"The Man Who Revealed the Hidden Structure of Falling Snowflakes"

A numinous fact, as basic to childhood as George Washington’s cherry tree confession (and far more reliable), is that no two snowflakes are exactly alike. 

Almost as incredible...is that one individual is responsible for this...revelation, a man as deserving of a place in that pantheon of those who have revealed something we never knew before as Copernicus, Newton and Curie. 

Let us add his name to the list: Wilson A. Bentley.

Beginning in the early 1880s, Bentley...[devised] a mechanism that combined a microscope with a view camera. Using light-sensitive glass plates not unlike those that had recorded Civil War battlefields, he learned how to make extraordinarily sophisticated “portraits” of individual snow crystals.

Isolating individual crystals itself posed a daunting challenge—there may be 200 of them in a large snowflake. And keeping the crystals frozen and unspoiled required Bentley to work outside, using balky equipment. 

Bentley seemed willing to pursue his arduous work—over the years he made pictures of thousands of snow crystals—not with any hope for financial gain but simply for the joy of discovery. 

Nicknamed Snowflake by his neighbors, he claimed his pictures were “evidence of God’s wonderful plan” and considered the endlessly varied crystals “miracles of beauty.”

In 1904, Bentley approached the Smithsonian with nearly 20 years of photographs and a manuscript describing his methods and findings. But...the submission [was rejected] as “unscientific.” (Eventually, the U.S. Weather Bureau published the manuscript and many of the photographs.)

Avowing that “it seemed a shame” not to share the wonders he had recorded, Bentley sold many of his glass plates to schools and colleges for 5 cents apiece. He never copyrighted his work.

Bentley’s efforts to document the artistry of winter garnered him attention as he grew older. He published an article in National Geographic. Finally, in 1931, he collaborated with meteorologist William J. Humphreys on a book, Snow Crystals, illustrated with 2,500 of Snowflake’s snowflakes

Bentley’s long, frigid labors culminated just in the nick of time. The man who revealed the glittering secret of every white Christmas died that same year on December 23 at his Jericho farm.

Read the full profile (by Owen Edwards) here. See the book here. 

Intriguing Headline of the Month: "When Lettuce Was a Sacred Sex Symbol"

"But in Ancient Egypt around 2,000 B.C., lettuce was not a popular appetizer, it was an aphrodisiac, a phallic symbol that represented the celebrated food of the Egyptian god of fertility, Min..."

Learn all about it (in Smithsonian Magazine) here. 

"Sleek and Sexy Bus Concepts from the Future that Never Was"

• Our mass transit future looked much cooler in the mid-20th century, with these slick bus designs. Just imagine taking to the roads in these retrofuturistic buses.

See many more here. 

"The Revolutionary Effect of the Paperback Book"

• The iPhone became the world’s best-selling smartphone partly because Steve Jobs was obsessed with the ergonomics of everyday life. If you want people to carry a computer, it had to hit the “sweet spot” where it was big enough to display “detailed, legible graphics, but small enough to fit comfortably in the hand and pocket.” 
• Seventy-five years ago, another American innovator had the same epiphany: Robert Fair de Graff realized he could change the way people read by making books radically smaller.
• Back then, it was surprisingly hard for ordinary Americans to get good novels and nonfiction. The country only had about 500 bookstores, all clustered in the biggest 12 cities, and hardcovers cost $2.50 (about $40 in today’s currency).
• De Graff revolutionized that market when he got backing from Simon & Schuster to launch Pocket Books in May 1939. A petite 4 by 6 inches and priced at a mere 25 cents, the Pocket Book changed everything about who could read and where. 
• Suddenly people read all the time, much as we now peek at e-mail and Twitter on our phones. And by working with the often gangster-riddled magazine-distribution industry, De Graff sold books where they had never been available before—grocery stores, drugstores and airport terminals. Within two years he’d sold 17 million.

Learn more here.

"Take the Impossible 'Literacy' Test Louisiana Gave Black Voters in the 1960s"

This week’s Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder overturned Section 4(b) of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which mandated federal oversight of changes in voting procedure in jurisdictions that have a history of using a “test or device” to impede enfranchisement. 

After the end of the Civil War, would-be black voters in the South faced an array of disproportionate barriers to enfranchisement. The literacy test—supposedly applicable to both white and black prospective voters who couldn’t prove a certain level of education but in actuality disproportionately administered to black voters—was a classic example of one of these barriers.

Most of the tests collected here are a battery of trivia questions related to civic procedure and citizenship. 

But this Louisiana “literacy” test, singular among its fellows, has nothing to do with citizenship. Designed to put the applicant through mental contortions, the test's questions are often confusingly worded. If some of them seem unanswerable, that effect was intentional. The (white) registrar would be the ultimate judge of whether an answer was correct.

Try this one: “Write every other word in this first line and print every third word in same line (original type smaller and first line ended at comma) but capitalize the fifth word that you write.”  

Or this: “Write right from the left to the right as you see it spelled here.”

See the full test (it gets increasingly difficult and convoluted) here. 

"11 Historical Figures Who Were Really Bad At Spelling"

Fun little article. Included in the list: Jane Austin (hard to believe!), George Washington, Winston Churchill, Agatha Christie, Einstein, and Hemingway (pictured above). Read it here. 

"Can You Relieve Pain With a Squeeze to the Hand?"

• The Claim: Applying pressure to a dime-sized spot located between the thumb and forefinger can calm anxiety and pain, particularly headaches and dental pain. 
• The Verdict: Of the more than 300 Chinese acupuncture points, hegu in clinical practice seems to be one of the most useful—particularly for pain relief, doctors say. Hegu hasn't been sufficiently studied to prove conclusively it alleviates pain, but one well-designed study found it blunted the worst pain experienced during a medical procedure.

Read the full article by Laura Johannes in the WSJ here.  

"Never Underestimate the Power of a Paint Tube"

• The French Impressionists disdained laborious academic sketches and tastefully muted paintings in favor of stunning colors and textures that conveyed the immediacy of life pulsating around them. Yet the breakthroughs of Monet, Pissarro, Renoir and others would not have been possible if it hadn’t been for an ingenious but little-known American portrait painter, John G. Rand.
• Like many artists, Rand, a Charleston native living in London in 1841, struggled to keep his oil paints from drying out before he could use them. At the time, the best paint storage was a pig’s bladder sealed with string; an artist would prick the bladder with a tack to get at the paint. But there was no way to completely plug the hole afterward. And bladders didn’t travel well, frequently bursting open.
• Rand’s brush with greatness came in the form of a revolutionary invention: the paint tube. Made from tin and sealed with a screw cap, Rand’s collapsible tube gave paint a long shelf life, didn’t leak and could be repeatedly opened and closed.
• The eminently portable paint tube was slow to be accepted by many French artists (it added considerably to the price of paint), but when it caught on it was exactly what the Impressionists needed to abet their escape from the confines of the studio, to take their inspiration directly from the world around them and commit it to canvas, particularly the effect of natural light. For the first time in history, it was practical to produce a finished oil painting on-site, whether in a garden, a café or in the countryside...
• Pierre-Auguste Renoir said, “Without colors in tubes, there would be no Cézanne, no Monet, no Pissarro, and no Impressionism.” 

Read the full story (by Perry Hurt in Smithsonian Magazine) here.

"When [And Why] Heineken Bottles Were Square"

• Since the first beer consignment was delivered to the United States upon the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, [Heineken] has been a top seller in the United States. The distinctive, bright green of a Heineken beer bottle can be found in more than 70 countries today. The founder’s grandson, Alfred Heineken...better known as “Freddy,”oversaw the design of the classic red-starred label released in 1964. He had a good eye for marketing and design.”Had I not been a beer brewer I would have become an advertising man,” he once said. 
• In 1960, Freddy took a trip to the island of Curacao in the Caribbean Sea and discovered that he could barely walk 15 feet on the beach without stepping on a littered Heineken bottle. He was alarmed by two things: First, the incredible amount of waste that his product was creating due to the region’s lack of infrastructure to collect the bottles for reuse. (Back then, bottles were commonly returned for refilling, lasting about 30 trips back and forth to the breweries). Second, the dearth of proper building materials available to those living in the impoverished communities he visited. So he thought up an idea that might solve both of these problems: A brick that holds beer.
• The rectangular, Heineken World Bottle or WOBO, designed with the help of architect John Habraken, would serve as a drinking vessel as well as a brick once the contents were consumed. The long side of the bottle would have interlocking grooved surfaces so that the glass bricks, once laid on their side, could be stacked easily with mortar or cement. A 10-foot-by-10-foot shack would take approximately 1,000 bottles (and a lot of beer consumption) to build. 

Read the full story (in Smithsonian Magazine) about this clever idea that never made it to market.

"Fascinating Collection Of Notes, Diagrams, and Tables Show How Famous Authors Including J.K. Rowling and Sylvia Plath Battled To Plan Out Their Novels Beforehand"

• Gathering your thoughts when writing a novel can be a tricky process. Which is why many of the greats made sure their planned their plots beforehand. 
• A mini-collection of notes penned by writers including James Salter and J.K. Rowling have surfaced. From tables to scrawls to diagrams they are a fascinating look at how authors were inspired to write their classic prose.

See the collection here.  [Pictured above: A table by J. K. Rowling which "gives a fascinating insight into how JK Rowling planned out the plot lines of the Harry Potter books which kept readers guessing for years."]

"To Study Mass Human Graves, Researchers Are Burying Dead Pigs"

• In order to help investigators find mass graves, researchers are going to create some – with pigs.
• Evidence of history's great tragedies – the Holocaust, Pinochet's reign in Chile, Joseph Stalin's in the Soviet Union and genocides in Africa – often come in the form of mass graves, where hundreds (or more) of bodies are buried. Without specific evidence, these graves can take years to find, if they're found at all.
• A new research project in Colombia seeks to use clues from the earth to help uncover missing "clandestine graves," whether they are from mass murders or individuals that have gone missing.
• In order to test the best methods for finding a clandestine grave...[researchers]...are setting up several "simulated graves" in Bogota, using pigs as stand-ins for human bodies. The pigs will be buried at varying depths and in different types of soil. The land will then be monitored over the course of 18 months to study how pig bodies decompose and to see whether there are any above-ground markers law enforcement can look for when searching for human grave sites.
• "Pigs are very similar to humans, are of similar size, have similar organ size, body fat to tissue ratios and hair and skin types," he says.

Read the full story here.

"Tattooing Makes Transition From Cult to Fine Art"

• Late last year, the British model Kate Moss revealed a personal fact that intrigued not only the fashion and celebrity media, but also the art world.
• The revelation...included the claim that the swallows on her haunch were the work of the German-born British artist Lucian Freud, who had died the previous year.
• In a rare interview published in the December issue of Vanity Fair magazine, Ms. Moss pondered the financial value of that tattoo: “It’s an original Freud. I wonder how much a collector would pay for that? A few million? I’d skin-graft it.”
• The numbers might sound surprising, but a nude portrait of Ms. Moss, painted by Mr. Freud in 2002 while the model was pregnant, sold three years later at Christie’s in London for...about $5.14 million at current exchange rates. 
• The mention of a skin graft put the spotlight on the relationship between tattoos and fine art — and by extension, art collection.

Read the full (and often surprising) NY Times article here.

[Pictured above: Tattoo On Human Skin. (Skin taken from an executed criminal, France, 1850-1900). Wellcome Collection.]

Recommended Podcast: Unearthing History: How Technology Is Transforming Archaeology

The transcript of the opening of this fascinating 16-minute segment from NPR's Talk of the Nation:

"Legend has it that the rainforest of Mosquitia hid La Ciudad Blanca, the White City. For centuries, explorers tried to find the fabled city in the jungle of Nicaragua and Honduras. Protected by white water, coral snakes, stinging plants and brutal topography, the White City remained an archeologist dream. But with a new application of recent technology, a documentary filmmaker, not an archeologist, found the White City.

In The New Yorker magazine, Douglas Preston tells the story of Steve Elkin's amazing discoveries. Doug Preston is an author and contributing writer at National Geographic, The Atlantic and Smithsonian magazine. His piece, "The El Dorado Machine," is in the May 6th edition of The New Yorker, and he joins us from his home in Santa Fe." 

Listen to the podcast here or get it via itunes (5/6) here.

You can find the New Yorker article here, but it is subscriber-only (for now).

"First Falcons Born In Paris In 100 Years"

• The first peregrine falcons to be born in Paris since the end of the 19th century have hatched at the top of a giant heating tower close to the Eiffel Tower.
• The three chicks, known as eyases, were born in an artificial nest placed at the top of the 130-metre tower, two of them on April 25 and their sibling a couple of days later.
• The birds of prey were common in the Paris of the 19th century, nesting notably in the upper echelons of Notre-Dame Cathedral.

Read all about it here. 

"From Decapitations To Celebrity Portraits"

• Laetittia Barbier traces the macabre origins of the wax museum all the way to the foot of the 18th century guillotine:

• Behind the scaffolds, a 32-year-old woman undertook the gruesome labor of casting in wax the severed heads of the enemies of the [French] Revolution. 
• The effigies were then paraded on picks in the streets as symbolic sacraments of the people’s victory. 
• The diligent wax manufacturer’s name was Marie Grosholz, a name she promptly changed after her wedding to become Madame Tussaud.

Saw it on Andrew Sullivan's blog:

"How the Potato Changed the World"

• Many researchers believe that the potato’s arrival in northern Europe spelled an end to famine there. 
• More than that, as the historian William H. McNeill has argued, the potato led to empire: “By feeding rapidly growing populations, [it] permitted a handful of European nations to assert dominion over most of the world between 1750 and 1950.”
• The potato, in other words, fueled the rise of the West.
• Equally important, the European and North American adoption of the potato set the template for modern agriculture—the so-called agro-industrial complex.
• Hunger was a familiar presence in 17th- and 18th-century Europe. Cities were provisioned reasonably well in most years, their granaries carefully monitored, but country people teetered on a precipice. France, the historian Fernand Braudel once calculated, had 40 nationwide famines between 1500 and 1800, more than one per decade. This appalling figure is an underestimate, he wrote, “because it omits the hundreds and hundreds of local famines.” France was not exceptional; England had 17 national and big regional famines between 1523 and 1623. The continent simply could not reliably feed itself.
• The potato changed all that. Every year, many farmers left fallow as much as half of their grain land, to rest the soil and fight weeds (which were plowed under in summer). Now smallholders could grow potatoes on the fallow land, controlling weeds by hoeing. Because potatoes were so productive, the effective result, in terms of calories, was to double Europe’s food supply.

A fascinating history (published in 2011).

The Mini-Van Turns 30 This Year...

• When Chrysler introduced the Dodge Caravan and Plymouth Voyager in 1983, the company was on the brink of collapse. It was a situation that sounds like it could have come from yesterday’s headlines: the company was nearly bankrupt and surviving off a $1.5 billion loan from Uncle Sam.
• Although Chrysler may have been the first to market with the minivan...they didn’t invent the idea of the miniature van.
• But in 1983 when Chrysler introduced the Voyager and the Caravan...they almost literally created the mold for the minivan. Not only that, but they created an entirely new market. The vehicle wasn’t sexy and it wasn’t even that great of a car, but it was an immediate success. 
• Indeed, Chrysler couldn’t make them fast enough, and drivers waited weeks for the minivan. It was a practical car that the baby boomers needed. 
• The success of the minivan helped bring the company back from the edge of bankruptcy. 
• As the minivan turns 30, its story seems more relevant now than ever. Hopefully, history will repeat itself and Detroit will once again start producing some exciting, game-changing automobiles.

Who knew? Read the full history here (from Smithsonian Magazine).

Vintage British Mugshots

Haunting.

    Photos from the mid-19th century.

    Photos from the early 20th century.

On the Menu This Easter in Newfoundland: Seal Flipper Pie

A fascinating tale of history and culture from Smithsonian Magazine:

• In Newfoundland, having a “scoff” (the local word for “big meal”) includes some pretty interesting food items unique to the region: scrunchions (fried pork fat), cod tongues and fishcakes, for example. 
• But perhaps the least appetizing dish, which is traditionally made during the Lenten season—specifically on Good Friday and Easter—is seal flipper pie. 
• The meal, which originated in the Canadian provinces of Newfoundland and Labrador, tastes as strange as it sounds. The meat is dark, tough, gamey and apparently has a flavor similar to that of hare (appropriate for America’s favorite Easter mascot, no?).
• While it might be difficult to imagine eating a meal made from something as cute and cuddly as a seal, the dish has a history based in survival. 
• Seals were especially important to Inuit living on the northern shores of Labrador and Newfoundland dating back to the early 18th century when seal meat, which is high in fat protein and vitamin A, was a staple in the early Arctic-dweller’s diet... 
• Seal hunters used all parts of the seal from their pelts to their fat to light lamps (at one time, London’s street lights were fueled with seal oil), but they couldn’t profit off of the flippers
• To save money and to use as much of the animal as possible, they made flipper pie. As the hunting industry grew, seal meat became a major resource for oil, leather and food for locals after the long, harsh winter in these regions.
• According to Annie Proulx’s best-selling 1993 novel The Shipping News, which takes place in...Newfoundland, the dish is quite tasty, but mostly evokes fond memories for the Newfoundlander characters.

For those of you who have access to two (2) seal flippers, here is a recipe for a traditional pie. 

Fascinating Story: The Dwarves of Auschwitz

From The Guardian:

• 'I was saved by the grace of the devil," Holocaust survivor Perla Ovitz told us. Again and again, she recounted in detail how she and her family were taken to the gas chamber and ordered to strip naked. A heavy door opened and they were pushed inside. "It was almost dark and we stood in what looked like a large washing room, waiting for something to happen. We looked up to the ceiling to see why the water was not coming. Suddenly we smelled gas. We gasped heavily, some of us fainting on the floor. With our last breath we cried out. Minutes passed, or maybe just seconds, then we heard an angry voice from outside – 'Where is my dwarf family?' The door opened, and we saw Dr Mengele standing there. He ordered us to be carried out and had cold water poured on us to revive us."