Category: History Blog

You might not think that maps are very interesting. I’ll grant you that looking at maps probably won’t surpass going to the movies or playing video games as “fun entertainment”. But maps can be interesting. Looked at as a timeline, maps have displayed man’s ever-increasing knowledge of the world around him. From early maps that look a lot like something a grade schooler might draw, maps have become ever more accurate.

While maps have been a showcase of the increase of knowledge, they’ve also displayed important changes in human history. Most maps made in the Middle Ages, for example, have Jerusalem as their center. As the influence of the Church waned and maps became important economic tools, Europe became the center of most maps. And of course, looking at maps with political boundaries can show how empires expand and contract, which countries merge with others or cease to exist entirely, and which new countries form out of the ashes of others.

Maps can also hold secrets. Secrets that stay hidden for centuries. Secrets that people have only noticed just now, and are still trying to understand. Take a look at the following map (click on it to open it in a new window or tab):

This map is called the “Waldseemuller map”. It is named after its creator, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, who first published the map in 1507. The map initially gained fame as the first map that used the name “America” to refer to the New World. So in a very real sense, the reason you call yourself an “American” is because Martin Waldseemüller decided to put that name on his map. The map is also famous for its layout – with Europe in the center, the Americas to the left and Asia to the right. Almost all maps made since Waldseemüller’s day have used this same layout.

But there’s a lot more going on with this map that you might imagine. Look at the map carefully. At first glance, it might look like any other European map of the world from the time: the continents are shaped incorrectly and lots of places are missing. But look closer. South America is the land mass on the bottom left of the map. It might not look especially accurate, but if you were to rotate the map, such that the grid lines over South America were perfect rectangles, you’d probably be shocked by what you saw – a continent that looks almost exactly as it does on modern maps. In fact, recent study of the map has shown that Waldseemüller’s map accurately portrays the width of most of South America to a minuscule 70 miles compared to today’s maps, which are made by careful surveying and satellite technology. Let me repeat that: 500 years ago, a man in Germany made a map of South America that, compared to the best maps we can make today, is only “off” on most points by 70 miles.

The secret of this map is, of course, how Waldseemüller made such an accurate map. Although the Vikings or John Cabot might be able to lay claim to discovering North America, it’s well established that Christopher Columbus was the first European to set foot on South American soil. And he did that in 1498. So, somehow, in less than 9 years, Europeans were able to develop an astonishingly accurate map of an entire continent.

And the mystery deepens – a lot – when you consider the west coast of South America. According to history, Vasco Nunez de Balboa became the first European to reach the Pacific by land (1513) and Ferdinand Magellan was the first to reach the Pacific by sail (1520). So if these were the first two Europeans to reach the Pacific… how did Waldseemüller make this map in 1507? Was there a mission to map the west coast whose name has been lost to history? Did a secret mission attempt to map the west coast? Did Asian mapmakers share their secrets with Europeans? If so, where? And when? And how come no one wrote anything down about it? And how did all of this information come into the hands of a German in 1507? Germany wasn’t much of a sea-faring nation, and the Spanish and Portuguese would have done everything in their power to keep the map out of the hands of a heretic economic rival.

We honestly don’t know how Waldseemüller made his map. But trust me, there are researchers out there trying to find out how he did.

I meant to post this so it it would appear on November 22nd, but forgot about it in all the holiday hoopla. Forgiveness, please!

November 22nd is my Dad’s birthday. Every few years, it’s also the date Thanksgiving falls on. But lots of people in the Chicago area might remember November 22nd, 1987 for something else entirely. For it was on that date that persons unknown hijacked the broadcast signal of both WGN-TV and WTTW.

In WGN’s case, it happened during the football highlights on the local news. Sports anchor Dan Roan was breaking down that day’s Chicago Bears game when suddenly the monitors in the studio began to flicker. The screen switched to someone dressed up as 80s television “personality” Max Headroom. In an homage to the computer-generated backgrounds used in the real Max Headroom shows, the person stood in front of a rotating piece of corrugated aluminum and just grinned. Horrified WGN engineers quickly switched to another transmitter, and viewers were treated to a priceless expression on Roan’s face. Said the sportscaster: “Well, if you’re wondering what happened, so am I.”

Things were even worse for WTTV. The PBS station didn’t have an engineer on duty that night, so the station’s programmers were helpless when “Max” broke in to their signal around 3 hours after the incident at WGN. This time “Max” had plenty of time to utter a bunch of nonsensical phrases, like “I stole CBS” and “My brother is wearing the other one”. “Max” then dropped his pants and was repeatedly slapped on the behind by a woman using a flyswatter. After a few seconds of this, the screen went dark and the broadcast returned to the Doctor Who episode that had been running when the “signal intrusion” first took place.

Interestingly, no one was ever caught – or even suspected or questioned – over the event, and the case remains open to this day. The amount of money and the skill set needed to pull off a stunt like this was not lost on FBI and FCC investigators. But “Max’s” rants didn’t have a political or economic slant to them – unlike “Captain Midnight“, a satellite dealer that hijacked HBO’s signal with a rant about how expensive the service was for satellite customers – so the FBI never really even knew where to start with the case.

Click here to read about the hijacking at DamnInteresting.com
Click here to see the WTTV hijacking in all its glory

In the opening days of World War II, the Germans enjoyed significant advantages over the Allies in almost every category you can think of. They had more soldiers, better officers, and more of just about any materiel an army would need. So when the war started, the Allies were almost powerless to stop the Nazi machine.

Almost. While the Brits couldn’t keep up with the Germans on the battlefield, they were more than a match for them behind the scenes. Instead of “fighting harder”, the British “fought smarter”. So while the Germans were deploying tanks and troops, the Brits were busy deploying code breakers, spies and helping resistance movements wherever possible. Their experience at “dirty tricks” would come in handy throughout the war – especially when it came time to invade Italy. And that’s where “Operation Mincemeat” comes in.

As the Allies saw it, their first task was to kick the Germans out of North Africa… which is exactly what they did. Their next target was Italy, but this presented a problem. The Allies knew the most logical place to invade Italy was Sicily. But so did the Germans. In fact, everyone in the world knew that Sicily was the Allies’ next target. Churchill himself even said that “[a]nyone but a fool would realize it’s Sicily”. So the question was… how to fool the Germans into thinking the Allies would land somewhere else?

How about taking a corpse, dressing it up as a military officer, handcuffing a briefcase full of “top secret documents” to it and shoving the whole mess into the sea where the Germans were sure to find it?

If that sounds like the plot of a third-rate spy novel… well, yeah. It does. And even though many of his superiors were certain that the plan would fail, Lieutenant Commander Ewen Montagu was sure that it would work.

Continue reading “Making Mincemeat of the Germans”

I’ve been to several different countries in my lifetime, and I’ve formed the opinion that the “average American” is about as smart as the “average Briton” or the “average German”. But one thing Americans as a whole seem to have great difficulty with is the difference between “England”, “Great Britain” and the “United Kingdom”. Americans tend to use these names interchangeably, and this is not correct. So take a couple of minutes to learn the difference:

There is a large island off the northern coast of France. This island – that is, the physical island itself – is known as Great Britain. Great Britain was traditionally divided into two separate countries: England and Scotland. However, Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603 and left no heir. This led to King James VI of Scotland – a descendant of Henry VII through his great-grandmother Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII’s eldest sister – being offered the English crown. James accepted, and became known as King James I in England.

It’s important to understand that although James was king of both countries, the two were still independent nations at the time. England and Scotland each had their own form of parliament, currency, customs procedures, army, navy, legal and educational systems… and all those other things that make one country different from another. King James himself would lead the first movement to unify England and Scotland; although he was unsuccessful, the idea persisted. In 1707, the Act of Union was passed by both the English and Scottish parliaments. With this act, both “England” and “Scotland” ceased to exist, and one nation called the United Kingdom of Great Britain was formed.

Continue reading “2 Minute History Lesson: The UK”

The MLB playoffs are upon us, and while I’m not a huge baseball fan, I do like a lot of the lore that surrounds the game… especially the curses. You’re probably familiar with the Curse of the Bambino, where the Boston Red Sox were condemned to eternal failure (and the New York Yankees eternal success) after Red Sox manager Harry Frazee sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees to (allegedly) fund Frazee’s production of the musical No, No, Nanette. The curse was finally broken in 2004, when the Red Sox won their first World Series since 1918.

And then there’s the far more colorful Curse of the Billy Goat, where the Chicago Cubs were condemned to eternal failure by a Greek immigrant named Billy Sianis, who owned a tavern close to Wrigley Field. It seems that one fateful day a goat fell off a passing truck and limped into the bar. Sianis nursed the goat back to health and eventually took him to Game 4 of the 1945 World Series between the Cubs and Detroit Tigers. Billy and his goat were allowed on the field before the game, because the goat was wearing a blanket embroidered with the phrase “We got Detroit’s goat!”. As gametime approached, ushers shooed Billy and his goat off the field and into the box seats that Sianis purchased two tickets for (one for the goat and one for himself). All was well until Cubs owner Philip Knight Wrigley decided to eject Sianis and the goat due to the goat’s “objectionable odor”. On the way out of the stadium, Sianis cursed the Cubs, saying that they’d never win another pennant in Wrigley Field because of the ejection. Sianis went back to Greece for a vacation, and the Cubs ended up losing the series, prompting Sianis to write “Who stinks now?” in a letter sent to Philip Wrigley from Greece. And then there’s the Curse of the Black Sox, the Curse of Rocky Colavito, and the Curse of Billy Penn.

But did you know that baseball teams in other countries have curses of thir own? It’s true! Just ask the fans of Japan’s Hanshin Tigers!

Continue reading “The Curse of the Colonel”

The city of Delft, in the Netherlands, is famous for two things.

The first of these is Delftware, a “porcelain substitute” developed in the city in the 16th century to compete with “real” porcelain, which came from China and was hideously expensive, even for rich people. Delftware is almost always white with a blue pattern on it; if you look in your grandmother’s china cabinet, you’ll almost certainly find some delftware in it – or at least a reasonable copy thereof. Delftware became amazingly popular, so much so that it was even exported into China and Japan. Amusingly, the Chinese made copies of delftware to ship back to Europe, so at some point it was possible to buy a Chinese copy of a European copy of a Chinese original!

The other thing Delft is known for is being the home of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek and Johannes (Jan) Vermeer.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, until very recently, was credited as being “the inventor of the microscope” in many middle and high school textbooks. But the truth is, microscopes existed decades before van Leeuwenhoek was born. However, van Leeuwenhoek did greatly improve microscopes. He was a glass grinder, and van Leeuwenhoek was a master at making lenses. And, while testing out the lenses, van Leeuwenhoek made many interesting observations that he dutifully forwarded to England’s Royal Society and other scientific groups. Even though van Leeuwenhoek was nothing more than a tradesman, really, he is known in some circles as “the father of microbiology” more than anything else.

Continue reading “The Mystery of Jan Vermeer”

For years, shortwave radio enthusiasts have noted a curious phenomenon: radio stations that seem to pop-up out of nowhere, read a list of numbers, then disappear… sometimes forever. Because the sole purpose of the broadcasts is apparently to read lists of numbers, shortwave junkies started calling them “numbers stations”… although as we shall see, other names might be appropriate.

No one seems to know when the “numbers stations” started broadcasting. No one seems to know who’s behind them. Shortwave enthusiasts assume that someone somewhere knows the purpose behind the stations, but as far as I or anyone else knows, that purpose is a mystery. In fact, there’s not a lot about the numbers stations that we do know. In fact, all we can say for sure is:

– The stations are sometimes transient, sometimes not: Some numbers stations appear to broadcast once, then disappear forever; others appear in certain places on the shortwave dial with clockwork regularity. In fact, certain stations appear with such regularity that broadcast schedules are posted on shortwave enthusiast websites.

– The stations broadcast for hours… or minutes: Some numbers stations repeat their “messages” a few times and then sign off; other stations might repeat their messages for hours and hours.

– The stations broadcast in many languages: Recordings and verified “sightings” have shown that numbers stations are broadcast in English, French, Spanish, German, Russian, Chinese, Hebrew… and just about every other major language you can think of.

Continue reading “The “Numbers Station” Mystery”

To most people born after 1920, the existence of dinosaurs is a given. Folks in our modern age don’t even question the fact that 300 million or so years ago, huge reptile-like beasts roamed around in a world devoid of humans. That Tyrannosaurus Rex and Brontosaurus once existed is as natural to us as the sun coming up, or rain falling from clouds.

Stop for a moment, though, and consider how downright bizarre the whole concept would have sounded to someone born in, say 1720. The only information most people at that time had about ancient animals came from the Bible or the works of classic Greek or Roman writers. And all those sources mention lions, tigers, bears and many other types of animals still very much in existence. It seemed logical to assume that if tigers existed in the time of the Old Testament, they’d always existed. If you could travel back to the 18th century and tell them that at one point, long in the past, gigantic, lizard-like creatures dozens of feet long roamed the earth, they’d probably burn you at the stake for witchcraft… and I can’t say that I’d blame them.

There was one thing that troubled people back then though, and that was the existence of fossils. At the time, most of the fossils people were familiar with were of ancient sea creatures like fish or bivalves. And what bothered the 18th century mind was why those fossils would turn up in the middle of the English countryside or high atop mountains deep in the heart of France.

Several schools of thought developed as “gentlemen scientists” investigated the matter further. Those investigations continued quietly on for some time, but the entire world seemed to turn upside down in 1811, when an uneducated young girl named Mary Anning found the remains of an ichthyosaur in Dorset, on the English coast. But rather than clearly making the case for the existence of dinosaurs, Annin’s fossil only made things even murkier. Since the fossil resembled a gigantic crocodile, the question wasn’t “what was this prehistoric beast?” but rather “what are the bones of a huge crocodile doing in England?”

Continue reading “The Tragic Fate of the Man Who Discovered Dinosaurs”

Enrico Fermi was one smart guy. The Italian physicist is most famous for building the world’s first nuclear reactor at the University of Chicago in 1939, but he was also famous for his work in the development of quantum theory and for winning the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on induced radioactivity in 1938. However, one of his more enduring theories came about as a result of a seemingly flippant remark that Fermi made one day at lunch.

The year was 1950. Fermi and some colleagues were sitting down and enjoying a nice lunch. The topic of the day was extraterrestrial life; professors and grad students eagerly traded theories about where alien life could be found and what it might be like. As the excitement level of the crowd continued to rise, someone noticed that Fermi hadn’t said anything. In fact, he was just sitting there quietly, eating his lunch. During a brief lull in the conversation, that person asked Fermi what he thought about extraterrestrial life. Fermi looked up, thought for a minute, then asked “Where is everybody?”

Now, that three word phrase might seem silly. Condescending. Flippant, even. But it was actually a very deep thing to say. And it would become the basis of the Fermi Paradox. The paradox is awfully complex, but in a nutshell it goes something like this: modern human beings (that is, humans that have left a physical record of their existence, such as writing or buildings) have been around for around 6,000 years. The universe has been around for around 14 billion years. Obviously, 6,000 years is a teeny, tiny fraction of the universe’s 14 billion total years, so isn’t it logical to assume that some other intelligent life has been around for longer than ourselves? And if so, why can’t we see any trace of their existence? We haven’t seen any evidence of their space probes, their battles to colonize other planets or their messages left in radio waves. Not only can we not find the alien equivalent of a Starbucks on Mars, we can’t find any evidence of their existence whatsoever.

The interesting question is why. Does intelligent life eventually get smart enough to destroy itself… and then do just that, as is the fear with nuclear weapons? Does the very process of gaining the intelligence necessary to colonize space ruin home planets, as is the fear with global warming? Is space simply so very vast that Wars of the Worlds are going on at this very minute, but humans lack the ability to notice it? Or is our greatest fear true: that we really are alone?

Ever heard of the “Romantic Movement”? It didn’t have anything to do with bringing home roses and chocolates for the missus; indeed it didn’t have anything to do with what we think of as “romance” at all. Wikipedia says that it was “an artistic and intellectual movement that originated in late 18th century Western Europe”. It was partly “a revolt against aristocratic, social, and political norms of the Enlightenment period”, but it was also (and more importantly) “a reaction against the rationalization of nature”.

There were two major scientific advances that led to the birth of the movement:

The first was medical science (and science in general), in that it seemed that scientists of the day were creeping ever closer to discovering the true “essence” of life. Whatever you want to call it – Life Force, Primal Essence, you name it – it seemed as if scientists of the day were mere inches from figuring out what that thing was and the Romantics feared that all manner of Bad Things would happen once Pandora’s Box was opened. One of the most famous pieces of Romantic literature – Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – deals with this question directly: a “mad scientist” type figures out how to harness the power of life and uses his skills to create a monster. You probably know the rest of the story. In any case, Mary Shelley’s fear is hardly unknown to us. In fact, such fear may be even more prevalent today than it was two hundred years ago. It seems that medical science – with its DNA and stem cell research – might again be on the cusp of “harnessing life”. And it scares people now just as much as it did then.

The other scientific advance that kicked off the Romantic Movement was the Industrial Revolution. For centuries, people made things with their hands. But suddenly, factories were popping up all over Europe, factories that could do the work of thousands of people using machines that didn’t require wages or sleep. People had a real fear of technology – much like people in the 1960s and 1970s that feared that computers would take over their jobs. In fact, the fear of technology was so great that a political movement took root in England that went from factory to factory smashing up the machines. The movement made such an impression that to this day “Luddite” is a pejorative term for someone that has a (real or imagined) fear of technology.

Continue reading “The Beautiful Forgery”