Evaporated Milk

At the Mesa de Pavones, in the middle of the steppes of Caraccas, Mr. Bonpland and I saw cows suspended in the air. Distance one thousand toises. Measuring with the sextant, the breadth of the aërial interval, we found the animal’s feet elevated above the soil 3’20”. Simple suspension, no double image. I was assured, that horses had been seen, near Calabozo, suspended and inverted, without exhibiting any direct image.

— Mirage described in Alexander von Humboldt, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, 1818

| Oddities

Managerese

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1910Ford-T.jpg

Henry Ford told a visitor to the Ford Motor Company that there were exactly 4,719 parts in a finished car.

Impressed, the visitor asked the supervising engineer if this were true.

“I’m sure I don’t know,” said the engineer. “I can’t think of a more useless piece of information.”

| Society · Technology

Pen Mystique

Note from poet Thomas Bailey Aldrich to zoologist Edward S. Morse:

My dear Morse:

It was very pleasant to receive a letter from you the other day. Perhaps I should have found it pleasanter if I had been able to decipher it. I don’t think I mastered anything beyond the date, which I knew, and the signature, at which I guessed.

There is a singular and perpetual charm in a letter of yours — it never grows old, and it never loses its novelty. One can say every morning, as one looks at it, ‘Here’s a letter of Morse’s I haven’t read yet. I think I shall take another shy at it to-day, and maybe I shall be able in the course of a few years to make out what he means by those t’s that look like w’s and those i’s that haven’t any eyebrows.’

Other letters are read and thrown away and forgotten, but yours are kept forever–unread. One of them will last a reasonable man a lifetime.

Admiringly yours,

T.B. Aldrich

| Society

The Sedgwick Pie

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stockbridge-cemetery-6.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Most graves in Massachusetts’ Stockbridge Cemetery are oriented with the feet facing east, so that on Resurrection Day the dead will rise facing Jerusalem.

Not so the Sedgwick family — patriarch Theodore Sedgwick ordered that his family’s graves form a circle with their feet toward the center. This way, on Judgment Day, Sedgwicks will see only other Sedgwicks.

It’s been called “the laughingstock of the entire Eastern seaboard.”

| Death · Religion · Society

Your Move

Playing go requires tremendous concentration, and Hashimoto Utaro and Iwamoto Kaoru shut out all distractions as they resumed an adjourned game in Japan’s Honinbo championship on Aug. 6, 1945.

Unfortunately, they were three miles from downtown Hiroshima.

The explosion damaged the building and injured spectators — but play resumed after lunch.

| Oddities

Hare Remover

Paul Armand-Delille was angry at the damage that rabbits were doing to his French estate, so on June 14, 1952, he inoculated two of them with a virus, Myxomatosis cuniculi, that he knew had curbed rabbit populations in Australia.

It, um, worked. Within 6 weeks, 98 percent of his rabbits were dead — and by the end of 1954, so were 90 percent of the rabbits in France.

Armand-Delille was charged one franc for illegally spreading an animal disease, then given a medal for services to agriculture. The medal depicts Armand-Delille on one side and a dead rabbit on the other.

Sixty years earlier, essentially the reverse had happened in the United States.

| Oddities