“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” That was Hamlet pointing out to Horatio that even the most educated people can’t explain everything. Sometimes the quote reads “our philosophy,” which is the way Shakespeare’s first folio read before he changed it to “your.”
Hamlet was talking about events like the Lindal railway incident, which happened 128 years ago today. Lindal is a village in Lancashire, England, and there was (and possibly still is) a railway yard there. Furness Railway locomotive 115 was shunting freight cars around on the various sidings around seven in the morning when Tom Postlethwaite, the engineer, noticed cracks opening up in the ground around the tracks. He shut off the steam and jumped out of the cab, followed by the fireman. then they watched as a huge hole opened up right under the locomotive. It fell 30 feet to the bottom of the hole.
Since it was a railroad yard, there was a crane readily available, along with work crews to man it. By 2:30 in the afternoon they’d pulled the tender out of the hole and took a break before trying to figure out how to get the locomotive — which weighed 35 tons — hoisted out. But while they all watched, the hole suddenly deepened and the locomotive fell to 60 feet down, then kept going and disappeared. The earth closed behind it. Nobody knows how far down the locomotive plunged, but it’s still down there somewhere. There was a mine deep beneath the railroad yard, but when they checked it, all the tunnels were intact and there was nothing out of the ordinary — and they probably would have noticed a locomotive that hadn’t been there before.
September 22 came and went annually after that until 1934, at a mine called the “Gresford Colliery” in Wales. the mine had been started in 1908, and was the deepest in the area at over 2,200 feet. It was a big mine, with up to 1850 workers underground. Luckily the full shift wasn’t there at 2:08am that day; there was a large explosion somewhere down there. The rescue efforts were disorganized, and there was an underground fire to put out as well, and only about half of the 500 miners in the pit were able to escape. The fire took several days to put out, and the investigation afterward never identified a cause. The mine — or grave, which it what it is now — never reopened.
Sometimes mysteries under the earth reemerge — sometimes still carrying a certain amount of mystery with them. September 22, 1991 saw an event like that, when the Dead Sea Scrolls were first made available to the public. The first scrolls were discovered in 1946 by two Bedouin shepherds — the actual discovery had to do with one of them falling into a cave containing some of the scrolls. Finding the first few scrolls — fragments, really — prompted a number of organized searches, and more caves (and scrolls) continue to be found. The latest discovery was just three years ago.
Reconstructing the original manuscripts from the surviving fragments isn’t simple. There are 972 distinct manuscripts, some nearly 3,000 years old. Parchment (or papyrus, which some were made of) doesn’t really last that long; some of the manuscripts had deteriorated into tens of thousands of fragments. They haven’t all been deciphered, at least not yet.
But September 22 doesn’t hold just subterranean mysteries. It’s also the day of the 1979 Vela incident. The Vela satellite, a “detector” designed to identify things like nuclear explosions that violate the Test Ban Treaty, reported a “double flash” in a remote part of the Indian Ocean. There was other evidence that something happened, but it was difficult to conclude — at least on the basis of unclassified information — exactly what had happened. Speculation was that it might have been an illicit nuclear test by Israel. Or by South Africa. Or by Israel and South Africa working together. Or a meteorite. There were plenty of measurements of electromagnetic effects, but some of the expected byproducts of an atomic bomb weren’t observed (as far as we know).
Electromagnetic effects can be measured primarily because of Michael Faraday, who was born September 22, 1791. He discovered electromagnetism, not to mention induction, electrolysis, electrochemisty, and diamagnetism. That last effect isn’t widely known — magnetic fields are generally thought to attract things, at least when they’re made of iron. But there are other materials, including bismuth and some forms of carbon, that are repelled by magnetic fields.
If you can get some “pyrolitic carbon”, you can do a fun demonstration: it’s a diamagnetic material that will hover above a strong magnet. It’s not hard to get; you can buy a small sheet of it for as little as ten cents. Sometimes it’s called pyrolytic graphite, by the way.
Although Faraday is mostly known for his discoveries in electromagnetism (and for the “farad”, which is a unit for measuring capacitance), he also invented something we find utterly commonplace. In fact, it might come as a surprise that it was “invented” at all, but it was. We have Michael Faraday to thank for the rubber balloon.
