The United States Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842 — Authorized and funded by the U.S. government, six ships sailed with 346 men (including officers, crew, scientists, and artists) on a four-year scientific and surveying mission, logging 87,000 miles around the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. Two ships and 28 men were lost, and the Expedition's contentious commander Charles Wilkes was court-martialled for his erratic behavior, and was sued by former officers and crew members. During the Civil War in 1861, he boarded a British ship, seized two Confederate agents, and nearly provoked military retaliation by England (he was court-martialled once again in 1864 for insubordination.) Wilkes' 1845 Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition and the Ex. Ex.'s journals were published by Congress, and some 40 tons of Expedition specimens and artifacts became the foundation of the Smithsonian Institution's collections. [Nathaniel Philbrick (video lecture) chronicles this almost-forgotten voyage in his 2003 book Sea of Glory (NYT review).]
posted on Oct-25-08 at 3:26 AM

Running Like Wildfire — Imagine a national disaster that stopped 99% of American transportation in its tracks; shut down the country; halted shipping and trade; hobbled counter-insurgency operations, and helped Boston burn down. It spread from Canada southward to Cuba and westward to the Pacific, crippling all that Americans took for granted: their cities and towns; their supplies of food and consumer goods; their jobs, businesses, and the national economy. Such was the Great Epizootic of 1872.
posted on Oct-18-08 at 1:39 AM

Exposition Universelle et Internationale de Paris, 1900. Approximately 200 antique photographs of Paris at the turn of the 19th century, mostly from the 1900 Paris World's Fair. French CG artist Laurent Antoine is reconstructing the Exposition in Maya 3D. Bienvenue!
posted on Nov-11-07 at 8:03 AM

Luigi Colani, Biomorphic Designer — This prolific master of plastic has been creating organically streamlined planes, trains, automobiles, trucks, motorcycles, ships, cities, homes, computers, cameras, televisions, furniture, pianos, ceramics, shoes, eyewear^PDF, pens, airbrushes, and other wonderful stuff (including the kitchen sink) for some 60 years. Wherever you need to go, you can reach your final destination in Colani style. More designs here, here, here, and here. [Brits and touristas take note: London's Design Museum will host a Colani exhibition, Translating Nature, from March 3 to June 17, 2007. Bibliophiles can check out the book Colani: The Art of Shaping the Future.]
posted on Feb-18-07 at 1:04 AM

Tales of Future Past* — It's been a looong Monday. Do you want to get off the planet and out of the city to a place where you can really live? Well, here's some food for thought on the way home down life's highways. First, take a break from all this depressing war talk. Then empower yourself by giving yourself some space and maybe taking off for a few days. Drive just a bit slower, turn up the volume and imagine that your mechanic will say the tranny's OK after all. Once you're in the front door, take time to get slightly wired and forget all about politics. Get recharged for tomorrow: have a nice long bath, put your mind at ease, watch Ur Fave shOw, and listen to some soothing music. Now, don't things look a lot better? [*Note the 'Start the Tour' links at the bottom of each page.]
posted on Feb-12-07 at 4:36 PM

Return of the Dodo — Finnish sculptor and photographer Harri Kallio takes a couple of feathered friends back to Mauritius to imagine what might have been.
posted on Jan-17-07 at 11:55 PM

Mr. Smith Goes to Venus — part 1^CC and part 2^CC. Legendary space artist Chesley Bonestell shows us what family vacations^CC should have been like in Coronet Magazine, March 1950. [Click thumbnails for LARGE images.]
posted on Dec-13-06 at 5:21 PM

Pearl Harbor ship salvage began immediately after the attack and continued until 1944. It was dirty, dangerous, detailed, (and discouraging) work for U.S. Navy salvors and divers, but their impressive repairs eventually returned eighteen sunken and damaged ships to wartime service. Only one was left where she fell. [More in the book Resurrection: Salvaging the Battle Fleet at Pearl Harbor.]
posted on Dec-7-06 at 1:35 AM

"I don't have any more babes." After offering fans $75 each to show up, Martin Scorsese's film crew prettifies the front row [Coral Cache] of NY's Beacon Theatre for the Rolling Stones' 2007 documentary. Are the boys — not to mention their audience [PDF] — getting a little long in the teeth, or can they rock for ages?
posted on Nov-16-06 at 7:55 PM

An Otter Family Album — for over 20 years, zoologist/educator J. Scott Shannon has been observing the "Clan", five generations of ocean-going river otters living in the bay [YouTube] below the historic town of Trinidad on California's northwest coast.
posted on Nov-13-06 at 2:40 PM

The real James Bond — Sidney George Reilly, the shadowy 'Ace of Spies' and inspiration for Ian Fleming's 007, was born Shlomo/Sigmund Georgievich Rosenblum in Ukraine/Poland in 1874. Perhaps illegitimate, dapper Sidney was a tireless self-promoter, patent-medicine chemist, world traveller, and high-stakes gambler (not only at the tables: he married four women but divorced none.) A Czarist Okhrana informer as a Parisian student, he was hired as an undercover agent in the late 1890s by M of Scotland Yard. Reilly worked both sides of the Russo-Japanese War, influenced British oil interests in Iran, brokered World War I arms sales, and volunteered for the Royal Flying Corps in Canada. Sent to Russia by C of Britain's SIS in 1918, he joined a plot to overthrow the Bolsheviks: it failed, but he escaped to London. Returning to Russia in 1919 to help the White Army, he was later awarded the British Military Cross. A staunch anti-Communist, Reilly schemed against them throughout his career. Lured back to Russia by agents of the 'Trust' — an anti-Bolshevik trap set by the Soviet OGPU — Sidney was arrested, interrogated, and shot in 1925.
posted on Oct-18-06 at 5:16 PM

The Sole Survivor — Allen Boyd [Real Player interview] is the sixth and last surviving member of his family: the other five committed suicide. Is suicide genetic?
posted on Aug-30-06 at 1:00 AM

Eject! Eject! Eject! Whether used in the air, on land, at sea (and under it), or on the way to the Moon, ejection seats and capsules have saved thousands of aviators worldwide. The basic concept was first tested in 1912, developed by the Germans in WWII, and became standard safety equipment in high-speed, high-altitude jet and rocket aircraft. (Although ejection seats were in Gemini spacecraft, they were only in early Space Shuttle flights.) Much happens very quickly during ejection, and harrowing accidents and pilot deaths still occur. The decision not to eject right away may be heroic, but even pilots who wait may live while innocent bystanders^{^} die. However, the efforts of dedicated researchers and rocket sled testing by seat manufacturers keep adding new members to the unique club of men and women who survive to fly again.
posted on Aug-28-06 at 12:45 AM

Around the world on a Dream Machine — 77 years ago, the giant German airship LZ-127 Graf Zeppelin left Lakehurst, NJ on an aerial world tour sponsored by American media mogul William Randolph Hearst. The airship's gondola carried 20 passengers in high-tech style, including: U.S. Navy observer Charles Rosendahl; English pilot, Zeppelin frequent flyer, and Hearst reporter Lady Grace Drummond-Hay; and Japanese naval aviator Ryunosuke Kusaka. The 41 crewmen were captained by Dr. Hugo Eckener, Zeppelin champion and the world's best airship pilot. The hydrogen-filled LZ-127 flew over the Atlantic to Germany, Siberia, Japan, over the Pacific to California, across the United States, and back to Lakehurst. The 20,500 mile, 21-day flight—with 12 flying days at ~80 mph top speed—defined airship travel's golden age. [More inside]
posted on Aug-8-06 at 7:21 AM

Port Revel sits at the foot of the French Alps near Grenoble, France. Since 1967 [PDF], its landlocked harbor has been the place to go if you want to learn how to sail a fleet [PDF] of the world's largest ships.
posted on Aug-6-06 at 10:29 PM

Mildred Fish Harnack was the only American woman executed for treason during World War II. Born, raised, and educated in Wisconsin, she moved to Berlin with her German husband Arvid in 1929. Arrested by the Nazis in September 1942 for their pivotal role in the Communist Red Orchestra resistance movement, they were tried in December 1942: Arvid was hung and Mildred received six years hard labor. Reviewing her case (during the humiliating German defeat at Stalingrad), Adolph Hitler ordered her retried in January 1943. This time, she was convicted, sentenced to death, and beheaded by guillotine in Plötzensee Prison on February 16, 1943.
[Mildred's life is detailed in the 2000 biography Resisting Hitler: Mildred Harnack and the Red Orchestra.]
posted on Jul-24-06 at 2:56 PM

The 1919 Transcontinental Motor Convoy — Take a 28 year old future U.S. President on a two month long, 3,251 mile, transcontinental road trip (where relatively few have gone before). Wait while he shoulders a little responsibility, add some autobahn^{^} envy, and 37 years later he signs into law over 40,000 miles of the National Defense Highway System (later renamed: it recently passed 50 years of growth.) About his favorite domestic program, Ike said, "More than any single action by the government since the end of the war, this one would change the face of America. ...Its impact on the American economy - the jobs it would produce in manufacturing and construction, the rural areas it would open up - was beyond calculation." More documents, logs, and first-hand reports from the 1919 convoy here.
posted on Jul-12-06 at 9:47 PM

'Twas blind, but now I see? — Virgil surgically regained his sight after nearly 50 years of blindness: "On the day he returned home after the bandages were removed, his house and its contents were unintelligible to him, and he had to be led up the garden path, led through the house, led into each room, and introduced to each chair." In the end, he and others like him [PDF] would have rather stayed in the Country of the Blind. (A happier ending was the more recent case of Mike Mays, previously posted here.)
posted on Jun-17-06 at 1:59 AM

Project Nekton — Take Mt. Everest, add a mile to the top, and turn it upside down. That's how far oceanic explorers Jacques Piccard and USN Lt. Donald Walsh descended on January 23, 1960 into the Pacific's Challenger Deep, the lowest spot in Earth's oceans. Their submersible, the second-generation bathyscape Trieste, was designed by Swiss balloonist Auguste Piccard (Jacques' father) and built in Italy. This underwater balloon was buoyed by 70 tons of gasoline, ballasted by nine tons of steel shot, and dangled a cramped, six-foot diameter, 14 ton observation gondola underneath it [more Trieste photos here]. It took Piccard and Walsh nearly five hours to touch bottom 35,800 feet down in the Mariana Trench. Their unique voyage still stands 46 years later: no one has gone back—except by ROV—and more people have landed on the Moon.
posted on May-28-06 at 11:06 PM

Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robots — Overview: an experimental mechanism that uses a living Madagascan hissing cockroach atop a modified trackball to control a three-wheeled robot. If the cockroach moves left, the robot moves left. Infrared sensors also provide navigation feedback to the cockroach, striving to create a pseudo-intelligent system with the cockroach as the CPU. Garnet Hertz, creator of Fly with Implanted Webserver and Cockroach with Wireless Video, has used Gromphadorhina portentosa on three generations of autonomous roachbots (YouTube video and Ars Electronica 2005 gallery).
posted on May-22-06 at 8:58 PM

Why Mommy is a Democrat — a self-published children's book by Jeremy Zilber (sample pages here.) Warm fuzziness, left-wing nuttiness, or squirrely propaganda?
posted on Apr-4-06 at 8:08 PM

The Mighty Atom. At 5'4", 145 lbs, and 82 years old, Joseph Greenstein's power of mind over matter made him one of America's greatest strongmen.
posted on Mar-3-06 at 10:36 AM

Secret tunnels may give any Tom, Dick, and Harry a way out in the movies, but Hollywood only scrapes the surface of serious pick and shovel work throughout history. The lure of freedom, overconfidence, or sheer persistence — combined with much ingenuity — has empowered good and evil schemes alike. Some hidey holes are mysterious and some are uncovered, but it's always a tough job for tunnel rats to keep the bad guys from digging in.
posted on Feb-25-06 at 3:27 AM

The real Jewish Underground — During the Nazi occupation of World War II, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian Jews were killed or transported to Nazi concentration camps. In 1942 and 1943, thirty-eight men, women, and children aged 4 to 74 years survived by living underground in two caves for nearly two years (their 344 day stay in Priest's Grotto beat Michel Siffre's 1972 NASA research study.) Emerging at night to cut firewood and steal food, these unwilling troglodytes returned to the cave before dawn to avoid capture. Spelunker Chris Nicola first discovered their survival story (PDF, pp. 6-12) in 1993.
posted on Feb-22-06 at 10:12 PM

The greatest Hollywood stunt pilots of them all, Frank Tallman and Paul Mantz not only looked the part, but flew camera ships, raced planes, and performed amazing aerial stunts in films for over 40 years. Not long after forming Tallmantz Aviation, Mantz was killed on location in the excellent 1965 version of Flight of the Phoenix. Tallman, grounded on FOTP due to a go-cart accident, lost his leg as a result but flew in movies for another 13 years until crashing in 1978.
posted on Feb-11-06 at 9:45 AM

Lifeboat ethics. "Terror had assumed the throne of reason, and passion had become judgment." After the ship William Brown sank on a voyage from England to America in 1841, its longboat with 41 passengers and crew aboard leaked badly and began sinking. To stay afloat, the first mate ordered sailors to throw men and women overboard: those remaining were saved and eventually rescued. One sailor who followed orders, Alexander Holmes, was convicted of manslaughter after he returned to Philadelphia in 1842. This true story inspired a famous fictional case, many legal opinions, two movies, and a recent book. What would you have done in the same life-or-death situation?
posted on Jan-7-06 at 5:09 PM

New Orleans' critical 17th Street Levee has apparently been plugged, but more work remains. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has a 1999 report, National Register Evaluation of New Orleans Drainage System, that discusses changes to the system throughout its history. It's worth noting that delays in implementing sewage and drainage improvements go back to the 19th century, even after the American South confronted the deadly Yellow Fever epidemic of 1878 (the last U.S. case was in 1996). More inside...
posted on Sep-5-05 at 11:30 PM

Into the eye of Katrina: an impressive Flickr set taken from the NOAA-43 and NRL-P3 Hurricane Hunters as they fly into the hurricane's eye. The set owner studies hurricane rainband intensity using ELDORA radar aboard the specially equipped planes. It's a rough flight, but once inside, the results are awe-inspiring.
posted on Aug-31-05 at 12:49 AM