In June 2001, a 10-year-old Staffordshire girl wrote her name on a tag, attached it to a helium balloon, and released it. It floated 140 miles to Wiltshire and came to rest in the garden of another girl.
Both girls were named Laura Buxton, both were 10 years old, both are fair-haired, and each owns a black female Labrador, a guinea pig, and a rabbit.
On the night of Sept. 2, 1859, an enormous solar flare produced brilliant auroras around the world. Newspapers and ships’ logs reported striking displays throughout the United States, Europe, Japan, and Australia; Bostonians could read by their light at 1 a.m.
At the height of the storm, a curious conversation took place between two New England telegraph operators:
Boston: Please cut off your battery, and let us see if we cannot work with the auroral current alone.
Portland, Maine: I have done so. Will you do the same?
Boston: I have cut my battery off and connected the line with the earth. We are working with the current from the Aurora Borealis alone. How do you receive my writing?
Portland: Very well indeed. Much better than with the batteries on. There is much less variation in the current, and the magnets work steadier. Suppose we continue to work so until the Aurora subsides?
Boston: Agreed. Are you ready for business?
Portland: Yes; go ahead.
They carried on in this way for two hours, the storm inducing enough current in the lines to support their transmissions. It marked the first conclusive link between auroral activity and electricity.
(Thanks, Michael.)
For Alexander Aitken (1895-1967), a prodigious memory was both a blessing and a curse. He memorized the Aeneid, knew π to a thousand places, and could quote long passages from Milton. But he was plagued by vivid memories of World War I, which haunted him until the end of his life:
I slid the rifle-sight to ‘450’, aimed and fired. … The Turk plunged into the trench in a swirl of dust. … This, of course, was what I was there for, but it seemed no light matter, and kept me awake for some time. I would come to no conclusion except that individual guilt in an act of this kind is not absolved by collective duty nor lessened when pooled in collective responsibility.
Unable to escape these visions, he suffered a chronic depression and had a complete breakdown in 1967, the last year of his life. “Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory,” wrote Montaigne, “as the wish to forget it.”
On April 6, 1823, HMS Leven was surveying East Africa when she spied her consort, the Barracouta, about two miles to leeward. This was surprising, as the brig’s sailing orders should have placed her far from that location, but Leven‘s crew recognized her peculiar rig and the faces of her men. Strangely, she stood away when Captain Owen attempted to close with her, and near sunset she lowered a boat, apparently to pick up a man overboard.
The next morning the Leven anchored at Simon’s Bay, and a full week passed before the Barracouta joined her there. Her log showed she had been 300 miles away when the Leven thought she saw her.
So what had the Leven seen? No other vessel of the Barracouta‘s class had been seen about the Cape at that time. The sighting has never been explained.
A Mr. Jonathan Jackson, of Columbus, Ohio, died some thirty years ago, leaving orders to his executors to erect a cats’ home, the plans and elevation of which he had drawn out with great care and thought. The building was to contain dormitories, a refectory, areas for conversation, grounds for exercise, and gently sloping roofs for climbing, with rat-holes for sport, an ‘auditorium’ within which the inmates were to be assembled daily to listen to an accordion, which was to be played for an hour each day by an attendant, that instrument being the nearest approach to their natural voices. An infirmary, to which were to be attached a surgeon and three or four professed nurses, was to adjoin the establishment.
— Virgil McClure Harris, Ancient, Curious and Famous Wills, 1911
“Everything has its beauty,” wrote Confucius, “but not everyone sees it.”
Born in 1834 to a Mexican Indian mother, Julia Pastrana spoke three languages, had excellent taste in music, and gave charitably to deserving institutions. But the world would not see beyond her hypertrichosis, which covered her face and body with straight black hair, and her showman husband paraded her around the world as “The Bearded and Hairy Lady.”
“I well recollect seeing and speaking to this poor Julia Pastrana when in life,” wrote Francis Buckland in Curiosities of Natural History. “She was about four feet six inches in height; her eyes were deep black, and somewhat prominent, and their lids had long, thick eyelashes: her features were simply hideous on account of the profusion of hair growing on her forehead, and her black beard; but her figure was exceedingly good and graceful, and her tiny foot and well-turned ankle, bien chaussé, perfection itself.”
She died bearing a child at 26, and her mummy continues to tour the world — ironically, an object of more enduring fascination than the beauties of its day.
In June 1994, shortly after Pink Floyd released the album The Division Bell, someone calling himself Publius posted two messages to the newsgroup alt.music.pink-floyd:
When readers asked for proof of his authenticity, Publius wrote, “Monday, July 18, East Rutherford, New Jersey. Approximately 10:30pm. Flashing white lights. There is an enigma.” Sure enough, at the appointed time during a Floyd concert the words ENIGMA PUBLIUS appeared in white lights at the front of the stage.
Unfortunately, the clues then dwindled, no explanation was given, and no winner was ever announced. Rumors about the enigma have appeared ever since in fan circles and semi-cryptically from the band’s organization, but no one really knows what the enigma is. “It is important to note that neither I nor anyone involved with this zine will enter into any correspondence on this topic,” wrote Jeff Jensen, editor of the band’s fan magazine, in issue 34. “It’s a puzzle for you, devised by the one who loves you enough to drive you mad.”
New Hampshire’s Mount Washington looks placid from a distance, but don’t climb too high: The summit is blasted by hurricane-force winds 110 days a year (the weather station is literally chained to the mountain) and the wind chill reached minus 103°F in 2004.
John Metcalf, a native of the neighbourhood of Manchester, … became blind at so early an age as to be altogether unconscious of light, and its various effects. His employment in the younger period of his life was that of a waggoner, and occasionally as a guide in intricate roads during the night, or when the common tracks were covered with snow. Afterwards he became a projector and surveyor of highways in difficult and mountainous parts; and, in this capacity, with the assistance merely of a long staff, he traverses the roads, ascends precipices, explores valleys, and investigates their several extents, forms, and situations, so as to answer his purpose in the best manner.
— John Platts, Encyclopedia of Natural and Artificial Wonders and Curiosities, 1876
According to legend, pearl-hunting Spaniards sailed up the Gulf of California in 1610 and became grounded in a vanishing inland sea, leaving a ship full of treasure in the California desert. Reports are curiously specific:
In 1949 the Los Angeles Times reported that three UCLA students set out with 1910 Imperial Irrigation District maps and a story from a Cahuilla Indian who said he’d seen a “serpent-necked” canoe near the Salton Sea in 1917. The Times doesn’t report the result — but if you found a fortune in pearls, you wouldn’t tell a newspaper, would you?
