The Heidelberg Tun

Germany’s Heidelberg Castle is home to a famously enormous wine barrel, capable of holding 57,853 U.S. gallons. This is actually the most recent of four enormous wine barrels that the castle has housed, the first built in 1591. Unfortunately it’s empty — today it serves mostly as a tourist attraction and a foundation for the fanciful dance floor above it.

“Everybody has heard of the great Heidelberg Tun,” wrote Mark Twain in A Tramp Abroad, “and most people have seen it, no doubt. It is a wine-cask as big as a cottage, and some traditions say it holds eighteen thousand bottles, and other traditions say it holds eighteen hundred million barrels. I think it likely that one of these statements is a mistake, and the other is a lie. However, the mere matter of capacity is a thing of no sort of consequence, since the cask is empty, and indeed has always been empty, history says. An empty cask the size of a cathedral could excite but little emotion in me.”

October 4, 2016 | Oddities

Missing You

The first men to spend a winter in Antarctica were so desperate for feminine society that they organized a “beauty contest” among the illustrations in a Paris journal. Icebound in the Bellinghausen Sea in 1898, the men of the Belgian research ship Belgica numbered 464 magazine pictures, “illustrating women famous for graces of form and manner, and public notoriety,” and for each of its members the group chose the woman “most suitable for his welfare, happiness, etc.” They also awarded a “prize of honor” to the most beautiful woman:

The rules say that hydrographer Georges Lecointe, “Minister of the Land of Beautiful Women,” planned to send the awards to the women themselves when the ship reached port. I don’t know whether this ever happened. “The presentation of the prizes is conditional upon the later appearance of the woman before the committee to exhibit the parts for which ballot has been cast, not for re-examination, but to obtain an official photograph.”

(From Cook’s Through the First Antarctic Night, 1900.)

October 4, 2016October 3, 2016 | Society

Podcast Episode 124: D.B. Cooper

In 1971 a mysterious man hijacked an airliner in Portland, Oregon, demanding $200,000 and four parachutes. He bailed out somewhere over southwestern Washington and has never been seen again. In today’s show we’ll tell the story of D.B. Cooper, the only unsolved hijacking in American history.

We’ll also hear some musical disk drives and puzzle over a bicyclist’s narrow escape.

See full show notes …

October 3, 2016October 2, 2017 | Crime · Podcast

Rotary Jails

Architect William H. Brown had a curious brainstorm in 1881 — a jail in which moving cells shared a single door:

The object of our invention is to produce a jail or prison in which prisoners can be controlled without the necessity of personal contact between them and the jailer or guard. … [It] consists, first, of a circular cell structure of considerable size (inside the usual prison-building) divided into several cells capable of being rotated, and surrounded by a grating in close proximity thereto, which has only such number of openings (usually one) as is necessary for the convenient handling of the prisoners.

The cell block, supported by ball bearings, could be turned by a single man with a hand crank. While it had a certain efficient appeal, in practice the jail proved dangerous, crushing prisoners’ limbs and raising concerns about safety during a fire. The last rotary jail was condemned in 1939; the only surviving example is in Crawfordsville, Indiana.

(Strangely related: Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon. Thanks, Jon.)

October 2, 2016October 1, 2016 | Crime · Technology

Size Matters

In June 1917, the California Olive Association adopted the following rather terrifying size designations:

Olives counting 120-135 olives per pound: Standard
Olives counting 105-120 olives per pound: Medium
Olives counting 90-105 olives per pound: Large
Olives counting 75-90 olives per pound: Extra Large
Olives counting 65-75 olives per pound: Mammoth
Olives counting 55-65 olives per pound: Colossal
Olives counting 45-55 olives per pound: Giant

Over the years they added Jumbo, Supercolossal, and Special Supercolossal. It wasn’t until the the 1970s that the government stepped in to limit further growth: “The Department of Agriculture feels that most people would not be able to figure out which are the larger olives, except at the range of smaller sizes, whose names are the more straightforward.”

While we’re at it — champagne bottles have some impressive names of their own:

0.1875 liters: Piccolo
0.2 liters: Quarter
0.375 liters: Demi
0.75 liters: Standard
1.5 liters: Magnum
3 liters: Jéroboam
4.5 liters: Réhoboam
6 liters: Methusaleh
9 liters: Salmanazar
12 liters: Balthazar
15 liters: Nebuchadnezzar
18 liters: Solomon
26.25 liters: Sovereign
27 liters: Primat
30 liters: Melchizedek

(Thanks, Drew.)

October 1, 2016 | Trivia

Brass

Reader John Kelleher found this letter in the University of Illinois archives — in 1921 instrument maker Elden E. Benge had written to cornet soloist Herbert L. Clarke asking whether there was any future in the trumpet:

(From The Sousa Archives. Thanks, John.)

September 30, 2016 | Art

A Modest Proposal

Mr. J. Armour-Milne refers to ‘the amount of drivel that is to be found in the Letters to the Editor.’ Whether or not you, in fact, publish drivel is not for me to decide, but a sure method of raising the standard of letters that you receive would be not only to publish your usual selection of letters, but also to print, each day, a complete list of the names of those correspondents whose letters you have rejected. The thought of possibly being included in your Rejects List, and then to have one’s acquaintances saying, ‘I see that you have had yet another letter refused by The Times,’ would be too much of a risk for most people.

— P.H.H. Moore, letter to the London Times, 1970

September 30, 2016September 29, 2016 | Society

Some Tidy Anagrams

PICTURES = PIECRUST
INSATIABLE = BANALITIES
SHATTERING = STRAIGHTEN
CORSET = ESCORT
RECLAIM = MIRACLE
TRANSPIRE = TERRAPINS
INTEGRAL = TRIANGLE

Darryl Francis finds that LISMORE, MINNESOTA is an anagram of REMAIN MOTIONLESS.

“There is a well-known story in The Spectator, of a lover of Lady Mary Boon, who, after six months’ hard study, contrived to anagrammatize her as Moll Boon; and upon being told by his mistress, indignant at such a metamorphosis, that her name was Mary Bohun, he went mad.” — William Sandys, ed., Specimens of Macaronic Poetry, 1831

In 1971, Word Ways encouraged its readers to find the anagram that this sad man had worked so hard for. What they found was MOLDY BALLOON.

September 29, 2016October 11, 2016 | Language

Good Turns

In order to get a license, London taxicab drivers must pass a punishing exam testing their memory of 25,000 streets and every significant business and landmark on them. “The Knowledge” has been called the hardest test of any kind in the world; applicants must put in thousands of hours of study to pass a series of progressively difficult oral exams that take, on average, four years to complete. The guidebook for prospective cabbies says:

To achieve the required standard to be licensed as an ‘All London’ taxi driver you will need a thorough knowledge, primarily, of the area within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross. You will need to know: all the streets; housing estates; parks and open spaces; government offices and departments; financial and commercial centres; diplomatic premises; town halls; registry offices; hospitals; places of worship; sports stadiums and leisure centres; airline offices; stations; hotels; clubs; theatres; cinemas; museums; art galleries; schools; colleges and universities; police stations and headquarters buildings; civil, criminal and coroner’s courts; prisons; and places of interest to tourists. In fact, anywhere a taxi passenger might ask to be taken.

Interestingly, licensed London cabbies show a significantly larger posterior hippocampus than non-taxi drivers. Psychologist Hugo J. Spiers writes, “Current evidence suggests that it is the acquisition of this spatial knowledge and its use on the job that causes the taxi driver’s posterior hippocampus to grow larger.” Apparently it’s not actually driving the streets, or learning the information alone, that causes the change — London bus drivers don’t show the same effect; nor do doctors, who must also acquire vast knowledge; nor do cabbies who fail the exam. Rather it seems to be the regular use of the knowledge that causes the change: Retired cabbies tend to have a smaller hippocampus than current drivers.

While driving virtual routes in fMRI studies, cabbies showed the most hippocampal activity at the moment a customer requested a destination. One cabbie said, “I’ve got an over-patched picture of Peter Street. It sounds daft, but I don’t view it from ground level, it was slightly up and I could see the whole area as though I was about 50 foot up. And I saw Peter Street, I saw the market and I knew I had to get down to Peter Street.” Non-cabbie volunteers also showed the most activity when they were planning a route. “Thus,” writes Spiers, “the engagement of the hippocampus appears to depend on the extent to which someone thinks about what the possible streets they might want to take during navigation.”

(Hugo J. Spiers, “Will Self and His Inner Seahorse,” in Sebastian Groes, ed., Memory in the Twenty-First Century, 2016.)

September 29, 2016September 30, 2016 | Science & Math