The ‘angry tree,’ a woody plant which grows from ten to twenty-five feet high, and was formerly supposed to exist only in Nevada, has recently been found both in eastern California, and in Arizona, says the Omaha Bee. If disturbed, this peculiar tree shows signs of vexation, even to ruffling up of its leaves like the hair on an angry cat, and giving forth an unpleasant, and sickening odor.
— Miscellaneous Notes and Queries, 1892
Amongst the curiosities of his day, Walchius mentions an iron spider of great ingenuity. In size it did not exceed the ordinary inhabitants of our houses, and could creep or climb with any of them, wanting none of their powers, except, of which nothing is said, the formation of the web. Various writers of credit, particularly Kircher, Porta, and Bishop Wilkins, relate that the celebrated Regiomontanus, (John Muller,) of Nuremberg, ventured a loftier flight of art. He is said to have constructed a self-moving wooden eagle, which descended toward the Emperor Maximilian as he approached the gates of Nuremberg, saluted him, and hovered over his person as he entered the town. This philosopher, according to the same authorities, also produced an iron fly, which would start from his hand at table, and after flying round to each of the guests, returned as if wearied, to the protection of his master.
— Cabinet of Curiosities, Natural, Artificial, and Historical, 1822
A son of William the Conqueror, William II of England is remembered mostly for the curious manner of his death. In August 1100, William organized a hunting expedition in the New Forest. In sharing arrows with the Anglo-Norman nobleman Walter Tirel, he said, “It is only right that the sharpest be given to the man who knows how to shoot the deadliest shots.” That was tempting fate, apparently: The king did not return after the hunt, and his body was discovered the next day with an arrow piercing his lungs.
Walter fled to France, but chroniclers generally don’t consider him a murderer. He was a skilled bowman, unlikely to fire impetuously, and the abbot who sheltered him in France heard him swear repeatedly that he had not been in the part of the forest where the king was hunting. On the other hand, William’s brother Henry was also in the hunting party, and he stood to gain (and did) from William’s death.
So what really happened? We’ll never know.
Mr. Hardwood had two daughters by his first wife, the eldest of whom was married to John Coshick: this Coshick had a daughter by his first wife whom old Hardwood married, and by her had a son; therefore John Coshick’s second wife could say:
My father is my son, and I’m my mother’s mother;
My sister is my daughter, and I’m grandmother to my brother.
— The Cabinet of Curiosities, 1824
In 1827, Keswick stonemason Joseph Richardson noticed that certain rocks in Britain’s Lake District gave a pure, ringing tone. After 13 years of effort he produced a lithophone, an arrangement of tiered rocks that one struck with mallets, and he took it on a three-year concert tour through Northern England.
It’s not clear what it sounded like: Richardson and his three sons played Mozart, Beethoven, and Handel, reportedly achieving different effects by striking the stones in different ways. An 1846 newspaper account says the tone varied from the warble of a lark to the bass of a funeral bell. Richardson called it “the resource of a shipwrecked Mozart.”
By 1848 they were performing for the queen and traveling to France, Germany, and Italy. On the eve of a trip to America, though, the youngest son died of pneumonia, and the band retired. Richardson’s great-grandson donated the instrument to a museum in 1917.
A singular product of vitreous lavas is called in Hawaii ‘Pélé’s Hair.’ This silky, filamentous substance is described by Miss Gordon Cummings, in her latest book of travels, as ‘of a nigh olive-green or yellowish-brown color, and glossy, like the byssus of certain shells, but very brittle to handle.’ It is said to be produced by the wind catching the fiery spray thrown up from the crater, but the extreme fineness of its texture seems rather to suggest the action of escaping vapors within the lava itself. This view is strengthened by the circumstance that a perfect counterfeit is fabricated at ironworks by passing jets of steam through molten slag, when a material resembling vitreous cotton-wool, admirably adapted for packing fragile articles, results. The chief seat of its natural production is the great Hawaiian crater of Kilauea (personified as the fire-goddess Pélé), and it is found well adapted for nest-building by some inventive Hawaiian birds.
— Edinburgh Review, quoted in Bizarre Notes & Queries, May 1886
Here’s an odd, little-cited detail in the mystery of the Mary Celeste, the American brigantine found sailing unmanned in the Atlantic in 1872. John Austin, the marine surveyor who inspected the ship for the board of inquiry, reported:
On approaching the vessel I found on the bow, between two and three feet above the water line on the port side, a long narrow strip at the edge of a plank under the cat-head cut away to the depth of about three eighths of an inch and about one and a quarter inches wide for a length of about six to seven feet. This injury had been sustained recently and could not have been effected by weather or collision and was apparently done by a sharp cutting instrument continuously applied through the whole length of the injury. I found on the starboard bow but a little further from the stern of the vessel a precisely similar injury at the edge of a plank but perhaps an eighth or tenth of an inch wider, which in my opinion had been effected simultaneously and by the same means and not otherwise.
“As the Official Surveyor for this Court of Inquiry,” Austin concluded, “I must profess intense bewilderment as to the tool used to cut such marks and why they would have been cut in any vessel at these locations.”
So, what, was she attacked by sea monsters? Who knows?
In the spring of 1819, a little girl, about eleven years old, appeared at the Royal Exchange, and made some very extraordinary calculations. Several gentlemen asked her some intricate question, and while they were calculating it, she gave a correct answer. She was asked to multiply 525,600 by 250; which she answered in one minute, 131,400,000. A second question was, how many minutes there are in forty-two years? Answer, 22,075,200. She was next desired to multiply 525,000 by 450; answer, 236,250,000. Several other questions, equally difficult, were put, all of which she answered very correctly. It is remarkable, that the girl could neither read nor write. She stated herself to be the daughter of a weaver, living at Mile-End, New Town, of the name of Heywood.
— Cabinet of Curiosities, Natural, Artificial, and Historical, 1822
On Nov. 12, 1717, German inventor Johann Bessler invited a committee of witnesses to a special room in the ducal castle at Weissenstein. In the room was a large wheel, 12 feet in diameter and 14 inches thick. At a push from Bessler it accelerated to about 26 rpm and maintained that speed. Under the committee’s supervision, the windows were secured and the Landgrave’s own seal was put on the door. The room was reopened twice in 54 days, and on both occasions the wheel was still spinning.
Bessler demanded 20,000 pounds for his secret. (He said the weights inside the wheel “could never obtain equilibrium.”) But while the Royal Society was debating whether to pay him, Bessler discovered one witness examining the axle, accused him of duplicity, and angrily smashed the wheel. He vanished into obscurity after that, dying in 1745.
The demonstration has never been explained. If Bessler had a secret, he took it with him.
The border between Delaware and Pennsylvania is a perfect curve.
It’s the arc of a circle centered on the cupola of the courthouse at New Castle.
It’s the only such boundary in the territorial United States.