While clearing land on his Smithville, Texas, ranch in the late 1990s, cattle farmer Jimmie Luecke wrote his name in letters a kilometer tall, producing the world’s largest signature.

It lies on several major flight paths into Houston, and NASA uses it to evaluate satellite imagery.

In 1901 Colombia minted special coins for use in leper colonies. Following the first leprosy congress in Berlin in 1897, the nation minted coins in five values for use in three colonies. The Philippines followed suit in 1913, followed by Japan and Malaysia. The United States produced special coins for a colony in the Panama Canal Zone.

The coins were produced to protect healthy people, but in 1938 Gordon Alexander Ryrie, director of Malaysia’s Sungei Buloh Settlement, proved that the disease can’t spread by such casual contact. His colony burned the notes it had printed.

In 1928 Cleveland’s Cunningham Sanitarium erected the largest hyperbaric chamber ever built, five stories tall and weighing 900 tons. It was inspired by Kansas City physician Orval J. Cunningham’s belief that diabetes and cancer are caused by anaerobic organisms that would die off if patients could be sequestered in a highly oxygenated environment.

After a year of work and a million dollars, the finished sphere was ready. It could accommodate 40 patients at a time in a climate-controlled environment of 68° and 65% humidity. With steel doors and circular portholes, it had the atmosphere of a ship. To minimize the risk of fire, none of the 36 patient rooms contained any wooden components.

Unfortunately, Cunningham ran into financial straits and had to sell the chamber after only five years. Renamed the Ohio Institute of Oxygen Therapy, it failed to attract patients, operated briefly as a general hospital, and closed finally in 1936. In 1942 the U.S. War Production Board ordered it scrapped, and the metal went into military tanks.

Some photos are here.

For years the village of Fucking, Austria, was plagued by sniggering tourists, who stole its distinctive road signs to keep as souvenirs. Replacing them cost 300 Euros per sign, which meant higher taxes for the residents. They considered changing the name of the village, but, said mayor Siegfried Höppl, “Everyone here knows what it means in English, but for us Fucking is Fucking — and it’s going to stay Fucking.”

Finally they installed theft-resistant signs that are welded to steel and secured in concrete. “We will not stand for the Fucking signs being removed,” said the local police chief. “It may be very amusing for you British, but Fucking is simply Fucking to us. What is this big Fucking joke? It is puerile.”

The residents of Shitterton, Dorset, had a simpler idea — they had their hamlet’s name carved into a 1.5-ton block of stone and had it installed with a crane. “We would get a nice new shiny sign from the council and five minutes later, it was gone,” said Ian Ventham, chairman of Bere Regis Parish Council. “We thought, ‘Let’s put in a ton and a half of stone and see them try and take that away in the back of a Ford Fiesta.'”

UDPATE: Another frequently stolen road sign is in East Kent, half a mile from Ham and 3 miles from Sandwich:

(Thanks, Dave.)

A 1907 magazine reports two curiously ingrown family trees. The first is that of an alleged Neapolitan sailor:

I married a widow. She had by her first husband a handsome girl named Silvietta, with whom my father fell in love and who became his second wife. Thus my father became my son-in-law and my stepdaughter became my mother, since she had married my father. Soon afterward my wife gave birth to a son, who became my father’s stepbrother and at the same time my uncle, since he was my stepmother’s brother.

But that was not all, for in due time my father’s wife also gave birth to a boy, who was my brother and also my stepson [grandson?], since he was the son of my daughter. My wife was also my grandmother, for she was the mother of my mother, and thus I was my wife’s husband and at the same time her grandson. Finally, as the husband of a person’s grandmother is naturally that person’s grandfather, I am forced to the conclusion that I am my own grandfather.

We’ve seen that before, but the second story describes a more complicated route to the same outcome. Fifteen-year-old Ida Kriebel of Pennsylvania married 60-year-old Jacob Doney and became her own grandmother:

Domey’s first wife was the widow of John Wieden. She had three more children by Doney. One of her children married Samuel Kriebel, and a year later died. The widower married again. From this second union came Ida Kriebel. By this arrangement Doney became the stepgrandfather of his own child [wife?].

“The second Mrs. Doney also became stepgrandmother of twenty-five men and women, and stepgreat-grandmother of a lot of boys and girls of about her own age.”

This is in my notes with the words “ridiculous escape”: An 1889 article in Charles Dickens’ All the Year Round tells how Italian humanist Celio Secondo Curione outsmarted the Inquisition:

In my new prison I had been confined for a week, with huge pieces of wood chained to my feet, where I was favoured with a sudden inspiration from Heaven.

As soon as the young man who acted as my keeper entered my chamber, I begged and prayed of him to release one of my feet from its encumbrances. It would be sufficient security, I said, that I should still by the other foot be fastened to an enormous log. As he was a humane sort of fellow, he consented, and set one foot free. A day, two days passed, during which I applied myself to work. Taking off my shirt, and also the stocking from the leg which was at liberty, I made them up into a dummy resembling a leg, on which I put a shoe. I was in want of something, however, to give it consistency, and was anxiously looking about in all directions, when I caught sight of a cane-stick lying under a row of seats. Seizing it joyfully, I inserted it into the sham limb, and concealing the true one under my cloak, waited the result of my stratagem. When my young keeper made his appearance next morning, he asked me how I was. ‘I should do pretty well,’ I said, ‘if you would be good enough to put my fetters on the other leg, so that each may have a rest in turn.’ He assented; and, without perceiving it, attached the log to the dummy.

“At night, when their loud snores informed him that his gaolers were asleep, Curion threw aside the false leg, resumed his shirt and stocking, and opened noiselessly the prison door, which was fastened by a simple bolt. Afterwards, though not without difficulty, he scaled the wall, and got away without interruption.”