In 1958 the U.S. Air Force mistakenly dropped an atom bomb on South Carolina. A B-47 was over Mars Bluff when navigator Bruce Kulka accidentally released the device. Its fissionable core was stowed elsewhere, fortunately, but the bomb still contained thousands of pounds of conventional explosives. It fell 15,000 feet into the home of William Gregg, where it created a mushroom cloud and left a 75-foot crater.
Presumably they raised his insurance rates.
1861 came with its own entertainment: Earth passed through the tail of a brilliant comet. Observers watched streams of material converge toward its distant nucleus, and by day its gas and dust obscured even the sun.
Sorry you missed it? Sit tight — it’ll be back in 200 years.
Every year, the citizens of Mount Horeb, Wis., celebrate the achievements of Elm Farm Ollie, a courageous Guernsey who in 1930 became the first cow to fly in an airplane.
Festivities include an opera called Madame Butterfat.
See For the Record.
What does this say?
Read it again.
An intelligent and very respectable gentleman, named Ebenezer Snell, who is still living, at the age of eighty and upwards, was in a corn-field with a negro on the 17th of June, 1776, in the township of Cumminton, Mass., one hundred and twenty-nine miles west of Bunker Hill by the course of the road, and at least one hundred in an air-line. Some time during the day, the negro was lying on the ground, and remarked to Ebenezer that there was war somewhere, for he could distinctly hear the cannonading. Ebenezer put his ear to the ground, and also heard the firing distinctly, and for a considerable time. He remembers the fact, which made a deep impression on his mind, as plainly as though it was yesterday.
— Charles Bombaugh, Facts and Fancies for the Curious From the Harvest-Fields of Literature, 1860
Lightning-prints are appearances sometimes found on the skin of men or animals that are struck by lightning, and are currently believed to be photographic representations of surrounding objects of scenery.
At Candelaria, in Cuba, in 1828, a young man was struck dead by lightning near a house, on one of the windows of which was nailed a horse-shoe; and the image of the horse-shoe was said to be distinctly printed upon the neck of the young man. On the 14th of November, 1830, lightning struck the Chateau Benatoniére, in Lavendée. At the time a lady happened to be seated on a chair in the salon, and on the back of her dress were printed minutely the ornaments on the back of the chair. In September, 1857, a peasant-girl, while herding a cow in the department of Seine-et-Marne, was overtaken by a thunder-storm. She took refuge under a tree, and the tree, the cow and herself were struck with lightning. The cow was killed, but she recovered, and on loosening her dress for the sake of respiring freely, she saw a picture of the cow upon her breast.
— Frank H. Stauffer, The Queer, the Quaint and the Quizzical, 1882
Let’s play a game. We’ll take turns bidding for a dollar bill. Both of us will have to pay our final bids, and the winner gets to keep the dollar.
Not surprisingly, the bidding will soon reach 99 cents. But then I’ll bid $1.00, giving up any hope of profit but getting at least the dollar for my trouble. And then you’ll bid $1.01, with the same idea. And so on indefinitely: First we were bidding for gain, but now we’re trying to minimize our losses.
It sounds absurd, but this game has led people to pay $5 for a $1 bill. Yale economist Martin Shubik invented it to show how an irrational decision can be reached by perfectly rational steps.
(Thanks, Cody.)
Niagara Falls paused on March 29, 1848.
An ice jam upstream stopped almost all water flow for 30 hours.
Maine science teacher Roger Bennatti once perched an unwrapped Twinkie on his blackboard to see how long it would take to go bad.
That was 30 years ago. “It’s rather brittle, but if you dusted it off, it’s probably still edible,” Bennatti told the Associated Press in 2004. “It never spoiled.”
(This is not a myth.)
If the weather is likely to become rainy, windy or in other respects disagreeable, spiders fix the terminating filaments, on which the whole web is sustained, unusually short. If the terminating filaments are made uncommonly long, the weather will be serene, and continue so, at least for ten or twelve days. If spiders be totally indolent, rain generally succeeds; their activity during rain is certain proof that it will be of short duration, and followed by fair and constant weather. Spiders usually make some alteration in their webs every twenty-four hours; if these changes take place between the hours of six and seven in the evening, they indicate a clear and pleasant night.
‘The clouds grow heavier over head —
The spider strengtheneth his web.’
— Frank H. Stauffer, The Queer, the Quaint and the Quizzical, 1882
