Wonder: The world is stranger up close. - Page 40

Editor’s note

The open room

Wonder begins where familiarity loosens. This edition crosses science, art, language and history to recover the useful shock of looking closely at things we thought we already knew.

Q1580

WonderArt

Accused of selling a Dutch national treasure to the Nazis, Han van Meegeren faced execution for treason. His defence was that the painting was not a Vermeer at all — it was his own forgery. To prove it, he painted another one in his cell.

Van Meegeren was a mediocre painter dismissed by critics, so he set out to fool them. He aged canvases, mixed period pigments and baked his work to crack the varnish, then sold 'lost Vermeers' to the greatest experts of the day. One reached Hermann Göring. After the war that made him a collaborator, so he confessed to the lesser crime of fraud — and the court made him paint under supervision to check. He was convicted of forgery and became, briefly, a folk hero for having swindled the Reich.

Art historyRead card

Q1581

WonderHistory

In July 1518 a woman began dancing in the streets of Strasbourg and could not stop. Within a month around 400 people had joined her, some dancing until they dropped. Nobody has fully explained it.

The city's records are clear that it happened; physicians of the day concluded it was 'hot blood' and — disastrously — prescribed more dancing, hiring musicians and clearing halls. Explanations since have included ergot poisoning from mouldy rye and mass psychogenic illness brought on by famine, disease and dread. The second fits better: the region had endured years of hunger and plague, and stress-driven outbreaks of this kind are documented elsewhere. It is a reminder that the mind can produce physical epidemics.

Medical historyRead card

Q1582

WonderHistory

After a munitions ship exploded in Halifax harbour in 1917, Boston sent doctors and supplies overnight. Nova Scotia has sent Boston a Christmas tree nearly every year since.

The blast was the largest man-made explosion before nuclear weapons — roughly 2,000 people died and a square mile of the city was flattened. Boston's relief train left within hours, through a blizzard, arriving with medical staff before many Canadian teams could. Halifax sent a tree in thanks the following Christmas, and revived the gesture permanently in 1971. Every year Nova Scotia picks a large spruce and ships it to Boston Common, where it is lit in early December — a thank-you note over a century long.

HistoryRead card

Q1583

WonderHistory

In 897 Pope Stephen VI had the body of Pope Formosus dug up, dressed in papal robes and propped on a throne to stand trial. A deacon was made to answer on the corpse's behalf. It was found guilty.

Formosus had been dead for months. The charges were political — the papacy was a prize fought over by Roman factions — and the verdict stripped him of his titles, annulled his acts and had three fingers removed from his right hand, the ones used in blessing. The body was thrown into the Tiber. Public revulsion was such that Stephen was imprisoned and strangled within the year, and later popes annulled the trial. It remains the strangest proceeding in the history of the Church.

HistoryRead card

Q1584

WonderHistory

In 1918 nearly 200 American soldiers were trapped behind German lines and being shelled by their own artillery. A homing pigeon called Cher Ami flew 40 km through fire, shot through the breast, to deliver the message that stopped it.

The 'Lost Battalion' had sent two earlier birds; both were shot down. Cher Ami got through despite being hit, arriving blinded in one eye with a leg hanging by a tendon and the message capsule still attached to it. The barrage lifted and 194 men were rescued. Army medics saved the bird and carved it a small wooden leg. Cher Ami was awarded the French Croix de Guerre and is preserved at the Smithsonian, where it has been on display for over a century.

Military historyRead card

Q1585

WonderHistory

In twelfth-century Suffolk, villagers found a boy and girl with green-tinged skin who spoke an unknown language and would eat nothing but raw beans. The girl grew up, married locally, and said they had come from a land with no sun.

Two independent chroniclers, Ralph of Coggeshall and William of Newburgh, recorded the story within living memory of the events. The boy sickened and died; the girl learned English, lost her colour once she ate a wider diet, and settled. The likeliest reading is not magic but hunger: green skin fits severe malnutrition, and the children may have been Flemish orphans, speaking an unfamiliar tongue after their community was scattered. It is one of the few English folk tales with sober medieval sources behind it.

Medieval chroniclesRead card

Q1586

WonderTechnology

In 1938 Douglas Corrigan was refused permission to fly the Atlantic. He took off from New York saying he was going to California, and landed 28 hours later in Dublin, claiming he had misread his compass. Nobody believed him, and nobody minded.

Corrigan had helped build Lindbergh's Spirit of St Louis and had been applying for years to make his own crossing; his patched-up aircraft was repeatedly judged unfit. So he filed for a transcontinental flight, pointed the nose east into the cloud, and turned up in Ireland. Officials suspended his licence for precisely the length of his voyage home. America adored him — he got a ticker-tape parade bigger than Lindbergh's — and he maintained the compass story, straight-faced, for the rest of his life.

Aviation historyRead card

Q1587

WonderScience

After surgery in 1953, Henry Molaison could no longer form new long-term memories. He met his doctors afresh for fifty years — and in doing so became the most important patient in the history of memory research.

An operation to control severe epilepsy removed much of his hippocampus on both sides. It stopped the seizures and stopped his memory. Crucially, he could still learn physical skills — practising a tracing task, he improved daily while insisting each time he had never done it before. That split proved memory is not one system but several, stored in different places, and it underpins nearly everything we now know about how remembering works. Only after his death was his name published; in life he was known simply as H.M.

Neuroscience historyRead card

Q1588

WonderOcean

In 1872 the Mary Celeste was found drifting in the Atlantic in good order, with cargo intact, food in the galley and the crew's belongings untouched. The ten people aboard were never seen again.

Her lifeboat was missing and the last log entry was nine days old, which points to an orderly evacuation rather than violence. The best explanation is that fumes from the cargo of industrial alcohol frightened the captain into a temporary abandonment — the ship was towed behind on a rope that then parted, leaving them adrift while the vessel sailed serenely on. Popular retelling turned it into a ghost story, helped by a young Arthur Conan Doyle, whose lurid short story fixed the legend in the public mind.

Maritime historyRead card

Q1589

WonderHistory

In 1939 Basil Brown, an excavator with no formal training, traced the outline of a 27-metre Anglo-Saxon ship in a Suffolk mound. The timber had rotted away centuries earlier — only the iron rivets held the shape of the hull in the sand.

Landowner Edith Pretty had a hunch about the mounds on her estate and hired Brown, a Suffolk man who had taught himself archaeology from books. What he uncovered was the burial of an Anglo-Saxon king, probably Rædwald of East Anglia, complete with the great iron helmet now on every book cover about the period. It rewrote England's 'Dark Ages' as a time of gold, trade and craft. Brown's role was minimised for years; the British Museum now credits him properly.

British MuseumRead card

Q1590

WonderHistory

In 2009 Terry Herbert took a borrowed metal detector into a Staffordshire field and found the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold ever discovered — over 3,500 pieces, almost all of it war gear.

Herbert had been detecting for eighteen years without much to show for it. Over five days the field kept giving up gold: sword fittings, helmet fragments, garnet inlay of astonishing fineness. Valued at £3.285 million, the sum was split between him and the landowner under English treasure law. What makes it strange is the contents — hardly any jewellery or coins, almost entirely the stripped decoration of weapons, as though someone had methodically emptied the spoils of a battlefield and buried them.

Birmingham MuseumsRead card

Q1591

WonderSpace

In 1908 something detonated over Siberia with enough force to flatten roughly 2,000 square kilometres of forest. More than a century on, no impact crater has ever been found.

Around 80 million trees went down, all pointing away from a single centre. The likeliest culprit is a small asteroid or comet fragment perhaps 50–60 metres across that burst in the atmosphere before reaching the ground — which is why the trees fell but nothing dug a hole. The region was so remote that no scientific expedition arrived for nineteen years. Had it come down hours later, with Earth turned a little further, it could have struck a major city. It remains the largest impact event in recorded history.

NASARead card

Q1592

WonderHistory

When his ship was torpedoed in 1942, Poon Lim drifted alone on a wooden raft in the South Atlantic for 133 days, catching fish with a hook made from a torch spring. It is still the longest recorded solo survival at sea.

A Chinese steward on a British merchant ship, Lim found a raft with a few tins of biscuit and some water. When those ran out he improvised: a fish hook from a torch spring, a knife from a biscuit tin, a canvas canopy to catch rain. He taught himself to swim to keep his strength. Ships and aircraft passed without seeing him. Brazilian fishermen found him at last, and he had lost only about nine kilos. He said afterwards he hoped no one would ever have to break his record.

Maritime historyRead card

Q1593

WonderTechnology

In 1943 a naval engineer was designing springs to steady instruments on rough seas. One fell off a shelf and walked itself end over end across the floor. His wife found the name in a dictionary: Slinky.

James watched the spring tumble gracefully instead of clattering, and realised he had a toy rather than an instrument mount. Betty James found 'slinky' — meaning sleek and graceful — in a dictionary. The first 400 sold out in ninety minutes at a Philadelphia department store in 1945. Betty went on to run the company for decades after Richard left. Hundreds of millions have been sold, and NASA has taken Slinkys into orbit to demonstrate how springs behave without gravity.

Invention historyRead card

Q1594

WonderTechnology

Play-Doh began life as a putty for rubbing coal smoke off wallpaper. When homes switched to gas heating the business was dying — until a teacher mentioned children liked modelling with it.

Kutol of Cincinnati made a doughy compound that lifted soot from wallpaper without water. As coal fires gave way to gas and vinyl wallpaper arrived, demand collapsed. Kay Zufall, a nursery school teacher, read that the putty made good modelling clay and told her brother-in-law at the company. They removed the detergent, added colour and almond scent, and relaunched it as a toy in 1956. More than three billion cans have sold since — a cleaning product saved by children finding the better use for it.

Invention historyRead card

Q1595

WonderTechnology

A chemist searching for clear gun sights in 1942 kept producing a compound that stuck to everything and ruined his equipment. He set it aside twice. Only years later did he realise the sticking was the product.

Cyanoacrylate bonded instantly to anything faintly damp — including skin and lab glass — which made it useless for the optics work Coover was doing. He rediscovered it in 1951 while developing heat-resistant aircraft canopies, and this time recognised what he had: an adhesive needing no heat or pressure. It reached shops in 1958. Field surgeons in Vietnam used a spray version to close wounds fast enough to get men to hospital, and medical-grade cyanoacrylate still seals surgical incisions today.

Invention historyRead card

Q1596

WonderScience

In 1879 a researcher working on coal tar derivatives went to dinner without washing his hands and noticed his bread tasted sweet. He traced it back to the laboratory bench and found saccharin.

Fahlberg went back and, in an act of research technique no laboratory would permit today, tasted his way along the bench until he found the compound — around 300 times sweeter than sugar. He patented it without crediting his supervisor Ira Remsen, who was quietly furious for the rest of his life. Saccharin's moment came with sugar rationing in both world wars. The same story recurs: aspartame and sucralose were also found by chemists who licked something they should not have.

Chemistry historyRead card

Q1597

WonderHistory

When Alfred Nobel's brother died in 1888, a French paper is said to have mistaken it for Alfred's death and called him a merchant of death who grew rich finding new ways to kill. He is said to have read it, and rewritten his will.

Nobel invented dynamite, held 355 patents and owned armaments works, so the charge would have stung. The famous version of events is worth holding loosely: no original copy of the obituary has ever been found, and the Nobel Foundation notes he had been thinking about prizes for decades and was influenced by his friendship with the peace campaigner Bertha von Suttner. What is certain is the will he signed in 1895, leaving almost his whole fortune to reward those who had conferred the greatest benefit on humankind.

HistoryRead card

Q1598

WonderHistory

In 1962 a Soviet submarine near Cuba, out of radio contact and under depth charges, prepared to fire a nuclear torpedo. Three officers had to agree. One, Vasili Arkhipov, said no.

Submarine B-59 had been submerged for days in stifling heat, its batteries failing, when American ships began dropping practice charges to force it up. The crew could not know the war had not already started. The captain and political officer agreed to launch; Arkhipov, second in command of the flotilla, held out and talked them into surfacing instead. The West did not learn his name until 2002. He was not decorated for it, and the day is now sometimes called the closest the world came to nuclear war.

National Security ArchiveRead card

Q1599

WonderHistory

Before Apollo 11 landed, the White House quietly prepared a statement to be read if Armstrong and Aldrin were stranded on the Moon. It was never delivered, and stayed unknown for thirty years.

There was no way to rescue a crew stuck on the lunar surface; if the ascent engine failed they would simply have run out of air. Speechwriter William Safire drafted the contingency address, which begins by saying the men who went to the Moon to explore in peace will stay to rest in peace, and instructs that contact be cut before Mission Control closes with a version of a burial at sea. The memo surfaced in 1999. It is the finest thing ever written that nobody had to hear.

US National ArchivesRead card

Q1600

WonderMind

Two brothers adopted separately at birth met at 39 and found they had both married women named Linda, divorced, remarried women named Betty, named their sons James Alan, and owned dogs called Toy.

Jim Lewis and Jim Springer became the founding case of the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart, which went on to follow more than a hundred separated pairs and found striking similarities in personality, taste and even mannerisms. The caution is real: some of the coincidences are less astonishing than they sound, since both were given the common name James by different families, and researchers who go looking for matches will find some. What survived scrutiny is the broader finding — that heredity shapes personality far more than mid-century psychology assumed.

Minnesota Study of Twins Reared ApartRead card

Q1601

WonderHistory

For years London poured its waste into the Thames and did nothing. Then the summer of 1858 grew hot, the river stank so badly that Parliament soaked its curtains in chloride of lime, and the money for a sewer system was approved in eighteen days.

Members debated moving upriver to Hampton Court. Joseph Bazalgette was given the job and built 132 km of main sewers and 1,700 km of street sewers, deliberately sizing the pipes at twice the diameter the calculations required — a decision that kept them working for well over a century. Cholera in London effectively ended, though the connection to dirty water was still disputed at the time. Much of Bazalgette's brickwork is still carrying London's waste today.

London MuseumRead card

Q1602

WonderHealth

In 1854 a Soho cholera outbreak killed hundreds in ten days. John Snow mapped every death, saw them cluster around a single water pump, and persuaded the parish to remove its handle. The outbreak stopped.

Nobody yet accepted that water carried disease; the consensus blamed bad air. Snow's map of Broad Street, with a black bar for each death, is the founding document of epidemiology and one of the most influential graphics ever drawn. He also spotted the exceptions that proved him right — the local brewery workers, who drank beer, were untouched. The authorities put the pump handle back once the panic passed. Snow died four years later, before his idea was generally accepted.

London MuseumRead card

Q1603

WonderHistory

In 1814 a vat at a London brewery burst, setting off a chain reaction that released more than half a million litres of porter into the streets of St Giles. Eight people died in the flood.

The Horse Shoe Brewery on Tottenham Court Road kept its porter in enormous wooden vats bound with iron hoops. One hoop failed, the vat gave way, and the surge knocked over its neighbours. The beer flattened two houses and flooded the cellars of a poor neighbourhood where families lived below street level. The brewery was taken to court and the disaster was ruled an act of God, so nobody paid. The Dominion Theatre stands on the site today.

HistoryRead card

Move into another roomDriveFor the next attempt.