In 1944, fully a year before the first successful nuclear test, Astounding Science Fiction magazine published a remarkably detailed description of an atomic bomb in a story called Deadline. The story, by the otherwise undistinguished author Cleve Cartmill, sent military intelligence racing to discover the source of his information — and his motives for publishing it.
In the latest episode of the Futility Closet podcast, we follow postal enthusiast W. Reginald Bray as he sends bowler hats, seaweed, his dog and even himself through the British mail.
Futility Closet on the curious cases of Ernest Cody and Charles Adams, two naval officers who vanished from a World War II surveillance blimp over the Pacific.
In this episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll follow the strange history of the WWII project to construct a 2-million-ton aircraft carrier made of ice.
In episode 16 of the Futility Closet podcast we'll hear H.L. Mencken's translation of the Declaration of Independence into American English, and learn why a merchant repeatedly auctioned the same 50-pound sack of flour, raising $250,000.
In 1900 three lighthouse keepers vanished from a remote, featureless island in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides. The lighthouse was in good order and the log showed no sign of trouble, but no trace of the keepers has ever been found.
Stewardess Violet Jessop was both cursed and blessed — during the 1910s she met disaster on all three of the White Star Line's Olympic class of gigantic ocean liners, but she managed to escape each time.
Georgia slaves Ellen and William Craft made a daring bid for freedom in 1848: Ellen dressed as a white man and, attended by William as her servant, undertook a perilous 1,000-mile journey by carriage, train, and steamship to the free state of Pennsylvania in the North. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll follow the couple's harrowing five-day adventure through the slave-owning South.
The New York Times proposed an outrageous undertaking in 1908: An automobile race westward from New York to Paris, a journey of 22,000 miles across all of North America and Asia in an era when the motorcar was “the most fragile and capricious thing on earth.”
Irish practical joker Horace de Vere Cole orchestrated his masterpiece in 1910: He dressed four friends as Abyssinian princes and inveigled a tour of a British battleship. One of the friends, improbably, was Virginia Woolf disguised in a false beard and turban (far left in above photo).
When Albert Marr joined the South African army in 1915, he received permission to bring along his pet baboon, Jackie.
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Hosted by Greg and Sharon Ross, Futility Closet is a celebration of the quirky and the curious, the thought-provoking and the simply amusing. This podcast is an audio companion to… Read the rest of the article: Futility Closet Podcast #006: Texas Camels, Zebra Stripes, and an Immortal Piano
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Hosted by Greg and Sharon Ross, Futility Closet is an interactive exploration of the popular website that catalogs more than 7,000 curiosities in history, language, mathematics, literature, philosophy, and art.… Read the rest of the article: Futility Closet Podcast #004: Mystery Airships, Marauding Lions, and Nancy Drew
Menu of a Paris restaurant from Christmas 1870, about 99 days into the Prussian siege Hosted by Greg and Sharon Ross, Futility Closet is an interactive exploration of the popular… Read the rest of the article: Futility Closet Podcast #003: Extreme Pedestrians, Kangaroo Stew, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Hosted by Greg and Sharon Ross, Futility Closet is an interactive exploration of the popular website that catalogs more than 7,000 curiosities in history, language, mathematics, literature, philosophy, and art.… Read the rest of the article: Futility Closet Podcast #002: Mass Hysteria, Airborne Sheepdogs and Mark Twain's Brother
Hosted by Greg and Sharon Ross, Futility Closet is an interactive exploration of the popular website that catalogs more than 7,000 curiosities in history, language, mathematics, literature, philosophy, and art.… Read the rest of the article: New Boing Boing Podcast! Futility Closet Podcast #001
