LSD is a drug which has been enjoyed for decades in the United States of America, generally by bored teenagers, experimental collegians, and, on occasion, responsible adults.
So it was surprising then that researchers, who published their findings Monday, were the first to follow through on an idea that has probably occurred to approximately every LSD user in history: What, exactly, happens to my brain on drugs?
It turns out, the researchers found after scanning the brains of users high on the drug, you are a baby. Or, more precisely, thinking like one: "free and unconstrained."
"In many ways, the brain in the LSD state resembles the state our brains were in when we were infants," Robin Cahart-Harris, a co-author of the study, tells Reuters. "This also makes sense when we consider the hyper-emotional and imaginative nature of an infant's mind."
In 1899, while Nicola Tesla was working in his lab in Colorado Springs, he started registering strange electric disturbances on one of his sensors.
"The changes I noted were taking place periodically and with such a clear suggestion of number and order that they were not traceable to any cause known to me,” he later wrote.
They were not the sorts of signals that came from the sun, the earth, the Aurora Borealis, or atmospheric disturbances. He couldn't shake the experience, or stop ruminating on what he might have encountered.
“A purpose was behind these electric signals,” he wrote several years later. “The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another.”
Tesla believed he had intercepted an interplanetary communication, and for the rest of his life, he would work on creating a system that would allow Earth to answer back. He wasn’t alone. As the French scholar Florence Raulin Cerceauhas documented, for the previous century or so, a small group of serious, Victorian-era scientists had been working on proposals for extraterrestrial communication.
Mostly, they involved giant mirrors.
One idea was to use a heliotrope like this one, just much larger. (Photo: Public domain)
These days, space scientists are fairly certain that, if we do encounter other forms of life out there in the universe, they'll be located far away, maybe on one of those exoplanets they keep identifying. But in the early 19th century, it still seemed possible that alien life might exist in our own solar system, close enough that, with a very large or very bright signal, we might be able to communicate without leaving Earth.
In 1820, Carl Friedrich Gauss, the German prodigy most famous for his mathematical work, came up with an early idea for how to contact any intelligent beings living on the Moon. In a stretch of Siberian tundra, humans could build a giant figure—the geometric proof of the Pythagorean theorem, in which the elements, a right triangle and three squares, would be so large that they could be seen from the Moon.
In 1840, Joseph von Littrow, of the Vienna Observatory, had a similar idea. He proposed excavating trenches about 20 miles wide to form geometric shapes, filling those trenches with water and kerosene, and lighting them up at night to increase their visibility. Both Gauss and von Littrow reasoned that, if there was intelligent life out there, those beings would recognize mathematical truths as a sign that Earth had its own intelligent beings. Math would be the universal language.
Soon, though, the idea of building giant math problems was abandoned. Instead, scientists proposed, Earth could flash lights across space to signal moon men or Martians, if they existed, with a version of interplanetary telegraphy. We would just need a lot of mirrors.
Gauss promptly came up with an elaborate mirror plan involving 100 mirrors. Sixteen square feet each, these mirrors would create a giant heliotrope (a light-beaming instrument that he had invented) that could reflect sunlight all the way to the Moon. That was just the beginning.
In 1874, Charles Cros, a French inventor with a flair for poetry (or, perhaps, a poet with a flair for invention), floated the idea of focusing electric light on Mars or Venus using parabolic mirrors. The next year, in 1875, Edvard Engelbert Novius came up with a scheme involving 22,500 electric lamps.
Then, an astronomer writing under the name A. Mercier proposed putting a series of reflectors on the Eiffel Tower, which would capture light at sunset and redirect it towards Mars. He also had an idea for a series of mirrors that would transfer sunlight from the light side of a mountain to its dark side, so the signal to Mars would be clearer. In each of these scenarios, the light would flash a simple code to show to whoever or whatever might be out there that the signal was intentional.
By the turn of the century, enthusiasts for extraterrestrial communication were convinced that interplanetary messaging could really be possible; there was even a prize meant to stimulate research. The Pierre Guzman Prize, established in the will of a wealthy Frenchwoman, would go to whoever could communicate with a planet or other star and receive a response. It came with a 100,000-franc reward.
None of these mirror plans were ever put into practice, though. In 1909, William Pickering, the American astronomer who first proposed the existence of a Planet X, gave some idea why. He calculated that a system of mirrors that could reach across the distance from Earth to Mars would cost about $10 million to construct, and though he believed it could work, he suggested that more proof of the existence of Martian life be proffered before anyone actually started to build such a system.
But Tesla thought he had, if not proof, at least a strong indication of extraterrestrial life. For the rest of his life, he worked on a new machine that could send energy across vast distances, “without the slightest dispersion,” he wrote in 1937. He kept information about his invention close, though, and after his death, any details about the machine were lost.
Whatever Tesla registered, it probably wasn’t a signal from Mars or the Moon. But what did he actually receive? That's still a mystery.
Here's something amazing. While you were busy today patting yourself on the back for taking out the trash, Stephen Hawking and a billionaire were announcing a plan to send robots to a star system 4.37 lightyears away.
How would they do this? Thousands of tiny robots, some very powerful lasers, and a massive scientific collaboration, of course. (Not to mention some rich friends on the board, like Mark Zuckerberg.)
The project was announced on the 55th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin becoming the first man in space, preceding the U.S.'s so-called moonshot. The new project's name has a similarly lofty title: Breakthrough Starshot.
It is being funded initially by Yuri Milner, a Russian billionaire who invests in tech companies (including Facebook.) Milner said Tuesday that he's investing $100 million to begin research on the starshot, but says it could cost $10 billion to finish the job, which, by the way, won't be done anytime soon.
Even if everything goes right, it could be nearly a half-century before we get data back from Alpha Centauri, according to The New York Times.
The front door of the club's clubhouse, known as the Old Barn. (Photo: Tim Pierce/CC BY 3.0)
Let's stipulate that Charles Storey, the board president of Harvard University's secretive and highly exclusive Porcellian Club, is probably a smart man.
He got into Harvard, after all, which is hard to do. And he also gained entry into the Porcellian, one of the university's oldest clubs for undergraduates and one that has counted Theodore Roosevelt and Oliver Wendell Holmes as members.
But neither of those credentials quite explain perplexing comments Storey, class of '82, made Tuesday about sexual assault, in defending the club's policy of having only men as members. If the club accepted women as members, he told the Harvard Crimson, that "could potentially increase, not decrease the potential for sexual misconduct."
If there are no women around, women cannot be sexually assaulted at the club, in other words, which is a true statement.
There's some evidence that Storey thought about his comments, which broke a 225-year streak of public silence for the Porcellian, before making them. He sent them by email, for one thing, in a long statement that includes a lot of other thoughts on sexual assault at the university. Storey also seemed to recognize that his statement would get some attention.
“To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time an officer of the PC has granted an on-the-record statement to a newspaper since our founding in 1791,” Storey wrote in the email to the Crimson. “This reflects both the PC’s abiding interest in privacy and the importance of the situation.”
Storey and the Porcellian Club—members are "Porkies" for life—have been under fire for weeks after a scathing report said that Harvard's final clubs were a hotbed of "nonconsensual sexual conduct." And Rakesh Khurana, dean of Harvard College, has been aggressive in calling the six all-male final clubs antiquated and "at odds" with the 21st century. (Final clubs are highly-exclusive social clubs that are a Harvard tradition; there are also two co-ed final clubs and five all-female final clubs, which were founded in the more recent past.)
At any rate, the Porcellian Club will always have its history. It is generally considered the most prestigious of the final clubs, on a par with Yale's famous secret society Skull and Bones. It's so prestigious that after former President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who achieved things, did not get into the club, he later called it one of the most "devastating" things he's ever dealt with.
It's possible that Roosevelt wasn't missing much. It's also possible that 225 years of silence may have been the right choice for the club all along.
Two graduate students burned by Foodcam. (Photo: Atlas Obscura)
The MIT Media Lab is a much-vaunted, glass-walled bastion of technological progress. At any given moment, the luminaries inside might be presenting the future to a select group of investors,literally reinventing the wheel, or warming up a team of opera-singing robots.
But that kind of innovation is sporadic at best, and innovators need daily nourishment, in every sense of the word. It may go unremarked upon in fancy slide decks or tours touting the lab accomplishments, but make no mistake: The beating heart of the Media Lab's creative universe lies in a small corner of the third floor, on about a foot of average-looking countertop flanked by a coffeemaker and a microwave.
This is the domain of Foodcam.
By media lab standards, Foodcam is a simple technology—the whole thing is made up of a camera, a button, and some wires. Put half a pizza or a box of cookies on the counter, push the button, and a photo of the leftovers is beamed to the waiting screens of hungry people in the know. It's so easy to use, it requires no instructions beyond a warning sign ("don't place anything here unless you want to share it with the community!") and a sticker emblazoned with FOODCAM.
The cam in action. (Photo: Atlas Obscura)
But likeso many vital innovations, Foodcam's simplicity only adds to its power. On a recent Tuesday, a press of the button sent students pouring out of stairwells yelling, "Chips! Chips!" Hearing that a tagalong wasn't on the Foodcam email list, his friend exclaimed, "You're not!?" At least one devotee has called it "the most important and revolutionary invention to come out of the Media Lab." (Hyperbole? Perhaps. But a sugar rush can do that to you.)
Foodcam was born in the late 1990s, the brainchild of a few Media Lab employees looking to find a use for a cool, then-new Axis 200+ webcam. Inspired by hunger and a lab-wide leftovers problem, they positioned the camera over a centrally located kitchen counter and began a perpetual livestream. Soon after, they added a button that, when pressed, sent a picture of the counter's contents to everyone on a particular email list. It worked like magic. "You'd put it there, you'd hit the button, and the food would disappear," says Jon Ferguson, a member of the original Foodcam team.
It has since evolved with the times. Early on, it announced its bounty with a robotic bell and a soundboard that yelled "COME AND GET IT." When the recession hit in the early 2000s, drying up the excess food supply, Foodcam took a brief hiatus ("It was just kind of depressing, so we took it down," remembers Will Glesnes, also on the original team). After a couple of years, it returned; in March of 2008, it joined Twitter. Last year, it got its own channel on the Lab's team-wide Slack account.
It has also developed its own list of rituals and hacks. Students flooding up and down from other floors spoke of calculating the most efficient routes to the counter. Rumor has it that certain competitive eaters figured out how to get notified whenever there's motion on the livestream—before the button is even pressed—in order to get a head start. Graduate student Maya Wagoner set up her phone so that it texts her whenever food is there and she's close enough to sprint. "In the past, it's taken me years to trace the patterns of a city to find out where and when free food is available," she says. "Now I just have to run really fast and be in this building at all times."
Of course, as Wagoner and others attest, this bounty is available only to those already in the network—you can't see the livestream without a Media Lab login, and there's no point in keeping track of the Twitter unless you're in the building. This exclusivity is part of the point. Foodcam is more than just a renewable fuel cell: Progress requires calories, sure, but it also requires leaving your desk every once in a while. At Foodcam, you can literally rub elbows with people from different labs, different generations, and different countries, with the only necessary commonality being an immediate desire for a burrito.
Suranga Nanayakkara, a former Media Lab post-doc, so loved Foodcam's equalizing power that he brought the idea back with him to Singapore University. "It provides a way for impromptu introductions and informal social interactions," he says.
That sense of connection can persist even across physical space. Ferguson left the Lab last year and is now working across the river at a nearby startup, but he misses his invention. "I stayed subscribed to it for a long time to see the traffic and feel connected," he says. (Eventually, overwhelmed by emails and nostalgia, he unsubscribed.)
Foodcam also allows for a deep dive into student food culture—a brief scroll through its Twitter timeline reveals lonely styrofoam containers of tomato soup, bagged lunches with green apples peeking out, and an infinity of bagels. Plus, true to its setting, it lends itself to experiments: Brief, less-than-rigorous analysis reveals that Bertucci's, placed out in the late afternoon, disappears within seconds, and that chocolate Dunkin Donuts go faster than plain.
Both, true to their purpose, incite big dreams. "I wish Foodcam were everywhere," says Wagoner after a bite of a glazed donut. She then muses: "It seems scalable." In this way, the future is born.
In the Pacific Ocean, approximately 500 miles from the west coast of Mexico, lies the Revillagigedo Archipelago. It’s a collection of largely uninhabited volcanic islands, rich with marine life. The waters are home to several species of sharks, whales, dolphins and the manta birostris—giant manta ray.
As the name suggests, the giant manta ray is, well, enormous. The wing span—measured from point to point of the pectoral fins—can reach up to 23 feet. Evidently, they can also be friendly, as photographer and anthropologist Anuar Patjane Floriuk found out when he took the above photo during a January 2014 diving expedition.
"Giant mantas are usually very curious about divers and enjoy the bubbles that we generate while diving," he says, "so they approach very closely to us."
In these same waters, Mexico-based Floriuk has also photographed humpback whales, for which he was recognized in the 2016 World Press Photo Contest. When shooting underwater, he says, "you don’t think too much, you feel and improvise ... most of the thinking process is focused on diving properly. The rest of your senses are overwhelmed by the spectacle of nature."
When you load up the car for a camping weekend set in the 1800s, the gear is a little different: Canvas tent. Wool bedroll. Hobnail boots instead of hiking sandals. Homemade food wrapped in wax paper. An ice cooler disguised as a wooden chest. Muslin underwear. Silk suspenders.
Anywhere you have dedicated history nerds who dream about the romance of the past, you'll find reenactors reliving it, usually in the context of a dramatic struggle for the fate of a nation. In September 2015, a crowd of 75,000 gathered in a field south of Moscow to watch—or fight in—a pivotal 1380 battle between medieval Russians and Mongols. Three months earlier, 6,200 reenactors in Napoleonic garb recreated the 10-hour battle of Waterloo for the benefit of 64,000 spectators gathered in Belgium. For four years running, U.S. military history geeks have spent an April weekend sleeping in trenches at the Midway Village Museum in Illinois, facing mustard gas attacks from another continent a hundred years ago.
To call someone a farb is to call them inaccurate, with an added layer of moral judgment: a farb's gear is not just wrong, but wrong, a sin against history. It's reenactor slang that dates back to the 1960s, the dawn of the modern reenactment era, when the Civil War centennial and the civil rights movement coincided to cause a surge of mainstream interest in a hobby previously dominated by small-scale "town history" celebrations and marksmanship drills. In the same way contemporary comic con attendees snipe about "real" fans versus "fake geeks," reenactors who devoted a lot of attention to the accuracy of their historical "impressions" complained about those who didn't—and still do.
Your quintessential farb might spend all weekend talking on a cell phone, or wear a jumble of mismatched “old timey” costume pieces from different decades. Bright-colored crocheted snoods—decorative female hairnets—area reliable target of ire; more 1940s than 1860s, they’re nevertheless sold to entry-level reenactors by opportunistic merchants happy to take money from a newcomer looking for a quick “period hairstyle” solution.
Farbs are an inevitable part of any large-scale reenactment, since perspectives on history—and what historical immersion means—are far from uniform. There’s natural tension between hobbyists who want to dress up and fire canons, then sit down for a beer with fellow nerds, and people who want to get as close to time travel as possible—who would rather not see anyone duck behind a tree with a can of insect repellant.
A sign at a re-enactment regarding historically-accurate costumes. (Photo: istolethetv/CC BY 2.0)
Emotional connection to the era adds another layer. As historian and Revolutionary War reenactorSeán O'Brien notes, a participant looking to honor his family's memory of a much-mythologized ancestor "tends not to listen when you point out that wearing cavalry boots with breeches and a uniform coat six sizes too big with modern glasses and a bunch of medallions hanging off his hat doesn't look anything like a mid-19th century uniform."
Even for someone incredibly dedicated to historical accuracy, reenactment involves compromise simply by the fact of life in the present. Today’s corset-fancying woman would not have been shaped in one since the age of nine, and will therefore never achieve an 1800s-accurate ribcage shape. Nobody’s going to actually try to kill anyone, or forego prescription medication, or risk drinking unsterilized water during a battle. Wearing sunblock may be inaccurate, but so is a fresh sunburn because it’s been months since you spent a full day outdoors.
And since volunteers are paying for period-appropriate gear out of their own pockets, not everyone can afford to sink a few hundred dollars into 1862-accurate handmade shoes.Griping aboutsomeone else’s reenactment choices can quicklyfeel like sour grapes. No one is immune; a Confederate reenactor who was an extra in Glory bragged to filmmakerGareth Harfoot that he'd pushed Matthew Broderick off a pier for not properly returning a salute—and gotten away with it by fading into the crowd with his impeccable costume.
A photograph from 1864 showing Confederate prisoners captured at the battle of Fisher's Hill, under the guard of Union troops. (Photo: Library of Congress/LC-DIG-ppmsca-15835)
However, the accuracy debate isn't solely about reenactors. At large events, spectators outnumber reenactors by a factor of ten or more; these events are billed as educational “living history,” sponsored by museums and historical societies, and partly funded by spectators’ entry fees. Although onlookers will be able to spot prominent anachronisms like flashlights, they’ll take other historical compromises at face value.
When individual units and events set their own accuracy standards to determine who can participate, they enter a minefield of heated political arguments over who the hobby belongs to, and who it’s meant to serve. Should women be banned from fighting units? Aren’t reenactors overwhelminglytoo old, too fat, and too white? At what point does a reenactment misinform more than it educates?
A cautionary tale is embedded in the term farb itself. Although it has several popular folk etymologies, it wasmost likely invented by the First Maryland "Blackhat" Regiment, led by German teacher Gerry Rolph. "Farb" is the German word for "color"—and during weekend sewing sessions in Spring 1961, the Blackhats mocked other units for too-colorful uniforms. Ironically, the original farbs may have been onto something: the Confederate army had a problem with blue, and therefore so do reenactors.
An illustration from 1895 showing the uniforms worn by Union and Confederate soldiers. (Photo: US Government/Public Domain)
Moreover, according to uniform historian Fred Adolphus, Confederate cadet grey may never have been as blue or as irregular as the shade reenactors have tried to recapture, based on acomparison of reproduction cloth with museum-conserved uniforms.
For symbolic reasons,the Confederate government wanted uniforms in the pale, bluish grey of state militias, to reinforce the idea that states had always been independent nations with a legal right to self-government. But the only fabric mills capable of producing that fabric in quantity were in the north,particularly around Lowell, Massachusetts. Thus Confederates spent the early years of the war inan array of mismatched hues as they tried different dye processes and imports. The homemade stuff tended to fade to brown after a few weeks or months in the sun—good camouflage, but demoralizing since "butternut" was an insult with the same meaning as "hayseed."
Meanwhile, already-available manufactured fabric was often too dark a blue, to the extent that Union forces declared outright they'd execute as a spy any captured Confederate whose too-indigo uniform might be mistaken for a Federal soldier's. Further complicating matters, Confederate uniforms sometimes wereFederal uniforms with some of the color boiled out. Many of the deaths at the 1862 Battle of Antietam,the bloodiest single day of fighting in all of U.S. history, occurred because a Confederate unit under A.P. Hillwas wearing captured Union uniforms, sowing confusion on both sides. (It's equally but less lethally confusing for modern spectators.)
Even once Southern industrial production of grey cloth had ramped up in places likeRoswell, Georgia, and Richmond, Virginia'sCrenshaw woolen mills, achieving a regular, repeatable bluish gray was a challenge. The most readily available colorfast dyes of the time were indigo and black walnut, but "indigo's tricky," says natural dyer Jess Lionne, "because, first of all, indigo itself doesn't dissolve in water."
The same thing that stops indigo from washing out stops it from washing in, unless the dyer deoxygenates the water—usually by adding live bacteria and waiting a few days. This yogurt-like process smells like rotten fish, and attracts a lot of flies.
For a reenactor, the problem is obvious: no contemporary fabric company is going to use stinky, slow natural indigo instead of the synthetic version. However, the problem for uniform suppliers in the 1860s was indigo's lack of predictability. Once dyeing begins, it's hard to know in advance how dark a blue a vat will produce, since that depends on both bacterial activity and the potency of an individual indigo plant. To regularize the process, suppliers combed together dyed andundyed wool or cotton fibers until they achieved the desired shade with minimal heathering.
This process takes skill and machinery which are no longer readily available. Charlie Childs, founder ofCounty Cloth, revered purveyor of Civil War reproduction fabric and clothing, relied on a 30-year partnership withHarry Lonsdale, a Philadelphia upholsterer who specialized in reproduction wool for refurbishing classic cars. Since Lonsdale's recent retirement, Childs has been on an unsatisfying quest to find a worthy replacement. A long process of sending swatches back and forth between Childs (himself an experienced handweaver), a mill, a dyer, and a spinner, may still result in cloth that isn't quite right.
As Mark Twain wrote inThe Gilded Age, his co-authored 1873 satire of post-Civil-War corruption, "History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends."
It's not quite the same as saying history rhymes; but it's a little like saying there will be reenactments, and they'll get a bit farby. Or that 150 years after a war about skin color and about fabric, men will still fight a battle of blue versus grey.
In the attic of an old house near Toulouse, a French family found a canvas that may have been painted by the Italian artist Caravaggio more than 400 years ago. When they came upon it, in April 2014, it was covered in dust; when cleaned, it showed a young woman, with her servant looking on, grasping the hair of a man whose throat she’s cutting.
This is a famous scene: the beheading of Holofernes, a story from the Book of Judith. If it is an authentic Caravaggio painting, it could be worth around $136.5 million.
For two years experts have worked on authenticating it, and the French government has forbid its export so that they can continue that research. So far, experts have not been able to agree on whether or not Caravaggio actually painted the thing.
Eric Turquin, the art dealer who unveiled the painting in 2016, cites details like the blood on Holofernes’ neck and the rough fingernails of the figures as signs of a master at work. Nicola Spinosa, a Caravaggio expert in Italy, also thinks it should be considered a true Caravaggio. But both admit there’s been no absolute proof of its provenance—and there may never be.
Other experts aren’t so sure Caravaggio painted the scene. A competing theory has it that Louis Finson, a Flemish painter who admired Caravaggio, created the painting as a copy of a Caravaggio work. Caravaggio did paint the beheading of Holofernes, but it’s significantly different:
This version is recognized as a Caravaggio. (Image: Public domain)
Without any definite proof, art critics are left to make arguments for why or why not this should be attributed to Caravaggio. "These people don’t behave like Caravaggio’s people behave....There is a fundamental lack of energy," writes one critic, who believes the painting is a fake. Either way, says one expert who believes the painting came from Finson, it's "an interesting work."
Every day, we highlight one newly found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com.
Counting up octopi and tailing sea turtles is all in a day's work for ocean biologists. But last year, biodiversity researchers off the coast of Panama were thrilled to come across an unusual underwater event—a massive crab party, with thousands upon thousands of small crustaceans stampeding across the the sea floor.
While submarining in the Hannibal Bank Seamount last April, the researchers came across an unusual layer of murk, and dove deeper to investigate. "As we slowly moved down to the bottom of the seafloor, all of a sudden we saw these things. At first, we thought they were biogenic rocks or structures," lead author Jesús Pineda said in a Woods Hole Institute press release. "Once we saw them moving—swarming like insects—we couldn't believe it." Pineda and his team published their results in PeerJ this month.
Later DNA analysis revealed the crabs to be Pleuroncodes planipes, also known as "red crabs" or "tuna crabs"—shrimp-sized, lobster-shaped crustaceans that are easily carried off by currents, and eat plankton they catch in the micro-hairs on their legs.
Not only were these crabs hanging out in unusually large numbers, they were also much further south than P. planipes has ever been found. Pineda theorizes that low-oxygen conditions might protect the crabs from their many predators, which include whales, porpoises, squid, sea birds, and large fish.
They don't have to worry about humans, though—most of us just want to watch their swarm skills on YouTube.
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.
Some of Tim Mullen's many curious items. (All photos: Ella Morton)
In his one-bedroom apartment four floors above a Manhattan Chipotle, Tim Mullen is trying to get his television to work. It takes a while, but the TV’s pretty old—almost 70 years old, in fact. It stands in a corner, all 295 pounds of it, beside a brain in a bell jar, a wart-zapping X-ray wand, and an electrostatic generator that, if you were to put your finger in the path of its spark, could easily kill you.
An RCA Victor television from 1947 stands sentinel in a corner.
Mullen is a collector of old, weird, cool-looking machines. His apartment is crammed with, in his words, "early technology, mostly electrical, from the beginning of the electric period—about 1880—right up to World War II."
And these items aren't look-but-don't-touch museum pieces. Mullen uses many of them on a day-to-day basis. He'll put bread in the ornate 1920s toaster, stream music from one of the Art Deco radios, and stand in the formidable wind of a squeaky ceiling fan that doesn't have a safety grille.
Have you ever seen a more elegant spit-sucker? Saliva-vacuuming machines like this one were used by discerning dentists during the 1930s.
Collecting—and tinkering with—vintage machinery has been a lifelong pursuit for Mullen, who, to his parents' alarm, spent his youth building Van de Graaff generators in the basement of the family home. Now a post-production engineer with a long history of building circuits for fun and profit, Mullen delights in hunting down dusty, non-working devices and fiddling with them until they run again.
Rotating Geissler tubes were the turn-of-the-century version of disco party lights.
"It’s imperative for me, of all people—I’ve got to get that damn thing working," he says of his beloved machines. They "give off heat, they give off light and sound, it’s almost like a critter. I want to see them be happy and work."
Though he collects everything from pre-World War II televisions—"rarer than Stradivarius violins"—to Jazz Age dental equipment, Mullen has a particular penchant for late-Victorian electro-medical devices.
A "globe top" refrigerator from the 1930s.
Right now, his Holy Grail is the Hogan high-frequency apparatus, an electrotherapeutic machine that consists of a four-foot-tall wooden cabinet equipped with a switchboard and topped with a Tesla coil. "Here’s the punchline," says Mullen, excitedly: "two-foot-long lightning bolts."
These bolts would blaze and spark from the coil, accompanied by an almighty buzz. "It’s so wild-looking it was used as a prop in the first Frankenstein movie," says Mullen. "I really need a Hogan. They’re around. I’ve just got to find one."
A toaster from the 1920s.
One rare and highly prized item that he has managed to get his hands on is what he calls his "Victorian teleport," an upright glass cylinder with a wooden frame that's perfectly sized to fit a standing human being. Above the cylinder hangs a lamp that emits an incredibly bright, white light. It is only after staring at it for a few seconds that Mullen warns not to look too long, because it tends to make one's eyes feel "crunchy."
The teleport lamp.
When Mullen flips a big switch on the wall, the cable suspending the lamp extends, sending the light down into the cylinder. It's all very dramatic until there's a bang from another room and everything goes dead. One of the circuit breakers has tripped. That happens a lot in this apartment.
Mullen built this panel to control the teleport.
The "Victorian teleport" is actually a carbon arc blueprinting frame from 1905—"essentially the world’s oldest running photocopier," says Mullen. He got it from an antique seller in Philadelphia. To bring it home to New York, he carefully wrapped and padded the two arcs of glass, stacked them in the back of a truck, and drove 20 miles per hour "like a grandma." When cars honked at him on the FDR, one of Manhattan's traffic-prone parkways, he yelled, "Go around me!"
Having amassed an apartment's worth of vintage wonders over the decades, Mullen can now approach flea markets and antique sales in a more relaxed state of mind. He doesn't have to have everything—but those rarer-than-Stradivarius items still catch his eye.
One of Mullen's many vintage fans. Unlike some of the others, this one has a safety grille.
Hunting around for examples of what he dreams of acquiring, Mullen pulls out a black-and-white photograph of a hospital "electric room" filled with sinister-looking furnishings, including a wicker dentist-style chair, a tube resembling a cannon, and a glass-and-wood cabinet containing a whirring turbine and X-ray apparatus.
The photo was sent to him by a friend. ("He said he’s an archivist; maybe he’s a patient at the New Jersey State Insane Asylum.") Pointing to a mysterious machine in the photo, Mullen lights up. "I don’t know what that is," he says. "But I want one."
Tim Mullen will be giving a tour of his astounding collection during Obscura Day on April 16. Visit the event page to sign up.
What does it take to become a pinball master? (All photos by Eric Grundhauser)
Pinball has been around since the 1930s, mixing bright lights, loud sounds, and a high level of dexterity to create one of the most enduring entertainments of all time. While the popularity of the game has waxed and waned down the decades from its pinnacle in the 1970s and '80s, to a relative nadir in the early 2000s, there remain a devoted (and growing) number of pros who continue to be masters of pinball.
But what kind of skill and/or sorcery does it take to become a pinball wizard? How good could I get in, say, an afternoon? To find out, I met up with world champion pinball player Bowen Kerins, who has been playing competitively for 23 years and took out the Professional and Amateur Pinball Associationworld championship in 1994, 2005, and 2013.
Every pinball machine is different, but Kerins gave me a few general tips on how to become a better player. The first: pay attention to where you want the ball to go. Most players, when they step up to a game of pinball, focus almost entirely on not losing their ball. But as Kerins sagely advises, that’s an exercise in futility: “You will lose the ball. Everyone will lose the ball, every time.”
By focusing on something you want to hit instead, you end up actively seeking higher scores instead of just letting it happen. In addition, you will have a better chance of triggering some cool effect—depending on the machine.
The flipper buttons, and gun-shaped plunger on The Shadow pinball machine.
In terms of flipper control, Kerins suggested learning how to “catch” the ball. This entails bringing it to a stop in the crux of an upturned flipper. Then, says Kerins,“you can pause, you can figure out your timing, and then make a decision.” A more advanced option for better shot-targeting is to transfer the ball from one flipper to another, using them as little ramps.
At that deadly moment in any game when the ball is shooting straight down the center, most players just start jamming on both flippers. This is not the best approach. “You can actually lose track of the ball in the in-between," says Kerins. "Sometimes you can actually hit the ball up into the other flipper that happens to still be up. Then you bonk out.”
The key to avoiding this is to never hit both flippers at the same time, always keeping at least one up. There is also a more extreme maneuver called a “slap save,” that involves hitting the flipper button so hard that you nudge the game, moving the ball towards the flipper. Surprisingly, this is a tournament legal move. “In my opinion, in a tournament, if the ball goes down the middle, there is almost always something you could have done about it,” says Kerins.
There's a lot going on in a pinball game, you gotta stay sharp.
One last tip: Pay attention to the machine. “The game wants to tell you what to do through its effects,” says Kerins. “If lights are flashing, it usually means something good will happen by shooting that shot.” Sometimes more tantalizing shots are more risky, but they are almost always worth higher points.
With these tips given, Kerins and I went to Brooklyn pinball mecca Sunshine Laundromat to test my new (theoretical) skills. We opted to focus on Kerins’ favorite machine, the pinball game based on the 1994 Alec Baldwin pulp movie The Shadow. The game is notable for its two dagger-shaped (technically, phurba-shaped) lane-splitters at the top of the two major ramps. These can be turned from side to side using extra buttons below the flipper buttons, directing the ball down one of two lanes on each ramp. “It’s really hard,” says Kerins. “The shots are fast and tight, and there aren’t very many ways to save a ball once it’s out of control. A lot of people die very quickly on it.” Sounds like the perfect testing ground.
The Shadow knows... how to be a hard pinball game.
As luck would have it, Kerins himself had played on Sunshine’s Shadow machine just weeks earlier, racking up a confidence-destroying score of three BILLION points. That’s a hard number to beat, but Kerins gave me some more realistic goals. “A 300-400 million score is satisfying," he says. "The usual high score on Shadow is 750 million. That’s hard to get. It’s very hard to get that.” Okay, 750 million points it is.
To get a sense of my baseline skills, I played a few games in my normal pre-training style, frantically trying my damnedest to keep from losing the ball as it flew around the field. I managed to eke out scores in the 40 million range, with one exceptional game landing me over 116 million points, as I randomly activated “scenes” from the movie, like the “The Beryllium Sphere” and “Escape Underwater Doom.”
The phurba lane changer.
As with many other games of pinball, I was quickly overwhelmed, having trouble dividing my attention between the signals on the field, the directions in the score box, and the various shouts and quotes issuing from the machine. I kept shooting for the ramps, but it felt like the flippers were a bit weak, and the ball would almost make it up the ramp, before rolling back down, and straight into the ball return. Given Kerins’ astronomical score on the very same machine, this was no excuse.
Time to try out some of my new skills. I quickly became adept at hitting the ramp closer to the flippers for a quick 10 million points, but hitting the more distant ramp was a challenge, despite my patient approach. In the meantime, I accidentally got better at getting the ball in all of the bonus areas around it. Unfortunately these peripheral benefits were not enough to overcome the sheer number of times the ball would roll back down the back ramp and right between the flippers. I tried a slap save, but the game immediately gave me a tilt warning. “You still think you can control the game with brute force?” an electronic villain asked me. I guess not.
The scenes available in the play field.
Focusing so closely on my technique and not the game itself, my scores tanked. I couldn’t seem to crack 30 million points. Yikes.
After a short break, I came back, this time trying to internalize Kerins' tips and also focus on the game. Very zen. Amazingly, this approach worked. I began focusing on The Battlefield, which was located in a tricky corner in the left of the field that I had become pretty good at hitting. Once the ball is in The Battlefield, it needs to bounce off 30 bumpers, then sink down the back of the box using nothing but the sliding panel bumper. If you can pull this off, it’ll earn you 50 million points.
Focusing on getting the ball up there and earning that first 50 million paid off. I was catching the ball and sending it right where I needed it, and keeping calm when it looked like the ball was going to be lost down the middle. Within a couple of games I was earning well above 100 million points each time. Still a far cry from a huge score, but a marked improvement.
A... satisfying score.
My high score came at about game 17: 307,005,840 points. Through a combination of winning The Battlefield, earning a multi ball round, and hitting the top loop, I managed to stay alive for a game that felt like it was firing on all cylinders. I finally understood the table and had the skills to make it work for me. I was The Shadow’s worst nightmare. Until I lost the ball for the final time off the back ramp. Dammit.
After another dozen games, I wasn’t able to beat, or even fathom, Kerins’ high score. Or even The Shadow’s general high score. But I did improve immensely using Kerins’ tips. My ultimate high score was, as he said, "satisfying." As much as I wanted it to be true, becoming a pinball wizard isn’t something that's possible in an afternoon. But, as Kerins says: “Keep shooting ramps, and good things will happen.”
There came a time in your average ancient man's life when he fell in love with a woman, and then he fell in love with another woman, and then he fell in love with another woman, and the maybe a fourth, fifth, and sixth, and then had sex with all of them for days, months, or years.
In other words, polygyny was pretty common thousands of years ago. But, scientists said recently, around 10,000 years ago, something changed. Ancient humans became more monogamous. The theorized reason will be familiar to anyone who has sat through Sex Ed: sexually transmitted infections, or STIs. Chlamydia and gonorrhea, to be exact.
All of that hot ancient human sex was killing the population, since many STIs can cause infertility. Which means, the Guardian reports, monogamists came to be regarded as the superior beings, fining or ostracizing their sex-happy brothers and sisters. Interestingly, monogamy also became dominant around the same time that humans adopted another more-sustainable pursuit: agriculture as the major means of food production.
Almost 600 feet deep, in the bottom of Loch Ness, a robot named Munin has found the remains of a large object with a very long neck.
It’s the Loch Ness monster—or, at least, a human-made version of Nessie.
The 1970 movie The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes featured a glimpse of the Loch Ness monster, and the crew had built a mechanical Nessie to feature in the film. Originally, it had two humps and was 30 feet long. But the director, Billy Wilder, didn’t like the look of it.
“The director did not want the humps and asked that they be removed, despite warnings I suspect from the rest of the production that this would affect its buoyancy. And the inevitable happened. The model sank,” Adrian Shine, a Loch Ness expert, told the BBC.
Loch Ness is deep lake, and once something sinks to the bottom, it’s not exactly practical to fish it out again. But for Munin the robot, diving 600 feet deep is no big deal: its sonar scanners are accurate at almost 10 times that depth.
So there you have it: there is a Loch Ness monster hiding in the depths of Loch Ness.
Animated characters have been entertaining us since way back in 1908, when the world's very first animated cartoon was put out into the world. This is that film, Fantasmagorie, a French animation by caricaturist Émile Cohl.
Fantasmagorie is a largely confusing series of frames. The video follows a stick man through his interactions with various morphing objects, such as an elephant that turns into a house. The artist's hands appear various times through the short film, bringing the fantastical shots back into reality for a few moments.
Fantasmagorie is so named after the Victorian-era "fantasmograph," another name for the magic lanterns that projected ghostly images onto the walls.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
The desert outside Coober Pedy has served as the set for Mad Max III, Red Planet, and other otherworldly movies. (Photo: Jessanne Collins)
The operative word, when it comes to the Australian outpost of Coober Pedy is “interesting.”
“Coober Pedy is interesting,” said the publicist who arranged my trip there in 2013, with audible italics. “Interesting,” people I met in Adelaide would exclaim cautiously when I told them my itinerary. That ominous euphemism even makes it into Lonely Planet’s tepid directory: “With swarms of flies, no trees, 50 degree summer days, subzero winter nights, cave-dwelling locals and rusty car wrecks in front yards, you might think you’ve arrived in a wasteland. But it sure is interesting.”
The Australian I met at a party in New York a week before I left was more direct: “Coober Pedy is weird,” she said, before recounting that when she visited as a teenager, the bus driver admonished her upon embarking, “Don’t get raped.”
Of all the unlikely tourist destinations on the planet, Coober Pedy, Australia has to be one of the least likely. If Americans had heard of Coober Pedy, it was likely from 1994 year cult movie classic Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and if you’ve seen that you’ll know that it’s also not the best advertisement for a visit. It’s so tiny, so far-flung even by Australian standards that it’s hard to imagine its appearance on too many bucket lists. And, yet, it is a tourist destination, in a strange way, or it’s intended enough to be that a few years ago, I traveled there on a trip sponsored by the state government, so that I could write about why people might want to visit.
Coober Pedy from the air. (Photo: Jessanne Collins)
It’s possible that 26 hours of flying and a 14-hour time change had something to do with my initial impressions of Australia, a place that seemed somehow more foreign than I’d anticipated. My jetlag felt like a blood clot, and even the seemingly simple act of ordering an iced coffee in Adelaide, my stopover before heading out to Coober Pedy, proved absurd when I was handed a cup of cold coffee with a scoop of ice cream on top. I laughed at myself, in my awkward delirium, but also felt rattled to my core, understanding exactly how far away from home I was, how little I knew about the place I’d come, how extremely, very alone I was here.
It was that lingering sense of disorientation and a bit of loneliness that I caught an early flight on a small regional airline, one of only two departures each week. If you look at a map, Coober Pedy is just south of right smack in the middle of Australia. It doesn’t get much more outback. And from the sky thevast, emptydesert out there looks like another planet: Mars, appropriately, as this is the location for many films set on the Red Planet. But approaching Coober Pedy, you can see how the earth is pockmarked with white hills that surround small black holes, like anthills. Unlike any alien planet we know, this landscape is inhabited. And clearly there are things to get at underground.
Life in Coober Pedy happens as much below ground as above it. This is why I’m booked at one of the town’s best-known efforts at tourist attraction: an underground hotel. I think when I first heard it described—the locals here live in homes carved deep into the sandstone, an ingenious bit of engineering that means despite the desert’s unforgiving temperatures, they don’t need climate control—I pictured something a bit glamorous, if perhaps faded at the edges. I imagined descending deep into a pleasantly cool cavern, with an outdated but well-maintained water feature or two, perhaps in an overly opulent glass elevator like the Marriott Marquis. (Clearly, I’ve been in New York too long.)
It’s upon landing that I realize this is not going to be that. The tiny jet unloads its sparse passengers directly onto the tarmac and into a one-room airport. I’ve been told there will be a hotel shuttle but there’s not. One by one everyone else from the flight finds their rides and leaves. The airport staff is also the flight crew, and they’ve already re-boarded the plane and taxied away. There’s just one other guy lingering, and a baggage handler, loading a dolly with cargo. We are literally the only three people in this airport.
The airport at Coober Pedy. (Photo: Jessanne Collins)
The guy introduces himself. His name is Andrew and he’s headed to the same hotel as I am, the one I’m now sure isn’t going to have elevators at all. He works for the South Australian government on unemployment policy and comes here, where unemployment and poverty rates are high, to conduct studies. I tell him I’m a writer from New York, here to write stories that will inspire people to visit. “Coober Pedy is very interesting,” Andrew says. Finally, the baggage handler finishes his work and comes over to collect us: it turns out he’s also the hotel shuttle driver.
Driving into town, true to Lonely Planet’s prediction, I feel very much as if I’m arriving in a wasteland, or at least a fairly barren military outpost. The hotel is on what amounts to the main strip, a collection of low buildings, some of which are half-dug into mounds of ruddy earth.
When I check in I say goodbye to Andrew and head for my “deluxe” room, which means underground, and that’s about it. It’s simple and clean enough and the decor has not been touched since the ‘80s, or earlier. The walls show the scars of the machinery that carved the room out of the sandstone. The air is pleasantly cool and assured to be fresh—it’s ventilated with a visible pipe—but immediately I’m having trouble breathing.
Outside, the desert sun is beating down, the parking lot is dusty. Across it there is a fairly bleak looking café. I need coffee and a computer, connection of some kind. There’s a man curled up on the ground in a patch of shade, talking to himself, looking at me. I’m ignoring him with heightened attentiveness when I’m startled to hear my name from above. There is Andrew, leaning over a railing. I note that the rooms on the second floor have not just windows, but doors that open to the outside. He waves, I wave, remembering that I haven’t, after all, arrived alone.
Another reason why Coober Pedy is interesting is that it’s built around a mining industry that’s pretty idiosyncratic. According to an oft-recited local legend, a century ago a teenager stumbled on an opal deposit and people started coming here to dig for it, seeking fortunes in the wasteland. Those endless anthills are opal mines—reportedly, there are as many as a million of them. It’s these that, shepherded by a Yugoslavian tour guide with a thick accent—also a part-time miner—I’m spending the afternoon exploring.
Opal forms when water mixes with silica in the fissures of rock. (Photo: Jessanne Collins)
Opal, of course, is that iridescent gemstone that, at least in my mind, is filed among Rainbow Brite, certain legwarmers, mood rings, and other colorful hallmarks of the 1980s. Opals, in other words, aren’t exactly diamonds. There are a fabled few miners who’ve made millions out here. But for the most part, my tour guide tells me, mining for it is a modest enterprise: With a small investment in the right equipment and an inexpensive permit, anyone can dig a hole in the ground and start picking away at the sandstone by hand, looking for pearlescent layers in the rock where millions of years ago water mixed with silica. Mostly, miners are attracted to the prospect of working for themselves, setting their own hours, being their own bosses.
Of course, the mere possibility of striking it even just a little bit rich doesn’t hurt. Compared to big industrial mining industries, opal is wrought in a way that’s a little more carefree and cunning: some people dream of where to start to dig, my guide says, others literally toss a hat to the wind and go dig where it lands. The appeal was enough to bring prospectors here in droves in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and still sustain hundreds of active mines. Prospecting is even part of the draw for tourists, who are invited to pick through piles of chaff discarded from the mines on the chance that anything potentially precious has been overlooked by the professionals.
An opal mine is technically little more than a hole in the ground. (Photo: Jessanne Collins)
For those that would prefer to simply go opal shopping, there are shops in town peddling jewelry. There’s a pretty extensive museum that pays tribute to every possible aspect of the stone, and to the history of the town it built. So clearly Coober Pedy is a mecca for opal aficionados. But there are other draws that lure visitors here. Not too far out in the desert there’s a rockscape called the Breakaways, not quite as iconic as Uluru but vast and strange and stunning. (There’s also an easily accessible stretch of Australia’s famous “dingo fence”—an unassuming looking wire divide that becomes very assuming when you consider that it’s 3,500 miles long and keeps all the dingos on the continent on one side so that smaller livestock can be farmed on the other.)
And from here you can get to the Oodnadatta Track, a long unpaved hardcore-desert route that connects a smattering of other small outback outposts, which lukewarm Lonely Planet ranks as #24 on its top 25 sites in Australia.
When I return to my room at the end of the day I’m still dusted with the desert and can't escape the feeling of suffocation below ground. So I go to the front desk and request to switch to one of those rooms upstairs, with windows and doors that open to the outside. There’s a young man working at the desk and at first he can’t quite figure out why I’m asking for what’s considered a downgrade. “Your room is the deluxe!” He says. “I know, but … I’m claustrophobic,” I say. “I really just want a window.” He laughs as he types up the switch. It takes a long time. We make small talk meanwhile. He’s from Sri Lanka, where he worked in finance. He came to Australia for the promise of a job in Adelaide, but it fell through. He wound up here, 600 miles out in the desert, working at the front desk of an underground hotel.
“I don’t really understand why people come here,” he finally says, looking around to make sure we’re alone, in a tone not much more than a whisper.
He’s reluctant to hand my key over. Not in a shady way. He just wants to keep chatting. I’m reluctant to take it. We talk a long while after I do.
A museum rendition of an underground house in Coober Pedy. (Photo: Jesseanne Collins)
My new room is smaller, stuffy with stale smoke and a little more ragged around the edges. But it has a sliding glass door that opens onto a dank little concrete balcony inhabited by skittering skinks and overlooking the main drag’s gas station. I drink a mini bottle of white wine from the mini bar and open a can of Australian Pringles, which are reassuringly Pringle-y, and I leave the door open even when I go to sleep, willing to chance lizard invasion in exchange for the desert air.
To call a desert a wasteland is to misunderstand it entirely. A desert isn’t a dearth of life or points of interest, it’s rife with interesting (and even, yes, weird) plants and animals, if you know how to look. Even if there’s nothing obviously alive in plain sight for miles, the ancientness and expansiveness of all that sand and stone and nothingness can’t not remind you that the planet itself has a lifespan, and all of human civilization is a microsecond of it.
Less iconic than Uluru, the Breakaways near Coober Pedy are still stunning. (Photo: Jessanne Collins)
I’ve started to think that the same is true for this strange little town, with its rough edges and faded tributes to its luminous rocks, and that this is the real draw of visiting a place like this: the chance to unearth something small but precious in spite of the odds. For me, it was an unlikely bit of human connection just when I needed it most; a certain valuable emotional state only attainable in circumstances that are a bit uncomfortable, a set of stories I’m still telling years later. All of this is not the obvious stuff of everyday junkets, to be sure; what I got out of visiting Coober Pedy was somewhat harder to put a finger on. Maybe this is why there seems so little to say besides the vague accolade that it’s “interesting.”
It could be that the ultimate travel incentive exists in Coober Pedy: You have to be here to get it.
Coober Pedy's golf course shows of the local sense of humor. It's the only golf club in the world with reciprocal playing rights at Scotland's St. Andrews. (Photo: Jessanne Collins)
In the middle of the night I wake up with a feeling that there is something in the room with me. I’m alert in an instant, on edge, before realizing that it’s just that a howling wind has picked up and it is funneling through the open door, flapping the faded drapery, filling the room with dust. I’m still reluctant to shut the door. Instead, I step out on the balcony. A desert wind is something else entirely strange and fascinating: that all that air can travel unfettered, carrying ancient dust and crazy-making positive ions, on nothing but its own invisible momentum. Who knows why it ended up exactly here, or from how far it came?
A view from Tajikistan's Rasht Valley. (Photo: Tim Brown)
This story originally appeared in Roads & Kingdoms. Find more food and travel storytelling at Roads & Kingdoms.
Mirzasho Akobirov is reclining comfortably on a cold, jagged rock as though he had stumbled upon a chaise lounge. Propped up on an elbow, he is silhouetted by a quickly setting sun on a cold evening in early March.
Akobirov, who is 56, occasionally gestures behind him towards Jafr, the village where he was born and still lives, and the Rasht Valley, a wide stretch of land in northeastern Tajikistan that extends up towards the Kyrgyz border. It is in that valley that Akobirov spends most of his time, cultivating and grooming his botanical garden.
Akobirov’s neighbors in Jafr have orchards typical of the Rasht Valley: a few apple and pear trees, and perhaps an apricot or peach tree. Akobirov’s orchard is different. According to him, the lush plot of perhaps four or five acres produces 52 different types of apples, 37 varieties of pears, and 24 kinds of apricots, as well as peaches, black mulberries, white mulberries, walnuts, and an assortment of cherries.
The garden has made him famous throughout the valley and, to a certain extent, beyond: praising his orchard’s fruit, Tajikistan’s president, Emomali Rahmon, once called him the country’s best orchard keeper. More practically, in a region and country where the primary export is labor migrants to Russia, sales of his fruit and saplings have helped him to open a guesthouse at one end of the garden. At another, he has begun construction on a small museum celebrating this remote region. He already has many of the artifacts that he would like to display, by his count, a few thousand of them: ancient, leather-bound Korans; rusted medals and coins; tapestries and colorful, stitched carpets; swords; paintings; and trinkets of unknown provenance. He acquired almost all of them from other villagers living in the Rasht Valley. Some he bought, when he had the money to pay; some he bartered for, trading fruit and saplings for heirlooms.
Mirzasho Akobirov, 56, inherited his interest in botany from his father. (Photo: Tim Brown)
Akobirov is slim, with close-cropped white hair and a tightly trimmed white beard. He is fond of one-piece jumpsuits and perpetually carries around a rubber thermos of tea, which he makes from a blend of different grasses that he grows in his garden and finds in the mountains above. He often quotes, or seems to be quoting, poetry, sprinkling the conversation with vague aphorisms. Of the need to see the world, he says: “What if the lamp does not know where the fire began?”
From his perch on the rock, Akobirov says that he inherited his interest in botany from his father. As a young boy, he would accompany his father on trips to the mountains above Jafr to collect cuts from the wild apple trees, which his father would graft to trees in their garden.
“I loved that there was always fruit in our garden,” Akobirov says. “Guests would come, and my father would of course set fruit that he had grown in his garden in front of them.”
The Rasht Valley was a good place to grow up interested in orchards. The higher hills in the valley are barren and prone to erosion, but wild cherry and apple trees grow at lower elevations. It is not far from where researchers, using DNA sampling, have determined humans first domesticated the apple a few thousand years ago in what is now Kazakhstan.
More recently, as a part of the Soviet Union, while Tajikistan and all of Central Asia were net-importers of most other foodstuffs, the region became an important source of fruit. In the Rasht Valley, engineers installed enormous pumps that sent water from the base of the valley up into the hills to provide better irrigation. By the 1980s, Central Asia produced 35 percent of the entire Soviet Union’s fruit.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, Akobirov spent nearly ten years studying agricultural practices at a technical institute in southern Tajikistan and then at a university in Dushanbe, Tajikistan’s capital. At the end of the 1980s, after returning to Jafr, he decided to try to create a botanical garden there. Gorbachev was General Secretary of the Soviet Union, and his reforms inspired Akobirov. He petitioned local officials for the land, was granted it, and began to build his garden. “My purpose—the purpose of the garden was the same—was to bring back the trees from my grandfather’s time that had become very rare, that had vanished.” Akobirov scoured the mountainsides and went from village to village, gathering seeds and saplings that he deemed worthy of his garden.
In 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved. Within months, civil war broke out in Tajikistan. Some of the heaviest fighting was in the Rasht Valley, which was known as a stronghold of opposition to the government. Akobirov, who supported the democratic opposition forces, attempted to flee but was captured and spent eight months in prison. He was unable to return home after he was released and eventually went to Almaty, Kazakhstan, where he waited out the rest of the war, which ended in 1997.
The combination of Soviet collapse and civil war ravaged Tajikistan and left the economy in shambles. The amount of land dedicated to fruit cultivation dropped by 40 percent over the course of the war. Without access to other sources of fuel for heat in the winter, villagers resorted to cutting down fruit trees for kindling. Irrigation systems built under Soviet direction either fell into disrepair or were destroyed during the fighting, and orchards withered.
Akobirov returned from Kazakhstan to find his garden ruined. “The village headman had divided, sold it piece by piece to other families,” he says. “Our neighbors came and took some parts of it and planted them in their own gardens. They destroyed the garden.”
With GDP per capita in Tajikistan sitting below $200 after the war, many Tajik men began migrating to Russia for work. The Russian economy had rebounded from the fall of the Soviet Union and a 1998 financial crisis. Almost all of the first wave of Tajik migrants had been educated under the Soviet school system and spoke Russian. As citizens of the Commonwealth of Independent States, a loose association of many former Soviet Republics, they could enter Russia without visas. According to the World Bank, the remittances sent home by these migrants were the main source of poverty reduction in Tajikistan between 2003 and 2008.
Akobirov, however, stayed in Jafr, and decided to rebuild the garden. Thankfully, he says, “I have six sons, four brothers.” Akobirov’s voice slows as he remembers all that needed to be done. “Little by little, we gathered saplings, we gathered fuel, we remade the garden again from new.”
The garden looks haphazard, almost unkempt, belying the constant attention it receives. At the garden’s peripheries stand tall, thin trees. The largest resemble weeping willows, with long strands of leaves that tumble almost to the ground. A row of skinny poplars runs along one side. Densely planted cherry trees used to create a wall along another side. The cherries proved too bitter, so he and his sons hewed the trees back down to their stumps and grafted on new saplings.
Inside the garden, rose bushes stand next to stones that serve as platforms for clay vases and ancient shards of pottery. Toward the center, opposing rows of apple trees form a path that leads from the front of the garden to the back, away from the unfinished museum, past a small gazebo where Akobirov dries grasses for his tea, to a tree nursery that resembles a dense thicket of shrubs. A solitary, majestic white mulberry tree stands behind the nursery next to the guesthouse.
While Akobirov and his family rebuilt the garden in Jafr, Tajikistan’s dependence on the money sent home by labor migrants in Russia deepened. In 2013, remittances accounted for half of Tajikistan’s GDP.
The grounds that Akobirov and his sons have begun to clear for his park. The Rasht Valley is below. (Photo: Tim Brown)
Even two of Akobirov’s sons, who are now in their mid and late 20s, eventually traveled to Russia, lured by the prospect of jobs or possibly just the chance to escape toiling in the garden. One son returned after only a short while, but another, Ravshan, stayed for seven years. Akobirov hated that his son was gone: “It was a torment for me. Why? Because he lost the nature, the culture of home. His morals changed completely.” Ravshan finally returned this past winter, only after Akobirov forced his hand by having friends in Russia buy him a ticket. He doesn’t plan to let any of his children go again.
Akobirov knows the reasons people give for migrating—“because there isn’t work here, there aren’t factories, everything is mountains, people are unemployed”—but it still pains him to see generation after generation of young Tajiks pulled away from their homeland.
Akobirov becomes more agitated as he discusses migration. “They give away their youth,” he says of Tajik migrants. It is not just that the migrants come back different; he worries that their effort, too, is squandered building Russian cities rather than in improving conditions at home.
Over the past year and a half, falling oil prices and sanctions have caused the Russian economy to contract significantly, eroding the market for labor migrants. As the value of the ruble has fallen, remittances returned to Tajikistan have plummeted. In January, more than half of the respondents to an ongoing World Bank survey project, Listening2Tajikistan, stated that they were struggling to buy enough food.
“Living, striving, suffering in one’s own country,” asserts Akobirov, “that’s better than working like an innocent in a different country where they order you to work, they don’t give you money, the police trample all over human rights. That’s just a complete loss.” Akobirov would like the government of Tajikistan to repair strained relations with Kyrgyzstan, which is only a few hours away from Jafr by car, so that cross-border trade increases. He’d like more people in the valley to try to start small businesses—even the grass, he thinks, has medicinal purposes and, therefore, value. His botanical garden, he hopes, can continue to represent one example of a successful business.
Rising from the rock at last, Akobirov leads us down to his small, white Lada 4X4, a beat up and boxy relic of the Soviet Union. Along the way, he stops to show us a patch of land that he and his sons have recently begun to develop. A few apple and cherry trees are just beginning to blossom. When he’s finished, he tells us, this will be his park.
The world's largest private-sector coal company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Wednesday, thanks in large part to an expansion into Australia that left the company saddled with $10.1 billion in debt.
Peabody Energy thought it could afford the expansion, but when coal prices began diving in 2011—in part because of less demand from mills in China—the company found itself with heavy debt, and no immediate means to pay it off.
Other forces, including the Obama administration implementing tougher environmental rules, have also conspired to hurt the company, which was founded 132 years ago by a 24-year-old named Francis Peabody.
According to Reuters, the bankruptcy was less about the long-term survival of Peabody Energy—the company will continue to operate as usual—and more yet another sign of how badly the coal industry has been reeling.
Peabody is the fifth major coal company to file for bankruptcy in recent years, according to Bloomberg, though, in Peabody's case, spending $4 billion in 2011 to acquire Australian mining company MacArthur Coal proved to be spectacularly ill-timed.
“The outlook for coal players remains bleak,” Sandra Chow, a credit analyst who tracks coal producers at CreditSights Inc., told Bloomberg. “Any recovery remains a long way from here.”
The city of Nara, Japan, is notable for several reasons. It was the country's capital from 710 to 784. It has the abandoned Nara Dreamland amusement park. And the city is also home to around 1,200 freely roaming sika deer.
The presence of deer in Nara is attributed to a legend, in which Takemikazuchi, the God of Thunder, arrived at Mount Mikasa in Nara on a white deer. Explains photographer Yoki Ishii, who captured the above image: “Ever since, the deer at Nara have been regarded as divine messengers, and protected.”
The deer live in Nara Park but roam freely in the town. They’ve been known to stop traffic, and are happy to be hand-fed by tourists. But for Ishii, it was the unexpected sight of the deer early in the morning, without people, that prompted her to create a photo series of the animals .
“I imagined a scene of the world where human beings disappear and deer occupy the town," she says. Ishii's photo project, titled “Beyond the Border,” allowed her to “visualize my imagination by camera.”
Ishii prefers to photograph the deer early in the morning. For this particular image in her series, Ishii had anticipated the moment between the ice-cream cone and the deer licking his lips. Seeing the photograph, she says, she “imagined he was a metamorphosis from a man.”
One of the world’s smallest nations is also one of its most remarkable. Like most countries, it has its own form of government (a republic), a banking system and currency, a railroad, postal service, navy, tourist attractions and citizens. It even has its own space program. But it is unusual in one respect in that it doesn’t officially exist.
What is most curious about Molossia, is that it is to be found right here in the United States. Hidden away in Northern Nevada, Molossia exists as a sovereign nation, imagined and brought into life by its President, His Excellency, Kevin Baugh, who says, “What it lacks in size it makes up for in spirit!”
For Obscura Day 2016, I caught up with the President to find out more about the history of the world’s smallest sovereign nation, and what visitors might expect.
The bank at Molossia, with bank notes pinned to the outside wall.
Molossia is located near the Sierra Nevada mountains, and although only about half an hour’s drive from Reno, is firmly its own territory of just over 11 acres. The border to Molossia is marked with a sign stating that “beyond this point you are no longer in United States territory”. Like entering any other country, passport and custom laws apply, and the president will be only to glad to mark your passport with one of the rarest of stamps, “Republic of Molossia.”
Molossia is ostensibly a micronation, an independent country that isn’t recognized officially by other world governments. They live just off the page of geography books, but are very much real, physical places. Baugh explains how his own country had evolved over the past 39 years, split between northern Nevada and California.
It was, like most other micronations, a fun project, beginning when Baugh was a teenager in 1977. Back then, Molossia was a fantastical kingdom created with a friend. Now, he describes it as “a real place.”
A Republic of Molossia war bond.
Today, there are around 400 or so micronations of varying sizes and seriousness. They can range from loopholes in history, such as the Principality of Seborga in Italy, whose citizens took advantage of their town being omitted from any official documents during the unification of Italy in the 1800s to create their own independent nation. Others were created with specific political agendas in mind, such as the Conch Republic in Key West, organized to protest a proposed U.S. Border Patrol roadblock in the Keys. Some, such as the obscure Kingdom of Redonda in the Caribbean, date back to the 19th century, whilst new ones are created each year. They can be found on World War II anti-aircraft platforms in the North Sea (the Principality of Sealand) and in 18th century Czech mansions (the Other World Kingdom, a monarchy where women rule over men).
They all though share a common bond in rejecting the conventional, and in claiming sovereignty over actual land. They might not have a delegate at the UN, but they are very much physically real. There is even a micronation Olympics due to be hosted in 2016 by the Democratic Republic of Belia.
An invasion of Molossia's territory by the government of Kickassia.
The Molossia Trading Company, in the Republic's 'Red Square'.
But one of the most enduring and largest is Molossia. Like most micronations, a lot of Republic is imbued with a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor; whilst other nations set their currency against the gold standard, Molossia’s currency, the Valora, is linked in value to Pillsbury Cookie Dough (the current exchange rate of 1 Valora to $1 is 0.75).
Baugh likens the sensibility of the Molossian people (at present 31 citizens) to a form of political satire. For example, Molossia claims to have been at war with the now-defunct East Germany since 1983. The dispute lies over a 15 kilometer long territory off the coast of Cuba called Ernst Thälmann Island. During a state visit in the 1970s by Erich Honecker, Fidel Castro renamed what was then called Cayo Blanco del Sur in honor of Thälmann, leader of the German Communist Party until he was imprisoned by the Nazis and executed by the Gestapo in 1944. But when East Germany was dissolved, the island was never mentioned in any official documents, and is technically the last remaining part of the former German Democratic Republic. Baugh has been waging war on the uninhabited island, which still stretch of sand called GDR beach, and until it was toppled over by a hurricane in 1998, a statue of Ernst Thälmann.
The Molossia Post Office is the oldest building in Red Square, and is manned by Ralph the Postal Guy.
The handmade Supremo Soap of the Republic of Molassia.
Would the recent lift of travel restrictions between the U.S. and Cuba enable Molossians to visit the contested land? “We do plan to someday,” Baugh says, ”Of course that would likely end our never-ending war, which would be a major milestone in our nation's history—and something we may not wish to happen!”
The Molossia railroad.
But despite its eccentricities, Baugh’s project to create his own nation is very much an earnest one. “It started nearly 40 years ago, as an actual nation, not just something in the backyard. It is active day-to-day just like a normal country,” Baugh says. His ultimate aim is to become something similar to the Marshall Islands, a presidential republic in free association with the U.S. Micronations today are becoming more well known than ever, something Baugh credits to the internet. Molossia hosted Micro Con in 2015, “a meeting of Denizens of the Micro-national World”, with delegates from 17 other micro-nations gathering in Anaheim, raising public awareness of these somewhat idiosyncratic and often delightful small whimsical countries.
Miguel de Palomares was one of the first Catholic priests to come to Mexico, back in the beginning of the 16th century. Within three years of taking over Mexico City, the Spanish had built the country’s first Catholic cathedral, right on the site of an Aztec temple. When de Palomeres died, in 1542, that’s where he was buried, underneath a slab of heavy stone.
Recently, the Associated Press reports, when a construction crew was digging holes for lamp posts, they came upon that slab. About a century after it was first built, the cathedral had been torn down, to make way for a newer, bigger one, and the site’s old purpose more or less forgotten. At one point, another crew drilled a hole directly down into de Palomeres’ grave. The slab covering it has a large hole drilled into it.
The Spanish who conquered Mexico reused Aztec sites—perhaps for the symbolism of building their churches where Aztec temple once stood, perhaps, the AP suggests, out of practicality. The walls and floors of those old temples were well made.
Every day, we highlight one newly found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com.
