“Armless Wonder” Charles B. Tripp and “Legless Wonder” Eli Bowen share a bicycle, from a publicity shoot in the late 19th century.
Each man spent more than 50 years in the circus world — Tripp could write, paint, cut paper, and do carpentry with his feet, and Bowen trained himself to tumble and do stunts on a long pole. But apart from this photo, there’s no clear evidence that the two worked as a team.
On April 12, 2006, numismatist Scott A. Travers bought a pretzel in Times Square and paid for it partly with a 1914 penny worth $350.
In the same week he spent a 1908 penny worth $200 and a 1909 one worth more than $1,000. “I’m planting a seed,” he told the New York Times, “and I hope that a new generation of people will come to appreciate the history that coins represent.”
In the weeks that followed, seven people came forward claiming to have found the $1,000 penny. “The coins were real, but none of them was mine,” Travers said.
In January 2009, the New York Daily News reported that all three of Travers’ coins were still unclaimed. That doesn’t mean they’re still circulating — but they might be.
In 1740, Norwegian pastor Hans Egede published an account of an extraordinary encounter during one of his missionary voyages to Greenland:
Anno 1734, July. On the 6th. appeared a very terrible sea-monster, which raised itself so high above the water, that its head reached above our main-top. It had a long sharp snout, and blew like a whale, had broad, large flappers, and the body was, as it were, covered with a hard skin, and it was very wrinkled and uneven on its skin; moreover on the lower part it was formed like a snake, and when it went under water again, it cast itself backwards and in so doing it raised its tail above the water, a whole ship-length from its body.
He gives a similar account in A Description of Greenland, published five years later. Eric Pontoppidan, who became bishop of Bergen in 1746, wrote in his Natural History of Norway, “I have hardly spoke with any intelligent person born in manor of Nordland, who was not able to give a pertinent answer, and strong assurances the existence of this fish; and some of our north traders, that come here every year their merchandise, think it a very strange question, when they are seriously asked whether there be any such creature; they think it as ridiculous as if the question was put them whether there be such fish as eel or cod.”
Memorable corrections in the New York Times:
“A caption, showing a clown sitting in a subway car, misstated the location. It was an E train in the Lexington Avenue station in Manhattan, not a G train in the Bergen Street station in Brooklyn.” (Feb. 20, 2000)
In December 1937, Jesse Owens outran a racehorse over a hundred-yard course in Havana. That’s an old carnival trick — a man can reach his top speed much more quickly than a horse.
But the following September, Olympic hurdler Forrest Towns outpaced a prize cavalry horse over a 120-yard course of five hurdles in Fort Oglethorpe, Ga.
Towns won by a nose in 13 seconds. “I’ll take two-footed racers in the future,” he said.
From The Strand, January 1910:
This is a portrait of a dog living at Les Praz, near Chamonix, who, in the summer of 1908, distinguished himself by climbing Mont Blanc. His master, a workman, was employed on repairs to the observatory on the summit, and one morning, after having been seen by his owner’s wife at eight o’clock, the dog disappeared. He must have rapidly tracked his master by scent, for he arrived at the summit at half-past two in the afternoon, having accomplished in six and a half hours what usually is estimated to require thirteen hours for a man. The presence of some tourists at the top ensured this fact being properly attested, and Mont Blanc, as the dog is now called, is quite a hero in his village. — Miss Morgan, Hotel Masson, Veytaux, Montreux, Switzerland
See The Dog of Helvellyn.
Playing cards were used as currency in early Canada. In 1685 the intendant of the French garrison in Quebec found that he had no money to pay his troops, “and not knowing to what saint to make my vows, the idea occurred to me of putting in circulation notes made of cards, each cut into four pieces; and I have issued an ordinance commanding the inhabitants to receive them in payment.”
This worked surprisingly well, so when funds ran short the following year they tried it again. The system continued intermittently for 70 years, collapsing finally only with the chaos of the Seven Years’ War.
In chess, a pawn may be captured “in passing” — when a pawn advances two squares from its initial position, it may be captured by an adjacent pawn as if it had advanced only one square.
This can lead to a curious state of affairs:
From this position White plays 1. Bg2+ and declares checkmate. Black says “Au contraire,” plays 1. … d5, and announces checkmate himself. White shakes his head, plays 2. cxd6 e.p., and reasserts his own claim:
Black claims that this last move is absurd. He says the game ended when he advanced his pawn to d5. But White argues that the pawn never reached d5 — in principle it was captured on d6, and thus could not stop White’s original mate.
So who won the game? It would seem to be a matter of opinion!
From Heinrich Fraenkel, Adventure in Chess, 1951.
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.