The Miracle Stair

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:San_Loretto_Chapel,_Santa_Fe,_NM.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

This spiral staircase, in the Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe, has no newel, or central pole — its treads are upheld by stringers, notched structural supports as in a conventional stair, but here the stringers make two complete turns as the helical stair rises 20 feet to the choir loft. All of this is held together by wooden pegs rather than glue or nails.

It was built sometime between 1877 and 1881, but the creator’s identity is not recorded. “It’s a magnificent work of art that humbles me as a master carpenter,” wrote Tim Carter in the Washington Post in 2010. “To create a staircase like this using modern tools would be a feat. It’s mind-boggling to think about constructing such a marvel with crude hand tools, no electricity and minimal resources.”

| Technology

Smile

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elephantselfie_with_Christian_LeBlanc.jpg

When 22-year-old student Christian LeBlanc fed a basket of bananas to a group of elephants on the Thai island of Koh Phangan in 2015, one of them seized his GoPro camera by its mount, and when the self-timer triggered the shutter he got “the worlds first ever Elfie.”

“Elephants are incredibly intelligent and it definitely makes you wonder if it was a conscious action,” he wrote. So who gets the credit? For now, in the judgment of Wikimedia, “This file is in the public domain because, as the work of a non-human animal, it has no human author in whom copyright is vested.”

| Technology

Singing Lessons

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

When the local population of rufous-collared sparrows dwindled in Buenos Aires, scientists found an innovative way to teach mating calls to younger birds: They consulted hand-drawn annotations of sparrow songs that had been made in the 1960s and used a computer to broadcast simulated versions in local habitats. Within three months a local bird was heard copying parts of the song. Similar efforts have succeeded in England and Australia, and scientists are beginning to stockpile databases of birdsong to aid future generations. “One day we’ll be grateful to have all those records,” physicist Gabriel Mindlin told the Guardian.

Birds mimicking human technology: Technical Fowl, Pitching In, Ghosts of Scotland. (Thanks, Sharon.)

| Science & Math · Technology

The Karidis Keyboard

When IBM released the ThinkPad 701 subnotebook in 1995, users got a surprise. The unit was only 24.6 centimeters wide, but opening the lid presented a keyboard more than 4 centimeters wider. The secret was a dissection: The keyboard was stored in two pieces, each roughly a right triangle, and as the lid was opened these slid to either side, with one moving downward until they merged into a full-sized keyboard. (Mathematician Greg Frederickson wrote, “You find yourself opening and closing the lid repeatedly just to watch this movement!”)

The effect was so pleasing that the “butterfly keyboard” entered the permanent collection of Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art, but IBM discontinued the feature when it retired the 701. Designer John Karidis said, “The butterfly keyboard was no longer necessary, because people moved to larger displays. Where the butterfly approach makes sense is where you want the largest keyboard possible in combination with an 8-inch or 10-inch display.”

| Technology

Things to Come

https://archive.org/details/the-strand/The%20Strand%20v26%201903/page/678/mode/2up

H.G. Wells’ predictions for the “house of the future,” made in 1903:

  • Chimneys will be obsolete, replaced by an electric heater in the center of each apartment. The absence of chimneys will also permit roof gardens.
  • Air will be circulated by an electric fan “and will come in through a proper shaft and filter” communicating with the roof.
  • No longer required for ventilation, windows may take any shape and will be positioned for lighting and for aesthetic effect.
  • Labor-saving appliances will include dustless sweepers, self-making beds, and “neatly-mounted electric cooking things.”
  • Walls and floors will meet in a curve rather than at right angles, to prevent the accumulation of dust.
  • Walls will be soundproof, doors will be framed in metal, artificial stone floors will be clad in linoleum, and all will be fireproof.
  • “In the end our present houses may come to be thought singularly squat, massive, and dark beside these elegant new comers.”

He also thought that single-family homes would become rare in urban areas, replaced with “a wide forest of buildings in which many families may live,” sharing common restaurants, children’s playgrounds, and the like. “The scope for ingenuity and for invention in planning such places is enormous.”

| History · Technology

Postal Inspector

In 1897, to help inaugurate New York City’s new pneumatic mail system, officials sent a live black cat in a canister from the Produce Exchange Post Office on Bowling Green to the General Post Office on Park Row, a distance of 3,750 feet.

“How it could live after being shot at terrific speed from Station P in the Produce Exchange Building, making several turns before reaching Broadway and Park Row, I cannot conceive, but it did,” recalled postal supervisor Howard Wallace Connelly. “It seemed to be dazed for a minute or two but started to run and was quickly secured and placed in a basket that had been provided for that purpose.”

At its peak the system would carry 95,000 letters a day through 27 miles of tubes connecting 23 post offices. It was discontinued in 1953, outmoded by the growing volume of mail and the advent of the automobile.

| Oddities · Technology

The Hurt Locker

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Image: Wellcome Trust

The iron maiden, the medieval torture device consisting of a hinged cabinet with a spike-lined interior, seems to have been a myth. There’s no mention of it before the 19th century.

Bielefeld University legal historian Wolfgang Schild suggests that enterprising exhibitors may have pieced together the first specimens using artifacts gathered from museum collections, to attract paying customers. It’s possible that German philosopher Johann Philipp Siebenkees invented a history for the device — in his writings he claims that it was first used on Aug. 14, 1515, to execute a coin forger. But there’s no reliable evidence for it in the Middle Ages.

| Hoaxes · Technology

Amara’s Law

“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” — Roy Amara, president of the Institute for the Future, 1978

(“A modern maxim says: People tend to overestimate what can be done in one year and to underestimate what can be done in five or ten years.” — J.C.R. Licklider, Libraries of the Future, 1965)

| Quotations · Society · Technology

The Blast Shadow

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On the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, a customer was sitting on the steps of Sumitomo Bank in Hiroshima, waiting for the branch to open, when an atomic bomb exploded over the city. The bank was only 260 meters from ground zero, and as the intense heat burned its stone face white, the customer’s body shielded one section of the steps, leaving a “shadow” in that place.

The steps are now preserved in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.

In 1946, the British mission to Hiroshima and Nagasaki noted that the surfaces of asphalt roads “retained the ‘shadows’ of those who had walked there at the instant of the explosion.” It called them “objects of macabre interest and pilgrimage for visitors.”

| Death · History · Technology

A Salt Hygrometer

An “easy and curious method of foretelling rainy or fine weather,” from an 1860 book on conjuring, of all places:

“[T]he best instrument of all, is a good pair of scales, in one of which let there be a brass weight of a pound, and in the other a pound of salt, or of saltpetre, well dried; a stand being placed under the scale, so as to hinder it falling too low. When it is inclined to rain, the salt will swell, and sink the scale: when the weather is growing fair, the brass weight will regain its ascendancy.”

| History · Oddities · Technology