Wonder: The world is stranger up close. - Page 39

Editor’s note

The open room

Wonder begins where familiarity loosens. This edition crosses science, art, language and history to recover the useful shock of looking closely at things we thought we already knew.

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

Q1562

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

Q1563

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

Q1568

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

Q1571

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

Move into another roomDriveFor the next attempt.