Futility Closet

Where there’s a will, there’s a way. In 1849, Henry Box Brown escaped slavery by mailing himself to Philadelphia.

Brown stood 5’8″ and weighed 200 pounds, and he spent 26 hours in a box 2’8″ x 2′ x 3′. Unfortunately, he spent a lot of it upside down. “I felt my eyes swelling as if they would burst from their sockets,” he later wrote, “and the veins on my temples were dreadfully distended with pressure of blood upon my head.” The trip from Richmond covered 275 miles by overland express stage wagon.

When the box was opened, his first words were “How do you do, gentlemen?”

Record skyscrapers through history:

• 1873 – Equitable Life Building, New York: 142 feet (6 floors)
• 1876 – St. Pancras Chambers, London: 269 feet (9 floors)
• 1889 – Auditorium Building, Chicago: 269 feet (17 floors)
• 1890 – New York World Building, New York: 309 feet (20 floors)
• 1894 – Manhattan Life Insurance Building, New York: 348 feet (18 floors)
• 1895 – Milwaukee City Hall, Milwaukee: 350 feet (9 floors)
• 1899 – Park Row Building, New York: 391 feet (30 floors)
• 1908 – Singer Building, New York, 612 feet (47 floors)
• 1909 – Met Life Tower, New York, 700 feet (50 floors)
• 1913 – Woolworth Building, New York: 792 feet (57 floors)
• 1930 – Chrysler Building, New York: 925 feet (77 floors)
• 1931 – Empire State Building, New York: 1,250 feet (102 floors)
• 1972 – World Trade Center, New York: 1,368 feet (110 floors)
• 1974 – Sears Tower, Chicago: 1,451 feet (108 floors)
• 2003 – Taipei 101, Taipei, Taiwan: 1,474 feet (101 floors)

“In keeping with Channel 40′s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts in living color, we bring you another first, an attempted suicide.” — Florida newscaster Christine Chubbuck, before shooting herself on live television, July 15, 1974

In Death Valley, rocks move. No one’s actually seen it happen, but they leave tracks hundreds of feet long. Experts attribute the phenomenon to a combination of wind, ice, and mud, but some of the stones weigh as much as a man. One 700-pound rock disappeared altogether in May 1994. Hmm.

A minister, a priest, and a rabbi walk into a bar.

The bartender says, “Is this a joke?”

In April 1865, Abraham Lincoln related the following story to his bodyguard, Ward Hill Lamon:

About ten days ago, I retired very late. I had been up waiting for important dispatches from the front. I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. I soon began to dream. There seemed to be a deathlike stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along. I saw light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me; but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break? I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. “Who is dead in the White House?” I demanded of one of the soldiers, “The President,” was his answer; “he was killed by an assassin.” Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which woke me from my dream. I slept no more that night; and although it was only a dream, I have been strangely annoyed by it ever since.

He was assassinated a few days later.