A museum exhibit at the Mütter Museum of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia is pretty strange even by wacko museum standards. It documents the things that people have swallowed—the number is in the thousands by the way—as collected by Chevalier Jackson, a pioneering laryngologist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Ah, batteries. They always die sooner than you think, right? Not this one! Called Karpen’s Pile, this battery has been working uninterrupted since the 1950′s. That’s 60 years of charge!
In 1945, after Japan had conceded defeat in World War II, Sony founder Masaru Ibuka invented a product to try and serve the millions of homes who had electricity but lacked the appliances to use it. The result was this electric rice cooker.
If the thought of you sleeping in a museum by yourself for a month isn’t the stuff anxiety attacks are made of, then perhaps you’re just who Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry is looking for.
Last night, a thief walked out of the Paris Museum of Modern Art with some $US127 million in paintings by Picasso, Matisse, and Braque. There were no lasers and no temperature-sensitive security systems. Hell, there wasn’t even an alarm.
In 1851, Leon Foucault demonstrated the Earth’s rotation to the world with a magnificent pendulum in the Paris Pantheon. In 2010, that pendulum crashed to the Musée des Arts et Métiers’ marble floor. The damage, as they say, is irreparable.
