Wonder: Ideas for closer looking. - Page 35

Editor’s note

Wonder

Selected for evidence, scale, close looking and clear explanations of unfamiliar subjects.

WonderLiterature

In 1898 a struggling writer published a novel about the largest liner ever built — the Titan — striking an iceberg on an April night in the North Atlantic and going down with most aboard, for want of lifeboats. The Titanic sailed fourteen years later.

The parallels are hard to shake off: both ships were the largest afloat, both were called practically unsinkable, both carried far too few lifeboats, both were running fast through icy water on the northern route, and both names differ by four letters. Robertson was a former merchant sailor, and the likeliest explanation is expertise rather than prophecy — he knew the size ships were heading towards, knew the lifeboat regulations were inadequate, and knew the North Atlantic. He wrote the disaster the industry was building for itself. After 1912 the book was hurriedly reissued, and it has never quite been read as fiction since.

Morgan Robertson, Futility (1898)Read card

Q1548

WonderHistory

Violet Jessop was aboard the Olympic when it was rammed, aboard the Titanic when it sank, and aboard the Britannic when it went down too. She survived all three and kept going to sea for another thirty years.

Jessop was a stewardess on the Olympic in 1911 when a warship struck it, a stewardess on the Titanic in 1912 when she was put into a lifeboat holding a stranger's baby, and a nurse on the hospital ship Britannic in 1916 when it hit a mine in the Aegean. Sucked towards the Britannic's still-turning propellers, she jumped from her lifeboat and struck her head on the keel — an injury she later credited a thick head of hair with softening. She went back to work on liners and retired only in the 1950s, to a cottage in Suffolk.

Violet JessopRead card

Q1549

WonderHistory

Tsutomu Yamaguchi was on a business trip in Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. Burned and half-deaf, he travelled home the next day — to Nagasaki, arriving in time for the second bomb.

An engineer for Mitsubishi, Yamaguchi was three kilometres from the Hiroshima hypocentre. He made it back to Nagasaki and was describing the blast to a disbelieving supervisor on 9 August when the second flash filled the window. He lived to 93. In 2009 Japan formally recognised him as the only official double survivor — though others were caught by both — and he spent his last years speaking against nuclear weapons, saying his survival appeared to have been given to him as a task.

Tsutomu YamaguchiRead card

Q1550

WonderHistory

The American Civil War opened with shells landing on Wilmer McLean's Virginia farm. He moved his family 190 km away to escape it — and four years later the surrender was signed in his front parlour.

In July 1861 the First Battle of Bull Run was fought across McLean's land; a shell is said to have come down through his kitchen. A grocer with no wish to be at the centre of a war, he moved south to the quiet village of Appomattox Court House. On 9 April 1865, officers looking for a suitable room knocked on his door, and Lee surrendered to Grant in his parlour. Souvenir-hunting officers then stripped the furniture and carried it off, some of them leaving money on the floor as they went.

HistoryRead card

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WonderHistory

Abraham Lincoln's son was pushed off a crowded train platform and pulled back to safety by a stranger. The stranger was Edwin Booth — brother of the man who would shoot his father.

Robert Todd Lincoln told the story himself in a letter of 1909. Waiting for a sleeping-car ticket at Jersey City, he was pressed against a moving carriage and dropped into the gap; a hand seized his collar and hauled him out. He turned and recognised Edwin Booth, the most celebrated American actor of the age. Neither knew what was coming. Within about a year or two Edwin's younger brother John Wilkes Booth shot the president at Ford's Theatre — and Edwin, told later of the rescue, is said to have taken some comfort from it.

HistoryRead card

Q1552

WonderSpace

In 1954 Ann Hodges was asleep on her sofa in Alabama when a 4-kilogram rock from space came through the ceiling, bounced off her radio and struck her hip. She is the only person confirmed to have been injured by a meteorite.

The meteorite was around 4.5 billion years old and had split in the atmosphere; the other piece landed miles away. Hodges was left with a spectacular bruise and, almost at once, a legal fight — her landlady claimed the rock belonged to the house. Hodges eventually kept it for a $500 settlement and later gave it to the Alabama Museum of Natural History. The attention exhausted her. Given how much of Earth is ocean and empty ground, the odds of a stone that has crossed the Solar System finding a sofa are almost past arithmetic.

SmithsonianRead card

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WonderLiterature

In 1838 Edgar Allan Poe wrote a novel in which shipwrecked sailors draw lots and eat the cabin boy, Richard Parker. Forty-six years later a real crew was rescued having done exactly that — to a cabin boy called Richard Parker.

Poe's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, contains the scene almost as a throwaway. In 1884 the yacht Mignonette sank in the South Atlantic and four survivors drifted for weeks; they killed and ate the seventeen-year-old cabin boy, whose name was Richard Parker. The case became R v Dudley and Stephens, the decision every English law student still reads on whether necessity can excuse murder. It is said a relative noticed the resemblance to Poe's book years later. The name resurfaced once more in Life of Pi, given to the tiger.

Literary historyRead card

Q1554

WonderScience

Roy Sullivan, a park ranger in Virginia, was struck by lightning seven separate times between 1942 and 1977 and survived every one. It cost him a toenail, his eyebrows, and several hats set on fire.

Sullivan worked in Shenandoah National Park, high ground in a region of violent summer storms, which goes some way to explaining the first strike or two. Seven is another matter — the odds of being hit even once in a lifetime are roughly one in fifteen thousand. He grew wary of storms and reported that people began to avoid standing near him. He kept the burnt hats. Guinness still lists him as the human being struck by lightning more times than any other on record.

Guinness World RecordsRead card

Q1555

WonderScience

For centuries nobody knew where birds went in winter — theories included hibernating in mud and flying to the Moon. In 1822 a stork landed in Germany with an African hunting spear through its neck, and the question was settled.

The bird had been speared in central Africa, survived, and completed its migration north with 80 cm of wood still through it. Germans call it the Pfeilstorch — the arrow stork. Until then, even serious naturalists had proposed that swallows overwintered in lake mud, and one seventeenth-century Englishman argued birds flew to the Moon. Roughly two dozen more arrow storks have turned up since, but the 1822 bird is the one that changed minds. It is still on display in Rostock, standing calmly with the spear through its neck.

University of RostockRead card

Q1556

WonderHistory

In January 1919 a storage tank in Boston burst and released two million gallons of molasses. The wave was eight metres high, moved at around 56 km/h, and killed twenty-one people.

The tank had leaked so persistently that locals collected the drips, and it had been painted brown to hide the seepage. When it gave way it flattened buildings and buckled the elevated railway. Molasses is a non-Newtonian fluid: it moved fast enough to outrun people, then thickened as it cooled, so rescuers had to cut victims free. The court case that followed ran for years and helped establish that companies must answer for the structures they build. Residents insisted the harbour smelled sweet on hot days for decades afterwards.

HistoryRead card

Q1557

WonderHistory

In 1983 a Soviet early-warning system reported American missiles inbound. The duty officer, Stanislav Petrov, decided it was a malfunction and did not pass it up the chain. He was right.

The satellite system flagged five launches from the United States. Petrov's job was to report; protocol pointed towards retaliation, and Cold War tensions were at their sharpest in years. He reasoned that a genuine first strike would involve hundreds of missiles, not five, and called it a false alarm — with no way of being certain and minutes to decide. The cause turned out to be sunlight glinting off high cloud into the satellite's sensors. He was quietly reassigned rather than decorated, and the story only emerged in the 1990s.

HistoryRead card

Q1558

WonderHistory

On Christmas Eve 1914, soldiers on the Western Front heard carols coming from the opposing trench. By morning thousands of men had climbed out unarmed to swap cigarettes, bury their dead, and in a few places kick a football about.

It was never ordered and never universal — the truce held along parts of the British and German line, while elsewhere the fighting carried on. Letters home describe German troops setting candles on trench parapets, then singing, then calling across. Football did happen, though the tidy image of an organised match is mostly later invention; the reliable accounts are of scratch kickabouts on frozen ground. Commanders on both sides moved quickly to stop it recurring. The war had four years still to run.

Imperial War MuseumRead card

Q1559

WonderHistory

The US Army ran a secret unit of artists, designers and sound engineers who fought the Second World War with inflatable tanks, recorded troop noise and fake radio traffic. They staged more than twenty deceptions and are thought to have saved thousands of lives.

Roughly 1,100 men, many recruited from art schools and advertising, could impersonate a division of 30,000. They inflated rubber tanks and lorries, played recordings of armoured columns through enormous speakers audible for miles, and sent radio chatter to be intercepted. Fashion designer Bill Blass and painter Ellsworth Kelly served among them. The work stayed classified for decades; the unit finally received the Congressional Gold Medal in 2024, by which time only a handful of its members were alive to accept it.

Military historyRead card

Q1560

WonderHistory

In 1943 British intelligence dressed a corpse as a Royal Marines officer, chained a briefcase of fake invasion plans to his wrist, and floated him off the coast of Spain. Hitler moved his defences to the wrong island.

The body was that of Glyndwr Michael, a homeless Welshman who had died in London. Given the identity 'Major William Martin', he was supplied with letters, a photograph of a fiancée and used theatre tickets to make the life convincing. The documents suggested the Allies would land in Greece and Sardinia, not Sicily. The Germans took the bait and thinned their Sicilian defences. Michael's grave in Huelva now carries a note recording his real name — the man who never existed, and did.

Military historyRead card

Q1561

WonderHistory

In December 1900, a relief boat reached a lighthouse in the Outer Hebrides to find the lamp unlit, the table set, and all three keepers gone. No trace of them was ever found.

On the island of Eilean Mòr, everything was in order except the men. Two sets of oilskins were missing and one was left behind, and the logbook recorded severe storms — though weather records from nearby show the days were calm. The likeliest explanation is prosaic and grim: a freak wave sweeping the western landing while the men secured equipment, which would explain why one left without his coat. That has not stopped a century of speculation. The lighthouse was automated in 1971 and still stands.

Northern Lighthouse BoardRead card

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WonderHistory

The 1904 Olympic marathon was run in searing heat on dust roads with one water stop. The first man home had ridden 18 km in a car; the actual winner was carried over the line, having been dosed with strychnine and brandy by his own trainers.

Of 32 starters, 14 finished. Fred Lorz was hailed the winner before officials learned he had hitched a lift when his legs gave out, then rejoined on foot. Thomas Hicks was given strychnine — a stimulant in tiny doses, a poison in larger ones — mixed with brandy and egg white, and finished barely conscious. A Cuban runner, Félix Carvajal, had lost his money gambling, ran in cut-off trousers and street shoes, and stopped to eat orchard apples that made him ill. He still came fourth.

Olympic historyRead card

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WonderHistory

In 1847 Ignaz Semmelweis worked out that doctors were carrying death from the mortuary to the maternity ward on their hands. Washing them cut deaths tenfold. His colleagues rejected the idea, and he died in an asylum.

At the Vienna General Hospital, the ward staffed by doctors had a death rate several times that of the ward staffed by midwives. Semmelweis noticed the doctors came straight from performing autopsies, ordered handwashing in chlorinated lime, and watched mortality collapse. He could not explain why it worked — germ theory was still years away — and the profession took the implication, that they were the cause, as an insult. He was dismissed, declined, and died at 47 of an infection. Lister and Pasteur proved him right within two decades.

Medical historyRead card

Q1564

WonderHistory

In the 1920s young women painted glowing radium dials onto watches, shaping their brushes with their lips as instructed. When they began to fall ill, their fight for compensation helped create modern workplace safety law.

Radium paint made dials readable in the dark, and the work was well paid and thought glamorous — some workers painted their nails and teeth with it for a night out. Their employers knew the danger and protected their own chemists while telling the women it was harmless. Five of them, the 'Radium Girls' of New Jersey, sued while gravely ill. Their case established that workers could sue employers for occupational disease, shaped the safety standards that followed, and later informed the protection of Manhattan Project staff.

Labour historyRead card

Q1565

WonderSpace

In 1977 an Ohio radio telescope picked up a narrow, powerful signal from the direction of Sagittarius. The astronomer checking the printout circled it and wrote 'Wow!' in the margin. Nothing like it has been heard since.

The Big Ear telescope was scanning for narrowband transmissions — the kind nature rarely makes and technology often does. The signal lasted 72 seconds, exactly the window Big Ear could observe one point of sky, and it sat close to the frequency of hydrogen, a plausible channel for anyone trying to be heard. Jerry Ehman's red-pen 'Wow!' gave it its name. Repeated searches have never recovered it, and recent work suggests a natural source — a cloud of hydrogen briefly lit up. Probably not aliens. Still unexplained enough to keep the file open.

Ohio State UniversityRead card

Q1566

WonderTechnology

In 1983 an Air Canada jet ran out of fuel at 12,500 metres because someone had calculated the load in pounds instead of kilograms. The pilots glided it down and landed on a disused runway that had become a racetrack.

Canada had recently gone metric, and the fuelling sum was done with the old conversion factor, leaving the aircraft with about half the fuel it needed. Both engines stopped mid-flight. Captain Bob Pearson happened to be an experienced glider pilot; first officer Maurice Quintal remembered a former airbase at Gimli, Manitoba. It was now a drag-racing strip, with a race meeting under way. They landed the airliner on it, nose gear collapsed, and stopped short of the crowd. Nobody was seriously hurt.

Aviation historyRead card

Q1567

WonderHistory

In 1971 a lightning strike tore apart an airliner over Peru. Juliane Koepcke, seventeen, fell three kilometres still strapped to her seat, landed alive in the rainforest, and walked for eleven days to find help.

She was the only one of 92 aboard to survive, with a broken collarbone and a gashed arm. Her parents were biologists who had raised her at a jungle research station, and her father's advice saved her: follow water downstream, because moving water leads to people. She waded and floated for eleven days, keeping to the river, and reached a hut where lumber workers found her. Werner Herzog — who had narrowly missed that same flight — later made a documentary with her about it.

LANSA Flight 508Read card

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WonderHistory

In 1972 a bomb destroyed a Yugoslav airliner at 10,160 metres. Flight attendant Vesna Vulović fell in a section of the fuselage, landed in deep snow, and survived — the highest fall without a parachute anyone is known to have walked away from.

She was 22 and was not even meant to be on the flight — a scheduling mix-up put her aboard in place of another Vesna. Being trapped in a fuselage section, wedged by a food trolley, is thought to have slowed her fall, and the snow-covered slope she hit did the rest. She was in a coma for days and paralysed from the waist down for a time, but eventually walked again. She remembered nothing of the fall, and said afterwards she was never frightened of flying.

Guinness World RecordsRead card

Q1569

WonderHistory

In 1848 a railway explosion drove a metre-long iron rod through Phineas Gage's skull. He survived, walked and talked — but those who knew him said his character had changed, and modern neuroscience began.

The tamping iron entered under his cheekbone and exited through the top of his head, destroying much of his left frontal lobe. He was conscious within minutes and back on his feet in weeks. Reports that he became impulsive and unreliable were the first strong evidence that specific regions of the brain govern personality and judgement, not just movement and speech. Later scholars think the 'no longer Gage' story was exaggerated — he went on to work as a stagecoach driver in Chile, which takes considerable competence.

Neuroscience historyRead card

Q1570

WonderTechnology

After a walk in the Alps in 1941, George de Mestral grew curious about the burrs stuck to his dog. Under a microscope he found tiny hooks catching in loops of fur — and spent the next decade turning that into Velcro.

Most people pull the burrs off and think no more about it. De Mestral, a Swiss engineer, looked closer and saw a fastening system nature had already solved. It took years to work out how to mass-produce hooks and loops in nylon; textile manufacturers thought the idea absurd. He named it from velours and crochet — velvet and hook. It is one of the founding examples of biomimicry, the practice of copying nature's engineering, and it went to the Moon on Apollo spacesuits.

Invention historyRead card

Next reading modeDriveIdeas for sustained work.