Amusing Planet
Exploring Curiosities
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The Mummies of Guanajuato
In the historic city of Guanajuato, in central Mexico, lies one of the world's most unsettling collections of human remains. The Mummies of Guanajuato are a collection of more than a hundred naturally mummified bodies that were exhumed from the Pantheon of Santa Paula municipal…
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Flocken Elektrowagen: The Electric Vehicle That Arrived Before Its Time
The electric vehicle might seem like a very modern invention, but is actually as old as automobile itself. It first appeared in the autumn of 1888 on the streets of Coburg, a small German town. With four wheels and a wooden body, it looked remarkably like a horseless carriage,…
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Henry Box Brown: The Man Who Mailed Himself to Freedom
On the morning of March 23, 1849, a wooden box was loaded onto a wagon in Richmond, Virginia. It was an ordinary-looking package, roughly three feet long and two feet wide, with air holes bored into its sides. Inside, folded into a cramped space with barely enough room to move,…
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Adele Spitzeder's Banking Swindle
In 19th-century Munich, a woman with no formal banking experience began promising ordinary people extraordinary returns on their savings. Workers, servants, craftsmen and farmers flocked to her door, carrying the money they had spent years accumulating. Some mortgaged their…
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The Zenith Balloon Tragedy of 1875
On a cold April morning in 1875, three men ascended into the sky above Paris in a balloon, hoping to push the boundaries of human flight. Their journey was a scientific expedition, an attempt to explore the upper atmosphere and venture into a realm where few human beings had…
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Charles Vance Millar And The Great Stork Derby
On October 31, 1926, Toronto lawyer and millionaire Charles Vance Millar died suddenly of a heart attack. He left behind no wife, no children, and no close heirs. What he did leave behind was one of the strangest wills ever written. Within a decade, Millar's final wishes would…
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Project Stargazer: Astronomy From Balloons
For a few hours on a December day in 1962, two men floated at the edge of space beneath a giant balloon, peering into the heavens through a telescope. Their mission, known as Project Stargazer, was an ambitious attempt to turn a high-altitude balloon into an astronomical…
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Douglas Corrigan's "Wrong Way" Flight to Ireland
When Douglas Corrigan climbed out of his weather-beaten Curtiss Robin at Baldonnel Airfield near Dublin on 18 July 1938, he claimed to have made a simple navigational error. He had departed New York the previous day, supposedly bound for California, yet after twenty-eight hours…
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The Mysterious Rzepin Train Disaster
In July 1952, reports of a railway disaster in Poland began circulating in the Western media. According to these reports, a Soviet military train derailed near the Polish town of Rzepin on 9 July 1952, killing around 160 Red Army soldiers who were returning to the Soviet Union.…
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The 19th Century London Garrotting Panics
During the early 1860s, reports of violent robberies known as garrottings filled British newspapers. Victims were said to be attacked from behind, choked into unconsciousness, and robbed before their assailants vanished into the darkness. As sensational accounts multiplied, fear…
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Tiny Broadwick's Massive Legacy
On June 21, 1913, a tiny woman weighing barely 80 pounds climbed into an airplane over Los Angeles and prepared to do something no woman had ever done before. Suspended outside the aircraft in a small swing-like seat, Georgia Ann “Tiny” Broadwick pulled a release lever and…
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The Texas City Disaster
On the morning of April 16, 1947, residents of Texas City, a busy industrial port on the Gulf Coast of Texas, watched smoke rise from a cargo ship moored at the docks. Fires aboard ships were not uncommon, and many people gathered along the waterfront to observe the firefighters…
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The Tragic End of Milo of Croton
Milo of Croton was the strongest man in the ancient Greek world, or so the stories say. A six-time Olympic champion, military hero, and larger-than-life celebrity, he became the subject of countless legends. Yet despite his extraordinary feats of strength, Milo is remembered…
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The Ancient Underground Aqueducts of Siena
Underneath the narrow streets, churches, and palaces of the Italian city of Siena lies a sprawling network of underground aqueducts that supplied water to the Tuscan city for centuries, enabling it to flourish despite a chronic lack of nearby rivers and streams. Extending for…
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Giovanni Battista Bugatti: The Papal Executioner of Rome
For nearly seven decades, one of the most feared men in Rome lived an otherwise ordinary life. He sold umbrellas, attended church, and walked the narrow streets of the Borgo district near the Vatican. Yet whenever he crossed the Tiber River, Romans knew that someone was about to…
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John Michell: The Forgotten Genius Who Predicted Black Holes
More than a century before Albert Einstein revolutionized physics with his theory of general relativity, and nearly two centuries before astronomers accepted the existence of black holes, an English clergyman and scientist named John Michell proposed a startling idea. In 1783,…
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The Execution of Alchemist Georg Honauer
It appears that quite a few people have been killed or brought to justice for having failed to deliver on their promise of turning ordinary metals into gold, in other words, alchemy. One was the English chemist James Price , who took his own life after his deception was exposed.…
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Marcus Terentius Varro and The Invisible Creatures That Cause Disease
In the first century BC, nearly two thousand years before the invention of the microscope, the Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro made a remarkable observation about the cause of disease. Writing in his agricultural treatise De Re Rustica around 37 BC, Varro advised landowners…
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The Giants of Patagonia
For centuries, travellers to the southern tip of South America returned with astonishing stories. They spoke of a land swept by fierce winds and endless plains, inhabited by people of extraordinary size. Some claimed these inhabitants were giants, towering far above ordinary…
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The Sultana Disaster: The Deadliest Maritime Tragedy America Forgot
In the early hours of April 27, 1865, a steamboat packed with nearly two thousand exhausted Union soldiers drifted northward on the Mississippi River. The American Civil War had ended and these soldiers who had survived battlefields, diseases, and some of the Confederacy’s most…