Wonder: The world is stranger up close. - Page 41

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.

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

Q1619

WonderTechnology

When an oxygen tank exploded 320,000 km from Earth, three astronauts sheltered in a lunar module built for two. Engineers on the ground had to make its square air filters fit round sockets, using only what was aboard.

Carbon dioxide was climbing towards lethal levels. A team at Mission Control was handed a duplicate of every item on the spacecraft and told to build an adapter from it — the answer used plastic bags, cardboard from a flight manual, tape and a sock, read up to the crew step by step over the radio. It worked. The lunar module, never designed as a lifeboat, kept three men alive for four days, and all three came home. NASA called it a successful failure.

NASARead card

Q1620

WonderSpace

Many astronauts report the same experience on seeing Earth from space: a sudden, overwhelming sense that the planet is small, fragile, and has no visible borders. Researchers call it the overview effect.

The term was coined by the writer Frank White in 1987 after interviewing astronauts who kept describing the same shift. Accounts recur across nationalities and decades: a strong feeling of connection, an impatience with conflict, and a lasting protectiveness towards the planet. Several astronauts have returned to become environmental campaigners. Psychologists have since studied it as a form of awe — a state that reliably makes people feel smaller and more generous at the same time.

Space psychologyRead card

Q1621

WonderTechnology

In 1938 a chemist opened a cylinder of gas that weighed full but released nothing. He sawed it open and found the gas had turned itself into a white, slippery powder that almost nothing would stick to: Teflon.

Plunkett was working on refrigerants at DuPont. The tetrafluoroethylene had polymerised on the cylinder walls into PTFE, a substance so unreactive that acids do not touch it and so slippery it is among the lowest-friction solids known. Its first serious use was in the Manhattan Project, sealing equipment against ferociously corrosive uranium compounds. Frying pans came much later, after a French engineer's wife suggested putting it on cookware. Plunkett always described it plainly as an accident.

Invention historyRead card

Q1622

WonderHealth

In the early 1990s a Welsh trial tested a new compound for angina. It did little for chest pain, but the men in the study were oddly reluctant to hand back the leftover tablets. The drug was renamed Viagra.

Sildenafil was designed to relax blood vessels and improve blood flow to the heart. It underperformed on that measure at Pfizer's trial site in Merthyr Tydfil, and the study was heading for closure when nurses reported the persistent side effect volunteers were declining to discuss in detail. The company changed direction, and it was approved in 1998. The same molecule is also used, under a different name, to treat pulmonary hypertension in babies — the use it was closest to being designed for all along.

Pharmaceutical historyRead card

Q1623

WonderFood

In the 1930s Ruth Wakefield chopped a bar of chocolate into her biscuit dough expecting it to melt through. It did not. The chunks held their shape, and the chocolate chip cookie existed by accident.

Wakefield ran the Toll House Inn in Massachusetts and was a trained dietitian, not a novice — the story that she was out of baker's chocolate and improvised is probably tidied up in the retelling. What is certain is the result was wildly popular. She sold the recipe to Nestlé; the widely repeated detail that she was paid one dollar and a lifetime supply of chocolate is disputed. Nestlé printed the recipe on its packaging, where a version of it remains today.

Food historyRead card

Q1624

WonderHistory

In 1590 an English relief ship reached the colony at Roanoke and found it deserted — houses dismantled, no bodies, no sign of struggle. Carved into a post was a single word: CROATOAN.

Governor John White had sailed to England for supplies and was delayed three years by war with Spain. He had agreed with the settlers that if they moved they would carve their destination, and add a cross if they left under duress. There was no cross. Croatoan was a nearby island and the name of a friendly people, which points to the least dramatic and most likely answer: they were absorbed into a local community. A storm forced White home before he could sail there, and he never returned.

HistoryRead card

Q1625

WonderHistory

In 1959 nine experienced Russian hikers cut open their tent from the inside and fled barefoot into −25°C. All died. The case stayed unexplained for sixty years.

The details fed decades of theory: some bodies had serious internal injuries but no external wounds, one was missing her tongue, and traces of radiation were found on clothing. Explanations ranged from avalanches to weapons tests. In 2021 researchers using models originally built for animating snow in films showed that a rare slab avalanche on that specific slope could produce exactly those crushing injuries — and would push people to cut out and run. Not everyone is convinced, but it is the first account that fits the evidence.

HistoryRead card

Q1626

WonderScience

Edward Cope and Othniel Marsh spent thirty years trying to destroy one another — bribing crews, stealing fossils, dynamiting their own sites so the other could not dig them. Between them they named around 130 new dinosaurs.

The feud filled American museums and gave the world Triceratops, Stegosaurus, Diplodocus and Allosaurus. It also produced spectacular sloppiness: Marsh built an Apatosaurus with the wrong skull, an error that stood in museums for decades, and Cope once assembled a plesiosaur with its head on the tail. Both men ruined their finances and reputations, and both died with far less than they started with. Palaeontology got its golden age out of two men who could not stand each other.

History of scienceRead card

Q1627

WonderNature

In 1945 a Colorado farmer beheaded a cockerel for dinner and the bird got up and walked away. Mike the Headless Chicken lived another 18 months, fed by pipette, and toured the country.

The axe missed most of the brainstem, which controls breathing and heart rate, and a clot sealed the artery so he did not bleed out. One ear and much of the stem stayed attached, so basic functions carried on. Lloyd Olsen fed him milk and water through an eyedropper and took him on tour, where thousands queued to see him. He died in a motel when Olsen could not find the feeding equipment in time. The town of Fruita still holds a Mike the Headless Chicken festival each spring.

University of UtahRead card

Move into another roomDriveFor the next attempt.