Boston Molasses Disaster

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Of sweetness, Shakespeare wrote: “A little more than a little is by much too much.” Boston learned this the hard way in the Molasses Disaster of 1919, when someone tried to fill a weak tank with 2.3 million gallons of the thick syrup.

“A muffled roar burst suddenly upon the air,” wrote the Boston Herald. “Mingled with the roar was the clangor of steel against steel and the clash of rending wood.”

The tank collapsed, sending a giant wave of molasses sweeping through the North End. Even in the January cold, the wave would have been 8 to 15 feet high and traveled at 35 mph. It broke the girders of the elevated railway, lifted a train off its tracks, and tore a firehouse from its foundation. Twenty-one people stickily drowned, and 150 were injured. Cleanup took six months; one victim wasn’t found for 11 days.

No one knows the cause, but it’s been noted that molasses was used in making liquor, and the disaster occurred one day before Prohibition was ratified. It appears the owners were trying to distill molasses into grain alcohol before the market dried up. Write your own pun.

| History · Oddities

Where the Buffalo Roam

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Those are bison skulls, in the 1870s, waiting to be ground into fertilizer. Before Columbus there were 60 million bison in North America; by 1890 there were 750. They were holding up our railroads. Now they’re back up to 350,000, but 70 percent of those are being raised for human consumption.

| History

Richard’s Paradox

Clearly there are integers so huge they can’t be described in fewer than 22 syllables. Put them all in a big pile and consider the smallest one. It’s “the smallest integer that can’t be described in fewer than 22 syllables.”

That phrase has 21 syllables.

| Science & Math

“Singular Death”

On the 8th of August, 1823, a young man, named Thomas Clements, lost his life in a manner as dreadful as it was extraordinary. He was fishing with a draw net, near Elizabeth Castle, Jersey, and taking a little sole out of the net, he put it between his teeth to kill it, when the fish, with a sudden spring, forced itself into his throat, and choked him. The unfortunate man had just time to call for assistance, but it came too late; he expired soon after in dreadful agony.

— The Cabinet of Curiosities, 1824

10/18/2017 UPDATE: It happened again in 2017, this time with a happy ending. (Thanks, Anatoly.)

| Oddities

Head Case

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Albert Einstein’s brain sat in a cardboard box for 43 years. After the physicist’s death in 1955, Princeton pathologist Thomas Stoltz Harvey removed the organ and took it with him as he moved around the country. He gave it up only in 1998.

| Oddities

Buffon’s Needle

Remarkably, you can estimate π by dropping needles onto a flat surface. If the surface is ruled with lines that are separated by the length of a needle, then:

buffon's needle

drops is the number of needles dropped. hits is the number of needles that touch a line. The method combines probability with trigonometry; a needle’s chance of touching a line is related to the angle at which it comes to rest. It was discovered by the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc in 1777.

| Science & Math