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Dick Clark, the man who introduced rock ‘n’ roll to America, died this morning of a heart attack. Clark was best known as the host of the show American Bandstand, on which he appeared for 31 years.
Long dubbed “the world’s oldest teenager” because of his boyish appearance, Clark bridged the rebellious new music scene and traditional show business, and was equally comfortable whether chatting about music with Sam Cooke or bantering with Ed McMahon about TV bloopers. He thrived as the founder of Dick Clark Productions, supplying movies, game and music shows, beauty contests and more to TV. Among his credits: “The $25,000 Pyramid,” “TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes” and the American Music Awards.
For a time in the 1980s, he had shows on all three networks and was listed among the Forbes 400 of wealthiest Americans. Clark also was part of radio as partner in the United Stations Radio Networks, which provided programs – including Clark’s – to thousands of stations.
Dick Clark may be better known to a younger generation as the host of Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, which began in 1972. Clark was 82. Link
Using
celebrities to sign people up for stuff is an age old technique that even
the Roman Empire was familiar with.
A newly translated inscription dating about 1,800 years revealed that the Roman army used a mixed martial arts champ to recruit soldiers:
His name was Lucius Septimius Flavianus Flavillianus and he was a champion at wrestling and pankration, the latter a bloody, and at times lethal, mixed martial art where contestants would try to pound each other unconscious or into submission.
Flavillianus proved to be so successful as a military recruiter that it was decreed that he be made a "cult figure in the band of heroes" after he died, with each tribe of the city erecting statues in his honor. The inscription, written in Greek, was engraved on the base of a statue found in Oinoanda's agora (a central public space) and would have been erected by the people of the city.
Link (Photo: Shutterstock) - via A Blog About History
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Bill Sauder talks about examining relics from the Titanic, in this clip from a NatGeo special. The perfumes he is talking about belonged to Adolphe Saalfeld, who was bringing samples to the United States in hopes he could market them here. Saalfeld survived the disaster and died in 1926. You can see the perfume case in an exhibit of Titanic relics. -via reddit
Ben Schmidt took data from ship’s logs to make a visualization of ocean traffic between 1750 and 1850. It is not meant to be comprehensive, as logs from many nations are not represented, and traffic on the Pacific is lost due to the orientation of the globe. But it’s still an interesting way to see how world exploration and trade progressed through the period. Schmidt also made another video showing just one year of traffic in more detail. See it and read about how this project was done at Sapping Attention. Link -via Metafilter
British respect for George Washington runs deep. In 1814, while on its way to burn the city named in his honor, a British fleet tolled a salute to Washington as it passed by Mount Vernon. So it comes as no surprise that a debate hosted by the UK’s National Army Museum selected Washington as the greatest foe to ever lead an army against Britain:
At the event, each contender had their case made by a historian giving a 40 minute presentation. The audience, who had paid to attend the day, then voted in a secret ballot after all five presentations had been made. [...]
Stephen Brumwell, author and specialist on eighteenth century North America, said: “Washington scores highly as an enemy of Britain on three key grounds: the immense scale of damage he inflicts upon Britain’s Army and Empire – the most jarring defeat that either endured; his ability to not only provide inspirational battlefield leadership but to work with civilians who were crucial to sustain the war-effort; and the kind of man he was. As British officers conceded, he was a worthy opponent.
The other choices were Michael Collins, Napoleon Bonaparte, Erwin Rommel and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Who else do you think deserved consideration?
Link -via Ace of Spades HQ | Image: Smithsonian Institution
Can you just plop a community of 70,000 residents onto 70,000 acres of land and keep it a secret? Sort of. People in the area knew that the government was doing something classified at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, but since there was a war on, no one questioned the need for secrecy.
In 1942, as part of the Manhattan Project, the U.S. government acquired 70,000 acres of land in Eastern Tennessee and established a secret town called Oak Ridge. The name chosen to keep outside speculation to a minimum, because Oak Ridge served a vital role for the development of the atomic bomb. The massive complex of massive factories, administrative buildings and every other place a normal town needs to function, was developed for the sole purpose of separating uranium for the Manhattan Project. The completely planned community was designed by the architecture firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, and had a population of more than 70,000 people. Due to the sensitive nature of the work at Oak Ridge, the entire town was fenced in with armed guards and the entire place — much like the Manhattan Project in general — was a secret of the highest concern.
My grandfather worked at the Oak Ridge facility during the war, and when he went home to the farm, he never discussed anything work-related with his family. Read more about how Oak Ridge was born at A Continuous Lean. Link -via Metafilter
The ocean liner Titanic sank on April 15, 1912, 100 years ago today. You’ve noticed the internet seems to be obsessed with this historic event, and Neatorama is no exception. In an extensive article at The New Yorker, we see how the story of the Titanic became entrenched in 20th-century culture, and several reasons are given for its extraordinary popularity. One is that the disaster happened to occur at the dawn of mass communication.
The Titanic was one of the first ships in history to issue an SOS. (“Send S.O.S.,” the twenty-two-year-old Harold Bride, the Titanic’s junior wireless operator, who survived, told the twenty-five-year-old Jack Phillips, the senior officer, who died. “It’s the new call, and it may be your last chance to send it.”) And the sinking was among the first global news stories to be reported, thanks to wireless radio, more or less simultaneously with the events. One of the early headlines, which appeared as the rescue ship carried survivors to New York—“WATCHERS ANGERED BY CARPATHIA’S SILENCE”—suggests how fast we became accustomed to an accelerating news cycle. The book winningly portrays the wireless boys of a hundred years ago as the computer geeks of their day, from their extreme youth to their strikingly familiar lingo. “WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH U?,” came one response to the Titanic’s distress call.
The article also examines themes of class and privilege, hubris, and heroism.
If you were writing a morality play about class privilege, you couldn’t do better than to dream up a glamorous ship of fools and load it with everyone from the A-list to immigrants coming to America for a better life. The class issue is one major reason the Titanic disaster has always been so ripe for dramatization. And yet the way we tell the story reveals more about us than it does about what happened. If the indignant depictions of the class system in so many Titanic dramas coexist uneasily with their adoring depictions of upper-crust privilege, that, too, is part of the appeal: it allows us to demonstrate our liberalism even as we indulge our consumerism.
The story of the Titanic had almost every dramatic angle possible for a great book or film, which is why so many books (both fiction and non-fiction), songs, poems, and movies sprang from the real-life disaster. You may find some titles you’ll want to read or watch in the article at The New Yorker. Link
Further reading on the Titanic at Neatorama
Masabumi Hosono: The Man Condemned for Surviving The Titanic
The Laroche Family on the Titanic
And many more posts on the Titanic.
You may have gotten over the shock of discovering that the sinking of the Titanic was a real historical event. Now brace yourselves: not everything that the movies tell you about it is accurate. Some of what people think to be true about the Titanic isn’t at all, such as that the owners claimed that the ship was unsinkable:
But this is perhaps the biggest myth surrounding the Titanic, says Richard Howells, from Kings College London.
“It is not true that everyone thought this. It’s a retrospective myth, and it makes a better story. If a man in his pride builds an unsinkable ship like Prometheus stealing the fire from the gods… it makes perfect mythical sense that God would be so angry at such an affront that he would sink the ship on its maiden outing.”
Contrary to the popular interpretation the White Star Line never made any substantive claims that the Titanic was unsinkable – and nobody really talked about the ship’s unsinkability until after the event, argues Howells.
Link -via Joe Carter | Image: Paramount
Aaah the good old days, when a man was free to test his invention of the American football helmet in the manliest manner possible-by letting other men kick him and beat him about the head with a baseball bat.
Take a trip down memory lane and you’ll no longer wonder why brain damage was so prevalent in the early 20th century, but you will wonder how they ever played a game of football without wearing helmets!
–via Stuff I Stole From The Internet
Comments Off Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.
Were there any black people on the Titanic?
There have been three excellent movies about the ill-fated luxury liner, the most famous, of course, being James Cameron’s 1997 classic Titanic, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. There are also two other very well-made movies about the doomed ship: another entitled Titanic (1953) and A Night to Remember (1958). In none of these three films is any black person depicted aboard the ship.
Several insightful, well-researched documentaries have also been made about the Titanic. In none of these (at least to my knowledge) are any blacks shown, seen, or talked about.
So, were there any blacks aboard the Titanic? The answer is yes. The Laroche family, consisting of four members, were the only blacks aboard the ill-fated ship.
Joseph Loroche was born on May 26, 1886 in Cap-Haïtien (in the northern part of Haiti). As a young boy growing up in Haiti, he was a very good pupil. In 1901, at the age of 15, he decided he wanted to study engineering. Unfortunately, there was no school for such in Haiti, so he decided to emigrate to France. He went to France, traveling with a teacher, Monseigneur Keruzan, the Lord Bishop of Haiti. Joseph was an excellent and dedicated student and made good marks.
France was a beautiful country with fine food and beautiful sites. Unfortunately, this couldn’t hide the extreme racial prejudice rampant there. The dark-skinned Laroche had trouble procuring employment. He got a few jobs here and there, but his employers made excuses that he was too young and inexperienced. He was paid poorly and often treated shabbily.
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Of all the coverage of the 100th anniversary of the Titanic disaster, has anyone thought about the dogs? There were a dozen canines aboard the ship when it sank. J. Joseph Edgette, professor emeritus of education and folklorist emeritus at Widener University is curating an exhibit devoted to the dogs of the Titanic.
Those that were saved included a baby Pomeranian named Lady, owned by Margaret Hays of New York City, who kept the puppy in the cabin with her, Edgette said. When passengers were evacuated, Hays wrapped it in a blanket. Crew members allowed her to get in a lifeboat with the puppy. “Because they assumed it was a baby, it survived,” he said.
Others that lived were Sun Yat-sen, a Pekinese belonging to Henry and Myra Harper (of Harper & Row publishing fame), also of New York City, and a small Pomeranian owned by Elizabeth Rothschild from Watkins Glen, N.Y.
All surviving dogs were small and were kept in the first-class cabins of their owners, Edgette said. “The crew was very respectful of first-class passengers and usually gave them what they wanted to make them happy.” The nine dogs kept in the onboard kennel perished, though the kennel was well-kept and the dogs were well taken care of, he said, by crew who fed and walked them.
The exhibit at the Widener University Art Gallery in Chester, Pennsylvania, will run through May 12. Admission is free. Link -via Time
Sunday will be the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic. Some people are just finding out that this was a real historical event, and not just a figment of James Cameron’s fertile imagination. See the full graphic at TwitPic. Link -via Breakfast Links
Whether or not you’ve ever actually watched a full one, you’re certainly familiar with the show-length advertisements known as infomercials. But have you ever wondered how these comically bad ads came about? After all, unlike other forms of advertisement, infomercials were created specifically for television. Here’s the story of the paid programs we all love to hate.
If you’re familiar with old-timey radio programs, then you probably already know that many pre-television radio programs didn’t have ads so much as sponsors whose name and product would be plugged in between just about every song. Even those unfamiliar with these early radio programs may recognize the idea from the movie O’ Brother Where Art Thou, where there are frequent mentions of Pappy O’Daniel’s Flour Hour.
Interestingly, that character was actually based on a real life Texas governor with the same name who also had a flour company, Hillbilly Flour, that sponsored a radio program. As if the frequent mention of the sponsor’s name wasn’t enough, the real Pappy O’Daniel ensured that even his performers reminded people of the product, so he even helped form a band known as the Light Crust Doughboys (the Hillbilly Band in the video was created after the Doughboys broke up). Sure it was still not quite an infomercial, but I’m sure you can see that sponsored programming is certainly nothing new.
As television began to catch on, the same concept was used again, only instead of using music or radio plays, the sponsors could create entire TV shows devoted mainly to pitching their products while consumers watched the programming intently. One of the most famous early examples was NBC’s The Magic Clown, which was created and sponsored by Bonomo’s Turkish Taffy and featured regular interruptions promoting said candy (aside from the name in the intro, there’s basically a full commercial at 4:09).
The first real infomercial appeared around 1950 and was for a blender, although there is a heated debate as to whether it was for a VitaMix or a Waring blender.
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Quick, what’s the one thing you know about the year 1929? I bet it has nothing to do with fire, flood, or disease. This picture appeared in the December 30, 1928 issue of the Ogden Standard-Examiner of Ogden, Utah. In the full graphic, the horoscope for the year is broken down into months, and the biggest headline for October is “World Peace Established.” Yeah, you can say hindsight is 20/20, but a better adage would be, “Don’t make predictions based on astrology.” Read more at Paleofuture. Link
Here is the last known photograph of the RMS Titanic, on the morning of April 11th, 1912. It was taken by photographer and later priest Francis Browne, who traveled only from Southampton to Cork on the ship. Passengers had to be ferried away from the enormous boat, as the dock had no accommodations for a ship that size. That fact gave Browne a chance to get the entire ship in a frame just before it started across the Atlantic. Browne took many other pictures of his one-day stay aboard the Titanic. See eleven of them at Buzzfeed. Link
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Scientists have been speculating and arguing about when hominids mastered the art of producing fire for a long time. Estimates ranged from a few hundred thousands years ago to two million years ago. But now hard evidence of a one-million-year-old cave fire has emerged.
The new evidence comes from South Africa’s Wonderwerk Cave. Archaeological investigations there in the 1970s through 1990s turned up Acheulean tools—stone handaxes and other implements that were likely produced by Homo erectus. In 2004, Francesco Berna of Boston University and his colleagues began new excavations. They found several signs of fire, including tiny charred bone fragments and ash from burned plants. They also found ironstone—which the hominids used to make tools—with telltale fractures indicative of heating. Using a technique called Fourier transform infrared microspectroscopy, which examines how a sample absorbs different wavelengths of infrared light, the team determined the remains had been heated to more than 900 degrees Fahrenheit, with grasses, leaves or brush used as fuel.
The shape of the bone fragments and the exceptional preservation of the plant ash suggest the materials were burned in the cave—not outside and then transported in by water, the team reports this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Spontaneous combustion of bat guano was also ruled out (apparently this sometimes happens in caves). That left hominids as the most likely source of the fire.
The age of hominid fire is important, because fire is a crucial ingredient of the theory that humans developed bigger brains due to eating cooked food (previously at Neatorama). Read more on this discovery at Smithsonian’s Hominid Hunting blog. Link
(Image credit: Wikimedia user 4028mdk09)
Comments Off James Cameron works with NatGeo to recreate the movements of the Titanic as she sank in real life, in this clip from Titanic: The Final Word With James Cameron, which will air Sunday night on the National Geographic Channel. It may not be as exciting as his movie version, but accuracy has its place. So Cameron has managed to promote his film in theaters and a TV show in one fell swoop.
Just about everyone is familiar with Chang and Eng as they are by far the most famous of all Siamese twins, but there’s still probably plenty of information you didn’t know about these two brothers. For example, the term “Siamese twins” was actually based on them. There’s also a chance you know someone related to them:
The twins adopted the last name Bunker, bought a plantation and slaves, and married two sisters, Adelaide Yates and Sarah Anne Yates. Chang had 10 children, Eng 11 or 12, and today the twins’ descendants are said to number more than 1,500, among them sets of non-conjoined twins.
Learn more about the brothers and about 6 other pairs of conjoined twins over at Environmental Graffiti.
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Thousands of soldiers were wounded during the Battle of Shiloh on April 6, 1862 -150 years ago today. Medics on both sides were overwhelmed, and some of those wounded had to wait quite some time for treatment.
Some of the Shiloh soldiers sat in the mud for two rainy days and nights waiting for the medics to get around to them. As dusk fell the first night, some of them noticed something very strange: their wounds were glowing, casting a faint light into the darkness of the battlefield. Even stranger, when the troops were eventually moved to field hospitals, those whose wounds glowed had a better survival rate and had their wounds heal more quickly and cleanly than their unilluminated brothers-in-arms. The seemingly protective effect of the mysterious light earned it the nickname “Angel’s Glow.”
In 2001, almost one hundred and forty years after the battle, seventeen-year-old Bill Martin was visiting the Shiloh battlefield with his family. When he heard about the glowing wounds, he asked his mom – a microbiologist at the USDA Agricultural Research Service who had studied luminescent bacteria that lived in soil – about it.
“So you know, he comes home and, ‘Mom, you’re working with a glowing bacteria. Could that have caused the glowing wounds?’” Martin told Science Netlinks. “And so, being a scientist, of course I said, ‘Well, you can do an experiment to find out.’”
And that’s just what Bill did.
Martin and a friend worked on the question and their research eventually won a science fair competition. Read about their findings at mental_floss. Link
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Imagine taking a road trip with some friends, but this time, you’re not in a Winnebago during Spring Break or runnin’ a quickie to Tijuana and back. There are no cell phones, no GPS systems and no 24-hour convenience stores. Nope, this little jaunt is about 8,000 miles round-trip, and you’ll be lucky to travel 12 clicks on a good day. There’s no reliable map to guide your path. You’ll have to chow stewed dog meat to stave off starvation. Oh, and you’ll encounter hail the size of grapefruit, rattlesnakes galore and potentially hostile tribes who very well may want to kill you.
The good news? You can’t get lost because you have no idea where you’re going.
We’re talking, of course, about the great journey of Lewis and Clark, the original cross-country Hikapalooza over 200 years ago when the first U.S. citizens reached the Pacific by land. Together, the members of the expedition braved that big mass of unknown territory known as “the geography of hope,” an uncharted land full of rumors, from Bigfoot to savage cannibals. Not to mention gold under the rainbow.
1778 Map of Western North America
A Three Hour Tour…
President Thomas Jefferson was the one who came up with this crazy idea, but he made it sound pretty simple: Explore a water route up the Missouri River and then along the Northwest Passage to the Pacific Coast. Yeah, right.
While the idea of finding a path connecting the two shores was a good call, it was pretty much impossible because of those pesky Rocky Mountains (who knew?). So what was supposed to be a quick trip to the Pacific ended up lasting 28 months.
Meriwether Lewis
To organize the expedition, Jefferson called on Meriwether Lewis, a 29-year-old fellow Virginian and his personal secretary. Lewis accepted the challenge and got his old Army buddy, William Clark, to ride shotgun. Of course, for Clark, partnering with Lewis meant demoting himself from Lewis’s previous superior officer to the equal-ranking position of captain. It was an important political move, and one that he wouldn’t forget (stay tuned).
While Clark recruited and trained the team, Lewis took a series of crash courses in kayaking, medicine and scientific observation (image of their compass courtesy of Smithsonian Legacies). The crew consisted of a black slave (Clark’s) named York, a dog (a Newfoundland named Seaman) and a support staff of four dozen (mostly soldiers and gung-ho frontiersmen). For provisions, the group took along some party mix, mainly in the form of “ardent spirits” — a.k.a., 120 gallons of Kentucky Whiskey, about 30 gallons of brandy and a spot of rum (to ward off the chill, of course). The caravan also toted a traveling library, cooking kettles, canvas tenting, trade goods, axes, and personal possessions such as Lewis’ writing desk and his favorite blankie. They called their new troop the Corps of Volunteers for North Western Discovery. Although, had the crew known what they were in for, they might have called it, Do It Yourself; We’re Not Crazy.
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The Week magazine has an online toy that will give you an opinion. A bad one, in hindsight. Unlike a real “generator,” these opinions are not constructed on the fly -they are things that were really said by someone at some time in history. Push the button and get another one randomly selected from the files. Link -via Buzzfeed, where you’ll find a list of their favorites.
Astrophysicist and geek idol Neil deGrasse Tyson watched the 1997 film Titanic and noticed the stars in the sky during the scenes when (spoiler alert) the boat sank. They were not the stars that would have been visible in that location on April 15, 1912. But they will be accurate in the re-release of the film today! You may think that deGrasse Tyson was being pedantic, but imagine getting all those preteen Titanic fans interested in historic star fields. Link -via Geeks Are Sexy
Here’s a rundown of the most famous hoaxes in history. They fooled a lot of people in their time, but we can’t say we’re smarter than those folks now. The hoaxers are always one step ahead in finding ways to fool us! -via the Presurfer
The sorocal is a retro-cool Japanese marvel of current and ancient technology: a calculator combined with an abacus. Sharp made four models in the seventies and eighties, including the one that you see above. Math students used the manual system to verify the results of the electronic system.
Link -via Retronaut | Photo: Partners & Spade
Norman John Gillies was 5 years old when he was among the final 36 people evacuated from their homes on St. Kilda. The tiny island, 100 miles off the coast of Scotland, was turned into a nature preserve afterward and no one lives there. Gilles is now the last living person who remembers living on St. Kilda.
Norman John was named after his mother’s two brothers. They were among five men trying to land on Dun in a strong sea swell when their boat capsized. No St Kildan could swim. Norman John’s grandfather was saved along with another man and one body was retrieved, “But not Norman or John’s.” Both uncles perished.
St Kilda could ill afford to lose able-bodied males. Already depleted by disease and emigration, by the 1920s the community was struggling to feed itself. Nurse Williamina Barclay, posted to Hirta at this time, was horrified by what she found. Well aware, too, of the limited medical service she could provide, she tried to persuade the islanders that the time had come to leave St Kilda. The younger adults were mostly in favour, the older ones against.
Young Norman John knew nothing of this. He remembers Nurse Barclay for teaching him his first hymn while she was treating burns he’d got when his young cousin, in a misguided jest, showered him with hot peat ash from the household fire. Too young to work with the adults (“like children over nine or 10″) or to be in the tiny island schoolroom, Norman John roamed over Hirta. “We didn’t have toys,” he recalls. “We played hide and seek and ran free.” There was no crime on the island – the community genuinely lived by the 10 commandments – and doors were never locked. His most vivid memory is of his mother standing on a high dry-stone wall beckoning and shouting to both ends of the island, “Tormod Iain” – Norman John in Gaelic – “Time for your dinner!”
It was the death of Gilles’ mother that convinced the last holdouts on St. Kilda to leave for good. Read about life on the isolated island and how different it became for the evacuees after they moved to mainland Scotland. Link -via Metafilter
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Long-distance communication at a relatively high speed (compared to carrying messages) came about with the invention of the optical telegraph in France, fifty years before the electrical telegraph.
The optical telegraph network consisted of a chain of towers, each placed 5 to 20 kilometres apart from each other. On each of these towers a wooden semaphore and two telescopes were mounted (the telescope was invented in 1600). The semaphore had two signalling arms which each could be placed in seven positions. The wooden post itself could also be turned in 4 positions, so that 196 different positions were possible. Every one of these arrangements corresponded with a code for a letter, a number, a word or (a part of) a sentence.
1,380 kilometres an hour
Every tower had a telegrapher, looking through the telescope at the previous tower in the chain. If the semaphore on that tower was put into a certain position, the telegrapher copied that symbol on his own tower. Next he used the telescope to look at the succeeding tower in the chain, to control if the next telegrapher had copied the symbol correctly. In this way, messages were signed through symbol by symbol from tower to tower. The semaphore was operated by two levers. A telegrapher could reach a speed of 1 to 3 symbols per minute.
The technology spread through Europe, but was confounded by wars and governments. It eventually faded when the electrical telegraph came into use. Read all about this amazing but obsolete technology at Low-tech Magazine. Link -via the Presurfer
Having to endure the mind numbing monotony of duplicating manuscripts by hand every day of their cloistered lives, medieval monks vented their frustration by adding cartoons and statements in the margins.
Surprisingly, many of the statements are obscene and quite blasphemous, especially considering their source. What’s not surprising is that historians are finding these unedited remarks quite illuminating, giving them a rare glimpse into the daily lives of the original office workers.
Hit the links for a sample of the comedy stylings of medieval monks, courtesy of Colin Dickey and the Lapham Quarterly.
You may have heard that the first rock ‘n’ roll song was “Rocket 88″ in 1951. But there were folks singing (and even recording music) about “rocking” way before that. What we call rock ‘n’ roll grew out of the blues and the rhythm & blues songs of the 1940s. So what was the first recorded rock ‘n’ roll song? That may be argued about for a long time to come. Mental_floss has five rocking songs that are good candidates for the title -and four of them are from the 1940s! Listen to them and tell us what you think. Link
Have you ever been offered a lot to drink and afterward found yourself contending with Pharaoh?
If you know what I mean.
No, you don’t? Well, that was one of Benjamin Franklin’s 220 euphemisms for being drunk. He published a list of them in 1737. Here’s Keith Habersberger of the comedy team I Made America playing the role of Benjamin Franklin. It’s one of many videos by the troupe about six Founding Fathers kidnapped by time travelers and abandoned in Chicago in 2012.
Troupe Website -via Flavorwire
The wreckage of the RMS Titanic has been lying at the bottom of the ocean for 100 years. We’ve seen a few pictures, but we’ve never been able to see the whole thing -until now. National Geographic is showcasing new images of the shipwreck in its April issue.
In recent years explorers like James Cameron and Paul-Henry Nargeolet have brought back increasingly vivid pictures of the wreck. Yet we’ve mainly glimpsed the site as though through a keyhole, our view limited by the dreck suspended in the water and the ambit of a submersible’s lights. Never have we been able to grasp the relationships between all the disparate pieces of wreckage. Never have we taken the full measure of what’s down there.
Until now. In a tricked-out trailer on a back lot of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), William Lange stands over a blown-up sonar survey map of the Titanic site—a meticulously stitched-together mosaic that has taken months to construct. At first look the ghostly image resembles the surface of the moon, with innumerable striations in the seabed, as well as craters caused by boulders dropped over millennia from melting icebergs.
Get a preview with some large-size, hi-resolution images at the Neatorama Spotlight Blog. Link
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