 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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The Roadside Shrines of Greece
Roadside shrines erected in memory of those who lost their lives in road accidents are a common sight across Greece. They are found next to highways, and mountain roads, and dirt tracks. The shrines are usually small metal or concrete boxes elevated from the ground on legs or pillars. Some are decorated in the fashion of miniature churches. Virtually all of them have tiny glass doors, behind which a lamp will burn. There will be a bottle of extra oil, a couple of images of saints, a sun-drenched
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How The Soviet Helped Vulcan, An American Town, Get a Bridge
In south West Virginia, near the border with Kentucky, the United States, is a small unincorporated community named Vulcan. Vulcan was once a thriving coal mining town, but in the early 1960s, the mines dried up and many residents moved away in search of employment elsewhere. No longer a productive community, Vulcan's infrastructure deteriorated and even the state government forgot the town existed.
© Amusing Planet, 2019.
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The Last Gas Streetlights
For much of human history, people have lived in the dark. The sun shines for only half the day, or less—lesser still during winter. So everything that required good visibility, including sewing, embroidery, reading and writing was accomplished while there was still daylight. But that didn't mean people retired to bed early. In 18th century London, shops were often open till ten at night. Balls went on till two or three in the morning lighted only by candle chandeliers.
© Amusing Plan...
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Bone Records: Soviet-Era Bootlegged Music on X-Rays
During the Cold War, Soviet Russia was a very restrictive place. The media was heavily censored, foreign radio and television station waves were jammed, books that criticized the Soviet regime were banned, and playing western music that was deemed morally and culturally depraved was prohibited. At the same time, dissident activity was rife. Banned literature and underground publications were reproduced by hand and the documents passed from reader to reader. Even music was bootlegged.
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Cat Ladders of Bern
Cats love climbing, and they certainly need no human help to navigate precarious-looking structures. But in the Swiss city of Bern, cat owners are extra concerned of the wellbeing of their pets. All around the city you will see structures built specially for cats to climb. They look like fire exits, but of a more dangerous kind, attached to the outer walls, creating a path from the upper floor balconies or windows down to the street. Switzerland-based graphic designer and writer Brigitte Schust
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Buchette Del Vino: The Wine Windows of Florence
A unique architectural curiosity found only in the Italian city of Florence are tiny decorated openings on the outside walls of many sumptuous palaces. They are about the size of a cat door, but are located below the level of the waist. The openings are blocked by a wooden or iron door, and many doors have knockers. For many centuries, a surreptitious trade of wine was conducted through these tiny windows. A customer looking to buy wine would knock on the door, whereupon the cellarman or porter
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Qinngua Valley, Greenland's Only Forest
Greenland is actually quite white and blue, due to all the glaciers that cover the world's largest island like frosting on a cake. But near the southern end, sheltered within narrow fjords, there is still some greenery left. South of Tasersuag Lake and east of Tasiusaq Fjord, oriented north-south, is a valley about 15 kilometers long that contains the only natural forest in Greenland. Qinngua Valley is protected on either side by tall mountains nearly 5,000 feet high that shields the valley f...
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Sergei Krikalev: The Man Who Went Up a Soviet And Came Down a Russian
Late in the spring of 1991, Soviet cosmonauts Sergei Krikalev and Anatoli Artsebarski, along with Britain's first astronaut, Helen Sharman, blasted off into space towards Mir, the Soviet space station. Sergei Krikalev's and Anatoli Artsebarski's mission was to relieve the existing crew of the space station, while Helen Sharman was onboard as part of the British Juno program to conduct experiments on life sciences. Sharman returned back to earth together with the crew of the previous mis...
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What a 7-Year-Old Russian Boy Doodled in The 13th Century
Fifty years ago, a trove of manuscripts written on birch bark was discovered in the Russian city of Novgorod, situated some 200 kilometers south of Saint Petersburg. Birch bark was frequently used in the old days as a replacement for paper, which was—until a few centuries ago—a valuable commodity. Birch trees were widely available and could be easily cultivated. In fact, Novgorod is surrounded by birch forests, whose bark was used for centuries by the locals for writing since it was soft an...
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Mauritania's Iron Ore Train
At one million square kilometers, Mauritania is not a small country, but a very small percentage of it is habitable. The rest is covered by the sands of the Sahara. Towns and settlements are separated by vast stretches of inhospitable desert. Roads often have to make detours hundreds of kilometers long just to avoid the drifting sands. The mining town of Zouerat in northern Mauritania is one such isolated outpost. With a population close to fifty thousand, Zouerat is not a small town either....
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Witch Windows of Vermont
Photo credit: Larry Lamsa/Flickr An architectural oddity found only in the US state of Vermont is the so-called "witch window". These are normal portrait-style windows, but angled diagonally so that its long edge is parallel to the roof slope. They are installed in the upper stories in the gable-end wall of the house, and are usually found in old farmhouses. According to the locals the windows were installed to prevent witches from flying into the house, because apparently witches can't f...
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Water Powered Funiculars
Funiculars are an odd mode of transport, but at the same time, they are one of the most energy-efficient one. The system consist of two counterbalanced cars attached at the ends of a long cable that goes up a slope and over a pulley and then comes back down. So when one car goes up, the other comes down. The weight of the two cars counterbalances each other, so that only a minimal amount of energy is required to pull up the ascending car, which is usually provided by an electric motor. Some hist
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The Bolivian Clock That Runs Backwards
The building that houses Bolivia's legislative assembly in Plaza Murillo, in central La Paz, features a clock above the entrance that looks like a mirror image. The positions of the numerals on the clock face are reversed, and the clock itself runs anticlockwise. The building, which was erected during the 1920s and was originally intended to serve as the headquarters of Bolivia's central bank, featured a regular clock until 2014, when the clock was reversed to better reflect the "souther...
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European Trees With The Most Interesting Stories
The Environmental Partnership Association (EPA) is seeking votes from the public to help them select the winner of the European Tree of the Year competition 2019. Each year participating countries select an entrant by holding a national poll, from which a winner is selected in the European round by an online poll that runs throughout the month of February. The winner is announced at an awards ceremony in late March held in the EU Parliament, Brussels.
© Amusing Planet, 2019.
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Cemetery Guns And Coffin Torpedoes
This unusual-looking gun, now exhibited at the Museum of Mourning Art in Arlington Cemetery, once kept body snatchers away from cemetery grounds and discouraged them from digging up dead bodies. The gun would be set near the foot of the grave and a series of tripwires would swing the gun in the appropriate direction when triggered, and fire upon the unsuspecting thieves.
© Amusing Planet, 2019.
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Yasukuni Shrine, Where War Criminals Are Revered
The Imperial Shrine of Yasukuni, in Chiyoda, Tokyo, is a beautiful spiritual place for remembering those who died in service for Japan. As many as 2.4 million men, women and children, and even various animals, are enshrined here. These people (and animals) lost their lives in numerous conflicts involving Japan spanning nearly a hundred years—starting from the Boshin War of 1868-1869 to the Second World War, including the First Indochina War of 1946-1954. Those enshrined are mostly militar...
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Shin's Tricycle
Behind a glass case at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum is a battered and rusted tricycle. The seat is missing, and so are the pedals and the handle grips, and the entire metal frame of the cycle is caked in rust. Like many of the artifacts preserved at the museum dedicated to the world's first nuclear attack, the tricycle has a heart-wrenching story.
© Amusing Planet, 2019.
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When Little Boys Wore Dresses
Until about a century ago, in the western world, you couldn't tell whether a young child was a girl or a boy from the way he or she dressed. All young children dressed alike, irrespective of their gender, in girls clothing complete with girly shoes, long hair and ponytails. Trousers or breeches wasn't worn until boys were at least four, but some continued to wear skirts, gowns and petticoats until they were significantly older—about eight years of age. By that time, the boys would eagerly ...
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Edwin Smith Papyrus: The 3,600-Year-Old Textbook of Surgery
In 1862, an American Egyptologist named Edwin Smith bought an ancient scroll of papyrus from an Egyptian dealer. Smith didn't know how to read it, but he figured it was something important and precious. He kept the papyrus scroll with him until his death in 1906, whereupon his daughter donated the papyrus to the New York Historical Society. It was there the importance of document, now known as the Edwin Smith Papyrus, was first understood.
© Amusing Planet, 2019.
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Historic Watercolors Document How The World Was Before Photography
Before there were cameras, people documented how the world and its inhabitants looked like through paintings. Oil on canvas was the medium of choice because of its vivid colors and the durability of the medium itself. But starting from the 18th century, many European artists—both professional and amateur—began to prefer watercolors, especially those who liked to paint outdoors. The materials required to paint in watercolor can be easily carried in a compact carrying case. Additionally, water...
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How Australia Remembers The World's Biggest Gold Nugget
On February 1869, two British prospectors, John Deason and Richard Oates, were digging for gold in central Victoria, Australia, when their pickaxe struck something hard very near the surface. When Deason bent down to examine the large stone he thought was on the way, he discovered an enormous gold nugget—the largest anybody had ever seen, and will ever see. The nugget measured two feet in length and almost a feet in width. Miners and their wives posing with the finders of the world's bigge...
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The Statue of Liberty of Lake Mendota
This is what will happen when the polar ice melts and sea level rises. Well, not really. It's just a continuation of a prank that started forty years ago. In 1978, a student party named Pail and Shovel swept the students election at the University of Wisconsin. During their campaign, the party made absurd promises that included installing escalators on Bascom Hill, painting the curbs fluorescent so drunk students could find their way home from the bars, flooding Camp Randall for faux naval ba...
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Music in The Clouds
In June 1867, James Glaisher, an English astronomer and meteorologists, and an avid balloonist, was floating over Paris in a balloon when he entered a region of dense cloud: Suddenly, whilst we are thus suspended in the misty air, we hear an admirable concert of instrumental music, which seems to come from the cloud itself and from a distance of a few yards only from us. Our eyes endeavour to penetrate the depths of white, homogeneous, nebulous matter which surrounds us in every direction. We
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Globsters: When Sea Monsters Wash Ashore
On November 30, 1896, two young boys, Herbert Coles and Dunham Coretter, were bicycling along Anastasia Island, near St. Augustine on the Atlantic coast of Florida, the United States, when they noticed an enormous carcass half buried in the sand, apparently washed from the sea. The boys thought it was a whale, and reported their discovery to the local physician, Dr. DeWitt Webb. Dr. Webb visited the carcass the next day, and discovered that it was not a whale. But he couldn't say what the mass...
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James Hiram Bedford: The First Person To Be Cryogenically Preserved
Will humans ever posses the technology to revive a dead person back to life? Dr. James Hiram Bedford certainly hopes so. He has been waiting for that day for the last fifty years frozen in a lab at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. James Hiram Bedford was an American psychology professor at the University of California. Prior to his death in 1967, Bedford expressed his desire to be cryogenically frozen so that his body could be repaired and his consciousness revived with more advanced techno
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Gyrobus: The Flywheel-Powered Public Transportation
Back in the 1940s, Swiss engineers developed a new kind of zero-emission electric bus that used a large spinning flywheel to store energy rather than rechargeable batteries. The reason was simple—they wanted something quieter and cleaner, but most importantly they wanted a vehicle that wasn't constrained by overhead power lines. Many Swiss cities at that time had trolley buses as public transport that ran on predetermined routes powered by electricity. But rails restricted movement and runni...
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Hagfish: The Slimy Creature of The Deep
Hollywood horror movie monsters and aliens aren't complete without loads of repulsive slime, mucous and saliva drenching from their mouths. But this image of a car covered in some white gelatinous mess is not a scene from a movie set. The sticky situation was created in 2017 on an Oregon (USA) highway when a truck carrying live hagfish overturned and covered passing cars in slime.Read more »
© Amusing Planet, 2019.
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Halton Arp's Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies
Less than one hundred years ago, astronomers were not even sure whether our galaxy made up the entire universe or there were more Milky Ways like ours. Edwin Hubble settled the debate in 1925 when he established that the Andromeda Galaxy was not a cluster of stars and gas within our own galaxy, but an entirely separate galaxy located a vast distance away from the Milky Way. Since then astronomers have discovered thousands of galaxies, but they are also aware that there are potentially hundreds
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The Tomb That Inspired Britain's Iconic Telephone Box
The United Kingdom Post Office introduced the first public telephone kiosk, designated K1, in 1921. These were constructed out of pre-cast concrete sections, had a four-sided rectangular form with a pyramidal roof, and was topped by a wrought iron spear. It was not a particularly bad design, but somehow, it didn't appeal to the British public. The London Metropolitan Boroughs as well as the Birmingham Civic Society voiced their dislike and even resisted the Post Office's effort to erect K1 k...
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Juhyo, The Snow Monsters of Mount Zao
High against the slopes of Mount Zaō, in central Japan, the cold, moisture-laden winds from Siberia slams into creating a natural wonder that brings thousands of tourists every winter from all over Japan. The tiny water droplets that the strong wind carries freezes against Mount Zaō's pine trees and their branches forming icicles. These icicles grow nearly horizontal, owing to the strong winds, over which falling snow settles creating towering, grotesque white figures that the Japanese call ...
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RMS Tayleur: The Other Titanic
The sinking of the Titanic is one of the best remembered maritime disasters in history. A grand luxury ship touted as the safest vessel afloat, carrying over two thousand passengers, many of which were wealthy and powerful members of society, sinking on her maiden voyage was an unimaginable event. The loss of the Titanic, for many, was symbolic of the fragile nature of society itself, and science's valiant but futile attempts to triumph over nature. But Titanic wasn't the first casualty suff...
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Bookwheel, The 16th Century Forerunner to The eBook Reader
For many of us, the ebook reader was the next best thing to happen since Gutenberg's printing press. The printing press made books widely available, and the ebook reader conveniently shrunk the same to such compactness that we can carry a thousand of them around wherever we go without discomfort. Such a concept would have been fantastic for someone born in the 16th century, but nevertheless, the idea did cross their minds—especially the mind of Agostino Ramelli. Read more »
© Amusing ...
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Henry Cotton: The Psychiatrist Who Tried to 'Cure' His Patients by Removing Their Teeth
This illustration of a mutilated mouth is not the result of a road accident, but that of a doctor's obsession with an utterly bizarre theory of insanity—a theory that left hundreds of his patients dead and thousands maimed for life. Dr. Henry Cotton was the medical director and superintended of the Trenton State Hospital, a large lunatic asylum in New Jersey. Before returning to the US to accept the position as medical director at a young age of 30, Cotton had studied psychiatry in Europe u...
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The Filipino Hero Who Killed Ferdinand Magellan
Ferdinand Magellan is remembered in the west as the intrepid Portuguese explorer who led the first voyage to circumnavigate the globe, but for the Philippines he is just another white man who fell to his death attempting to conquer lands that did not belong to him. The real hero—for the Filipinos—is Lapu-Lapu, the tribal chief who famously vanquished Magellan becoming the first Filipino hero to successfully resist colonization by a foreign power. Magellan's conflict with the proud and unyi...
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The Caves of Maresha And Bet-Guvrin
The Shfela lowlands in south-central Israel, at the foot of the Judaean Mountains, is characterized by a thick layer of soft chalk that was extensively quarried in the past by the local population leaving the underground hollow like a piece of cheese. There are more than a thousand caves here underneath the former towns of Maresha and Bet Guvrin situated on the crossroads of the trade routes that led to Mesopotamia and Egypt. These quarried caves served as cisterns, oil presses, baths, dovecotes
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The Ancient Portraits of Fayuum Mummies
These haunting portraits of long-dead men, women and children come from a vast region known as the Fayuum Basin, located immediately to the west of the Nile south of Cairo. Watered by canals diverting the Nile river, this sprawling oasis is one of the most fertile region in Egypt with rich agricultural land and a large saltwater lake that has been providing the local population with fresh fish since ancient times. It was in Fayuum where farming first developed in Egypt, and during Roman occupati
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Moqui Marbles And Martian Blueberries
Across many places in southern Utah, in the western United States, where the orange-colored sandstone gives way to the spectacular white- and pink-colored cliffs and bluffs of Navajo Sandstone, one can find hundreds of iron spheres either embedded in the rock or gathered loosely into "puddles" on the ground. They range in size from fraction of an inch to several inches in diameter. They are called moqui marbles. The word "moqui" comes from the Hopi Tribe, and it means "the dead" in t...
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Grammichele: The Hexagonal Town
Located in the province of Catania, in the Italian island of Sicily, is the town of Grammichele. It is one of the few towns in the world to have the unique hexagonal layout. The town was founded after the great Sicily earthquake of 1693 wiped out an earlier settlement called Occhialà, located to the north of modern Grammichele. The survivors built a new town and named it Grammichele, after St. Michele, in the hope that the saint will protect the new town from further disasters. Read more »
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Charvolant: The Kite-Drawn Carriages
On 8 January 1822, an extraordinary journey was made from Bristol to Marlborough. An English schoolteacher named George Pocock took his wife and his kids on a 182 km-trip in a carriage drawn not by horses but by a couple of enormous kites. Pocock designed the carriage himself, which he called "Charvolant". George Pocock was fascinated with kites from a young age, and as he played and experimented with them, he learned that kites had tremendous lifting power. Young Pocock would tie small ston...
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