King Bomb

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tsar_photo11.jp

On Oct. 30, 1961, the Soviet Union detonated the most powerful weapon in human history. At 50 megatons, “Tsar Bomba” was 5,000 times more powerful than the bomb that had destroyed Hiroshima. Its flash was visible 1,000 kilometers away, its mushroom cloud rose 40 miles, and the atmospheric disturbance it created circled the earth three times.

One cameraman wrote: “The clouds beneath the aircraft and in the distance were lit up by the powerful flash. The sea of light spread under the hatch and even clouds began to glow and became transparent. At that moment, our aircraft emerged from between two cloud layers and down below in the gap a huge bright orange ball was emerging. The ball was powerful and arrogant like Jupiter. Slowly and silently it crept upwards. … Having broken through the thick layer of clouds it kept growing. It seemed to suck the whole earth into it. The spectacle was fantastic, unreal, supernatural.”

A more distant observer heard only an indistinct blow, “as if the earth had been killed.”

The bomb had little value as a practical weapon, but it gave Khrushchev crowing rights and advanced us all along a dangerous road. Four hundred years earlier, Leonardo had prophesied, “Men will seem to see new destructions in the sky. … There shall come forth from beneath the ground that which by its terrific report shall stun all who are near it and cause men to drop dead at its breath, and it shall devastate cities and castles.”

(Thanks, Matt.)

| History · Technology

Philosophy

One day there was a traveller in the woods in California, in the dry season, when the Trades were blowing strong. He had ridden a long way, and he was tired and hungry, and dismounted from his horse to smoke a pipe. But when he felt in his pocket he found but two matches. He struck the first, and it would not light.

‘Here is a pretty state of things!’ said the traveller. ‘Dying for a smoke; only one match left; and that certain to miss fire! Was there ever a creature so unfortunate? And yet,’ thought the traveller, ‘suppose I light this match, and smoke my pipe, and shake out the dottle here in the grass – the grass might catch on fire, for it is dry like tinder; and while I snatch out the flames in front, they might evade and run behind me, and seize upon yon bush of poison oak; before I could reach it, that would have blazed up; over the bush I see a pine tree hung with moss; that too would fly in fire upon the instant to its topmost bough; and the flame of that long torch – how would the trade wind take and brandish that through the inflammable forest! I hear this dell roar in a moment with the joint voice of wind and fire, I see myself gallop for my soul, and the flying conflagration chase and outflank me through the hills; I see this pleasant forest burn for days, and the cattle roasted, and the springs dried up, and the farmer ruined, and his children cast upon the world. What a world hangs upon this moment!’

With that he struck the match, and it missed fire.

‘Thank God!’ said the traveller, and put his pipe in his pocket.

— Robert Louis Stevenson, “Fables,” Longman’s Magazine, August 1895

| Literature

East Meets West

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Diomede_Islands_Bering_Sea_Jul_2006.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

The Diomede Islands of the Bering Strait are a world apart, though only 2.4 miles separate them. Little Diomede belongs to the United States, Big Diomede to Russia, and the international date line runs between them.

So when Lynne Cox swam between them in 1987, she set a peculiar endurance record: Though the waters were cold enough to kill an average swimmer in 30 minutes, she departed “Yesterday Isle” at 1 p.m. on a Friday … and arrived safely on Tomorrow Island on Saturday.

| Oddities

“Mysterious Markings”

http://books.google.com/books?id=ehgDAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_slider_thumb#v=onepage&q=queer%20inventions&f=false

The workmen on my father’s estate were cutting up some fallen timber in the park, when, on splitting open a certain beech tree, a peculiar marking in the form of a cross, with an ‘M’ above, was discovered in the centre of it. The whole measures about twelve inches by six, and is very clearly marked, as the accompanying photograph shows.

No one has any explanation to offer as to how these marks came. Perhaps some of your readers could do so. In the photograph the two moieties are displayed side by side. — Miss Rosemary E. Greville-Nugent, Clonyn Castle, Delvin, Co. Westmeath, Ireland.

— Strand, July 1908

See “Singular Discovery.”

| Oddities

A Shakespearean Sub

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Van_Drebbel.jpg

The first navigable submarine appeared in 1620. Dutch inventor Cornelius Drebbel covered a wooden frame with greased leather to make a watertight, steerable craft for the Royal Navy; within four years he’d produced an “invisible eel” large enough to accommodate 12 oarsmen and remain 15 feet underwater for three hours. It’s said he even took James I on a test dive in the Thames, making him the first monarch to travel underwater.

It’s not clear how Drebbel avoided carbon dioxide buildup. An acquaintance of Robert Boyle who had sailed on the sub said the inventor produced a “chemical liquor” that would “cherish the vital flame residing in the heart.” Possibly he had found a way to produce oxygen gas by heating nitre.

Drebbel’s sub never saw action, but it was centuries ahead of its time. As late as 1901 H.G. Wells wrote, “I must confess that my imagination, in spite even of spurring, refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocate its crew and founder at sea.”

| Technology