In 1739, to celebrate Russia’s victory over Turkey, empress Anna Ivanovna ordered a palace of ice to be built in St. Petersburg. Designed by architect Pyotr Yeropkin, the massive building was 60 meters long and 6.5 high, surrounded by sculptures and artillery, fully furnished (including a bed, mattress, and pillows), and featuring a garden filled with trees, birds, and even an elephant. All of this was made entirely of ice.
It melted the following summer.
When self-styled “moisture accelerator” Charles Hatfield arrived in San Diego in 1915, he’d already created storms for ranchers in Los Angeles. Or, rather, storms had appeared after he’d released his secret chemical mixture into its evaporating tanks; critics claimed the storms were already coming. But San Diego needed to fill its Morena Dam reservoir, so they agreed on a fee and Hatfield released his chemicals.
On Jan. 16, 1916, heavy rain started and didn’t stop. Dry riverbeds filled, then overran their banks, flooding farms and homes, destroying bridges, cutting telephone cables, and marooning trains. Two dams overflowed and one broke, killing 20.
Hatfield said he’d filled the reservoir as agreed and disclaimed responsibility for the $3.5 million in damage. After a long legal battle, the rain was ruled an act of God and then the courts threw out the case.
Hatfield never did reveal his chemical recipe. He died in 1958.
If you were planning to get rich by inventing chicken spectacles, you’re 100 years too late.
Andrew Jackson patented this pair in 1903 so that chickens could “be protected from other fowls that might attempt to peck them.”
Born in 1804, Zerah Colburn was thought to be mentally retarded until the age of 7, when his father overheard him solving multiplication problems for other children and discovered he was a prodigy. From the 1872 autobiography of Amos Kendall, with whom he boarded briefly:
He could multiply together any two numbers under a hundred in less than a minute. He could tell, apparently without thought, how many days there are in any number of years less than thirty, and in any number over thirty and up to a hundred upon a minute’s reflection. After being told the denominations of weights and measures, he would reduce one to another with the greatest readiness. He answered correctly the question, ‘How many gills are there in three barrels?’ The question, ‘How many are 25 × 25 + 35 × 35 +45 × 45?’ he answered correctly with little hesitation. He readily multiplied any number over a hundred by any number less. In less than a minute he answered correctly the question, ‘How many days are there in seventy-three years?’
“What rendered his performances more wonderful was, that he did not know a figure when written, and could not count more than fifty. How he knew the names of larger numbers was a mystery, and he was sometimes embarrassed in making his answers understood. After he had stated correctly the number of days in a given number of years, he was asked how many hours there were. He said he did not know the number of hours in a day. On being told it was twenty-four he immediately gave a correct answer.”
Lord Monboddo relates the following anecdote of a serpent: ‘I am well informed of a tame serpent in the East Indies, which belonged to the late Dr. Vigot, once kept by him in the suburbs of Madras. This serpent was taken by the French when they invested Madras, and was carried to Pondicherry in a close carriage. But from thence he found his way back to his old quarters, though Madras was above one hundred miles distant from Pondicherry.’
— Frank H. Stauffer, The Queer, the Quaint and the Quizzical, 1882
On March 14, 1887, Rhode Island evangelist Ansel Bourne woke up in an unfamiliar room. To his astonishment, he found that he was in Norristown, Pa., where he had been running a stationery and confectioner’s shop for two months, calling himself A.J. Brown.
His nephew helped him return to Providence, where psychologists diagnosed a case of dissociative fugue, multiple personality, and amnesia.
Inspired, Robert Ludlum borrowed the preacher’s surname for his novel The Bourne Identity.
In 1760, was brought to Avignon, a true lithophagus, or stone-eater. He not only swallowed flints of an inch and a half long, a full inch broad, and half an inch thick; but such stones as he could reduce to powder, such as marble, pebbles, &c. he made into paste, which was to him a most agreeable and wholesome food. I examined this man, says the writer, with all the attention I possibly could; I found his gullet very large, his teeth exceedingly strong, his saliva very corrosive, and his stomach lower than ordinary, which I imputed to the vast number of flints he had swallowed, being about five-and-twenty, one day with another. Upon interrogating his keeper, he told me the following particulars: ‘This stone-eater,’ says he, ‘was found three years ago, in a northern uninhabited island, by some of the crew of a Dutch ship. Since I have had him, I make him eat raw flesh with the stones; I could never get him to swallow bread. He will drink water, wine, and brandy, which last liquor gives him infinite pleasure. He sleeps at least twelve hours in a day, sitting on the ground, with one knee over the other, and his chin resting on his right knee. He smokes almost all the time he is not asleep, or is not eating. The flints he has swallowed, he voids somewhat corroded, and diminished in weight; the rest of his excrements resembles mortar.’
— John Platts, Encyclopedia of Natural and Artificial Wonders and Curiosities, 1876
The great thing about Gustave Verbeek’s comic strips is that when you reach the end of a page, you can invert it to see the story continue.
He created 64 such comics for the New York Herald between 1903 and 1905.
In 1963, an Indiana construction engineer discovered a small hoard of coins on the bank of the Ohio River. Two of them eventually passed to a Clarksville museum, which identified them as Roman coins from the third century.
No one has explained how they came to be there. The engineer who found them said they’d been grouped as though in a leather pouch which had since disintegrated. But his name, and the rest of the hoard, has been lost.
The Isle of Dogs. An 18th-century engraving.