The first eyewitness account of the Wright brothers’ flying machine appeared in the journal Gleanings in Bee Culture.
The editor, beekeeper Amos I. Root, had visited the Wrights in 1904 at Huffman Prairie, Ohio, where they were working to perfect the machine after its historic first flight the preceding December.
Root sent copies of his article to Scientific American — but they were dismissed.
Locked between India and Tibet, the tiny kingdom of Bhutan has a curious claim to distinction: its postage stamps.
In 1951 American entrepreneur Burt Todd became one of the first Westerners to visit the Himalayan nation, and he devised the stamp program explicitly to help expand the country’s economic base.
There followed two decades of increasingly bizarre postage: 3-D stamps; stamps scented like roses; stamps with textured brushstrokes and bas-reliefs; stamps printed on stainless steel, silk, and extruded plastic; even “talking stamps,” discs of grooved rubber that can be played on a phonograph (one plays the national anthem, another contains a fleeting spoken history of Bhutan).
Todd lost his contract in 1974, and the country moved into more conventional postage. But the tradition isn’t entirely over: In 2008, Todd’s daughter arranged the world’s first CD-ROM postage stamp — it plays a video recounting the history of Bhutanese kings.
Seeing the reversible word ‘chump’ among your ‘Curiosities,’ I am sending you a name, ‘W.H. Hill,’ which, when written in the style shown, reads the same when reversed. Surely this is the only name possessing so convenient a peculiarity.
— B.R. Bligh, in Strand, September 1908
Nancy Luce is remembered as a terrible poet, but her life was so sad that it’s hard to laugh. Described by one writer as “chicken mad,” Luce spent 76 years on Martha’s Vineyard, cultivating her birds as personal friends and selling poems about them to tourists. The poems reveal such misery that they can be moving despite their strangeness:
Poor little heart, she was sick one week
With froth in her throat,
Then 10 days and grew worse, with dropsy in her stomach,
I kept getting up nights to see how she was. …
Poor little Ada Queetie’s last sickness and death
Destroyed my health at an unknown rate,
With my heart breaking and weeping,
I kept the fire going night after night,
To keep poor little dear warm.
This was real pain, but visitors saw only an eccentric old woman. She died in 1890, unlamented — and tourists today leave plastic chickens on her grave.
Binary Arts devised this wonderful three-dimensional illusion for the third Gathering for Gardner in 1998.
You can download a dragon of your own here.
On the first of December, 1787, some fishermen fishing in the river Thames, near Poplar, with much difficulty drew into their boat a shark, yet alive, but apparently very sickly; it was taken on shore, and, being opened, in its belly were found a silver watch, a metal chain, and a cornelian seal, together with several pieces of gold-lace, supposed to have belonged to some young gentleman, who was unfortunate enough to have fallen overboard; but that the body and other parts had either been digested, or otherwise voided; but the watch and gold-lace not being able to pass through it, the fish had thereby become sickly, and would in all probability very soon have died. The watch had the name of ‘Henry Watson, London, No. 1369,’ and the works were very much impaired. On these circumstances being made public, Mr. Henry Watson, watchmaker, in Soreditch, recollected that about two years ago he sold the watch to Mr. Ephraim Thompson, of Whitechapel, as a present to his son, on going out his first voyage, on board the ship Polly, Capt. Vane, bound to Coast and Bay: about three leagues off Falmouth, by a sudden heel of the vessel, during a squall, Master Thompson fell overboard, and was no more seen.–The news of his being drowned soon after came to knowledge of his friends, who little thought of hearing any more concerning him.
— The Kaleidoscope, Jan. 22, 1822
See The Shark Arm Affair.
Charles Dickens slept with his head pointing north. “He maintained that he could not sleep with it in any other position,” noted journalist Eliza Lynn Linton.
Ben Jonson was buried upright in Westminster Abbey — it’s not clear whether this was his request or required by circumstance.
And in 1800 Maj. Peter Labelliere was buried on Box Hill head down, declaring that as “the world was turned topsy-turvy, it was fit that he should be so buried that he might be right at last.”
By the levee of the Missouri River in Fort Benton, Mont., stands a bronze statue of a vigilant sheepdog. It commemorates Shep, a dog who appeared at the town’s Great Northern Railway Station one day in August 1936 while workers were loading a casket onto a train. The dog watched the train depart, then turned and trotted off down the tracks.
Thereafter, for five and a half years, Shep would appear on the platform to meet four trains a day, scanning the passengers who alighted and then retiring under the platform. His master still had not returned when in January 1942 he slipped on the rails and disappeared under an engine.
A cynic might wonder how much of this story is tied up in Montana tourism. But plausible it certainly is: Essentially the same thing had happened 12 years earlier in Japan.
In 1943, writer Cleve Cartmill proposed a story about a futuristic bomb to John W. Campbell, the editor of Astounding Science Fiction. Campbell liked the idea and gave him some background material on fission devices and uranium-235.
The story, “Deadline,” ran in Campbell’s March 1944 issue — and shortly brought a visit from the FBI. Apparently the technical details in Cartmill’s story had some uncomfortable resonances with the top-secret Manhattan Project, then under way at Los Alamos:
Two cast-iron hemispheres, clamped over the orange segments of cadmium alloy. And the fuse–I see it is in–a tiny can of cadmium in a beryllium holder and a small explosive powerful enough to shatter the cadmium walls. Then–correct me if I’m wrong, will you?–the powdered uranium oxide runs together in the central cavity. The radium shoots neutrons into this mass–and the U-235 takes over from there. Right?
Campbell explained that he’d studied atomic physics at MIT and had drawn the research from unclassified journals. In the end the authorities were satisfied — but they asked him not to publish any more stories on nuclear technology.
See The War Ahead and Five Down.
From The Strand Magazine, August 1909:
The above photographs show front and side views of a fancy dress representing ‘Half-an’-‘Arf’. The costume was prepared in three evenings during spare time, and the dress suit was in no way altered or damaged, all the tramp-side garments being superstructed. There is a nine days’ beard on one side of the face, the hair being combed with isinglass to make it stand up. The face and arm are stained and made up with powders to look exactly like a natural tramp’s complexion minus the dirt. The boot is an old hand-sewn one, made up with painted and stained brown paper, with a hole in front from which a piece of tow protruded. The whole costume cost about a shilling to produce, and was a great success at more than one dance.