The land speed record for a petrol-powered rail vehicle was set way back in 1931, when aircraft engineer Franz Kruckenberg experimented with a “rail zeppelin” on German railway lines. An aircraft engine drove a rearward-facing propeller to accelerate a lightweight aluminum body to the startling speed of 230.2 km/h (143.0 mph), a railway record that held until 1954.
The vehicle evolved over a few years but was eventually dropped in favor of other high-speed designs.
In 1913 Canadian politician Sam Hughes proposed the MacAdam Shield Shovel, a spade that could double as a protective shield in the trenches — it was provided with a hole through which a soldier could survey the enemy.
Some 20,000 had been manufactured before it was discovered that the blade was not remotely bulletproof, and it wasn’t much use as a shovel … because there was a hole in it.
This sounds apocryphal, but it’s interesting. According to Texas lore, John Higginson, owner of the Memphis, El Paso & Pacific Railroad, faced a problem in the 1860s. He had committed to serve the route between Marshall, Texas, and Shreveport, La., but the Civil War had reduced his stock to three boxcars. How could he maintain regular service between two cities 40 miles apart with no engine?
He did it (the story goes) by loading a team of oxen into the first boxcar; freight and passengers into the second car; and the train’s crew and management into the third car. At Marshall, Higginson would start the train coasting down a long descending grade, and at the bottom they’d unload the oxen, hitch them to the front of the train, and drive them until they reached the top of the next hill. Then they’d load the oxen into the first car again and ride down the hill. At Shreveport they’d turn around and use the same method to get home.
In The Humor and Drama of Early Texas (2002), George U. Hubbard writes, “With gravity for the downgrades and oxen for the level areas and the upgrades, the little railroad managed to operate in both directions on a timely and consistent schedule.” With no competition on the Marshall-Shreveport line, Higginson (supposedly) maintained a profitable railroad with no engine at all.
Hubbard cites B.A. Botkin’s A Treasury of Railroad Folklore, from 1953. I find that the Southwestern Historical Quarterly ran an item giving essentially the same details in the early 1950s, citing a Texas newspaper of 1918, and Railway World mentioned it in 1911, quoting the Fort Worth Record (which calls it an “old railroad story”). I can’t find any corroboration beyond that. Good story, though!
Here’s one solution to the population problem: In 1967 Buckminster Fuller patented a giant floating geodesic sphere enclosing a city, hoping to reduce the economic and environmental costs of using land for housing. Each sphere would be a mile in diameter, enclosing an enormous volume of air that would be warmed by the sun, enabling it to carry buildings bearing thousands of people. The structural weight of even a half-mile sphere would be a thousandth the weight of the air inside, and heating the air even 1 degree would raise the whole structure like a hot-air balloon. By opening and closing polyethylene “curtains,” the occupants could keep the sphere floating at a chosen altitude. The cities could be tethered to mountaintops or float freely, enabling them (for example) to travel to disaster sites in a matter of days, and permitting humans to “converge and deploy around Earth without its depletion.”
“Cloud Nine is probably possible, but even Bucky didn’t expect to see one soon,” writes J. Baldwin in BuckyWorks: Buckminster Fuller’s Ideas for Today (1996). “He offered it as a jarring exercise, intended to stimulate the imaginative thinking we’re going to need if the billions of new Earth citizens predicted to arrive soon are to have decent housing.”
Cruising the Mediterranean in 1962, the American aircraft carrier USS Independence came upon a full-rigged sailing ship with a striped hull, a teak deck, and an ornamented bow and stern.
With a light signal the carrier asked, “Who are you?”
The ship answered, “Training ship Amerigo Vespucci, Italian navy.”
The Independence replied, “You are the most beautiful ship in the world.”
The first motion picture to feature a live cat is believed to be this 1894 short in which French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey drops an inverted feline to watch it land on its feet.
When the experiment was published in Nature in 1894, the editors wrote, “The expression of offended dignity shown by the cat at the end of the first series indicates a want of interest in scientific investigation.”
Another poem by James Clerk Maxwell:
The tendrils of my soul are twined
With thine, though many a mile apart.
And thine in close coiled circuits wind
Around the needle of my heart.
Constant as Daniel, strong as Grove.
Ebullient throughout its depths like Smee,
My heart puts forth its tide of love,
And all its circuits close in thee.
O tell me, when along the line
From my full heart the message flows,
What currents are induced in thine?
One click from thee will end my woes.
Through many a volt the weber flew,
And clicked this answer back to me;
I am thy farad staunch and true,
Charged to a volt with love for thee.
In a quarry at Aswan lies an unfinished obelisk, the largest the ancient Egyptians ever attempted. It’s 137 feet long and weighs more than 1,000 tons, more than two jumbo jets or 200 African elephants. If it had been completed it would have weighed more than twice as much as any other obelisk that the Egyptians ever erected. Cracks appeared in the granite before workers could carve it from the bedrock, so the project was abandoned.
“The obelisk is so large that it makes a cameo appearance in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 silent film The Ten Commandments,” writes Egyptologist Bob Brier in Cleopatra’s Needles (2021). “In one scene we see Israelites toiling under the whip of a cruel taskmaster, pulling a large block of stone up an inclined ramp. That incline is the unfinished obelisk!”
Deposition of Elizabeth Brett, a Hertfordshire farmer’s servant, regarding an alarming experience on Sept. 15, 1784:
This deponent, on her oath, saith, that on Wednesday the 15th day of September instant, between four and five o’clock in the afternoon, she, this deponent, being then at work in her master’s brewhouse, heard an uncommon and loud noise, which, on attending to it, she conceived to be the sound of men singing as they returned from harvest-home. That upon going to the door of the house she perceived a strange large body in the air, and, on approaching it in a meadow-field near the house, called Long Mead, she perceived a man in it; that the person in the machine, which she knew not what to make of, but which the person in it called an air-balloon, called to her to take hold of the rope, which she did accordingly; that John Mills and George Philips, labourers with said Mr. Thomas Read, came up soon after, and, being likewise requested to assist in holding the rope, both made their excuses, one of them, George Philips, saying he was too short, and John Mills saying that he did not like it; that this deponent continued to hold the rope till some other harvest-men of Mr. Benjamin Robinson, of High Cross, came up, by whose assistance the machine was held down till the person got out of the machine. And this deponent further, on her oath, saith, that the person now present and shown to her by William Baker, Esq., the justice of peace before whom this deposition is taken, as Mr. Vincent Lunardi, and in her presence declares himself to be Mr. Vincent Lunardi, was the person who called to me from the machine, as above stated, and who descended therefrom in the said field called Long Meadow.
Other witnesses acknowledged that Lunardi had told them “that he had set out from the Artillery Ground in London, a little before two o’clock in the afternoon of the said day, in the machine, and had travelled through the air to the place where they found him.” He later described his view of the city from this new perspective.
From Christopher H. Turnor’s Astra Castra, 1865, via Humphrey Jennings, Pandaemonium, 1985.
Lewis Carroll was an early enthusiast of photography, though he seems to have found the social aspects trying — he published this poem in 1857:
From his shoulder Hiawatha
Took the camera of rosewood,
Made of sliding, folding rosewood;
Neatly put it all together.
In its case it lay compactly,
Folded into nearly nothing;
But he opened out the hinges,
Pushed and pulled the joints and hinges,
Till it looked all squares and oblongs,
Like a complicated figure
In the Second Book of Euclid.
This he perched upon a tripod —
Crouched beneath its dusky cover —
Stretched his hand, enforcing silence —
Said, “Be motionless, I beg you!”
Mystic, awful was the process.
All the family in order
Sat before him for their pictures:
Each in turn, as he was taken,
Volunteered his own suggestions,
His ingenious suggestions.
First the Governor, the Father:
He suggested velvet curtains
Looped about a massy pillar;
And the corner of a table,
Of a rosewood dining-table.
He would hold a scroll of something,
Hold it firmly in his left-hand;
He would keep his right-hand buried
(Like Napoleon) in his waistcoat;
He would contemplate the distance
With a look of pensive meaning,
As of ducks that die ill tempests.
Grand, heroic was the notion:
Yet the picture failed entirely:
Failed, because he moved a little,
Moved, because he couldn’t help it.
Next, his better half took courage;
She would have her picture taken.
She came dressed beyond description,
Dressed in jewels and in satin
Far too gorgeous for an empress.
Gracefully she sat down sideways,
With a simper scarcely human,
Holding in her hand a bouquet
Rather larger than a cabbage.
All the while that she was sitting,
Still the lady chattered, chattered,
Like a monkey in the forest.
“Am I sitting still?” she asked him.
“Is my face enough in profile?
Shall I hold the bouquet higher?
Will it came into the picture?”
And the picture failed completely.
Next the Son, the Stunning-Cantab:
He suggested curves of beauty,
Curves pervading all his figure,
Which the eye might follow onward,
Till they centered in the breast-pin,
Centered in the golden breast-pin.
He had learnt it all from Ruskin
(Author of ‘The Stones of Venice,’
‘Seven Lamps of Architecture,’
‘Modern Painters,’ and some others);
And perhaps he had not fully
Understood his author’s meaning;
But, whatever was the reason,
All was fruitless, as the picture
Ended in an utter failure.
Next to him the eldest daughter:
She suggested very little,
Only asked if he would take her
With her look of ‘passive beauty.’
Her idea of passive beauty
Was a squinting of the left-eye,
Was a drooping of the right-eye,
Was a smile that went up sideways
To the corner of the nostrils.
Hiawatha, when she asked him,
Took no notice of the question,
Looked as if he hadn’t heard it;
But, when pointedly appealed to,
Smiled in his peculiar manner,
Coughed and said it ‘didn’t matter,’
Bit his lip and changed the subject.
Nor in this was he mistaken,
As the picture failed completely.
So in turn the other sisters.
Last, the youngest son was taken:
Very rough and thick his hair was,
Very round and red his face was,
Very dusty was his jacket,
Very fidgety his manner.
And his overbearing sisters
Called him names he disapproved of:
Called him Johnny, ‘Daddy’s Darling,’
Called him Jacky, ‘Scrubby School-boy.’
And, so awful was the picture,
In comparison the others
Seemed, to one’s bewildered fancy,
To have partially succeeded.
Finally my Hiawatha
Tumbled all the tribe together,
(‘Grouped’ is not the right expression),
And, as happy chance would have it
Did at last obtain a picture
Where the faces all succeeded:
Each came out a perfect likeness.
Then they joined and all abused it,
Unrestrainedly abused it,
As the worst and ugliest picture
They could possibly have dreamed of.
‘Giving one such strange expressions —
Sullen, stupid, pert expressions.
Really any one would take us
(Any one that did not know us)
For the most unpleasant people!’
(Hiawatha seemed to think so,
Seemed to think it not unlikely.)
All together rang their voices,
Angry, loud, discordant voices,
As of dogs that howl in concert,
As of cats that wail in chorus.
But my Hiawatha’s patience,
His politeness and his patience,
Unaccountably had vanished,
And he left that happy party.
Neither did he leave them slowly,
With the calm deliberation,
The intense deliberation
Of a photographic artist:
But he left them in a hurry,
Left them in a mighty hurry,
Stating that he would not stand it,
Stating in emphatic language
What he’d be before he’d stand it.
Hurriedly he packed his boxes:
Hurriedly the porter trundled
On a barrow all his boxes:
Hurriedly he took his ticket:
Hurriedly the train received him:
Thus departed Hiawatha.
He introduced it by writing, “In an age of imitation, I can claim no special merit for this slight attempt at doing what is known to be so easy. Any fairly practised writer, with the slightest ear for rhythm, could compose, for hours together, in the easy running metre of The Song of Hiawatha. Having then distinctly stated that I challenge no attention in the following little poem to its merely verbal jingle, I must beg the candid reader to confine his criticism to its treatment of the subject.”
