J.G. Christopher, of Minneapolis, Minn., is the possessor of a canary bird, the voice of which has been developed in a peculiarly painstaken manner, so that now this ‘educated’ songster can successfully render the well-known air, ‘A Life on the Ocean Wave.’ The bird will commence to warble like any other of these pets, and after uttering a few notes will immediately strike into the tune, and when its voice has attained full height the above tune will be sung entire, and in a manner that sounds singularly melodious and attractive, literally setting to note its natural vocal powers. This was only achieved after the most diligent and patient attention. As soon as the bird was old enough to pick up a living it was put in a room apart from all others, and a music-box also placed in the apartment and kept perpetually going, so that this singular pupil had nothing to learn from but that. After four months of such apprentice-ship, the owner was rewarded by hearing his little favorite render ‘A Life on the Ocean Wave’ as naturally and perfectly as if that was the song of its ancestors.

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

From Strand, January 1898: When match manufacturers S.I. Moreland and Sons challenged their customers to create “the greatest novelty of any sort that can be made with not less than 1,000 of our match-boxes,” G.W. Roberts of Birmingham submitted a full-size piano composed of 3,776 matchboxes and 5 pounds of glue.

Among other entries, F. Marshall’s 10-foot-6-inch model of the Forth Bridge is a marvel of engineering — other than 3,000 matchboxes, “no material whatever is used in the construction of the bridge — not even in the stays. When completed it stood the test of 42 lb. weight in the centre of either arch. I never saw the original bridge, but got an idea of it from a lithograph in a railway guide.”

And above is a model of Nelson’s ship Victory passing a large lighthouse, by Mr. Grubb of Atherstone, who worked three hours a night for five months. The ship is 3 feet 6 inches long and the lighthouse 5 feet 2 inches high.

The Strand also reports that a Lewis Sheldon constructed a double-masted turret ship-of-war 8 feet 3 inches long that carried 15 guns and six lifeboats, all made out of matchboxes. Sadly, they don’t include a photo.

The rocky island of Märket lies in the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Finland. When the Finns put a lighthouse on it in 1885, they unwittingly put it on Swedish territory.

This created a problem: Without moving the lighthouse or altering the coastline, the parties had to find a way to reapportion the island equitably according to their agreement.

The solution was to draw a reverse S on the map: Sweden grants Finland the lighthouse, but it gains a corresponding incursion into Finnish territory, so the island’s balance is restored.

It must be tricky to play croquet, though.

Somewhat related: The Tehachapi Loop.

On Dec. 8, 1942, American forces in Kienow, China, spotted an unidentified plane heading toward them on a beeline from Formosa. Pilots Bob Scott and Johnny Hampshire approached it and discovered it was an old American P-40B Tomahawk bearing an insignia that hadn’t been seen since Pearl Harbor. The pilot would not identify himself.

Fearing a trick by the Japanese, Scott and Hampshire fired briefly on the plane, but it sought neither to evade them nor to counterattack. Scott moved to the plane’s farther side and saw that it had been badly damaged before they came upon it — the canopy had been shot away, the right aileron was gone, and part of the wing was missing. The pilot’s head was slumped on his chest. Strangest of all, the P-40B had no landing gear — the wheel wells were empty.

Scott and Hampshire lost the plane in a cloud bank and then saw it crash in a rice paddy below. Who was the pilot, and where had the strange plane come from? No one knows, but after years of research Scott evolved a conjecture that it had been assembled by a small group of Air Corps personnel who had retreated from Bataan to Corregidor and then to Mindanao. If this is true it must have flown more than 1,000 miles through enemy airspace to reach China.

Japanese records confirm that there was an American P-40 over Formosa on Dec. 8, 1942, but where it came from, where it was headed, and indeed how it even got airborne remain a mystery.

These have been in my notes for years — I can’t conclusively disprove them, but I have my doubts:

• In 1930 four Germans bailed out of a glider inside a thundercloud over the Rhön Mountains, were carried upward by their parachutes into a region of supercooled vapor, and froze to death.
• The monument to Jose Olmedo in Guyaquil, Ecuador, is actually a secondhand statue of Lord Byron, substituted because the town had no money. (Also: Cuzco, Peru, is rumored to have a statue of Chief Powhatan rather than Atahualpa.)
• A surprising number of sources claim that Mississippi spent a fifth of its revenues on artificial limbs in 1866.
• In 1902 Germany manufactured a “Goethemobile” in honor of the poet. (I really hope this is true.)

Debunk/rebunk/semi-unbunk as you please.

George Hanger, an eccentric friend of George IV, once wagered £500 that 20 turkeys could outrace 20 geese over a course of 10 miles. The turkeys held a lead of as much as two miles for the first three hours, but toward evening they wandered off the road and began to roost.

“In the mean time, the geese came waddling on, and in a short time passed the turkey party, who were all busy in the trees dislodging their obstinate birds; but as to any further progress, it was found impossible, and the geese were declared the winners.”

In 1866, desperate for cash after a fire destroyed his hardware store in Placerville, Calif., Henry C. Hooker bought 500 turkeys and drove them over the Sierra Mountains to Carson City, Nev., where he sold them at a great profit to silver miners. (The turkeys took flight while descending a particularly steep precipice: “As I saw them take wing and race away through the air I had the most indescribable feeling of my life. I thought here is good-bye turkeys!”) He used the money to establish a new life as an Arizona stockman.

Architect Stedman Whitwell thought it illogical and confusing that different towns sometimes have the same name. He suggested assigning a unique name to each location based on its latitude and longitude. He published this table in the New Harmony, Ind., Gazette in 1826:

Insert an S to indicate south latitude and a V for west longitude; omit them for north and east. Thus New Harmony (38°11’N, 87°55’W) would be rechristened Ipba Veinul; New York would be Otke Notive, Washington D.C. Feili Neivul, and Pittsburgh Otfu Veitoup.

What these names lack in poetry they make up in utility: a traveler given the name of a town can immediately infer its location. Unfortunately, Whitwell’s scheme never caught on — and today the United States has 28 Springfields, 29 Clintons, and 30 Franklins.

From the London Graphic, July 19, 1879, a sketch and statement by Capt. Davison of the steamship Kiushiu maru:

Saturday, April 5, at 11.15 a.m., Cape Satano [Japan] distant about nine miles, the chief officer and myself observed a whale jump clear out of the sea, about a quarter of a mile away. Shortly after it leaped out again, when I saw that there was something attached to it. Got glasses, and on the next leap distinctly saw something holding on to the belly of the whale. The latter gave one more spring clear of the water, and myself and chief then observed what appeared to be a large creature of the snake species rear itself about thirty feet out of the water. It appeared to be about the thickness of a junk’s mast, and after standing about ten seconds in an erect position, it descended into the water, the upper end going first. With my glasses I made out the colour of the beast to resemble that of a pilot fish.

Davison’s statement was countersigned by his chief officer, Mr. McKechnie. This is the third account I know of a fight between a whale and a sea serpent; the others occurred in 1818 and 1875. The whales seem to lose every time. I’m going to award the crown to the serpents and maybe we can avoid any further hostilities.

The accompanying illustrations give the reader a fair idea of the results of a peculiar wreck that occurred on the Northern Division of the N.Y., N.H. & H. Railroad near Worcester, Mass., on February 2nd [1898]. Engine 823, a 50-ton freight locomotive, was pushing a snow plow at a high rate of speed when it collided with Engine 684, an eight-wheel locomotive of lighter weight, which was also running at a high speed, and pulling a milk train.

Five men who were in the snow plow jumped into a bank of snow and were uninjured. … Another strange feature of this peculiar wreck is that just previous to the collision the men in the snow plow discovered that the knob was off the door and they were locked in. They finally contrived to open the door, and on looking out saw the milk train coming. The snow plow was completely demolished. The wreck was caused by a telegraph operator going to sleep and allowing the snow plow to pass his station when he had orders to hold it.

— Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine, March 1898

In 1903, a prisoner named Will West arrived at Leavenworth. The record clerk took the photographs above and, thinking he remembered West, asked whether he had been there before. West said no.

The clerk took some measurements, went to the file, and produced this record, bearing the name William West:

Amazed, the prisoner said, “That’s my picture, but I don’t know where you got it, for I know I have never been here before.”

Incredibly, this was true. A different William West had been serving a life sentence at Leavenworth since 1901, and the new prisoner had the same name, face, and measurements.

The case became a strong argument in favor of the new science of fingerprinting.