Wonder: Ideas for closer looking. - Page 36

Editor’s note

Wonder

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

WonderTechnology

In 1913 a Sheffield metallurgist was trying to make gun barrels last longer. His experiment failed and the samples went on the scrap pile — where he noticed weeks later that one of them had not rusted.

Harry Brearley left school at twelve and taught himself chemistry in the evenings. Adding chromium to steel had not solved the erosion problem he was hired to fix, so the offcuts were discarded. Passing the heap later, he saw one sample still bright while the rest had gone brown — chromium forms an invisible oxide film that seals the surface. He saw at once that it belonged in cutlery rather than artillery. Sheffield called it 'rustless steel' at first, and the world eventually settled on stainless.

Invention historyRead card

Q1572

WonderFood

In 1905 Frank Epperson left a cup of fruit soda on his porch overnight with the stirring stick still in it. San Francisco froze, and he came out to find the first ice lolly. He patented it eighteen years later.

He was eleven. He showed it to friends, kept making them, and only in 1924 filed a patent for 'frozen confection on a handle', originally selling them as Epsicles. His children reportedly preferred 'Pop's 'sicles' — hence popsicle. The company was sold during the Great Depression and became a global business. It is the tidiest example of the general rule that many inventions are simply an accident somebody bothered to notice twice.

Invention historyRead card

Q1573

WonderSpace

In 1967 a PhD student found a pulse in her data repeating every 1.3 seconds — so regular it was half-jokingly labelled LGM-1, for little green men. She had discovered pulsars. The Nobel went to her supervisor.

Bell Burnell was analysing miles of paper chart from a radio telescope she had helped build at Cambridge when she noticed a bit of 'scruff' that kept returning. It proved to be a neutron star spinning several times a second and sweeping a beam past Earth — a lighthouse the size of a city, made of collapsed stellar matter. The 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics went to Antony Hewish and Martin Ryle, not to her. She has consistently declined to be bitter about it, and in 2018 gave a $3 million prize away to fund physics students from under-represented backgrounds.

Astronomy historyRead card

Q1574

WonderScience

In 1896 Henri Becquerel planned to test whether sunlight made uranium salts glow. Paris clouded over, so he shut everything in a drawer. Days later the photographic plate was fogged anyway — the uranium had been shining on its own.

His hypothesis was wrong in the most productive way possible: he thought sunlight was required, and the experiment proved it was not. Uranium emitted something entirely by itself. Marie and Pierre Curie took up the work, named the phenomenon radioactivity, and the three shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics. A week of bad weather in Paris opened the door to nuclear physics, medical imaging and radiotherapy — and to a century of learning, painfully, how to handle what was found.

Physics historyRead card

Q1575

WonderTechnology

In 1903 a French chemist knocked a glass flask off a shelf. It cracked but held its shape — a film of dried plastic inside had kept the pieces together. Car windscreens have worked that way ever since.

The flask had held cellulose nitrate, which had evaporated and left a clear lining. Bénédictus thought little of it until he read newspaper accounts of drivers badly cut by flying windscreen glass in the new motor cars. He went back to the flask, patented laminated glass, and the motor industry — initially reluctant about the cost — adopted it once the accident figures became impossible to ignore. The same sandwich of glass and plastic is in the windscreen of every car on the road today.

Invention historyRead card

Q1576

WonderScience

In 1965 a chemist produced a liquid so cloudy and thin that the technician refused to spin it. She insisted. The fibre that came out was five times stronger than steel by weight — Kevlar.

Kwolek was at DuPont looking for a fibre strong enough for lighter tyres. The batch looked like a mistake — normally the solution should be clear and syrupy. She persuaded a reluctant colleague to run it through the spinneret anyway, and it did not break. Kevlar now appears in body armour, helmets, cables, aircraft and gloves, and is credited with saving thousands of lives. She never personally profited much from the patent, which belonged to her employer, and spent her later career encouraging girls into chemistry.

Invention historyRead card

Q1577

WonderHealth

Cattle in 1930s America were bleeding to death from spoiled hay. The chemical behind it became a rat poison — and then warfarin, the blood thinner that has kept millions of people from having strokes.

A Wisconsin farmer drove through a blizzard in 1933 with a dead cow and a bucket of blood that would not clot, looking for someone who could explain it. Biochemist Karl Link traced it to mouldy sweet clover, which produces an anticoagulant. Sold first as rat poison — rats die of internal bleeding — it was later found safe in controlled human doses. President Eisenhower was given it after his heart attack in 1955, which did much for its reputation. It remains one of the most prescribed drugs in the world.

Medical historyRead card

Q1578

WonderHistory

Britain searched for Franklin's lost Arctic ships for 170 years. They were finally found in 2014 and 2016, close to where Inuit oral accounts had always said they would be.

Franklin's 1845 expedition vanished with 129 men while seeking the Northwest Passage. Victorian search parties dismissed Inuit testimony describing where a ship had sunk and where starving sailors had walked. Those accounts, passed down for generations, turned out to be accurate: Erebus was located in 2014 and Terror in 2016, both in the areas Inuit knowledge indicated. The wrecks are remarkably preserved in cold water — divers have found plates still stacked in cupboards — and the search is now a case study in taking indigenous knowledge seriously.

Parks CanadaRead card

Q1579

WonderArt

The Amber Room was a chamber lined entirely in carved amber, gold and mirrors, called the eighth wonder of the world. German troops dismantled and shipped it in 1941, and it has not been seen since.

Built in Prussia and given to Russia's Peter the Great, it covered 55 square metres in six tonnes of amber lit by candles, glowing gold. During the invasion of the Soviet Union it was crated up and taken to Königsberg, and the trail ends there — burnt in the 1944 bombing, sunk on a ship, or hidden in a mine, depending on which theory you follow. Hunters still search. A full reconstruction, taking 24 years and using the original methods, opened near St Petersburg in 2003.

Art historyRead card

Q1580

WonderArt

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

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

Art historyRead card

Q1581

WonderHistory

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

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

Medical historyRead card

Q1582

WonderHistory

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

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

HistoryRead card

Q1583

WonderHistory

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

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

HistoryRead card

Q1584

WonderHistory

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

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

Military historyRead card

Q1585

WonderHistory

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

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

Medieval chroniclesRead card

Q1586

WonderTechnology

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

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

Aviation historyRead card

Q1587

WonderScience

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

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

Neuroscience historyRead card

Q1588

WonderOcean

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

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

Maritime historyRead card

Q1589

WonderHistory

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

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

British MuseumRead card

Q1590

WonderHistory

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

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

Birmingham MuseumsRead card

Q1591

WonderSpace

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

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

NASARead card

Q1592

WonderHistory

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

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

Maritime historyRead card

Q1593

WonderTechnology

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

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

Invention historyRead card

Q1594

WonderTechnology

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

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

Invention historyRead card

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