In 1938, a wallet manufacturer in Lockport, N.Y., decided to include sample Social Security cards in its products. The company’s vice president thought it would be clever to use the actual Social Security number of his secretary, Hilda Whitcher.

It wasn’t. The sample card was half-size, printed in red, and bore the word SPECIMEN in large letters, but by 1943 more than 5,000 people were using Whitcher’s number as their own. The Social Security Administration voided the card and started a publicity campaign to educate users, but over the years more than 40,000 people reported the number as their own, some as recently as 1977.

“They started using the number,” Whitcher marveled. “They thought it was their own. I can’t understand how people can be so stupid. I can’t understand that.”

Considerable excitement was caused in our city last Tuesday evening by the announcement that a hailstone weighing eighty pounds had fallen six miles west of Salina, near the railroad track. An inquiry into the matter revealed the following facts: A party of railroad section men were at work Tuesday afternoon, several miles west of town, when the hailstorm came upon them. Mr. Martin Elwood, the foreman of the party, relates that near where they were at work hailstones of the weight of four or five pounds were falling, and that returning to Salina the stones increased in size, until his party discovered a huge mass of ice weighing, as near as he could judge, in the neighborhood of eighty pounds. At this place the party found the ground covered with hail as if a wintry storm had passed over the land. Besides securing the mammoth chunk of ice, Mr. Elwood secured a hailstone something over a foot long, three or four inches in diameter, and shaped like a cigar. These ‘specimens’ were placed upon a hand-car and brought to Salina. Mr. W.J. Hagler, the North Santa Fe merchant, became the possessor of the larger piece, and saved it from dissolving by placing it in sawdust at his store. Crowds of people went down to see it Tuesday afternoon, and many were the theories concerning the mysterious visitor. At evening its dimensions were 29 by 16 by 2 inches.

— Salina (Kan.) Journal, quoted in Scientific American, Aug. 19, 1882

On May 27, 1896, an F4 tornado walked through St. Louis, leaving a mile-wide path of devastation and playing some violent pranks along the way.

Above, wheat straws were forced half an inch into the body of one tree.

Below, a gardener’s shovel was driven 6 inches into another tree, and a 2×4 pine scantling was shot through 5/8″ of solid iron on the Eads Bridge, “the pine stick protruding several feet through the iron side of the roadway, exemplifying the old principle of shooting a candle through a board.”

George Washington University meteorologist Willis Moore also saw “a six by eight piece of timber driven four feet almost straight down into the hard compact soil.” The confirmed death toll is 255, but additional bodies may have floated off down the Mississippi.

Kokichi Sugihara of Japan’s Meiji Institute for Advanced Study of Mathematical Sciences has won first prize in the Neural Correlate Society’s sixth annual “Best Illusion of the Year” contest:

The top 10 finalists are here.

The British merchant cruiser Hilary was patrolling the North Sea in 1917 when commander F.W. Dean was called to the bridge to witness a “living thing” on the starboard quarter.

“The head was about the shape of, but somewhat larger than that of, a cow,” Dean recalled three years later in Herbert Strang’s Annual, “though with no observable protrusions such as horns or ears, and was black, except for the front of the face, which could be clearly seen to have a strip of whitish flesh, very like a cow has, between its nostrils. As we passed, the head raised itself two or three times, apparently to get a good look at the ship.”

Dean estimated that the creature was 60 feet long and ordered his men to use it for target practice. The first two crews missed it, but the third hit “and produced at once a furious commotion, which reminded me more than anything else of a bather lying on his back in smooth water and kicking out with all his force to splash the water.” The creature disappeared.

All this was noted in the log, over the objections of a superstitious crewman who insisted it was bad luck to record such encounters. Two days later, Hilary was torpedoed and sank. “If you ask me ‘Am I superstitious about seeing a sea-serpent?'” Dean wrote, “I only reply, ‘Well, if ever I found myself again at sea in command of a ship, and anything of the sort was sighted, I should leave it alone and make no entry in the log!'”

This one’s been tricky to write up because I can find so few sources. In a shed behind his farmhouse in Kent, electrical engineer Victor Martin apparently spent 50 years building a working replica of the London, Midland, and Scottish Railway as it existed in 1938. He started the project with his first wife in 1923 and continued it after retirement with his second wife, Louise, the daughter of a railroad stationmaster at St. Pancras. He arranged 500 engines and cars and nearly a mile of track; she added scenery, livestock, and people.

That’s just the beginning. For 30 years the Martins ran the railroad on a daily schedule, following the actual timetable used in St. Pancras in the 1930s. At Christmas they ran extra coaches to accommodate the holiday mail, and when the queen was traveling they included a royal coach on the line. During a national dock strike they added more freight trains, and during the Suez crisis of 1956 they stayed up all night running troop trains. (“Had to do it at night, you see,” Martin told a reporter, “for the secrecy.”)

How real must a model be before you’re a god? The denizens of Victor’s little world enjoyed perfect order until 1986, when Louise died and he cut back to a weekly schedule. Whether this was felt in 1938 is unknown.