In 1860 a party of explorers set out to traverse the Australian continent, but bad management and a series of misfortunes sent it spiraling toward tragedy. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll tell the story of the Victorian Exploring Expedition and its dramatic climax at Cooper’s Creek.
We’ll also try to validate Archimedes and puzzle over an unlucky thief.
Technical but interesting: Designer Iginio Lardani’s title sequence for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly contains only one error, and it’s in Lardani’s own credit (2:33 above).
“[A]n ‘error’ specific to optical printing caused by improper loading of the footage and mask being composited — Newton’s rings — appears in his title card alongside the text stating ‘TITLES | LARDANI,” notes film historian Michael Betancourt in Semiotics and Title Sequences (2017).
This appears to be an inside joke meant for other title designers. According to his son, Lardani had complete freedom in creating the design. Betancourt writes, “Recognizing this specific ‘error’ in the card stating ‘TITLES LARDANI’ depends on technical knowledge of the optical printing process. … given the technical perfection in the rest of the sequence, it is not just a ‘beginner’s mistake,’ but implies a conscious choice to include this compositing error in the design.”
“It is a joke only comprehensible (even recognizable) by an audience that recognizes the Newton’s rings and understands what they are — an error in the optical printing; this knowledgeable audience specifically includes title sequence designers rather than the general public. … Because it is specifically a specialized, technical mistake, its recognition will be severely limited to his peers — suggesting that they are the ones being addressed by it.”
In the 1870s Philadelphia’s Augustus Pleasonton convinced himself that blue light had almost miraculously beneficial properties: He and his followers insisted that it cured disease, promoted hair growth, banished deafness, even resolved insanity. In 1871 he patented a greenhouse (or bluehouse, I suppose) that would “accelerate the growth and maturity of plants and animals.”
It fell to Scientific American to point out that cobalt blue glass diminishes all rays across the visible spectrum; it just diminishes blue and violet light somewhat less than other wavelengths. A plant (or anything else) would receive more blue light simply standing in the sun than hidden in Pleasonton’s hut.
The fad faded, and by the inventor’s death in 1894 it had been forgotten. “It is amusing to see people making fools of themselves,” observed the Boston Globe, “but it soon grows wearisome.”
William Wellman vowed that his 1927 dogfight movie Wings would contain no stock footage or studio fakery. But after assembling his own planes and film crew, he kept them resolutely on the ground for weeks. When Paramount asked what was missing, he gave them a bewildering answer: clouds.
“Motion on the screen is a relative thing,” he said. “A horse runs on the ground or leaps over fences or streams. We know he is going rapidly because of his relation to the immobile ground.” But a plane alone in the sky may produce no sense of motion at all unless there are clouds around it — and the skies above Wellman’s San Antonio shooting location remained stubbornly clear.
Producer Jesse Lasky later wrote, “There were days on end of perfect sunshine, and our $200-a-week director wouldn’t turn a camera, while overhead mounted at thousands of dollars a day. I confess that we were about ready to yank him off the picture and replace him with someone who would be more amenable.”
In the end they were glad they waited — when the clouds arrived, Wellman’s cameramen took off, and Wings won the first Academy Award for Best Picture.
“There is nothing at McDonald’s that makes it necessary to have teeth.” — Harvard nutritionist Jean Mayer, Time, 1973
An old puzzle asks: Without lifting your pencil from the paper, can you draw a series of four straight lines that passes through all nine points in this grid?
The trick is to realize that the lines can extend beyond the grid’s area:
In 1970 Solomon Golomb and John Selfridge found a way to draw a closed path of eight segments that passes through all 25 points in this grid:
Can you?
Before they departed on Apollo 16 in April 1972, lunar module pilot Charles Duke told commander John Young about an eerie dream he’d had. The two of them were driving the lunar rover toward the North Ray crater when they crossed a ridge and discovered a set of tire tracks. They followed them, and after an hour they came upon another lunar rover that had been standing on the moon’s surface for thousands of years. In it were two dead astronauts who looked like Duke and Young.
In folklore seeing one’s double can be an omen of imminent death, but Duke didn’t take it that way. “I felt kind of comfortable,” he said later. “I took parts from this other vehicle, to show to the people down at Houston.”
But the impression remained with him as the mission departed for the moon. “The dream was so vivid that when we were landing I looked out of the window to the north to see if there were any tracks on the surface of the moon,” he said. “The landscape was very similar to what I [had] seen in my dream.”
On April 23, he found himself driving the rover with Young toward the North Ray crater and couldn’t resist looking for a second set of tracks. There was none, of course, but while he was distracted the rover began to slide backward down the slope and he had to fight to keep it from overturning. When they came to a stop the rover’s tracks extended ahead of them up the slope.
Young said, “Charlie, you said you were going to see some other tracks on the Moon.”
“None think the great unhappy but the great.” — Edward Young
Any two lines drawn between opposite sides of a square and intersecting at right angles are equal.
In 1978 two families hatched a daring plan to escape East Germany: They would build a hot-air balloon and sail it by night across the border. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll follow their struggles to evade the authorities and realize their dream of a new life in the West.
We’ll also shuffle some vehicles and puzzle over a perplexing worker.
