the ethics of posting fake reviews, the study indicates that the practice is motivated by simple economics. The fake reviews tend toward the extreme–that is, they are always either one-star (exceptionally negative), or five-star (exceptionally positive) reviews. It's in a business's best interest to post negative reviews about its competitors and to boost its own review averages through a slew of positive reviews.

With the help of an army of third-party assistants, everyone's doing it.

An advertisement for Silverman Slim's, an online "review dealer."

In the heady days of the mid-2000s internet, online "reputation management" or "search engine optimization (SEO)" firms were a big deal. In a process dubbed "astroturfing," these firms paid armies of freelancers around the world to post positive reviews for their clients. And they did this with reckless abandon. 

An anonymous former employee at Main Street Host, a self-titled "digital marketing agency," told the Huffington Post: "five or six years ago you could have just sat there and posted everything from the same computer. Nothing mattered."

But this was all headed for collapse. Though Yelp has measures in place to detect and remove fake reviews, the onslaught was too much for the company to handle.

Between 2012 and 2013, New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, launched an investigation into the practices of these so-called "reputation management" firms. In order to lure fake reviewers, investigators participating in "Operation Clean Turf" posed as the owners of a fictitious Brooklyn yogurt shop. They solicited proposals from a number of SEO firms, some of whom who offered to write fake reviews for the fake yogurt shop, and game Yelp's review system to highlight the positive reviews. 

Schneiderman's report uncovered a much more sophisticated network of fake reviews than they anticipated. Some of the firms employed complex IP-spoofing techniques. Freelance writers–from as far afield as Russia and the Philippines–were encouraged to "write in the mindset of the consumer," and constantly switch computers and locations to avoid detection by Yelp's fraud-targeting system. 

Worst of all, the freelancers were supposed to have been paid between $1 and $10 for each review they posted, while the SEO firms were to take a huge cut. And the companies wanted a lot for these meager payments: SEO company Webtools (which was caught in the sting operation along with the aforementioned Main Street Host), even gave its fake reviewers style tips, telling the "content creators" not to use too many superlatives, and to make each review sound unique.

Following the sting operation, 19 companies offered to settle with the Attorney General's office out of court, setting a precedent that fake reviews would not be tolerated in New York. 

 
Fake reviews for a New York area orthodontist had been removed for violating Yelp's terms of service. (Screenshot: Jeremy Berke)

But where there's a will, there's a way. If people were still out there writing fake reviews, I wanted to see how it worked for myself. Combing through the Attorney General's report, I found a few sketchy "reputation management" firms that had not been caught in the sting operation.

I graciously offered them my skills to write fake reviews, and one company, the not-shady-at-all sounding Silverman Slim's, actually got back to me. But getting paid to do the work was more difficult than I anticipated.

A representative explained via email that once Silverman Slim's got "sales" for reviews in my area, they would kick me the link. Once I completed each review, I would get compensated through PayPal.

After expressing my enthusiasm for review assignments in both Brooklyn and Toronto—places I legitimately frequent—I didn't hear back for a few days. I sent an email asking for an update. They responded by asking me to share their information with local businesses, negotiate a deal myself, and write the review. And after all that, they'd still take a cut of the profit.

It didn't seem to add up.

Whatever the case with this particular firm, fake reviews are not going away anytime soon. In 2012, tech-market research firm Gartner estimated that, by 2014, up to 10-15 percent of social media reviews would be fake. It's a brave new world, and we're already living in it. 

Nix Hospital Elevator Lobby in San Antonio. (Photo: DieselDucy/flickr)

Andrew Reams was just a toddler when he went on the elevator ride that launched a lifelong passion.

He was shopping with his mother in the early eighties at the Famous Barr & Co. department store St. Louis, Missouri, a grand building that has since been shuttered. He had never really seen an elevator before she brought him to the one that would transport them through the shopping center. She picked him and instructed him to push a button, which caused the door to open like a “magic wall” according to Reams.

“Ever since then I’ve always loved elevators,” he says. 

Reams has been researching elevators his “entire life” and particularly loves historic ones—he says an antique elevator is anything that has operated since before the 1950s and a vintage elevator hails from before 1980. He loves the detail; the glass roofs, ornate iron castings, art deco styling and other embellishments. Being in an old elevator creates an immediate connection to the past, and Reams likes to think about all of the people who have ridden in a car before him. For years Reams made trips to visit historic elevators, often around his home of Roanoke, Virginia, and throughout the United States.

Andrew Reams in the elevator at 1600 Anderson Road, McLean, VA. (Photo: DieselDucy/flickr)

Eventually he started taking videos of his trips on a camcorder, and in 2006 he uploaded his first YouTube videos. He says he just let them “sit” and didn’t think about it much. After all, how many people were going to be excited about an elevator ride? Lots, it turned out. His video racked up thousands of views. Commenters begged him to take more.

“I was like, ‘Who’s watching this crap?,” says Reams. “I thought I was the only one that was obsessed with elevators.”

He wasn’t.

Reams’ uses the online handle “DieselDucy” and posts to his YouTube channel routinely rack up tens of thousands of views. A video of an elevator at the Kansas City Marriott from two years ago has 80,189 views. Recent videos include a ride on an elevator at One World Trade Center, a pair of vintage elevators in Columbia, South Carolina, and a freight elevator in Austin, Texas. Reams estimates that he’s shot well over 3,000 elevators. He has made connections with elevator companies, and some of them have provided him with special tours, or donated items to a small elevator museum that he runs out of his home.

And he has tapped into a small but dedicated network of enthusiasts that he didn’t even realize existed before posting his inaugural video.

The call station at the Smithsonian Castle elevator. (Photo: DieselDucy/flickr)

A quick perusal of the “related channels” bucket on Reams page reveals ElevExplorings by JimLiElevators, Elevators from Sweden!, and TJElevatorfan, just to name a few. There are elevator fans in Indonesia, Scotland, and Russia.  It’s easy to fall down a rabbit hole (or elevator shaft) of similar feeds from around the world. Reams has made good friends through his hobby, including Jacob Batcha, who runs the The Elevator Channel, which has over 8,000 subscribers. The two often pop up in each others videos.

Reams gets comments on just about every video. “I rode a Series 1 at a hospital and it’s so fast, I got ill,” wrote one fan. “Still was fun!” Others love to evaluate and critique the elevators: “Very cool buttons!” Some make requests, such as the elevator enthusiast who chimed in to ask if Reams could film a ThyssenKrupps elevator “with the grocery store beep and the buzz”. But often fans simply express unbridled enthusiasm: “HOLY CRAP!! :-D Awwesomee!! :-)”.

A Schindler 3300 indicator 2 in Washington DC. (Photo: DieselDucy/flickr)

An old Salem elevator machine. (Photo: DieselDucy/flickr)

Reams make appearances in his videos (often sporting a baseball cap), but his calm, twangy voice is the star. He narrates all the action from behind the camera, often issuing forth a string of descriptions and phrases that make perfect sense to his fans. “All right, we’re gonna get to watch this thing in action,” he says in a typical video as his hand comes into frame to prop a door open. “Just an old bottom-drive, Otis traction!” Seconds before he had filmed his ride in an elevator with orange paneling and decorative mirrors, but now he is making his way into the “machine room”, the place where the equipment that makes the elevator run lives. Reams calls his videos “elevaTOURS” because he is a bit of a completest—he likes to shoot the exterior of the building, the machine rooms and even makes guest stars out of building employees. Sometimes Reams has to get creative to gain access to places that aren’t available to the general public.

Andrew's video of the elevator at the Kansas City Marriott hotel has over 80,000 views. 

“Sometimes it’s better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission,” says Reams. Although now that he’s becoming well known by people within the elevator industry, he has worked those connections to get easier access. Still, run-ins happen. Once, when documenting elevators in Kansas City, a security guard stopped him and demanded to know why he was traveling all over the building, snapping pictures and taking video. It seemed suspicious, he said. Reams explained his mission and after initial bewilderment (“Let me get this straight, you just came in here to look at elevators?”) the guard told him there was something he should see. It was a service elevator from 1913.

“It’s one of those old ones where you use the lever to make it go up and down, and that was really cool,” says Reams, who names the ride as one of his favorites.

The controller on old Sears elevator in San Antonio. (Photo: DieselDucy/flickr)

In addition to the machinery, history, and design, Reams says autism is a big reason he’s obsessed with elevators. Reams has Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism, and says that a fixation on things is common in people diagnosed with the condition. Reams also enjoys having complete control over a multi-sensory environment—a ride in an elevator provides visual flourishes, but can also include the whirr of an old-fashioned motor or the scent of gear oil—and surmises that others with autism like it for the same reason.

Doors open on the service elevator at the Smithsonian. (Photo: DieselDucy/flickr)

Elevator buttons in an old Otis car station.(Photo: DieselDucy/flickr)

“The whole purpose of elevaTOURS is an outreach to fellow people with autism and all elevator enthusiasts,” reads the introductory text on Reams’ site. Reams has used his channel to connect with people with autism, and families with autistic children often reach out to him. 

Reams dreams of journeying to international destinations—old cities full of old elevators and countries where different regulatory standards mean different kinds of elevator design.

But for now he is content to continue documenting the elevators of the United States, sometimes making very long trips to take very short trips at increments of several hundred feet per minute. 

One of Bidder's bottles (Photo: Marine Biological Association of the U.K/Facebook)

A few months back, Marianne Winkler and her husband, Horst, were taking a vacation on Amrum, a German island in the North Sea, just south of the border with Denmark. She was walking along the beach one day, when she found an old bottle. Inside, there was a note with instructions: Break the bottle.

Marianne tried to retrieve the bottle's contents without breaking it, but it was impossible. So, she and her husband broke the bottle, the Telegraph reports. Inside, they found another piece of paper—a postcard with instructions to send it back to the Marine Biological Association of the U.K. So they did.

Starting in 1904, 111 years ago, George Parker Bidder, marine biologist interested in geology, erosion and sponges, released 1020 of bottles just like the one Winkler found into the sea. His aim was to better understand how the deep currents of the sea worked: the bottles were designed so that they'd bob along close to the sea floor. 

Most of them were found in the months after their release, by fisherman trawling deep in the water. And with the evidence he collected, Bidder was able to show these deep ocean currents moved from east to west.

The Marine Biological Association of the U.K. believes that the bottle Winkler found was released in the latter part of the experiment, in 1906. That would make it 108 years old—and, most likely, the oldest message in a bottle ever to be recovered. The final determination is now being put in the hands of Guinness World Records.

The association also made good on Bidder's promise of a reward to anyone who found the bottle and returned the postcard—one shilling. 

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. 

Geological detail from the Byrgius Quadrangle of the moon. (Image: U.S. Geological Survey)

In the 1960s and '70s, the U.S. Geological Survey created a Geologic Atlas of the Moon. The series of maps, best viewed while listening to Jefferson Airplane, depicts earth's only natural satellite in a particularly psychedelic manner, using a full spectrum of colors to show the age and type of rock that makes up the moon's surface.  

The maps were created using a combination of telescopic observations, images captured by lunar orbiters and rangers, and rock samples collected during Apollo missions. They depict the three main topographical features of the moon: craters, highlands, and maria, which are large basaltic plains that formed after volcanic eruptions.

The age of these formations is measured according to the moon's own geologic time scale, established by astrogeologist Gene Shoemaker. It differs from the geologic time scale of Earth, because it corresponds to impact events that have modified the lunar surface. 

Named after Tycho Brahe, the Tycho impact crater is 108 million years old. Approximately. (Image: U.S. Geological Survey)

The five periods of the moon's time scale—Copernican, Eratosthenian, Imbrian, Nectarian, and Pre-Nectarian—are also lettered and color-coded on the geologic maps. (Trivia: the study of the surface and physical features of the moon is known as selenography, named after the Green lunar goddess Selene.)

Below are some of the more vivid maps from the geologic atlas. Once you've marveled over the trippy color combos, visit the U.S. Geological Survey moon atlas site for a comprehensive breakdown of what it all means in topographical terms. 

They do things colorfully down south. (Image: U.S. Geological Survey)

At the top left is the Grimaldi crater, which is 108 miles in diameter. At top right is the Ocean of Storms, a lunar mare. (Image: U.S. Geological Survey)

The far (out) side of the moon. (Image: U.S. Geological Survey)

If Plato could see this, he'd be like, "Whoa." (Image: U.S. Geological Survey) 

A map depicting Byrgius, a crater on the western side of the moon. (Photo: U.S. Geological Survey) 

An artist's rendering of Captain Webb accepting libations during the long swim. (Image: CS&PF/Public Domain)

It's a hot August day, and you, like many, may choose to beat the heat with a few bracing laps in your local water feature. If you show up at the pool or pond to find the lanes crowded and the shallows swamped, you have only one man to blame—Captain Matthew Webb.

The 19th-century swimming sensation loved water so much it eventually killed him. But first, 140 years ago today, he swam the English Channel, catapulting himself into fame and his favorite sport into respectability. 

Webb was born in January of 1848, in Shropshire, England. When he was six years old, his parents moved their growing family to Coalbrooksdale, a mining town nestled in the the valley of the River Severn, the longest in the UK. Young Webb spent his days testing himself against the river, swimming across one way and crossing back via the precarious Buildwas Rail Bridge, watching the water rush beneath the struts. Stuck inside during the long British winters, he slaked his thirst for adventure by reading seafaring tales—like W.H.G. Kingston's Old Jack, in which the titular sailor tells of "Naval Exploits," "Pirate Strongholds," and swimmers so good they fight off sea monsters with their bare hands.

By age 12, Webb had enlisted as a merchant seaman and was aboard the HMS Conway, a naval training ship. He then spent the next decade-and-a-half hopping between cargo ships, trading vessels, and passenger cruisers, and served a brief stint as captain of the steamship Emerald, where he had trouble holding onto his crew due to what The History Channel calls his "well-deserved reputation for recklessness." 

The HMS Conway, swarming with reckless boys. (Photo: Flapdragon/WikiCommons Public Domain)

He also had a tendency to jump overboard and rescue people whenever he had a chance—a habit he picked up after saving a fellow classmate who fell off the Conway, and honed while home on break by pulling his younger brother out of the river. One particularly daring but unsuccessful rescue attempt garnered him the first ever Stanhope Gold Medal for gallantry, still the Royal Humane Society's most prestigious award.

As evidenced by this hobby, Webb didn't really want to be on the water: he wanted to be in it. In the 19th century, there weren't very many opportunities for aspiring professional swimmers—the Plague Years had kept germ-fearing Europeans out of the water, and the sport had a few centuries of suspicion to make up for. Rather than racing other pros or teaching amateurs, Webb slowly made his hobby more lucrative by marketing himself as an attraction. He invented showy scenarios and rose to self-imposed challenges, some serious and some silly, and he always took home a purse when others bet against him—in the same year, he wagered that he could swim 20 miles from Blackwell Pier to Gravesend faster than anyone had before, and also that he could stay in the water "longer than a Newfoundland dog." He beat the record in four hours and 45 minutes, and the dog in about an hour and a half.

An illustration of Webb, decked out in medals. (Image: Illustrated London News/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

After dabbling in this for a couple of years, Webb was on the lookout for a massive stunt, the kind that could transform him from a well-decorated journeyman into an international superstar. It fell into his lap thanks to one of his equally fanatical peers. J.B. Johnson tried to swim the English Channel unaided in 1872, for unrecorded reasons—likely just because it was there. Little is known about Johnson except that he failed, and was pulled out of the water after about an hour. Webb knew he could do better, and, his goal set, Webb quit his captaincy in 1873 and threw himself into the sea full-time. 

He trained in the Lambeth baths, and then the Thames, swimming miles every day. He paid equal attention to the showman's end of things, and hired a coach, Fred Beckwith, a "professor of swimming" better known for orchestrating stunts and managing bets than for his actual skills in the water. Together they spread his name and intentions all over town: a poem by Sir John Betjeman, written after Webb's death, describes his ghost "swimming along the old canal/ That carried the bricks to Lawley" and arriving "dripping along in a bathing dress/ To the Saturday evening meeting," which seems, if not completely factually accurate, close to the truth in spirit.

A portrait of Webb in his element. (Photo: CS&PF/Public Domain)

In April of 1875, American showman Paul "The Fearless Frogman" Boyton hurried things along by successfully crossing the Channel wearing an inflatable rubber "immersion suit." Powered by a small canvas sail and fueled by scrambled eggs and brandy, Boyton's crossing wasn't nearly as physically impressive as an unaided one would be—but he did capture a lot of headlines, and Webb's ire. A few months later, Webb was prepared to take the plunge. 

His first attempt, on August 12th, was derailed by strong currents and bad weather. Twelve days later, on the 24th, he was ready to try again. He covered himself in porpoise oil, put on his red silk swimsuit, and leapt off Dover Pier around 1 pm. His new coach, Arthur Payne, had written the press announcing his athlete's intentions (along with a "paltry bet of 20 pounds to one," which he invited interesting parties to match), and the 3 boats that trailed Webb as he made his way into the Channel carried Payne, a small support staff, a few journalists, and an illustrator. 

Webb swam steadily through the afternoon and into the evening. Other than some stops for coffee and beef tea from his support team, and the occasional run-in with a porpoise or jellyfish, he stopped hardly at all. Like most Europeans at the time, Webb swam breaststroke—freestyle, though faster, was considered "violent and grotesque"—and those who watched him described a large, mustached man stroking high in the water, with "slow and steady arm strokes," the soles of his feet emerging after each kick. Payne occasionally jumped in to join him.

When the sun set, the water was illuminated by a three-quarter moon from above and phosphorescence from below, and when it rose again, the sea was "calm as glass." That morning, Webb flagged for a little bit in the currents close to shore, but a nearby mailboat sang "Rule Britannia" for him, and by 10:41 a.m. he was through them, and stumbling onto the beach at Calais. "I felt a gulping sensation in my throat as the old tune, which I had heard in all parts of the world, once more struck my ears under circumstances so extra-ordinary," he later wrote in his diary. "I felt now I should do it, and I did it."

The Strait of Dover today. (Photo: NASA/Public Domain)

He was slightly delirious, and the sailors who helped him stagger up the beach said he felt like a "lump of cold tallow." They put him in a carriage and sent him to the Paris Hotel to sleep. He had been swimming for 21 hours and 45 minutes.

He was famous virtually by the time he woke up—“the successful accomplishment of such a feat gave Webb a pre-eminence among all swimmers of whom there is any record,” biographers wrote decades later. The London Stock Exchange set up a fund for him and raised 2,424 pounds, just over $300,000 in modern dollars. His hometown threw such a big parade for him that, legend has it, a pig propped himself up against a wall to watch the procession, leaning on his front trotters and wondering what all the fuss was about. Swimming also surged into the public consciousness. Just as Webb had wanted to grow up to be Old Jack, every kid wanted to be Captain Webb. The British government began building municipal pools to keep up with the demand. 

A box of Captn Webb matches. (Image: CS&PF/Public Domain)

Webb capitalized on his fame, traveling overseas to give lecture tours and elongating his string of stunts. He swam from Sandy Hook to Manhattan Beach in 8 hours. He beat Fearless Frogman Boyton in a race off Nantasket Beach, and once "won a thousand pounds for floating in a tank of water at a Boston Horticultural Show for 128 hours.” He drew crowds rain or shine, and his face graced matchboxes all over Britain. Everyone wanted to see the mustached man who could swim forever, even if it was just while they were lighting a cigarette. 

But the crossing was the peak of his fame—no tank exhibition or Stateside grudge match could top it. In July 1883, nearly eight years after he first dived into the Channel, Webb tried to outdo himself. Seeking, in the words of his friend Robert Watson, "money and imperishable fame," he set up an exhibition swim through the rapids beneath Niagara Falls, an incredibly dangerous gauntlet of rock-filled whirlpools that had already killed a number of hapless people. Though spectators, as always, poured out to watch, the train and hotel companies refused to cut a deal with Webb, wanting nothing to do with what they saw as a suicide mission.

This caricature of Webb, by Carlo Pelligrini ran in Vanity Fair after he swam the Channel. Legend has it the character of Inspector Clouseau was based on Webb. (Image: WikiCommons/Public Domain)

Webb was piloted into the middle of the rapids, and leapt from the prow of the boat in the same red silk costume he had worn to swim the Channel. Within 10 minutes he was sucked under, and his body was found four days later, his swimsuit "torn to shreds." He was 35.

To this day, some hold that Webb was secretly broke, sick, and unhappy, and that he had meant to either turn things around that day or go down trying. Others are sure he thought he could do it, just as he had done everything else. Fred Kyle, Webb's business manager, told the New York Times that Webb "had everything to live for." When any one advised him about the water, Kyle said, "he would invariably say good-naturedly," 'he thinks he knows a lot about the water, doesn't he?'" Webb was fearless, and occasionally reckless, but he sure knew a lot about the water. And thanks to him, now the rest of us do, too.

A windshield's-eye view in Longview, Alberta this weekend. (Photo: National Weather Service Grand Forks/Weather Channel)

While much of the world swelters through one of the hottest summers on record, residents of the Rockies are pulling on boots and gloves. This past weekend, mountain towns in Montana and Alberta, Canada were blanketed with that rare August treasure: a few inches of snow. 

SNOWING IN ALBERTA...IN THE SUMMER? MOTHER NATURE STRIKES BACK AT TAR SANDS LOVING ALBERTA! #SNOW#AUG#MOTHERNATUREpic.twitter.com/u2zu3u6xls

— blood.tribe.election (@bloodtribeelect) August 22, 2015

Some towns were issued frost warnings. Experts predict the snow won't last long, as a warm front is scheduled to blast through the mountains later this week.

Summer snow isn't super rare—mountaintops stay fairly cold, and this year they've harbored the white stuff in Wyoming, Colorado, and even Hawaii. It also isn't always flags and shirtlessness, and Calgary got a storm last year that toppled hundreds of trees and knocked out power for days. The current dusting seems mostly harmless, and snowed-on residents should feel free to ship some down to more equatorial places whenever they wish.  

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.

Sonchus oleraceus (Photo: Sten Porse/Wikimedia)

In human history, certain societies have made it their business to try to take over the world. In plant history, there are species with the same instinct.

Faced with a field of green, most people would have a hard time picking out the aggressors: leafy plants with flowers don't look like much to our species, which, by instinct, is more concerned with bared teeth and sharp claws than fast-growing shoots and stubborn roots. But while people have been busy spreading to the ends of the earth, these plants have been on the same mission, often assisted by unwitting human allies.

For the first time, we have a comprehensive dossier on their activities.

Last week, an international group of scientists reported in Nature on the creation of a database of "naturalized plants"—species that have taken root outside their native habitat and maintained communities there without the help of humans. These are the colonists and invaders of the plant worlds, the tribes that strike out for distant lands in search of more or better resources. They make up 4 percent of all known plant species, and the most widespread species has established a presence in almost half of the land-based regions on this planet.

Not all alien plants are problems, but some do more than just establish a foothold: they take over and transform whole ecosystems. "That there are regions that have more aliens than native species—this is rather worrying," says Marten Winter, the scientific coordinator of the Synthesis Centre at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research and a co-author of the Nature paper. The most aggressive invaders can choke rivers, fuel forest fires, push out native species, and cost hundreds of millions of dollars to control. 

Sonchus oleraceus (Photo: Rob Hille/Wikimedia)

Common sowthistle, Sonchus oleraceus, is one of the most successful plants out there. It's found in 393 of the 843 regions listed in the scientists' Global Naturalized Alien Flora database—in more regions of the world than any other plant studied. (The database tracks how many countries, provinces or islands a plant is known to have colonized, not the total area of its spread.) The castor oil plant, Ricinus communis, is close behind, in 366 regions. Indian goosegrass, Eleusine indica, has found footholds in 302 different places.

These plants have used different strategies to further their expansionism. Common sowthistle, a dandelion with bright yellow flowers, is enjoyed by cows and can be eaten by humans; usually, it's made its big moves when its seeds have mixed in with seed crops. The castor oil plant allied more directly with humans, as it produces the medicinal castor oil so loathed by characters of British children's books and also looks quite nice in gardens. Indian goosegrass is the sort of thin, seedy plants whose long strips of pods catch in animal fur or hide in the soil on trips across oceans.

The castor oil plant (Photo: Llez/Wikimedia)

Sometimes people don't even notice these plants are on the move. People often move deliberately, to build a botanical garden for research, for instance, or an ornamental garden for simple pleasure. But these plants hop the fence, head out into the big wide world, and start a new life, thanks to us.

"Invasions are one of the main ecological process by which humans change nature," says Winter.

But even if these plants travel with us, their quiet infiltration to spots all over the world has been difficult for humans to track. In some places, the records existed but were kept in private stores of data. In some places, the ground work hadn't been done at all. The database that Winter and his colleagues built covers 83 percent of the world's land area and is the most thorough look at plant invasions ever done.

"The challenge was to find out what sources are there, which might have the information and then to get our hands on it," Winter says. "Emails had to be written in many languages. There are huge areas that very often in biogeography are white"—lacking in data. Chunks of Russia, for instance, are commonly blank. Part of the problem is that the data might not have been collected, but sometimes the data is missing simply because the researchers compiling it don't speak the necessary language or don't have good contacts in a region, Winter says.

Then there was the huge effort of standardizing data. "The name matching—the synonymy—is a huge, huge task," he says. "Researchers might have a different view of how to name something." One person's common sowthistle might be another's milky tassle, and even scientific names can change, over time.

Indian goosegrass (Photo: Matt Lavin/Flickr)

In the new paper, the scientists looked at the movement of plants from one continent to another and found that most naturalized plants were native to the Northern Hemisphere—it was more common for plants to move south than vice-versa. More specifically, they also found that more naturalized plants originated in temperate Asia or in Europe than on other continents.

One explanation for this trend comes from the history of human settlement. As Europeans sailed around the world in the era of exploration, they brought seeds with them, both purposefully and accidentally. But the connections between plant movement and human movement go back before the era of European colonization. Some of those migrants from temperate Asia grew in regions that look a lot like our first agriculture fields, and expanded across Europe as human cropland did. "We call them archaeophytes," Winter says,  "They arrived in Europe even before Columbus sailed to your country. "

And, like their human companions, they stayed, a conquering force—sometimes learning to live with other species they found there, sometimes wiping them out and taking their place. These plants might not look like much to us, but the ones below have managed to take over more of the world than any other of their kind. The cost can be very high; the U.S. spends $100 million per year on controlling aquatic plants. Just aquatic plants.

They're not necessarily damaging the ecosystems they've colonized—mostly, we just think of them as weeds in our lawns, gardens and fields. They follow us wherever we go, because, in the end, however dramatic their takeover, they wouldn't have been able to do it without us.

Chenopodium album (lamb's quarters) Photo: (Julio Reis/Wikimedia)

Capsella bursa-pastoris (shepherd's-purse) Photo: (Kristian Peters/Wikimedia)

 Stellaria media (chickweed) (Photo: Kaldari/Wikimedia)

Echinochloa crus-galli (cockspur grass) (Photo: Michael Becker/Wikimedia) 

 Datura stramonium (Jimson weed) (Photo: Pancrat/Wikimedia)

Oxalis corniculata (creeping woodsorrel) (Photo: Bouba/Wikimedia) 

 Poa annua (annual bluegrass) (Photo: James K. Lindsey/Wikimedia)

Photo: Thomas Guest/Wikimedia

Ah, the lonely life of the lighthouse keeper. In the heyday of sailing, long before automated beacons steered ships away from treacherous shores, brave men and women were asked to take up a secluded life devoted to watching the seas from their, often remote, outposts.

Those days are mainly gone, although many of the lighthouses still remain. Without even a human presence to give them a sense of life, many of the world's forgotten lighthouses are now just lonesome relics. Despite how bleak they can seem, these lighthouses manage to have a haunting beauty all their own, that makes the life of an old lighthouse keeper seem strangely romantic to this day. 

1. STROMBOLICCHIO LIGHTHOUSE
Stromboli, Italy

Photo: Giovani/ Wikipedia

Sitting atop a rocky volcanic crag in the Tyrrhenian Sea is the Strombolicchio Lighthouse. Built in 1905, the remote lighthouse sits atop the exposed chimney of a former volcano, an island unto itself. A part of the famed Aeolian islands, which the Greeks believed were the home to the god of the winds. Visitors can hike up to lighthouse itself, but be warned the trip is somewhat perilous. 

Photo: max77/Wikipedia\

Photo: George Keith on Flickr                        

2. WHITEFORD LIGHTHOUSE

Llanmadoc, Wales

Photo: David Dawson/Flickr

This old Welsh lighthouse is the last of its kind, but what a lovely survivor it is. Located off the coast of the Gower Peninsula, the cast-iron beacon was built back in 1865. It remained in service until 1920, when a newer lighthouse took over the Whiteford stations duties, but the metal tower stayed in place, abandoned and rusting. Today the Whiteford Lighthouse seems like a setting from the video game, Myst, but the only mystery in this lighthouse is why more people aren't amazed by it.

Photo: Thomas Guest/Flickr

Photo: Thomas Guest/Flickr

3. POINT SUR LIGHTSTATION
Big Sur, California

Photo: Carlos Xavier Hernández/Atlas Obscura

What is it about giant volcanic boulders that makes us want to build light houses on top of them? Here was have another example of a frozen bit of volcanic geology that is home to an incredibly remote station. Built in the late 1800s after a ship dashed itself against the rocks near Point Sur, the light station was hard to reach and kept the light house keepers who ran it, extremely isolated. That is until 1972 when the Coast Guard automated the light, and full-time keepers were no longer needed. Today it is the only complete turn-of-the-century lighthouse in California open to visitors.

Photo: Carlos Xavier Hernández/Atlas Obscura

Photo: NOAA's National Ocean Service/Flickr 

4. TURTLE ISLAND
Toledo, Michigan

Photo: Atlas Obscura

This fortress-like lighthouse on the Port of Toledo has been abandoned for over a hundred years, but still stands sentinel on its tiny island. The Turtle Island lighthouse was first built in the 1830s on a small spit of eroding land. By the 1880s the little lighthouse had been shored up into its current fortress-like state, and breakwaters were put in place to keep the erosion at bay. Unfortunately the lighthouse was abandoned a few years later in 1904, and has remained empty ever since. Today the island is privately owned and no plan for rehabilitation has stuck.     

Photo: Mushinzencat/Wikipedia

5. ST. GEORGE REEF LIGHTHOUSE
Crescent City, California

Photo: Anita Ritenour/Flickr

This 12-story lighthouse off the California coast was expensive to build, and even drove some workers mad, but it has saved countless lives by warning ships off from a treacherous patch of rocks. Finished in 1891, the lighthouse was built right into one the reef rocks. A number of workers lost their lives constructing it and life as a keeper of the property wasn't much safer—at least five keepers died on the job. It wasn't until 1975 that the lighthouse was finally taken out of service, replaced by a buoy. Friends of the deadly lighthouse have tried to save the site with funds generated by helicopter rides, but this too has been shut down, and the St. George Reef Lighthouse remains empty and deadly.

Photo: Anita Ritenour/Flickr

Photo: Anita Ritenour/Flickr 

6. ANO NUEVO ISLAND
Pescadero, California

Photo: Flickred!/Flickr

Technically the only thing that remains on this tiny island is the house, since the light itself collapsed long ago. However, the site is far from empty. Año Nuevo Island was at one point connected to the mainland, but rising sea levels buried the land bridge and created the island. Both a lighthouse and a mansion had been built on the property but fell into disrepair after they were abandoned by humans. However the island then became home to thousands of seals and sea lions that now use the island as a breeding ground. The lighthouse tower was torn down in 2000 as it was threatening to fall and injure the animals, but the keeper's house the mansion can still be seen on the site. 

Photo: www.bluewaikiki.com/Flickr

7. KLEIN CURACAO
Curacao

Photo: Luke J. Spencer/Atlas Obscura

The abandoned island of Klein Curaçao is not only home to an abandoned lighthouse, but to a number of the ships it failed to save. The little island is no longer inhabited save for a few fishermen's huts, but the remains of the lighthouse and wrecks of boats along its shores make it look more than a little haunted by tragedy. The island is also frequented by vacationers from nearby Curaçao who come for the diving, and wander about to experience the amazing ruins.

Photo: Luke J. Spencer/Atlas Obscura

Photo: Luke J. Spencer/Atlas Obscura

8. EARHART LIGHT
Howland Island

Photo: Joann94024/Wikipedia

Amelia Earhart was supposed to make a stop on Howland Island to refuel her airplane, but unfortunately, she would never make this scheduled stop. The beacon was created in 1937, but after Earhart's mysterious disappearance during that same flight that would have seen her stop on the island, interest in the spot dropped considerably and the light was extinguished, turning the abandoned tower into a daybeacon. Today the island is a wildlife refuge.

Photo: Joann94024/Wikipedia

Correction: This article previously noted the Strombolicchio Lighthouse as being in the Pacific Ocean. This has been updated to reflect its correct place in the Tyrrhenian Sea. 

The reef (Photo: Parks Victoria)

Off the south coast of Australia, the Wilsons Promontory Marine National Park has been hiding an incredible coral reef beneath its waters. Not long ago, when scientists for the region's parks department mapped the sea floor in the area, they noticed what they call some "amazing underwater structures."

When they sent down a robot with a video camera to investigate, they found a wealth of sea life: "massive coral fans, large sea whips and colorful sponge gardens beyonds scientists' expectations," Parks Victoria says.

Oh, and fish. Lots and lots of fish, including deep sea perch (also called orange roughy), which can grow about two feet long.

With coral reefs, including the Great Barrier Reef, dying from ocean acidification and other human impacts, the discovery of a new and vital reef is a refreshing change. There are animals living in this reef that scientists didn't think lived in this area, and there are enough different species in the reef to make it a biodiversity hot spot, the Age reports. 

And, like many reefs, it's just super beautiful. But maybe we should stay away from this one. Our attention hasn't done other reefs much good. 

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. 

In the history of destroyed art, are there any more tragic or strangely gratifying examples of destruction than those caused by bumbling?

The latest example of masterpiece-tarnishing klutzery comes from a young boy in Taiwan, who has tripped over his own feet and inadvertently punched a great big hole in painter Paulo Porpora’s 350-year old work, Flowers.

As The Guardian reports, the 12-year-old boy was perusing the Face of Leonardo: Images of a Genius exhibition at Taiwan’s Huashan 1914 Creative Park, when he lost his footing near the edge of the protective rope and tumbled toward the 17th-century painting. An oil-on-canvas still life, the historic work of art depicts a colorful flower arrangement held in a black vase. As can be seen in the museum’s security footage, the pre-teen valiantly tried to save himself from falling into the painting, while attempting not to spill the drink he had in his hand. Unfortunately, he only achieved one of those goals.

There is now a fist-sized, U-shaped tear marring the painting, which has been valued at $1.5 million. The boy looks visibly shaken in the security footage, caught in that breathless, liminal moment when you know you’ve irrevocably stepped over the line, but have not yet suffered the consequences.

On the bright side, Flowers is part of a private collection, and the painting is well-insured. The kindly owners of the work have said that neither the boy, nor his family will be held responsible for the restoration costs of the work. 

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.