A Navy collier during World War I, the U.S.S. Cyclops put to sea from Rio de Janeiro on Feb. 16, 1918, touched at Barbados on March 3 and 4, and was never heard from again. She took 306 crew and passengers with her.
In 1968, a diver off Norfolk, Va., reported finding the wreck of an old ship in about 300 feet of water. When shown a picture of the Cyclops he said he was convinced it was the same ship. But, strangely, even that wreck disappeared — further expeditions failed to find anything.
Cleveland is misspelled. The Ohio city was named for Gen. Moses Cleaveland, the leader of the crew that surveyed the local territory. But when the town’s first newspaper, The Cleaveland Advertiser, was established in 1831, the editor found that its title was too long by one letter — so he unceremoniously dropped an A.
When Thomas Edison died in 1931, his last breath was caught in a test tube by his son Charles.
He was convinced to do it by Henry Ford, who believed that a person’s dying breath contained his soul.
You can see it for yourself — the test tube is on display at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich.
“I must write something of myself today. I can look back and see plainly all my journey here. The day may come when I shall be laid away in the grave, and my boys — the dear boys I have loved so well — will look over my trunk and find this manuscript; they will then perhaps believe I am not crazy. I know Dr. Steeves tells them I am a lunatic yet. They will weep over this, as they think of the mother they have left here to die among strangers.”
— Mary Huestis Pengilly, Diary Written in the Provincial Lunatic Asylum, 1885
This disk was found in the ruins of a Minoan palace in 1908.
It’s an archaeological mystery. No one knows where it came from, what it was used for, or the language or meaning of its inscription. It’s known simply as the Phaistos disk.
In July 1808, 100 kilometers east of the Montana Rockies, Lewis and Clark wrote, “We have repeatedly heard a strange noise coming from the mountains. … It is heard at different periods of the day and night … and consists of one stroke only, or of five or six discharges in quick succession. It is loud and resembles precisely the sound of a six-pound piece of ordnance.”
They were leading the first overland expedition of the United States territory, so it wasn’t a cannon. The sounds have never been explained.
In 1658, French admiral Etienne de Flacourt reported a curious legend among the natives of Madagascar. They described a creature, called tretretretre, that was as big as a 2-year-old calf, with a round head, a human face and ears, an ape’s feet, a short tail, and frizzy fur.
That description matched nothing on the island, so the Europeans dismissed it. But since then, fossils have been unearthed of a giant lemur, Megaladapis, that may explain the myth. It had been thought to become extinct thousands of years ago, but now zoologists think it may have survived into the sixth century, when humans came to the island, and entered their folklore.
A few Megaladapis may even have survived into the 16th or 17th century, so perhaps Flacourt was witnessing the birth of a legend.
Kamikaze planes had no landing gear.
The Bavarian village of Oberammergau has a special deal with God. While the bubonic plague was ravaging Europe, the town’s citizens vowed that if they were spared they would perform a play every 10 years depicting the life and death of Jesus.
God, apparently, accepted. The death rate among adults rose from 1 in October 1632 to 20 in March 1633, but then it dropped again to 1 in July 1633.
True to their word, the villagers staged a play in 1634, and they’ve done so every 10 years ever since.
Excerpts from student exams in the 19th century:
— From Mark Twain, “English as She Is Taught: Being Genuine Answers to Examination Questions in Our Public Schools,” 1887
