Futility Closet

Karl Selim Lemström worked a quiet miracle in 1882: He strung conducting wire over the summit of a Lapland mountain and watched it draw down a shaft of light from the night sky — poetic proof that the aurora borealis is an electrical discharge from the upper atmosphere.

See Charged Words.

False book-backs ordered by Charles Dickens in 1851 to fill blank spaces in his study at Tavistock House:

• Five Minutes in China (3 volumes)
• Forty Winks at the Pyramids (2 volumes)
• History of the Middling Ages (6 volumes)
• Jonah’s Account of the Whale
• Captain Parry’s Virtues of Cold Tar
• Kant’s Ancient Humbugs (10 volumes)
• Bowwowdom: A Poem
• The Quarrelly Review
• The Art of Cutting the Teeth
• Drowsy’s Recollections of Nothing (3 volumes)
• Heavysides Conversations With Nobody (3 volumes)
• Growler’s Gruffiology, With Appendix (4 volumes)
• Miss Biffin on Deportment
• Lady Godiva on the Horse
• Munchausen’s Modern Miracles
• On the Use of Mercury by the Ancient Poets

And Hansard’s Guide to Refreshing Sleep, “as many volumes as are required to fill up.”

Alexander III once wrote a warrant condemning a prisoner to transportation:

PARDON IMPOSSIBLE, TO BE SENT TO SIBERIA.

The man appealed to the czar’s wife, who transposed the comma:

PARDON, IMPOSSIBLE TO BE SENT TO SIBERIA.

The prisoner was released.

The actress Minnie Maddern Fiske once found this message attached to the mirror in her dressing room:

MARGARET ANGLIN SAYS MRS. FISKE IS THE BEST ACTRESS IN AMERICA.

She returned it to Anglin, who found she had added two commas:

MARGARET ANGLIN, SAYS MRS. FISKE, IS THE BEST ACTRESS IN AMERICA.

Several times a year, the Atlantic sends a tidal wave up the Amazon. It’s loud, violent, and full of debris, and it can be up to 13 feet high.

So, naturally, people surf it.

A good ocean wave might last 30 seconds, but one surfer rode the pororoca for 37 straight minutes. It carried him 7.7 miles upriver.

Longest game of Monopoly:

• played upside down: 36 hours
• played in a bathtub: 99 hours
• played underground: 100 hours
• played in a treehouse: 286 hours
• ever played: 1,680 hours

Parker Brothers rejected the game in 1933, citing “52 fundamental playing flaws.”

“For God’s sake, go down to reception and get rid of a lunatic who’s down there. He says he’s got a machine for seeing by wireless! Watch him — he may have a razor on him.”

– Editor of the London Daily Express, refusing to see John Logie Baird, inventor of television, 1925

Here’s a sugar alcohol derived from the North Atlantic seaweed Fucus vesiculosus. It’s called fucitol.

And its optical isomers are called D-fuc-ol and L-fuc-ol.

The glycoprotein that vampire bats use to prevent their victims’ blood from clotting is called draculin.

And diethyl azodicarboxylate is explosive, shock-sensitive, carcinogenic, and an eye, skin, and respiratory irritant, which helps to justify its acronym: DEAD.

See Juvenile Chemistry.

(”Dedicated to the End of the Dictionary”)

A xylographer started to cross the sea
By means of a Xanthic Xebec;
But, alas! he sighed for the Zuyder Zee,
And feared he was in for a wreck.
He tried to smile, but all in vain,
Because of a Zygomatic pain;
And as for singing, his cheeriest tone
Reminded him of a Xylophone–
Or else, when the pain would sharper grow,
His notes were as keen as a Zuffolo.
And so it is likely he did not find
On board Xenodochy to his mind.
The fare was poor, and he was sure
Xerofphagy he could not endure;
Zoophagous surely he was, I aver,
This dainty and starving Xylographer.
Xylophagous truly he could not be–
No sickly vegetarian he!
He’d have blubbered like any old Zeuglodon
Had Xerophthalmia not come on.
And the end of it was he never again
In a Xanthic Xebec went sailing the main.

– Mary Mapes Dodge, Poems and Verses, 1904

Solution to The Stopped Clock:

Before she leaves the house, Andrea winds her own clock and sets it to an arbitary time. Then she notes the correct time at her friend’s house both when she arrives and when she leaves. When she returns home she consults her own clock to see how much time the whole trip has taken, subtracts the period she spent at her friend’s house, and divides the result by two to learn the travel time in each direction. By adding this interval to the time she noted as she left her friend’s house, she can infer the current time and set her own clock.

P.T. Barnum conceived a novel way to advertise his American Museum: He paid a man to place a brick at each of five New York intersections and to spend the day marching industriously from one to the next, exchanging bricks at each stop.

“What is the object of this?” inquired the man.

“No matter. All you need to know is that it brings you fifteen cents wages per hour. It is a bit of my fun, and to assist me properly you must seem to be as deaf as a post; wear a serious countenance; answer no questions; pay no attention to anyone; but attend faithfully to the work, and at the end of every hour, by St. Paul’s clock, show this ticket at the Museum door; enter, walking solemnly through every hall in the building; pass out, and resume your work.”

Within an hour the sidewalks were packed, and many spectators bought tickets so they could follow the mysterious man inside. “This was continued for several days — the curious people who followed the man into the Museum considerably more than paying his wages — till, finally, the policeman, to whom I had imparted my object, complained that the obstruction of the sidewalk by crowds had become so serious that I must call in my ‘brick man.’”

“This trivial incident excited considerable talk and amusement; it advertised me; and it materially advanced my purpose of making a lively corner near the Museum.”