Container for keeping 5,000 fresh eggs for more than a year, 1930

Chester E. Macduffee next to his newly patented, 250 kilo diving suit, 1911.

A rather curious design for a diving suit. It seems apparent that Chester did not take into account the weight of his invention. This suit would drop to the bottom of the ocean like a lead zeppelin leaving its occupant completely trapped. Even Houdini wouldn’t be able to escape this device.

Monstrosities of Evolution

These bizarre illustrations are from Ulisse Aldrovandi’s 1642 book, History of Monsters (Monstrorum Historia). Although the illustrations are extremely bizarre, they depict Aldrovandi’s vivid imagination and vast education in natural history, science and the diversity of life, including monsters.

Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605) is considered the founder of modern Natural History. The Ulisse Aldrovandi Museum is housed in the Museo di Palazzo Poggi di Scienza e Arte and is located in his hometown of Bologna, Italy. His Storia Naturale, a 13 volume printed work, was conceived as the most complete description of the three kingdoms of nature - mineral, vegetable and animal - available at that time.

Aldrovandi was an extremely educated man. Born to a noble family, he obtained degrees in medicine and philosophy, with further interests in botany, zoology and geology. He became the first professor of natural sciences at the University of Bologna. Of the hundred of books and essays he wrote, only a handful were published during his lifetime.

Nearing the time of his death, he proudly stated that his home held a collection of 18,000 “different natural things,” and 7,000 dried plants displayed in fifteen volumes. The seventeen volumes with drawings of animals, plants, minerals and monstrosities are an integral part of the museum. 

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The Famous Case of Emilie Sagée and her Doppelgänger

Before teaching at the Pensionat von Neuwelcke School for girls in France (pictured above), Emilie Sagee had taught at eighteen different schools. Eighteen schools from which she had been fired because of the phenomena that accompanied her. This 32-year old school teacher and her ability of bilocation has become one of the most witnessed and documented cases of a Doppelgänger in recorded history.

As Sagée was writing on the chalkboard while teaching her class, her double appeared, standing along side her mimicking her motions. It was her exact image except that it wasn’t holding a piece of chalk.

On another occasion, all of the school’s 42 girls were in the school hall for sewing and embroidery class. As they worked, they could clearly see Sagée in the school’s garden gathering flowers. However, when the girl’s teacher left the room for a moment, Sagée’s Doppelgänger appeared, sitting motionless in the teacher’s chair. Two girls tried to touch the apparition but were met with an odd resistance and were unable to penetrate the air surrounding the entity. Yet, one girl, stepping between the teacher’s chair and the table, passed through the apparition, which then slowly vanished.

Sagée was absolutely unconscious of what was happening and she only knew about the phenomenon because of the expression on the faces of the people who were there. It was by seeing their frightened faces, their eyes staring at something invisible which seemed to be moving near her, that she understood.  But she had never, herself, seen her double; neither had she noticed the stiffness and slowing down of her movements when her double appeared.

odditiesoflife:

Victorian Headless Portraits

The Victorian era had many photographs, most of which showed the subject sitting or standing with a stern expression. Since photography was still in its infancy, photographers were experimenting with novel ways to create fun photos that differed from the norm. Animals acting human was one popular concept, and then came the headless portrait. Funny, strange and entertaining, a new genre of photography was born.

 The Euphonia - A Marvelous Talking-Machine

This “marvelous talking-machine" was called the Euphonia. It consisted of a bizarre-looking head that spoke in a “weird, ghostly monotone” voice and was manipulated with foot pedals and a keyboard. By pumping air with the bellows and manipulating a series of plates, chambers, and other apparatus, including an artificial tongue, the operator could make it speak any European language. It was even able to sing the anthem God Save the Queen. The Euphonia was invented in 1845 by Joseph Faber, a German immigrant. A little known fact is that this machine greatly influenced the invention of the telephone.

The Euphonia was first exhibited at the Musical Fund Hall in Philadelphia. Its imitation of human speech was remarkably advanced given the state of technology at the time. Many who viewed the machine in action made the accusation that a small person must have been hidden inside. Apparently anyone who inspected the Euphonia’s mechanical workings was convinced that no trickery was involved, such as Faber employing a ventriloquist.

Frustrated at the lack of interest with his invention, Farber accompanied P. T. Barnum, of Barnum and Bailey’s Circus, to London. The Euphonia was again put on display at London’s Egyptian Hall and for the next several decades, it remained a part of Barnum’s exhibits. The financial returns for Faber, however, were extremely low and he ended up committed suicide without achieving the fame or fortune he had worked so hard for.

In a curious twist of fate, one person who happened to see the Euphonia in London and came away deeply impressed was Melville Bell, the father of the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell.

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Slaying the Buffalo Demon

Depicting Durga in her most famous narrative—slaying the buffalo demon, Mahisha—this multi-limbed form of the goddess is a sculptural masterpiece. Flanked by two slain demons, Durga is shown grasping with her lower left hand the head of the demon that emerges from the animal that she has just decapitated. Durga’s right leg, raised above the ground and extended in an active lunging pose, is supported by her animal companion (vahana), the lion, who bends to her weight.

Giant Legless Amphibians

Although they look like enormous earthworms, they aren’t. They are a newly discovered species of legless amphibian, complete with backbone, making them similar to salamanders or frogs. These creatures are part of a group of animals called caecilians. They live out their lives in underground burrows, tending to their slimy pink young, which emerge from their eggs as miniature adults.

The discovery of new vertebrates is rare, especially outside of tropical rain forests, but the new caecilians come mostly from human-inhabited areas in northeastern India. They’ve escaped notice for so long because these burrowers spend their lives underground, out of sight of human eyes.

Bibliothèque nationale de France, Français 2810 f.151r (St Anthony and the satyr). John Mandeville, Voyages. Paris, c1410-1412.

Six Strange Animals You Probably Didn’t Know Exist

Given the vast amount of animal species on this planet, there are always more to discover. The above animals are not common and most people don’t even know they exist. For your viewing and learning pleasure, here are six animals you probably weren’t aware of:

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Pee a Rainbow: Scientist Snaps Shot of Colorful Urine

Separated and Reunited in Death

These grave markers — pressed up against either side of an imposing wall, with a pair of clasped hands reaching over the wall’s top — date to a time in Dutch history when Catholic and Protestant graves were strictly segregated. A Catholic and a Protestant married couple, separated in death, arranged for this unique workaround in order to rejoin one another.

In 1842, a colonel in the Dutch cavalry, JWC van Gorkum, married a woman known as JCPH van Aefferden. The union was controversial — van Gorkum was Protestant and van Aefferden was Catholic. Despite the prevailing culture at the time, the two remained married for decades, only separating when van Gorkum died in 1880.

But when van Aefferden passed away eight years later, she couldn’t be buried with her late husband; even in death, Catholics needed to stay with their own. While alive, she made her wishes clear — she did not want to be buried in her family tomb and, instead, wished to be as close to her husband as possible. The solution, seen above, is their connected tombstones.

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The Hanging Coffins of Sagada

The people of Sagada in the Philippines follow a unique burial ritual. The elderly carve their own coffins out of hollowed logs. If they are too weak or ill, their families prepare their coffins instead. The dead are placed inside their coffins (sometimes breaking their bones in the process of fitting them in), and the coffins are brought to a cave for burial.

Instead of being placed into the ground, the coffins are hung either inside the caves or on the face of the cliffs, near the hanging coffins of their ancestors. The Sagada people have been practicing such burials for over 2,000 years and some of the coffins are well over a century old.

The Man in the Iron Mask

The Man in the Iron Mask is a name given to a prisoner arrested as Eustache Dauger in 1669. He was held in the custody of the same jailer for 34 years. His identity has been thoroughly discussed because no one ever saw his face, which was hidden by a mask of either black velvet cloth or iron. What facts are known about this prisoner are based mainly on correspondence between his jailer and his superiors in Paris.

The first surviving records of the masked prisoner are from July 1669, when Louis XIV’s minister sent a letter to the governor of the prison of Pignerol informing him that a prisoner named Eustache Dauger was due to arrive in the next month or so. Historians have noted that the name Eustache Dauger was written in a different handwriting than the rest of the text, suggesting that while a clerk wrote the letter under dictation, a third party, very likely the minister himself, added the name afterwards.

The governor was instructed to prepare a cell with multiple doors, one closing upon the other, to prevent anyone from the outside listening in. The governor himself was to see Dauger only once a day in order to provide food and whatever else he needed. Dauger was also to be told that if he spoke of anything other than his immediate needs he would be killed. According to many versions of this legend, the prisoner wore the mask at all times. 

The prison at Pignerol was used for men who were considered an embarrassment to the state and usually held only a handful of prisoners at a time, some of which were important and wealthy and granted servants. One prisoner, Nicolas Fouquet’s valet was often ill and so permission was given for Dauger to serve Fouquet on the condition that he never met with anyone else. The fact that Dauger served as a valet is an important one for whilst Fouquet was never expected to be released, other prisoners were, and might have spread word of Dauger’s existence. 

In time the governor was offered positions at other prisons and each time he moved Dauger went with him until he died in 1703 and was buried under the name of Marchioly. Though she may merely have been repeating rumours In 1711, King Louis’s sister-in-law stated in a letter that the prisoner had “two musketeers at his side to kill him if he removed his mask”. 

In 1771, Voltaire claimed that the prisoner was the older, illegitimate brother of Louis XIV but other theories include that he was a Marshal of France; Richard Cromwell; or François, Duke of Beaufort; an illegitimate son of Charles II, amongst others.

Typhoid Mary

Mary Mallon [foreground above] was born in Northern Ireland in 1869 but emigrated to the USA in ‘84. She worked as a cook in New York, where, within two weeks of her first employment, the residents developed typhoid fever. After this, each family for whom Mary worked invariably became ill with typhoid. Wherever Mary went outbreaks followed her. When one family she worked for rented a house in Oyster Bay for the summer, six of the eleven people in the house came down with typhoid, a disease said by local doctors to be “unusual” at that time.

Typhoid researcher George Soper was hired to investigate. He published his results saying he believed soft clams might be the source of the outbreak and that:

No one knew her whereabouts but eventually Soper traced her to an active outbreak in a Park Avenue penthouse. When Soper approached Mallon she adamantly rejected his request for urine and stool samples.

The New York City Health Department sent Dr. Sara Josephine Baker to talk to Mary but still she refused to cooperate, believing she was being persecuted because she was an immigrant. A few days later, Baker arrived at Mary’s workplace with several police officers who took her into custody. Cultures of Mary’s urine and stools, taken forcibly with the help of prison matrons, revealed that her gallbladder was teeming with typhoid salmonella. She refused to have her gallbladder extracted or to give up her occupation as cook, maintaining stubbornly that she did not carry any disease. 

She was held in isolation for three years until, in 1910, she agreed that she “[was] prepared to change her occupation, and would give assurance by affidavit that she would upon her release take such hygienic precautions as would protect those with whom she came in contact”. Upon release, Mallon was given a job as a laundress, which paid lower wages, so she changed her name to Mary Brown and returned to her previous occupation as a cook. For the next five years, she went through a series of kitchens, spreading illness and death, keeping one step ahead of Soper.

In 1915, a serious epidemic of typhoid erupted among the staff of a hospital, with twenty five cases and two deaths. City health authorities investigated, learning that a portly Irish-American woman had suddenly disappeared from the kitchen help. The police tracked her to an estate on Long Island. Mary spent the rest of her life in quarantine until, aged 69, she died of pneumonia.

World’s Oldest Socks

These odd, ancient socks are the earliest knitted items in the Victoria & Albert Museum’s collection and quite possibly the oldest socks in the world. Made in 300-499 AD, these Egyptian socks were excavated in the burial grounds of ancient Oxyrhynchus, a Greek colony on the Nile in central Egypt at the end of the 19th century. They have a divided toe and are designed to be worn with sandals.

Particularly intriguing is the technique used to construct these red wool socks. Called nålbindning, or single-needle knitting, this time-consuming process required only a single thread. The technique was frequently used for close-fitting garments for the head, feet and hands because of its elastic qualities. Primarily from prehistoric times, nålbindning came before the two-needle knitting that’s standard today; each needle was crafted from wood or bone that was “flat, blunt and between 6 -10 cm long, relatively large-eyed at one end or the eye is near the middle.”