 The Aqueduct of Loukous
In the Greek municipality of North Kynouria in Peloponnese, near the villa of Herodes Atticus, a wealthy Greek aristocrat and a Roman senator, stands an old aqueduct bridge crossing a small ravine. The aqueduct carries water from a spring located about one and half kilometer to the northwest. The water is rich in dissolved minerals, and over two thousand years of water dripping from the sides of the aqueduct have built up thick deposits that hang like stalactites in a limestone cave. Photo cre
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Wainhouse Tower: The Tallest Folly
Wainhouse Tower, standing high on a hill in the King Cross area of Halifax, is the tallest structure in Calderdale and a prominent landmark that can be seen for miles around. It has been called the world's tallest folly because it never got to be used for the purpose for which it was constructed. It's also associated with an interesting legend. The tower was commissioned as a chimney by John Edward Wainhouse, who owned the local dye works, in order to comply with the new smoke abatement act ...
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Via Cava: The Cave Roads of Tuscany
In southern Tuscany, there is a mysterious network of old pathways deeply entranced into massive rocks appearing like narrow canyons flanked by stone walls, some of which rise up to twenty meters tall. Some of the pathways connect burial sites and tombs, others lead straight to towns such as Sovana, Sorano and Pitigliano and to nearby fields and streams. Chisel marks are visible all over the rocky surface indicating the laborious process by which these passages were excavated, but for what purpo
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Bernd And Hilla Becher's Industrial Photography
For over 40 years, starting from the early 1960s, German artists Bernd and Hilla Becher photographed over two hundred industrial plants and buildings in Europe and North America. This included everything from water towers, coal bunkers, blast furnaces, gas tanks, coke ovens, oil refineries, grain elevators, storage silos, and warehouses. Each of these structures were photographed in an obsessively formalist way that defined a style and made them one of the most dominant influences in contempora
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The Legend of Bingen's Mouse Tower
On a small island in the Rhine river, outside Bingen am Rhein, in Germany, stands a 10th century stone tower with a macabre legend associated with it. The story goes that in the year 970, there was a terrible famine in Germany, so severe that people devoured cats and dogs just to stay alive, yet thousands died of starvation. At this time, the archbishop of Mainz was a cruel and wicked ruler named Hatto II, a despicable miser, whose dominant idea in life was to increase his treasures by fair mean
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Dresden's Tobacco Mosque
Standing on the banks of the Elbe river, in the German city of Dresden, is a monumental building with a multicolored glass dome and high-rise minarets reminiscent of a mosque. Its magnificent Islamic decoration and distinctive architectural character stands out from the typical Baroque buildings that Dresden is known for. Since its inception, more than a hundred years ago, the building has been known as the "tobacco mosque".
© Amusing Planet, 2019.
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Beautiful Siberian Lake is Actually a Toxic Waste Dump
The electric blue waters of this pond in the Russian city of Novosibirsk has become the backdrop of many Instagram fans lately. Photographs of women in bikinis posing by the lakeside and visitors riding inflatable unicorns on the azure waters have gone viral on social networks. But authorities warn visitors not to be deceived by its appealing turquoise shade, because the lake is actually a toxic reservoir where chemical residue from a nearby power plant is dumped. The lovely color that reminds
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Linnaeus's Flower Clock: Keeping Time With Flowers
Who needs a watch to tell time when we got flowers? Many species of flowering plants open and close their flowers at specific times throughout the day. The first person to make a recorded observation of this phenomenon was Androsthenes, an admiral of Alexander the Great, who noticed that a tropical Tamarind tree raise their leaves during the day and droop them down during the night. Many people made similar observations—Pliny the Elder, in the first century, and Albertus Magnus, the thirteenth...
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The World's Southernmost City
The southern part of South America is fractured into a number of small islands collectively known as Tierra del Fuego. Located roughly between 52° and 55° latitudes, these islands constitute some of the most distant landmasses on earth measured from the equator. The region is sparsely populated, but there are two major population centers here—Ushuaia and Río Grande—both located on Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego, the largest island of the archipelago. This island is shared by Argentina a...
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That Time When America Air-Dropped Pianos For Troops in Battlefields
You thought pianos dropping from the sky is a gag for cartoons? Then hear this story out. During World War Two, all kinds of production involving metals, such as iron, copper, and brass, that was non-essential to the war effort were halted by the American government, because these metals were needed to make guns, tanks, and artillery. Many musical instrument makers were affected by the new regulations, which meant that either they had to manufacture something else the military could use, or wait
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Hellburner: The 16th Century Weapon of Mass Destruction
In the age of sail, when ships were made of wood, fire was the number one enemy of sailors, and this fearsome tool was used in diabolic ways at times of war to sink enemy ships. A devious method pioneered by the ancient Greeks was to set on fire one of their own ships, loaded with combustible material such as tar and turpentine, and push it towards the enemy fleet. Such a fireship could wreck havoc upon the enemy with terrifying rapidity. In the 7th century, the Greeks discovered that naptha wh
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The World's Longest Dinosaur Trackway
In the French village of Plagne, in the Jura Mountains, 200 kilometers east of Lyon, there is a set of huge footprints made 150 million years ago. The footprints belonged to a sauropod, the largest class of dinosaurs, that had very long necks, which helped them reach the foliage on top of tall trees, long tails and four thick, pillar-like legs. An adult sauropod easily weighed 100 tons, although this particular individual probably weighed about 35 tons.
© Amusing Planet, 2019.
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The Triumphal Arch of Emperor Maximilian I
Like many rulers, the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I had a fascination for large monuments, but instead of actually building them he romanticized them on paper. One of his most famous commissions was The Triumphal Arch, composed of 195 woodcut prints which, when arranged, formed a grandiose arch standing twelve feet high and ten feet wide. Maximilian commissioned other ambitious woodcut projects but The Triumphal Arch is the only one that was completed during his lifetime, and it remains one o
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The Longest Papal Election in History
The main attraction in the ancient city of Viterbo, in central Italy, is a 13th century palace built to serve as the country residence for the pope. The Palazzo dei Papi, or the Papal Palace, also provided popes with a place to escape to whenever things turned violent in Rome, as it often did because of rivalry between the two dueling factions—the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, supporting the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor, respectively. One of the grand halls in the palace, known as the Concla...
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The World's First Parachute Jump
On December 26, 1783, a crowd gathered outside the observatory in Montpellier, a French city near the south coast on the Mediterranean Sea. They were about to witness the world's first successful jump in a parachute. The observatory was housed inside a tall mediaeval tower known as "Tour de la Babotte". It is one of only two towers that survive from a time when Montpellier was encircled by ramparts. The tower is some 26 meters tall, and for a while it had been used as an observatory to st...
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Hermits As Garden Ornaments
Between the 17th and the 19th centuries, a certain reproachful and voyeuristic trend emerged among wealthy British landowners. Not content with inanimate garden ornaments such as gnomes and bird baths, these people hired real, living and breathing persons, to live as hermits in make-believe hermitages erected on the lavish grounds of their estates. Most of them were required to make scheduled appearances on the grounds in appropriate clothing whenever the employer was entertaining guests. They w
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Thomas Edison's Forgotten Passion: Building Concrete Houses
Of all things Thomas Alva Edison is known for, concrete is not one of them. It was one of Edison's less successful ventures, but not one without significance. Towards the end of 19th century, Edison, like many businessman and builders of the time, was captivated by the possibilities of cement. Edison believed that concrete was the future and the answer to all housing problem, and he decided to act on this impulse in a big way. Concrete houses in Gary, Indiana constructed using methods devel
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François Coignet's Reinforced Concrete House
In a quiet suburb, north of Paris, by the River Seine, stands a derelict four-story building. Its windows and doors are broken, some are barred by bricks, and large patches of plaster have fallen off the walls. It is apparent that nobody has lived here for quite sometime. Creepers cover the outer walls, and small branches and shrubs pour out from inside the house through the upper windows. Despite the barbed wire fencing, the property has been vandalized as evident from the graffiti covering the
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The Galloping Horse Problem And The World's First Motion Picture
"The 1821 Derby at Epsom" by Theodore Gericault Horses have appeared in works of art throughout history. They have appeared in prehistoric cave paintings, such as those in Lascaux, in temples and tombs of ancient Egyptians and the ancient Greeks, and as monumental statues during classical antiquity. These depictions showed great knowledge of equine anatomy. George Stubbs, an 18th-century English painter, helped further this knowledge by dissecting horse carcasses to learn more about the a...
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Cunningham Sanitarium
On the shores of Lake Erie, in Cleveland, the United States, there once stood a giant steel sphere sixty-four feet tall. Inside the sphere were 38 rooms where Dr. Cunningham's patients spent up to two weeks at a time breathing air at twice the atmospheric pressure. Dr. Cunningham believed that the higher air pressure introduced oxygen in abundance into the body system and aided in the therapy of various diseases. This is known as hyperbaric oxygen therapy.
© Amusing Planet, 2019.
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Mocha Dick: The Whale That Inspired Moby Dick
About thirty kilometers off the coast of Chile is a small teardrop-shaped island called Mocha, inhabited by the indigenous Mapuche people. The island was well known among sailors, especially pirates and privateers, who used the island as their supply base, exchanging steel and manufactured goods for livestock, corn and potatoes. English and Dutch privateers would often stop at the island, load their ships with supplies, and after a brief stay, sail up the Pacific coast sacking Spanish ships and
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Taiwan's Giant Wall of Propaganda Spewing Speakers
Just off the southeastern coast of mainland China, lies a group of two islands collectively called Kinmen. For over seventy years, these islands have occupied a unique position in the delicate relationship between China and Taiwan. Kinmen Islands' location is the most peculiar. The islands sit in a small bay practically surrounded by the Chinese mainland, yet it is governed by Taiwan, which lies approximately one hundred miles away across the Taiwan Strait. The political status of Taiwan itse...
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The Avian Honeyguides of Africa
South of the great Sahara Desert in North Africa, there lives a bird called the greater honeyguide (Indicator indicator) that has developed a special symbiotic relationship with the local honey hunters. The honeyguide eats beeswax, and although it is excellent at finding bees' nests, it's unable to sneak past the stinging bees alone. Instead, it approaches humans and makes a loud chirping noise to attract their attention. Then it flies in the direction of the nest. Over the centuries, local...
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The Great Aurora of 1859
On the evening of September 2, 1859, after the sun went down on the western hemisphere, a spectacular show of light began on the skies above. Streams of luminous cloud in blue, green, purple and sometimes red shot upwards from the horizon in the north and filled the entire sky. Many people thought that there was a large fire burning somewhere. Others took it as a sign from the heavens of some great disaster that's about to befall man. Few realized what they were looking at, because many of th...
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Churches of Peace: The Churches That Defied The Holy Roman Emperor
In the towns of Jawor and Świdnica, in the Silesia neighborhood of Wroclaw, Poland, stand two magnificent timber-framed churches. The Holy Roman Emperor who ordered them built never expected to see them completed. In fact, he never wanted them built in the first place, for they were Protestant churches. But against all odds and under tremendous political and physical constraints, the Protestants displayed extraordinary resourcefulness, managing to complete three churches of such scale and comp...
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Pretty in Pink: The Muralla Roja
This innovative pastel-colored postmodern apartment complex is a popular landmark in the coastal town of Calpe, Spain. It is called Muralla Roja, which means "the red wall", although it is mostly pink with a bit of baby blue. Muralla Roja was designed by Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill, and built in the early 1970s. The building was built like a fortress drawing inspiration from the architecture of the North African kasbah. The silhouette of this high-walled, vertical structure is said to ...
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Telefon Hírmondó, The Telephone Newspaper
When cell phones were first introduced, they were unattractive, brick-like devices that could do nothing more than make voice calls and send and receive text messages. In order to entice customers to this new technology, network operators offered subscribers various value-added services, such as the ability to get news updates, infotainment, match scores, weather updates, and so on, on their phones through text messages. For a nominal fee, a customer could subscribe to any or all of these value
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Vellir: This Icelandic Geyser is in The Middle of a River
Iceland has many geysers but none is stranger than Vellir, also known as Árhver, because it is located smack in the middle of a flowing river. Located not far from the town of Reykholt, Vellir consist of a cone of cemented clay and gravel which can be clearly seen when the water level in the Reykjadalsa river is low, but at high water levels, the cone usually remains submerged. There are several other vents on small flats in the middle of the river, but only Vellir is more active with constan...
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Porto Flavia
On the west coast of Sardinia, the second-largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, there was once an unusual port. It's a small opening on the rock face of the limestone cliffs above the sea, that led directly to the Masua mines, where zinc and lead ores were extracted, via a 600-meter-long tunnel. Ores were brought by conveyor belts to the mouth of the tunnel, from which a mechanical arm loaded the ore directly onto waiting ships. The ingenious harbor was built in 1924 by engineer Cesare Vece...
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Kyshtym: The Nuclear Disaster That Was Kept Secret For 30 Years
Thirty years before the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl exploded, in what became one of the most devastating nuclear accidents in history, there was another major mishap at yet another Soviet nuclear power plant. It was hushed up by officials for more than three decades. The accident took place at Mayak, one of Russia's biggest nuclear facilities, located near the town of Kyshtym in the Chelyabinsk district in the Southern Ural mountains. The facility was built shortly after the end of the Secon...
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How Kazakhstan Became The Entire Soviet Union For 4 Days
1991 was a notable year in the geopolitical history of the world. It was the year the Gulf War started marking the beginning of America's constant military presence in the Middle East. That same year Cambodia made peace with Vietnam bringing an end to a decade-long war. Meanwhile, Yugoslavia collapsed, and clashes between Serbia and the other Yugoslav republics launched another war which ran through the rest of the decade. 1991 also saw India abandon its policies of socialism and self-suffici...
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The Hanging Coffins of China And Philippines
The ancient Bo and Guyue people of southern China did not bury their dead. Instead, they hung their coffins from tall cliffs. This peculiar burial custom was prevalent not only among the Bo and Guyue people of China, but among many other minority groups in several Asian countries such as Philippines and Indonesia. The precise reason for this kind of burial is not known. It is possible that the Bo people believed that placing the coffins high up the side of a mountain will enable the deceased to
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The Warship That Couldn't Stay Afloat
During the American Civil War, the Union Navy designed a class of warships called "Casco" that could submerge its hull at will to make the boat smaller and a harder target to hit. At least, that was the idea. Until the middle of the 19th century, all ships, including warships, were made of wood. Steam-propelled, ironclad warships first saw action in the Battle of Hampton Roads, also known as the Battle of Ironclads. The Confederate fleet had one ironclad ram named Virginia, and on the Union ...
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Gilbert Hill: Mumbai's Forgotten 66 Million Years Old Heritage
Concrete buildings aren't the only thing that rises vertically in the metropolis of Mumbai, India's most populous city. In a suburb, north of the city, there is a huge column of basalt rising 200 feet towards the sky. Surrounded on three sides by tall apartment complexes of nearly the same height, this monolith called Gilbert Hill is practically invisible to anyone but the nearest neighbors.
© Amusing Planet, 2019.
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Martha Gellhorn, The Only Woman Who Landed in Normandy on D-Day
On the eve of the Normandy landings in June 1944, there were over a thousand war correspondents all over Europe reporting back to the millions of British and Americans back home. A handful of these journalists and photographers were also women. Unfortunately, the government had prohibited women from going to the front lines, so while these women correspondents could cover stories from the war zone, they could not go in with the troops. Understandably, many female war correspondents were not hap
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Trevor, The Loneliest Duck
On an island far far away, there once lived a duck named Trevor. Nobody knew where he came from, because until his arrival there was no duck on the island. He had appeared mysteriously on this remote rocky island after one violent storm. Located in the South Pacific, about 2,400 kilometers northeast of New Zealand, this island called Niue is a country of its own, the entirety of which is confined inside a single 260-square-kilometer coral atoll. But Niue is far from cramped. It has a population
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The Shoe Fitting Machines That Blasted You With Radiation
Finding the right fit for your shoes is not that difficult. All you need to do is take a short walk through the store in the new pair. Squeezing the front end of the shoe, or sliding the index finger behind the heel is another common practice. But back in the 1920s through the 50s, many shoe stores across America and Europe had live x-ray viewing machines, like those in airports for checking luggage, only smaller. These machines clearly showed the bones and flesh of the feet as well as the outli
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Ethiopia's Church Forests
Ethiopia is almost completely depleted of its forest cover. In the early 1900s, nearly forty-five percent of the country was covered by forests. But the demand for agricultural land to feed the country's growing population saw this forest being gradually sacrificed for farmlands, until more than ninety percent of this vast tropical forest had disappeared. The remaining forest is not contiguous but scattered in tens of thousands of small groves, mostly in the northern part of the country. At th...
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Train Through a Football Stadium
Going to any sporting event to watch your favorite teams play, as opposed to staying at home and watching the live broadcast, has its perks. Stadium is all about the experience—the noise, the crowd, the shouting, the occasional disruption—it all adds to the thrill. So imagine how thrilling the experience must be for spectators watching the TJ Tatran Čierny Balog club play against visiting teams, when the game is disrupted by an old steam train chugging right through the stadium between the ...
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Soviet Televisions
This is the KVN-49, a black-and-white television set produced in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, and the first set to be mass-produced in the country. It was a popular model. In just over a decade, over 2.5 million KVNs were sold throughout the country. One striking feature of the television set is the large magnifying lens in front of the screen. The lens is made of plastic and is filled with a clear liquid such as distilled water or glycerol. Obviously, the purpose of the lens is to magnify th
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How Japanese Bamboo Helped Edison Make The Light Bulb
Thomas Alva Edison's invention, or shall we say "perfection", of the light bulb helped brighten up homes of people all across the world, but he is especially revered in Japan. Cleveland-based newspaper The Plain Dealer says Japanese people represent the largest percentage of visitors to Edison's childhood home in Milan, Ohio. Edison shares an unlikely connection with Japan. His admirers are at every corner of the country, but the relationship is especially deep with the citizens of Ya...
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The World's Oldest Printed Book
The Diamond Sutra is an ancient Buddhist sermon that generation of Buddhists have memorized and chanted since at least the fifth century. The sutra, which meditates on the illusory nature of the material world—the central theme of Buddhism, was originally written in Sanskrit in India, from which it was translated to Chinese in 401 AD. It is said that the teachings of The Diamond Sutra "cut like a diamond blade through worldly illusion to illuminate what is real and everlasting." A copy of...
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The Talking Statues of Rome
For the past five hundred years, the people of Rome have voiced their resentment against the authorities through a unique medium—short compositions and satirical verses ridiculing the government, the pope and his behavior. These humorous expressions of political discontent were posted anonymously on various prominent statues around the city where people met and discussed matters relating to their personal lives as well as the state. The prominence of the statues gave these anonymous voices exp...
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The Goliath Transmitter
Communication with submarines is difficult because radio waves do not easily travel through salt water. The obvious solution is to surface and raise an antenna above the water, but surfacing makes the submarine visible to enemy ships and hence vulnerable. Another solution is to use a buoy carrying the antenna that is floated to the surface. The buoy is tethered to the submarine which remains well below the surface.
© Amusing Planet, 2019.
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The Ice Block Expedition of 1959
In the autumn of 1959, a 3-ton block of ice made an 8,500 kilometer journey on the back of a pickup truck from the edge of the Arctic Circle to the Equator in central Africa. The journey which took four weeks to complete involved driving through the vast desert of the Sahara in fifty degree heat. During this entire time no refrigeration was used. The trip was a publicity stunt organized by a Norwegian company called Glassvatt, that manufactured insulating glass wool, to show how good their prod
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Gustave Doré's Victorian London
Our visual image of Victorian London is largely fixated on its sordidness—cramped streets, dark alleys, desolate slums, overcrowding, and illicit dens. Two people are responsible for creating in our heads such pictures of destitution and filth—one is Charles Dickens, whose works largely revolved around grinding poverty, and the other is French illustrator Gustave Dore.
© Amusing Planet, 2019.
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The Cranes of River Clyde
A giant cantilever crane looms over a car park adjacent to the Hilton Garden Inn at Glasgow City. During its heydays, this crane used to load cargo and steam locomotives onto waiting ships to be exported around the world. The crane is no longer operational, yet its arm still bears the name of its former owners—Clydeport. Known as the Finnieston Crane, it is one of only four such cranes still standing on the River Clyde, upon which Glasgow is built. They are the cherished symbols of the city&...
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Operation Sailor Hat
On the coast of Kahoʻolawe, the smallest of the eight main volcanic islands of Hawaiian, is a large crater left behind by a violent test conducted by the US Navy in 1965. Back then, starting from the beginning of World War 2 until the 1990s, Kahoʻolawe was used as a training ground and bombing target by the US armed forces. Thousands of soldiers, sailors, and airmen trained on Kahoʻolawe for the brutal assaults on islands such as the Gilbert and Marshall Islands, and New Guinea in the Western...
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Cycling Through Water
Through a large pond in the De Wijers nature reserve in Limburg, Belgium, runs a cycling lane that goes right through the waters instead of going over it. The 212-meter concrete path was built below the water level and dips low enough to put riders at eye level with the water. Two five-feet high embankments on either side of the bike path keeps the water of the pond away, while underground tunnels under the bike path ensures that amphibians and other aquatic life in the pond could freely move be
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The Lost Tomb of Genghis Khan
The death of Genghis Khan is shrouded in secrecy. The Great Khan died in the summer of 1227, during a campaign against the Tanguts, along the upper reaches of the Yellow River, in Yinchuan. But the manner of his death is unknown. It is reasonable to believe that he died of injuries sustained during the battle. It is also reasonable to believe that those wounds came not from an enemy arrow, as asserted by Marco Polo, but from falling off his horse during hunting, according to The Secret History
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Trümmerfrauen: The Women Who Helped Rebuild Germany After World War 2
After the end of World War 2, one of the main tasks was to clear the urban areas of ruin and start rebuilding Europe—Germany in particular, where the damage was extensive. Allied bombing had laid to waste nearly every German city, town and village, destroying millions of homes, public buildings, schools, factories, as well as centuries-old cathedrals, mediaeval houses and other historic structures. It is estimated that the war produced over 400 million cubic meters of rubble that needed to be ...
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The Hand of Glory
At the Whitby Museum in North Yorkshire is a strange artifact—a dismembered hand, dried and shriveled. It once belonged to a man who was hanged from the gallows for an unknown crime. The hand was cut off at his wrist when the lifeless body was still hanging. The hand was then dried and pickled in salt. The "hand of glory" is thought to have magical powers. Back in the shadowy days of black magic, witchcraft and the occult, sorcerers, shamans, and witch doctors kept such bizarre and otherw...
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Berezniki: The Russian City Swallowed By Sinkholes
The city of Berezniki, in Russia's Ural mountains, is slowly sinking into the earth. The city of more than 150,000 individuals was built directly on top of a potash mine, which was standard practice during Soviet times. After nearly a century of extraction, deep voids were left underneath the city. The ceilings of these huge underground caverns are supported only by walls and pillars of soluble salt. In 2006, when a freshwater spring began flowing into the mine some 720 to 1,500 feet below the...
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The Rockets of Mysore
Rockets were originally invented not to send things into space, but to shoot enemies with. Their effectiveness in warfare was demonstrated for the first time by the Chinese in the 13th century, when they used them against the Mongol invaders and successfully kept them away for months. These early rockets, known as 'fire arrows', were similar to bottle rockets we use today in firework celebrations, only larger. A short tube was filled with gunpowder, closed at one end and attached to a long ...
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Alexander Mitchell: The Blind Engineer Who Gave Sight to Seafarers
Sandbanks are a hazard to marine traffic. Often found near coastlines, near the mouth of a river and around ports, these shallow, submerged beds of sand keep changing their shape and position posing great navigation risk to ships. Because the sand tends to drift with the tides, it is difficult to anchor a warning lightship on a sandbank, much less get a firm foundation for a permanent lighthouse. The problem of erecting a lighthouse on sandbanks and shoals greatly disturbed Alexander Mitchell (
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Hanoi's Motorcycle Deliveries
Two-wheelers are the most popular mode of transport in Vietnam, especially in big and dense cities such as Hanoi. Motorbikes and scooters suit Hanoi's narrow streets and tiny alleys that connect one quarter with the next, allowing commuters to avoid the congested main roads. Motorbikes in Hanoi are used to carry everything—from a four-member family to cartons of eggs stacked to dangerous heights. Street vendors and delivery guys use bikes extensively.
© Amusing Planet, 2019.
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Human Decomposition in Japanese Artwork
In traditional Buddhist teachings, contemplating about death is an integral part of meditation. Buddha himself said that death is "the greatest of all teachers", for it teaches us to be humble, destroys vanity and pride, and crumbles all the barriers of caste, creed and race that divide humans, for all living beings are unescapably destined to die. Many Buddhist cultures also practice sky burials, where human corpses are left out in the open, such as mountain tops and forests, to be eaten b...
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Why Victorian People Loved Posing Next to Aspidistra Plants
Potted plants have been a part of households for thousands of years. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans all kept houseplants in their sprawling estates. The Romans, in particular, were fascinated with showy flowers and often decorated their homes with the largest and brightest variety of roses and violets. After the fall of the Roman empire, decorative gardening largely disappeared from Europe, and was replaced by a more utilitarian approach of growing herbs, vegetables, and fruits. Hou
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The Crooked Trees of Hafford
Approximately twenty kilometers northwest of the town of Hafford, in Saskatchewan, Canada, and just over five kilometers south-west of Alticane, is a grove of trembling aspens with dramatically twisted trunks and branches as if somebody took them by both hands and wrangled them into knots. The Crooked Trees has been a local attraction since at least the 1940s. According to Rick Simmonds, who owns the property upon which the crooked cluster of trees sit, the site is visited by five thousand visit
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Las Médulas: The Largest Roman Gold Mine
This incredible serrated landscape of red mountains and green chestnut trees is the result of two centuries of destructive mining carried out by the Romans. Known as Las Medulas, this historic mine located near the Spanish town of Ponferrada was the largest open-pit gold mine in the entire Roman Empire.
© Amusing Planet, 2019.
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The Dam Climbing Alpine Ibex
Alpine Ibex are big mountain goats that live among the peaks in the European Alps where predators cannot reach. They occupy the steep, rocky terrain above the tree line between two to three thousand meters above sea level. But they can't live there at all times, because there is no food up there. During spring and summer, the Ibex live among the conifers and the meadows where there are plenty of grass to feed. Before the first snow falls, the Ibex has to fatten up and build reserves to help s...
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The Adorable Custom of 'Telling The Bees'
The bee friend, a painting by Hans Thoma (1839-1924) There was a time when almost every rural British family who kept bees followed a strange tradition. Whenever there was a death in the family, someone had to go out to the hives and tell the bees of the terrible loss that had befallen the family. Failing to do often resulted in further loss, it was said, such as the bees leaving the hive, or not producing enough honey or even dying. Traditionally, the bees were kept abreast of not only death...
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Luna 15: The Soviet Probe That Tried to Gatecrash America's First Moon Landing
Two hours before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were scheduled to leave the surface of the moon after their historic moonwalk, an unmanned Russian probe called Luna 15 crash landed on the lunar surface just 540 miles away from Eagle. The Luna missions began in 1958, before the Apollo program was even conceived. Its mission was to send a series of robotic spacecraft to the moon—either an orbiter or a lander. The ultimate goal was to bring lunar sample back to earth. Luna 15 was the fifteenth o...
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Ugly Belgian Houses
There is a near universal appeal among Belgians to build their own house, which is reflected in the popular saying—"every Belgian is born with a brick in his stomach." The result of this becomes obvious when you drive through any Flemish suburb. Every house is different from its neighbor. Worse still, every house is a hotchpotch of different architectural styles. It's like a "nightmarish architectural Legoland", says Hannes Coudenys, who has been photographing these architectural sha...
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Prinkipo Orphanage: Europe's Oldest Wooden Building
This rickety wooden building, practically on the verge of collapse, is the largest wooden building in Europe and the second largest in the world. It stands on top of a small hill on Büyükada—a tiny island off the coast of Istanbul. The Prinkipo Greek Orphanage, also known as the Rum Orphanage, was originally conceived to be a luxury hotel and a casino. But when it couldn't obtain a permit, the building was turned into an orphanage. It operated for sixty years taking care of Greek Orthodo...
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Fake Tree Observation Posts of WW1
Camouflaging has always been a part of warfare, but it was only during the two world wars that things got really creative. During the First World War, both sides kept constant watch of the enemy lines for movement, but that was not an easy task. Anyone who stuck his head above the trench parapet for more than a few seconds was shot. So the French started disguising observation posts as trees. Then they taught the British how to do it. Later, the Germans started using them too.
© Amusing
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The 387 Houses of Peter Fritz
In 1993, while rummaging through a junk shop in Vienna, Austria, artist Oliver Croy made an extraordinary discovery—hundreds of beautiful, handcrafted architectural models each neatly wrapped in rubbish bags. Croy was so attracted by the skilled workmanship that he acquired the entire lot—nearly four hundred of them. Croy found out that the models were created by man named Peter Fritz, who worked as a clerk at a Viennese insurance company. Nothing more was known. Who Peter Fritz actually wa...
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Why is Batman's Gotham City Named After a Nottinghamshire Village
Gotham is a fictional city in the DC Universe but its namesake is not. Located across the Atlantic in South Nottinghamshire, this quiet, little village with a handful of houses, a church and a couple of shops, is completely unlike the city of crime and corruption it lends its name to. For starters, Gotham is actually pronounced "goat-um" (which means goat village) and not "goth-em", the way we pronounce the fictional city Batman calls home. While Batman's Gotham is a teeming metropolis...
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Somalia's Hand Painted Storefronts
Many businesses and shopkeepers in Somalia—which is one of the world's poorest nations—cannot afford luxuries such as backlit signs and vinyl posters to advertise their products and services. They instead rely on local artists to decorate their storefronts. Low literacy rate requires that these hand painted signs be accompanied with visual depictions of the products they sell. Photo credit: Feisal Omar/Reuters
© Amusing Planet, 2019.
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The Temples of Mount Fanjing
Fanjingshan or Mount Fanjing, in Guizhou Province in southwest China, is a sacred Buddhist site and a place of great natural beauty with unusual rock formations and rich biodiversity. Many Buddhists believe that Fanjingshan is where one can reach spiritual enlightenment as Maitreya Buddha did. Since the Tang Dynasty, which ruled over China from the 7th to the 10 centuries, scores of temples have been built here but only a few survive.
© Amusing Planet, 2019.
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Dagen H: The Day Sweden Switched Traffic Sides
Few traffic jams are as organized and coordinated as the ones that took place nationwide in the morning of September 3, 1967, on the streets of Sweden. That day, at exactly five in the morning, all traffic came to a standstill. Then slowly and cautiously, motorists and cyclists steered their cars, bikes and cycles across the road to the other side. Sweden had decided that they are no longer going to drive on the left side of the road. Chaos unfolded across the country as million of motorists, wh
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Nasoni: Rome's Ubiquitous Water Fountains
Drinking fountains in Rome are as quintessential as the city's many Roman monuments. Standing about three feet high, these 200-pound cylindrical cast iron structures with a long, bent spout can be found all over the city's piazzas and street corners. They are known as nasoni, which means "big nose", because they are said to resemble one.
© Amusing Planet, 2019.
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How War Drove to Extinction The Wake Island Rail
The day Japan bombed Pear Harbor, many American outposts in the Pacific, such as Philippines, Guam, Midway, Wake Island, Malaya, Thailand, and Shanghai also came under aerial attack. These raids took place within a few hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbor's naval base had begun. One of the targets, Wake Island, was a tiny atoll located strategically between two other American possessions, Guam and Midway islands. Message of the attack on Pearl Harbor was received by the garrison on Wake I...
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People Once Downloaded Games From The Radio
The year 1977 was an important year in the history of home computing. That year, the world's first microprocessor-driven personal computer was released—not one, not two, but three different models by three different manufacturers: the highly successful Apple II, the Commodore PET and the TRS-80, which actually outsold the Apple II by a factor of five until the early 1980s. All these machines and the ones that came after had cassette tapes for mass storage, because hard disk drives were stil...
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Wrigley Field's Rooftop Seats
One of the best spots to watch the Chicago Cubs play at their home ground, Wrigley Field, is not inside but outside the stadium, from the rooftops of the neighboring buildings. Sounds odd, but these rooftop seats are in big demand—sometimes more than the seats inside the stadium.
© Amusing Planet, 2019.
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Voder: The World's First Talking Machine
That voice in your GPS navigator, the virtual assistant in your smartphone, and the automated responses you get when you dial a company helpline number are not real voices. In other words, there is no big database of spoken words that the computer picks up and strings them together to create a sentence. They are generated on the fly by the computer, yet they sound so natural, so human, that more often than not they are completely indistinguishable from that of a real person.
© Amusing P
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Cragside: The World's First House To Have Electric Lights
Nearly a decade before Thomas Edison began working on incandescent lamps and a more affordable way to bring the bright world of electricity to Victorian homes, a fine country house near the town of Rothbury in Northumberland, England, was lit entirely by electricity.
© Amusing Planet, 2019.
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Carrières de Lumières: An Immersive Art Gallery in a Disused Quarry
In the Les Baux-de-Provence of southern France, is located Carrières de Lumières, or the Quarries of Light—an unusual multimedia exhibit space dedicated to art and music, housed inside a former limestone quarry. For many centuries, limestone was extracted from the quarries in the Alpilles mountains to build the nearby towns. But as the 20th century rolled in, new building materials such as steel replaced stone and the demand for limestone fell, until it became unprofitable for the operators ...
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Vardo: The Opulent Caravans of The Gypsies
Living in trailer homes is largely an American culture, but the history of mobile homes originated in Europe. The first trailer home owners were the travelling showmen who spent most of their lives on the road. Instead of pitching tent wherever they went, they had horse-drawn wagons where they cooked, ate, and slept. Later, around the middle of the 19th century, these caravans were adopted as living quarters by the Romani people, commonly called the Gypsies. These people originated from northwe
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The Castle of Zafra
In the beloved TV series Game of Thrones, young Ned Stark is seen clashing swords with the henchmen of Targaryen in front of a spectacular castle known as the Tower of Joy. Like many locations in this immensely popular TV series, the Tower of Joy is an actual castle, albeit with a different name. Its real name is Castle of Zafra, and it is located in the Spanish province of Guadalajara. Castle of Zafra stands on a rocky outcrop in the Caldereros mountain range, at an altitude of 1,400 meters. It
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Mimizuka: The Burial Site of Thousands of Noses
In the middle of a quiet residential neighborhood in the suburb of Kyoto, Japan, is a 30-foot-high, grass-covered hillock within which are buried an estimated 38,000 noses of men, women and children slaughtered during the Japanese invasion of Korea during the late 16th century. Led by the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Japan invaded Korea in 1592 with the intention of conquering the Korean Peninsula and China, which was then under the Ming dynasty. Japanese forces were largely successful in capturi
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WLW: The 500 Kilowatt Super Station
On most nights, during the 1930s, the airwaves over North America were dominated by a single radio station called WLW. Transmitting at a power of half million watts, it was the most powerful, legally-operating, radio station in the world. So much energy was pumped through the atmosphere that street lights in the neighborhood flickered and radio receivers rattled in tune with the modulation peaks. One gas station near the eight-hundred-foot-tall transmitting tower outside Cincinnati, Ohio, just c
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Quaker Guns of The American Civil War
"All warfare is based on deception," Sun Tzu wrote in the The Art of War, an ancient Chinese military treatise, often regarded as one of the most influential books ever written on war strategy. For centuries, Sun Tzu's words have been gospel for military strategist, businessmen and lawyers alike. Military deception is as old as war itself. The great city of Troy fell to the Greeks largely because of the Trojan horse—a deception. Smoke screens, a deceptive technique used to mask the move...
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The World's First Cyber Attack Happened Nearly Two Hundred Years Ago
Many say that the world's first cyber attack happened in 1988, when Robert Morris, a 20-something graduate student at Cornell, inadvertently set loose a computer worm that quickly clogged up large sections of the internet. Morris's intentions were not malicious—he just wanted to gauze how big the internet was, but the program he created to achieve that had the characteristic behavior of a worm—it replicated itself. Morris was sentenced to three years probation and 400 hours of community...
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The Red Taj Mahal: John Hesssing's Tomb
The Roman Catholic Cemetery in Nehru Nagar, Agra, harks back to a time when the many princely states that eventually united to become India had merchants and settlers originating from all over Europe, before the British had a death grip on the subcontinent. These people migrated to India attracted by the remarkable religious freedom India offered, regular pay, and overall better prospects, and found employment under various Indian courts. Eventually, they became so attached to the local culture,
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Syndrome K: The Fake Disease That Saved Lives
In the fall of 1943, as German soldiers began rounding up Jews in Italy and deporting them by the thousands to concentration camps, a mysterious and deadly disease called "Syndrome K" swept through the city of Rome causing dozens of patients to be admitted to the Fatebenefratelli Hospital located in the middle of the boat-shaped island on Tiber river. The details of the disease are sketchy, but the symptoms include persistent coughing, paralysis and death. The disease was said to be highly c...
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Why Did Ancient People Bury Butter in Bogs?
Peat bogs are favorite hunting grounds of archeologists because of the many odd surprises these marshy wetlands have revealed from time to time. These wetlands of decaying plant matter have remarkable preservation properties. Low in oxygen and high in tannic acid, bogs are perfect place to fall into and have your bodies stay intact for millenniums to come. Ritual sacrifices by drowning in peat bogs were common in northwestern Europe. We know this from the thousands of "bog bodies" that have ...
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The Stockholm Lights That Can Be Controlled By Anyone With A Phone
The 72-meter tall Phone Tower at the former headquarter of Ericsson at Telefonplan, in southern Stockholm, is a known landmark. It is the tallest building in the neighborhood for miles around. Every night, the windows of the top ten floors of the now defunct Phone Tower lights up with different colored lights. And the colors keep changing according to the whims of the public. The lights are wired to a computer, that reacts to how people touch the number pad on their mobile phones.
© Amu
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Alai Minar: Alauddin Khilji's Unfinished Minaret
The Qutub Minar in New Delhi is a well known landmark. The sandstone-colored minaret with intricately carved inscription and reliefs on its façade was erected in the late 12th century by Qutubuddin Aibak, the slave general of Muhammad Ghori, to celebrate Ghori's victory against the Rajput rulers of Delhi. It's believed that Aibak was inspired by his contemporary, the great Ghurid Sultan Ghiyas-od-din, who built a similar victory tower, the Minaret of Jam, in remote Afghanistan just a few ye...
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The Wheel of Urine
A pot of urine can tell a lot about your diet and health. It can tell whether you are adequately hydrated, or how well your kidneys are functioning. It can tell if you are suffering from jaundice, or if you have high blood sugar. Modern chemical analysis of urine can reveal a wide range of afflictions. Even centuries ago, before such diagnostic tests became available, and before there were microscopes and blood tests and X-rays, urine was the one and only body fluid that could be reliably analyz
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The Building That Steals Your Body Heat
More than a quarter million commuters pass through the Stockholm Central Station everyday, unaware that their bodies are being tapped for energy. Unlike the machines in The Matrix that enslaved humans and literally sucked energy out of their bodies using cables, the commuters at Stockholm Central Station aren't tethered to anything. They are free to roam about. In fact, the more they move, the more energy they produce.
© Amusing Planet, 2019.
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The World's Most Inland Lighthouse
Of all the lighthouses in the world, none was built further from the body of water it lit than the one on top of Bidston Hill, on the Irish Sea coast in England. This hundred-acre hill of heathland and woodland on the Wirral Peninsula is one of the highest points on the Wirral, visible for miles around, especially from the sea. The first pair of lighthouses went up in 1763 to guide ships through the shallow sandbanks on the mouth of the estuaries of River Dee and River Mersey as they approached
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What Grandmas Around The World Cook
I love photography projects that explore different cultures of the world—like Julian Germain's photos of classrooms from various countries, or Jan Banning's photos of bureaucrats' work desk. James Mollison's photos make make us wonder where children's sleep, or what they eat (photographed by Hannah Whitaker), or what they play with (photographed by Gabriele Galimberti). This time Italian photographer Gabriele Galimberti seeks out grandmothers and their love for good cooking. For two ...
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Salt Domes And Salt Glaciers of Iran
Million of years ago, the Persian Gulf was a much larger body of water than it is today, inundating large sections of the Arabian peninsula in the south and Iran in the west. As the water evaporated and the shores of the sea retreated, it left behind vast quantities of salt. The layer of salt became covered with sediments washed down from the mountains by rainwater, and over time, the sediment layer thickened, became compact and weighed down heavily on the salt layer underneath.
© Amusi
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The Cactus That Crawls Across The Desert
The narrow peninsula of Baja California Sur, sticking into the central Pacific off Mexico's west coast, is home to a unique species of cactus known as the "creeping devil" (Stenocereus eruca). Instead of standing erect like other species of its family, the creeping devil lies flat on the ground with only its tip slightly raised. When hundreds of these cacti grow together in a massive colony, it looks almost like the site of a brutal massacre, as if someone had ruthlessly hacked them to pie...
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The Arsonist Who Set Fire to an Ancient Wonder of The World So That People Would Remember Him
On the night of July 21, 356 BCE, two important events took place in the Mediterranean Basin. One created history, the other erased it. On that night, in the city of Pella, the capital of the ancient Greek kingdom of Macedonia, the wife of King Philip II gave birth to a baby boy. This child would, years later, create one of the largest empires of the ancient world rewriting the history of much of Europe, Asia and northeast Africa. He was Alexander the Great. The other event was more prosaic: an
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Stolpersteine: The 'Stumbling Stones' of Holocaust Victims
With hundreds of things to see in Berlin, few tourists pay attention to what lies under their feet. The barely four inch by four inch blocks of brass embedded in the pavement are easy to miss at first. But once you know they exist, you begin to come across them with surprising frequency. Each stone is engraved with the name, date of birth and fate of an individual who has suffered under the Nazi regime. Known as "Stolpersteine", or "stumbling stones", there are over eight thousand of th...
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The Catholic Church Built by a Muslim Emperor
The city of Agra on the banks of Yamuna is a historical city full of monuments from the Mughal period, of which the Taj Mahal is one of the best known. This colossal marble mausoleum with a dazzling white façade, four towering minarets and an onion dome on the roof is so breathtakingly beautiful that it overshadows pretty much everything else in this 500-year-old city, even something as rare as a Roman Catholic Church commissioned by an Islamic ruler. The Church of Akbar. Photo credit: Jeromee...
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Earthquake Rose
On February 28, 2001, an earthquake of magnitude 6.8 rocked the US state of Washington cracking sidewalks, toppling buildings, and causing some $2 billion worth of damages all throughout the state. In Port Townsend, 65 miles north of the epicenter, a local shop called 'Mind Over Matter' had a sand-tracing pendulum on display, featuring a pointed weight at the end of a long wire suspended over a tray of sand. The natural swing of the pendulum causes the weighted tip to trace long lines on th...
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Lunatic Express: The Train That Gave Birth to Kenya
More than a hundred years ago, before Europeans had set foot on what is now Kenya, a tribal prophet named Kimnyole spoke of a vicious "iron snake" that would slither its way across the grassy plains, devouring cattle, plundering their lands and wreaking havoc along the way. The beast, he said, would bring a kind of foreigner never seen before, one with strange red hair who would one day rule their land. Although Kimnyole could not have known the details, the prophecy he made was clear on on...
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