I, along with several onlookers, says a friend, recently, observed a swallow enter an exhaust-pipe in the roof of one of the Grand Trunk workshops, evidently for the purpose of building her nest in it. Unfortunately for her, she could not get out again; and her partner entered the pipe also, and backed out again with a feather in his beak. Three times did he ineffectually attempt to rescue his mate. When work was resumed in the afternoon, the swallow was blown out of the pipe by the steam, and lay dead on the roof of the building, the survivor standing by and showing signs of deep distress.

— James Baird McClure, ed., Entertaining Anecdotes From Every Available Source, 1879

The following is related by an eminent naturalist: ‘A young lady was sitting in a room adjoining a poultry yard, where chickens, ducks and geese were disporting themselves. A drake came in, approached the lady, seized the bottom of her dress with his beak, and pulled it vigorously. Feeling startled, she repulsed him with her hand. The bird still persisted. Somewhat astonished, she paid some attention to this unaccountable pantomime, and discovered that the drake wished to drag her out of doors. She got up, and he waddled out quietly before her. More and more surprised, she followed him, and he conducted her to the side of a pond where she perceived a duck with its head caught in the opening of a sluice. She hastened to release the poor creature and restored it to the drake, who by loud quackings and beating of his wings testified his joy at the deliverance of his companion.’

— Ballou’s Monthly Magazine, May 1870

Born in 1867 to a poor family in the Italian Piedmont, Jacques Inaudi began life as a shepherd but soon discovered a prodigious talent for calculation, and soon he was giving exhibitions in large cities.

Camille Flammarion wrote, “He was asked, for example, how many minutes have elapsed since the birth of Jesus Christ, or what the population would be if the dead from the past ten centuries were resurrected, or the square root of a number of twelve digits, and he gave the response accurately and in two or three minutes — while amusing himself with another activity.”

“The subtraction of numbers consisting of twenty-four figures is an easy matter for him,” reported Scientific American. “Problems for which logarithm tables are generally used he solves mentally with wonderful precision.”

Unlike other prodigies, Inaudi did not visualize his work. “I hear the figures,” he told Alfred Binet, “and it is my ear which retains them; I hear them resounding after I have repeated them, and this interior sensation remains for a long time.”

Inaudi’s father had approached Flammarion hoping that his son could be educated toward a career in astronomy. “It had been an error, whichever way one looked at it,” Flammarion wrote 10 years later. “In science, one cannot make use of his methods, of his adapted formulae, which are tailored to mental calculation.” It was just as well: “Regarding his financial position, he now has, as a result of the curiosity his ability has aroused, a salary, which is over three times that of the Director of the Paris Observatory.”

Telemann’s Gulliver Suite has an alarming score — the note values in the chaconne appear “Lilliputian” and in the gigue “Brobdingnagian.”

That’s a joke: The chaconne is notated in “3/32” time and the gigue in “24/1.” If they’re played at the correct tempos they resolve into normal-sounding dances in 3/4 and 9/8.

In 1932 the Lincoln Electric Company held an essay contest on the virtues of arc welding. The top three entrants received “what are believed to be the most unusual check ever issued”:

These checks, for $7500, $3500 and $1500 respectively, were ‘written’ on 1/8-inch sheet steel. Each check was 24 inches long and 10 inches wide. All information including date, amount, payee and name of bank was arc welded, welding operators in the Lincoln plant relieving the treasurer’s office of this detail.

The company president, J.C. Lincoln, signed each check by arc welding, and the prize winners endorsed them the same way. “When the panels of steel are presented to banks and paid, they will be returned to the bank of issue, where guards will cancel them with the aid of a submachine gun.”

(Steel, June 13, 1932)

The world’s shortest street is Ebenezer Place, in Wick, Caithness, Scotland. It’s 6 feet 9 inches long, just enough to accommodate a single door at the end of Mackays Hotel.

The longest street, arguably, is the Pan-American Highway, which extends some 29,800 miles from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to Ushuaia, Argentina. It’s 23,310,222 times as long as Ebenezer Place.

The world’s narrowest street is the Spreuerhofstraße in Reutlingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany, which varies between 19.7 inches and 12.2 inches in width.

Avenida 9 de Julio, in Buenos Aires, by contrast, is a full city block wide, with up to seven traffic lanes in each direction.

San Francisco’s Lombard Street may be the world’s most crooked, with eight hairpin turns in a single block.

There must be many contenders for the world’s straightest street; the straightest railway line cuts like an arrow across 297 miles of Australia’s Nullarbor Plain. Jerome Meyer calls this “undoubtedly the world’s most boring trip.”

(Images: Wikimedia Commons)

Otto Funk left New York City on June 28, 1928. He arrived in San Francisco on July 25, 1929. In the interval he walked 4,165 miles, fiddling every step of the way.

Oh, and defying death. “While traveling through Arizona Funk was struck by a rattlesnake,” reported the Los Angeles Times. “Unperturbed, the aged fiddler slew the snake, snipped off the rattles as souvenirs, cut open the wound and sucked out the blood and poison. He continued walking until he came to a doctor’s office.”

“I have seen God’s country, every foot of it that I walked over,” Funk said afterward. “You can’t see it right from a car or a train. Sole leather express is the only way.”