Roche Rock - Where Tristan And Isolde Hid In Plain Sight

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It is no surprise that Roche Rock in Cornwall in the United Kingdom is associated with a number of famous folktales. It is said that Triston and Isolde hid here when their love had been discovered by Isolde's husband, King Mark. Yet others have fled here from far more frightening enemies than a cuckolded king.

Atop Roche Rock lies the eerie remains of a chapel, dedicated to Saint Michael. The rock, even without the ruins, looks out of place, jutting unexpectedly out of the Cornish landscape. The chapel was built in 1409 and abandoned some centuries afterwards.

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11 Monarchs Crowned While They Were In Diapers

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Babies sure are cute. But do they make good world leaders?
Here's a peek at some of history's youngest rulers and their reigns.

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The Maijishan Grottoes - Artistic Treasure Of China's Past

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China has four major Buddhist cave complexes - by far the most visited being the Longmen caves. Less well known are the Maijishan Grottoes. Situated in Gansu Province in the northwest of China, this astonishing example of cave architecture hewn from rock consists of over 7,000 Buddhist sculptures not to mention almost 1000 square meters of murals.

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Playing With Matches: Sexy, Silly 1930s Ads That Went Up In Smoke

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Smoking is growing more taboo now, but back in the 1930s, cigarettes were sexy. And where there was smoke, there were matches. At one point, nearly every business in the country, whether it was a national chain or a local Mom 'n' Pop, produced logoed matchbooks to help their customers fuel their nicotine habit.

Matches were shaped like bowling pins, beers, and sexy ladies. Believe it or not, they compass everything from WWII racism against the Japanese to burying your dead to living it up in Atlantic City.

(thanks Lisa)

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The 10 Greatest FBI Agents In History

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Of all the US law enforcement agencies, the FBI has had one of the most intriguing and controversial histories. From humble beginnings as the plain old Bureau of Investigation, the FBI has, since then, been on the front line of the struggle against crime in America, from battles with armed bank robbers during the Great Depression era, to its involvement in the War on Terror and War on Drugs in the 21st century.

If the three letters only conjure images of Mulder and Scully from the X-Files, find out more about those who truly excelled in this exciting career: the 10 greatest FBI agents in history.

(thanks Karl)

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The Airship Postcard Albums Of Lord Ventry

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The golden age of the passenger airship came to an abrupt halt on May 6, 1937 when the Hindenburg scorched the night sky over Lakehurst, New Jersey. The public understandably lost faith in the zeppelin as a secure mode of transport.

But for the first three decades of the 20th century, an extraordinary variety of lighter-than-air craft shared the airways with early airplanes and gliders. These photographs and postcards illustrate the history of these curious aerostatic vehicles, both before and after the Hindenburg. Although there's no definite information about the owner of the postcards, it may have been Arthur Frederick Daubeney Olav Eveleigh-de-Moleyns, better known to the public as Lord Ventry.

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Gargoyles - Glorious Gruesome Grotesques

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In architecture, a gargoyle is a carved stone grotesque, usually made of granite, with a spout designed to convey water from a roof and away from the side of a building thereby preventing rainwater from running down masonry walls and eroding the mortar between.

They're also strange, bizarre, unpleasant or just plain ugly. They have been hovering around our towns and cities for centuries, for so long that it can be forgotten that they have meaning and purpose. Take a tour of the weird world of the gargoyle.

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Baby's First Butcher Shop

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This grisly 1840 doll-sized butcher shop with miniature animal carcasses and a floor covered in sawdust and blood would be shockingly graphic to our modern sensibilities. After all, here in the 21st century, we like to remain cheerfully oblivious about where our meat products come from.

But in Victorian times, such detailed model butcher shops were not uncommon, says Sarah Louise Wood, a curator at the Museum of Childhood at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The real question is: Why exactly do such things exist?

(thanks Lisa)

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Bokor Hill Station - Cambodia's Abandoned Town

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The history of Cambodia in the twentieth century is one of almost continual struggle and conflict. One place which encapsulates the traumatic events which the country persevered is the Bokor Hill Station. This eerie ghost town has been abandoned not once, but twice in its history.

Even its birth was savage. Designed as a resort for the French colonists of the early twentieth century, the construction of Bokor Hill Station was complete by 1925. Built by indentured Cambodian laborers it took nine months to build. Almost a thousand men perished during that time.

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Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb

How little did we know in 1957. Or maybe we did, and then this is just stupid. On July 19, 1957, five Air Force officers and one photographer stood together on a patch of ground about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. They'd marked the spot 'Ground Zero. Population 5' on a hand-lettered sign hammered into the soft ground right next to them.

Directly overhead two F-89 jets roar into view, and one of them shoots off a nuclear missile carrying an atomic warhead. They wait. There is a countdown; 18,500 feet above them, the missile is detonated and blows up. Which means, these men intentionally stood directly underneath an exploding 2-kiloton nuclear bomb.



YouTube link

More about this experiment.

(via b3ta)

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The Kennecott Mines: Abandoned Alaskan Boomtown

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In 1900 two prospectors were traveling through Alaska. Their horses were hungry and so when they spied a distant green hillside they thought their luck was in. They were not wrong. They had stumbled upon a massive deposit of copper ore, exposed at the surface.

Industry on a massive scale quickly followed. Yet by 1939 the copper was exhausted, the place abandoned. This is what remains of the Kennecott Mine Camp.

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Land Speed Record Vehicles

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A thrilling story of the land speed record and the fastest men on Earth. A look at just a few of the amazing vehicles that have broken or attempted to break land speed records, since the very first record was established over a century ago, featuring the pioneers who steadily pushed top speeds higher and higher as they broke one record after another.

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New Maya Temple Found

Some 1,600 years ago, the Temple of the Night Sun was a blood-red beacon visible for miles and adorned with giant masks of the Maya sun god as a shark, blood drinker, and jaguar. Long since lost to the Guatemalan jungle, the temple is finally showing its faces to archaeologists, and revealing new clues about the rivalrous kingdoms of the Maya.

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Famous Great Travelers

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Tourism has been around since antiquity but travel is timeless. The earliest guidebook, The Description of Greece, was written by Greek geographer Pausanias around A.D. 160.

A handful of history's boldest travelers staged epic journeys that crossed new lands, broke cultural barriers, and revealed the radical diversity of the world around us. In doing so, these trailblazers confirmed that wanderlust is part of the human condition.

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The Hardy Tree: An Early Work Of A Great Novelist

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In the churchyard of St Pancras Old Church in London, hundreds of old gravestones circle an ash tree. Of course, these were not how they were originally laid out. So, how did they get to this, their final resting place, as it were? And who was responsible?

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Dawn Of The Flick: The Doctors, Physicists, And Mathematicians Who Made The Movies

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Early optical toys from the 19th century are expressions of our almost primal urge to animate the inanimate. Or so believes Richard Balzer, one of the foremost collectors of optical toys, magic lanterns, camera obscuras, and other objects that play tricks on the eye.

For Balzer, these early optical toys, as well as our continued fascination with flipbooks, are part of a continuum that has culminated in the movies.

(thanks Lisa)

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Amelia Earhart's Birthday Celebrated In Google Doodle

Aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart would be 115 years old today, and to mark the occasion, Google has created a doodle that shows Amelia climbing onto an aircraft. Amelia Mary Earhart (1897 - disappeared 1937) was an American aviation pioneer and author. She was the first aviatrix to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.

During an attempt to make a circumnavigational flight of the globe in 1937 in a Purdue-funded Lockheed Model 10 Electra, Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan disappeared over the central Pacific Ocean near Howland Island.

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9 Intriguing Excerpts From Old FBI Files

Under J. Edgar Hoover, everybody who was anybody had an FBI file. When Einstein was asked to join the Manhattan project in 1939, the FBI concluded that, In view of his radical background, this office would not recommend the employment of Dr. Einstein on matters of a secret nature without a very careful investigation, as it seems unlikely that a man of his background could, in such a short time, become a loyal American citizen.

Here are some interesting things from the FBI archives.

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9 Really Strange Sports That Are No Longer In The Olympics

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From the earliest variations of existing events to competitions that can hardly be considered athletic, some former Olympic sports left us scratching our heads. Like Distance Plunging, Live Pigeon Shooting, Tug-of-War, and the seemingly contradictory sport of Solo Synchronized Swimming.

9 Really Strange Sports That Are No Longer In The Olympics.

(via Nag on the Lake)

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Remembering The Great California Cycleway

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Over a hundred years ago bicycles ruled the day, and highways were being built just for them. The California Cycleway, opened in 1900, was an elevated tollway built specially for bicycle traffic through the Arroyo Seco, intended to connect the cities of Pasadena and Los Angeles, in California, United States.

The inventor and promotor of the cycleway was Pasadena resident Horace Dobbins, who attracted ex-California governor Henry Harrison Markham to join him in the scheme. The toll was 10 cents one-way, or 15 cents round trip. Due to the end of the bicycle craze of the 1890s and the existing Pacific Electric Railway lines connecting Pasadena to Los Angeles, the cycleway never made a profit. In the first decade of the 20th century, the structure was dismantled, and the wood sold for lumber.

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