Thursday Things: Enigma from the Sea Edition
10 December 2020. Vol 2 No 50 By Dan McGirt. #70
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Make a wish. Photo by Lorene Farrugia on Unsplash
It’s always the last place you look. Divers Discover a Legendary Nazi Enigma Machine in The Baltic Sea
German divers who recently fished an Enigma encryption machine out of the Baltic Sea, used by the Nazis to send coded messages during World War II, handed their rare find over to a museum for restoration on Friday.
The legendary code machine was discovered last month during a search for abandoned fishing nets in the Bay of Gelting in northeast Germany, by divers on assignment for environmental group WWF.
Lots of places you’d like to visit are closed to the public right now because of the pandemic (held over by popular demand!). But many of those locations can still be visited by the magic of the internet! For example, the Palace Museum in China’s Forbidden City:
The Palace Museum is one of the world’s most renowned cultural heritage sites. As the largest and the best-preserved wooden imperial architecture complex in the world, it served as the home of 24 emperors during the Ming and Qing dynasties. The Museum consists of 9046 rooms and maintains more than 1.86 million pieces in its collection.
Google Arts & Culture has a new exhibit that takes you on a virtual tour of the Forbidden City, including the Palace Museum, and many items that are normally off limits to visitors.
Visitors can enjoy a 360-degree virtual tour of three main structures—the Hall of Supreme Harmony, the Meridian Gate, and the Gate of Supreme Harmony. The Hall of Supreme Harmony was the venue for grand imperial ceremonies and, with its double layer of eaves and portico, is among the most prominent examples of ancient Chinese architecture.
In addition, we’re launching 19 new online exhibitions with high-resolution images of thrones and decorations in the Palace Museum, some of which are not usually accessible to visitors. These include rare paintings that show the splendour of life in the Forbidden City, such as an Album Leaf from The Grand Wedding of the Guangxu Emperor, which is being displayed online for the first time.
You heard right! The Album Leaf from The Grand Wedding of the Guangxu Emperor is finally online! I know we’ve all been waiting for that.
Nazi typewriters aren’t the only thing found at the bottom of the sea. You can also find cars.
This is just cool, and it’s happening off the coast of Georgia, near St. Simons Island. A Chain Just Cut Through A Capsized Cargo Ship Filled With Cars And The Process Is Fascinating
Back in September of 2019, a 600+ foot cargo ship called the MV Golden Ray, which was apparently loaded in an unstable fashion with over 4,000 cars, capsized in St. Simons Sound just off the port of Brunswick, Georgia. Since then, responders have been working to remove the ship in sections to send the hulk to the scrapper. November was particularly exciting, as workers used a chain to cut off the first enormous chunk of ship, revealing mangled cars within. Here’s a look at the fascinating way the team pulled this off.
And here is a picture of the massive Versabar VB-10000 lift vessel dual-barge crane that is slicing the sunken ship like a sushi roll and salvaging the pieces:
Source: St. Simons Sound Incident Response
Many more pictures and video at the link. And the salvage operation has its own website. We’ll be checking in on their progress again soon. Because giant floating crane!
A Happy Subscriber recommended this article about the curious history of steam-heating for apartment buildings. Your Old Radiator Is a Pandemic-Fighting Weapon
The battle against pathogens reshaped the inner working of buildings, too. Take that familiar annoyance for New Yorkers: the clanky radiator that overheats apartments even on the coldest days of the year. It turns out that the prodigious output of steam-heated buildings is the direct result of theories of infection control that were enlisted in the battle against the great global pandemic of 1918 and 1919.
The Spanish Influenza, which caused just over 20,000 deaths in New York City alone, “changed heating once and for all.” That’s according to Dan Holohan, a retired writer, consultant, and researcher with extensive knowledge of heating systems and steam heating. … Most radiator systems appeared in major American cities like New York City in the first third of the 20th century. This golden age of steam heat didn’t merely coincide with that pandemic: Beliefs about how to fight airborne illness influenced the design of heating systems, and created a persistent pain point for those who’ve cohabitated with a cranky old radiator.
The short version is that steam heat was designed to be so strong it could heat an apartment even with all the windows open in the dead of winter, because early 20th century health experts believed fresh air was essential to fighting the spread of disease and the “fresh air” movement affected building design: “Having robust steam boilers that could keep apartments and dwellings comfortable with open windows became standard in New York City, as well as other northern cities in cold climates, such as Detroit, Chicago, Denver, Boston and Philadelphia.” And many of those systems are still there today, a century later.
Paul McCartney is still going, with a new album coming soon. Here is an extended meditation on McCarthy by a fellow Substack newsletter writer who is clearly a devoted fan: 64 Reasons To Celebrate Paul McCartney
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