Wonder: Ideas for closer looking. - Page 37

Editor’s note

Wonder

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

WonderTechnology

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

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

Invention historyRead card

Q1596

WonderScience

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

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

Chemistry historyRead card

Q1597

WonderHistory

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

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

HistoryRead card

Q1598

WonderHistory

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

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

National Security ArchiveRead card

Q1599

WonderHistory

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

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

US National ArchivesRead card

Q1600

WonderMind

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

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

Minnesota Study of Twins Reared ApartRead card

Q1601

WonderHistory

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

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

London MuseumRead card

Q1602

WonderHealth

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

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

London MuseumRead card

Q1603

WonderHistory

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

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

HistoryRead card

Q1604

WonderTechnology

For 84 years a mechanical figure in Turkish dress toured Europe beating chess champions, Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon. Inside the cabinet, hidden behind sliding machinery, sat a human player.

Wolfgang von Kempelen built it for the Habsburg court, and the illusion was in the cabinet: doors were opened one at a time to show gears while the operator slid quietly into the cleared space. A series of strong players took the seat over the decades. Edgar Allan Poe wrote an essay arguing correctly that a human must be inside. It burned in a Philadelphia fire in 1854. Amazon later borrowed the name for a service where humans quietly do the tasks software cannot — the joke intended.

HistoryRead card

Q1605

WonderHistory

The New York Sun ran six articles claiming a great telescope had revealed the Moon's inhabitants: bison, unicorns, and winged humanoids the reporter called man-bats. Circulation soared. None of it was true.

The series was attributed to the real and respected astronomer John Herschel, then observing from South Africa and quite unaware. Written by reporter Richard Adams Locke, probably as satire on extravagant scientific claims, it was read as fact and made the Sun one of the best-selling papers in New York. There was no dramatic retraction; the paper simply moved on. Herschel was reportedly amused at first and tired of the questions later. It remains the template for every viral fabrication since.

HistoryRead card

Q1606

WonderHistory

In 1917 two Yorkshire cousins, aged 16 and 9, photographed themselves with fairies cut from a magazine and propped up with hatpins. Arthur Conan Doyle published the pictures as proof that fairies were real.

Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths took the photographs to stop the adults teasing them about playing by the beck. Conan Doyle, grieving his son and deeply drawn to spiritualism, saw the images and championed them in The Strand Magazine. The pictures fooled a great many people for over sixty years. The cousins finally admitted the hoax in the 1980s — though Frances maintained to the end that the fifth and last photograph was genuine.

HistoryRead card

Q1607

WonderScience

In 1912 an English gravel pit produced 'Piltdown Man' — the missing link between apes and humans. It took until 1953 to establish it was a medieval human skull joined to an orangutan jaw, filed down and stained.

It was believed partly because it flattered: it placed the earliest Englishman in Sussex and matched the assumption that a big brain evolved before an upright jaw — which is the wrong way round. Genuine African fossils were dismissed for decades because they did not fit Piltdown. Fluorine dating finally exposed it. The forger has never been identified with certainty, with suspects including the solicitor Charles Dawson who found it. It is science's most useful embarrassment: proof that the method eventually catches its own errors, if slowly.

Natural History MuseumRead card

Q1608

WonderHistory

Hundreds of Roman scrolls carbonised by Vesuvius are too fragile to unroll — touching them turns them to dust. Researchers now scan them and let AI read the writing inside, without opening them at all.

The scrolls come from a villa at Herculaneum, the only library to survive from the ancient world. Brent Seales's team at Kentucky developed a way to X-ray a scroll, digitally unwrap the layers and train machine learning to spot the faint texture of carbon ink on carbon paper. A global prize competition followed: the first word recovered, in 2024, was πορφύρας — 'purple'. By 2026 an entire scroll had been read end to end. Hundreds more remain, and no one knows what is in them.

Vesuvius ChallengeRead card

Q1609

WonderLanguage

Linear B, the script of Bronze Age Crete, resisted professional decipherment for half a century. It was solved in 1952 by Michael Ventris — an architect who worked on it in his spare time.

Ventris saw the tablets at an exhibition aged fourteen and never let them go. Treating the problem like a code rather than a language, he built grids of sign patterns, and his breakthrough was to test a possibility everyone had dismissed — that the language underneath was an early form of Greek. It was. The tablets turned out to be inventories: sheep, wheels, oil, spices. Ventris died in a car crash at 34, four years after the announcement. Linear A, the older Cretan script, is still unread.

University of CambridgeRead card

Q1610

WonderHistory

In 1991 two walkers in the Alps found a corpse emerging from a glacier and assumed it was a lost climber. It was a man who died around 3300 BC, preserved whole — clothes, tools, tattoos, and his last meal.

Ötzi carried a copper axe, a bow he had not finished, and a birch-bark container holding embers. He has 61 tattoos, mostly small lines over joints that show wear — possibly a form of pain treatment. His last meal was ibex meat and grain, eaten roughly an hour before he died. And ten years after he was found, an X-ray revealed an arrowhead in his shoulder: he had been shot from behind. It is the oldest murder investigation on record, and it is still open.

South Tyrol Museum of ArchaeologyRead card

Q1611

WonderHistory

Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey was built around 9500 BC — carved stone pillars raised by people who had no pottery, no metal, no writing and no farming. It predates Stonehenge by about 6,000 years.

Massive T-shaped pillars, some five metres tall and carved with foxes, boars, scorpions and cranes, were set in rings by hunter-gatherers. The site upends an old assumption: it was thought farming came first and built the surplus that allowed temples, but here the monument appears to come first. Klaus Schmidt, who excavated it from 1995, argued that gathering to build may have driven the shift to agriculture rather than following it. Only a fraction has been dug. Whoever built it deliberately buried it.

ArchaeologyRead card

Q1612

WonderHistory

In 1950 Danish peat cutters found a body so well preserved they called the police. Tollund Man had died around 400 BC, hanged, and the bog had kept his face — eyes closed, expression calm, stubble still on his chin.

Peat bogs are acidic, cold and starved of oxygen, which stops decay and tans skin like leather. His stomach held a porridge of barley and seeds eaten twelve to twenty-four hours before death, and the rope was still around his neck — most likely a ritual killing rather than an execution. Only the head was fully conserved with the methods of the time; the body on display is a reconstruction. The Nobel-winning poet Seamus Heaney wrote about him, drawn to the strange gentleness of the face.

Silkeborg MuseumRead card

Q1613

WonderNature

Jonathan, a giant tortoise on St Helena, hatched around 1832. He was already an adult when the telephone was invented, and he is still grazing the governor's lawn today.

He arrived on the island in 1882 as a gift, already fully grown, which put his hatching around 1832 — before the first photograph of a person, before the electric light, before Darwin published. He has seen 40 British monarchs' worth of governors come and go. Now blind and without a sense of smell, he is hand-fed and appears perfectly content. Guinness lists him as the oldest living land animal, and he features on the reverse of the St Helena five-pence coin.

Guinness World RecordsRead card

Q1614

WonderNature

In 1925 diphtheria reached Nome, Alaska, with the sea frozen and no way in. Twenty mushers and about 150 dogs relayed the antitoxin 1,085 km in five and a half days through −50°C and a whiteout.

Balto got the statue in Central Park, but the hardest leg was run by Togo, a twelve-year-old husky who led Leonhard Seppala's team about 425 km — more than any other dog — including a crossing of unstable sea ice in a gale. Balto ran the final 88 km into town and met the photographers. Seppala was quietly bitter about it for years. The Iditarod race follows part of the route, and Togo has lately had his due, including a film named after him.

HistoryRead card

Q1615

WonderNature

Hachikō met his owner at Shibuya station each evening. When the professor died at work in 1925 and never came, the dog returned to the same spot at the same time every day for the next nine years and nine months.

Professor Hidesaburō Ueno of Tokyo Imperial University died of a haemorrhage during a lecture. Hachikō, an Akita, kept the appointment regardless. Commuters who had assumed he was a stray began feeding him once a newspaper told the story in 1932, and he became a national symbol of loyalty. A bronze statue was raised at Shibuya in 1934, with Hachikō present at the unveiling. He died the following year, near the station. The statue is still one of the most popular meeting points in Tokyo.

HistoryRead card

Q1616

WonderNature

A ship's cat known as Unsinkable Sam is said to have survived the sinking of the Bismarck in 1941, then two British destroyers, before being retired to a home for seamen in Belfast.

The story goes that a black-and-white cat was plucked from a plank after the Bismarck went down, taken aboard HMS Cossack, survived its torpedoing, was moved to the carrier HMS Ark Royal, and survived that too. Naval historians treat it as very likely embroidered — ships' cats were common, and a good yarn travels. A portrait of the cat hangs in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, filed carefully as legend rather than record. Some stories earn their keep either way.

Naval folkloreRead card

Q1617

WonderNature

Old Tjikko looks like an ordinary small spruce on a Swedish mountainside. Its root system has been dated to around 9,550 years old — it has been regrowing its own trunk since the end of the last ice age.

The visible tree is only a few hundred years old; the organism beneath it is not. Norway spruce can clone itself by layering, where a branch touching the ground takes root and becomes a new trunk from the same genetic individual. Radiocarbon dating of the root material gave the extraordinary age. It survived the ice age as a low shrub and only grew upright as the climate warmed — a living thing that has been quietly present through the whole of human civilisation.

Umeå UniversityRead card

Q1618

WonderTechnology

In 1942 the actress Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil patented a way to stop radio-controlled torpedoes being jammed, by hopping the signal across frequencies. The same principle underlies wifi, GPS and Bluetooth.

Lamarr was billed as the most beautiful woman in the world and was bored by the parts she was given; she kept an inventing table at home. The frequency-hopping idea came with a mechanism synchronised by piano rolls — Antheil's contribution — and the US Navy filed the patent away unused. It expired before it earned either of them anything. Related techniques became fundamental to secure and shared wireless communication, and she was finally inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014, fourteen years after her death.

Invention historyRead card

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