Ripley Entertainment Inc.'s Blog, page 188
August 14, 2020
August 13, 2020
The “Shocking” Truth About Benjamin Franklin’s “Discovery” of Electricity
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
Of all the iconic scientific experiments in history, few are more famous than Benjamin Franklin’s kite and key trick. Several artists have famously depicted it. Usually, their paintings show Franklin and a boy flying a kite in a field during a dramatic storm. In these depictions, a bolt of lightning strikes the kite shooting an arc of light from the key to Franklin’s finger. Today, some people celebrate this as the moment electricity got discovered.
There’s just one problem with this portrayal. Ancient Greeks, such as Thales of Miletus, who died around 546 BC, knew about static electricity. Thales even conducted experiments by rubbing wool against amber. The word “electron” even stems from a Greek word for amber.
Nevertheless, Franklin contributed significantly to our modern understanding of electricity. Here’s the real story about the experiment that changed the world.
Solving the Problem of Attraction
During the 18th century Enlightenment, scientists struggled to understand electricity’s natural properties, such as attraction and repulsion. Benjamin Franklin coined these terms and introduced others, including:
Plus (for positive charges)
Minus (for negative charges)
Battery
Electrician
Electrified
Charge
He turned his Market Street home in Philadelphia into a veritable electrical laboratory, designing instruments crafted from household items. Using a wire leading from an iron rod attached to the chimney, he brought electricity into the house. In a letter to a friend, Franklin wrote, “On the staircase opposite my chamber door, the wire was divided, the ends separated about six inches, a little bell on each end.”
Franklin’s Famous Electric Bells
When electricity filled the atmosphere, Franklin rigged a group of electric bells to ring. When small sparks jumped between the wires, the bells rang softly. At other times, huge arcs of electricity the size of an index finger lit up the staircase. The bells pealed loudly. Franklin’s wife, Deborah, felt terrified by the alarms and gadgets illuminating her hallway and filling it with noise during storms.
One evening, Franklin attempted to electrocute a turkey for a crowd of boisterous guests. Unfortunately, he ended up electrocuting himself instead, falling to the ground in convulsions. This brush with death highlighted the strange relationship people had with electricity. Most saw it as a peculiar phenomenon suited for parlor tricks.
From Traveling Electricians to Flying Kites
Traveling electricians toured the country, amusing people with their shows. Franklin watched them with interest. Soon, he moved beyond entertainment, encouraged by accounts of experiments coming out of Europe. He also made observations about lightning and electricity, finding clear parallels. Both appeared as light and in forked arcs. He also noted that both crackled and had the power to kill animals. His conclusion? Lightning was a form of static electricity.
An artistic representation of Benjamin Franklin flying a kite in a lightning storm.
To further confirm his observations, Franklin devised the famed experiment using a kite and a key. Franklin described it in a letter to British inventor, Peter Collinson, who lived in London. Collinson published Franklin’s epistle in 1751. The publication ushered in experimentation by European scientists fascinated with Franklin’s hypothesis, leading to death by electrocution for at least one researcher.
A Eureka Moment
French scientist, Thomas-François D’Alibard, successfully proved Franklin’s hypothesis in May 1752, using a 50-foot-long vertical rod. In Belgium and England, scientists followed suit. In the process, they successfully demonstrated that lightning was electricity. It took time for news of these tests to reach the New World. So, Franklin likely never knew these European scientists beat him to the punchline as he prepared his own trial.
Initially, Franklin planned on conducting his test from Christ Church steeple, still under construction. By the spring of 1752, though, the steeple remained unfinished. Franklin grew impatient and decided to proceed without it. In June, he and his son William flew a kite with a key tied to the string in a thunderstorm.
Franklin and the Lightning Rod
An experiment fraught with incredible danger, Franklin and his son risked electrocution. How did they escape with their lives? No lightning hit the kite. Instead, the kite encountered small amounts of electricity collected in the storm clouds. Franklin touched the key, causing the threads on the string to stand on end. The charge was collected in a Leyden jar, an antique electrical component capable of storing a high-voltage electric charge that could be released at a later date. The result? Franklin proved the presence of electricity as lightning.
The realization that electricity and lightning were the same had immediate repercussions, both practically and scientifically. Fifteen years later, Joseph Priestley, the British chemist who discovered electricity, published an account of the experiment. Franklin went on to design the lightning rod, an iron rod attached to the top of a building. The rod was connected to a wire. The wire transported lightning strikes harmlessly to the ground.
Soon, his lightning rods stood atop buildings, from New York to Boston, London to Paris. Franklin didn’t discover electricity or even perform the first experiments associated with its discovery. But he did create the lightning hypothesis and experimental conditions to prove it.
By Engrid Barnett, contributor for Ripleys.com
EXPLORE THE ODD IN PERSON!
Discover hundreds of strange and unusual artifacts and get hands-on with unbelievable interactives when you visit a Ripley’s Odditorium!
Source: The “Shocking” Truth About Benjamin Franklin’s “Discovery” of Electricity
August 12, 2020
The Stranger Than Fiction Stories Surrounding “The Omen”
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
If there’s one fundamental truth, it’s this one: fact is stranger than fiction. Is it creepier, too? Well, decide for yourself, as we dive into the shocking, terrible, supposedly supernatural mysteries that surrounded the making of the horror classic, The Omen.
As any movie fan will tell you, 1976’s The Omen is an iconic piece of supernatural cinema starring Gregory Peck and Lee Remick as Robert and Katherine Thorn, alongside Harvey Spencer Stephens as Damien Thorn, their adopted son who is actually the Antichrist. Needless to say, Damien’s presence causes all manners of supernatural events and grisly deaths over the course of the movie, but they were nothing compared to the spooky real-life horrors that plagued the set of The Omen!
Disasters Deemed Damien
Hollywood has spawned many curious tales of cursed actors (Rudolph Valentino’s, supposedly, cursed ring is said to be locked in a vault in Hollywood), cursed movie sets, and so on, but the so-called Curse of The Omen is just too compelling and convincing a story.
The tale begins before the filming of the movie began: lead actor Gregory Peck’s son shot himself mere months before work on the movie began. Sadly, his tragic death is just the first of many horrors that have been attributed to the movie!
Publicity photo of Gregory Peck taken for the film, The Omen (1976).
As Ripley’s has previously debunked, lightning most certainly can strike the same place twice. It’s darn unlikely, though, which is why those unfortunate souls who have been struck multiple times are sometimes considered jinxed. The same is true of The Omen, the creation of which was dogged by lightning strikes. Not only was the plane Peck was traveling to London in struck in September of that year, but so was that of Mace Neufeld, the movie’s executive producer, during a flight to Los Angeles soon after. To top things off, Harvey Bernhard, the producer, was on location in Rome when he was almost hit by a bolt of lightning himself!
“The devil was at work, and he didn’t want that film made,” Bernhard reportedly said. And yet, the supposed curse is just getting started.
Animal Accidents
The Omen also features iconic scenes in which the major players are attacked by vicious animals. Baboons threaten Damien and Katherine in one scene, while dogs chase Robert through a cemetery in another. Incredibly, there were unlikely incidents linked to both of these scenes. The baboon handler died the very next day following the shoot with these animals. And the pack of dogs turned so vicious that they nearly caused the stuntman terrible injury and could not be called off by their own handlers. What had gotten into them? The same thing that got to the baboons’ handler, some say, the curse of The Omen!
Another tragic death associated with the movie set was that of Liz Moore. John Richardson, The Omen’s special effects expert, was driving through the Netherlands with Moore when they were involved in a terrible car accident. Richardson escaped, largely unscathed, but Moore’s head was completely severed when a tire smashed into their vehicle. A terrible, grisly accident, but fans of the movie will understand the significance of this: it’s reminiscent of a scene in The Omen, in which Keith Jennings, investigating Damien’s supernatural origins, is decapitated by a sheet of glass that comes loose from a vehicle on a construction site!
Was The Omen Cursed?
Now, it’s true that some of these tales may have been embellished in the telling. Richardson later reported that, just before the crash, he passed a road sign that read Ommen, 66.6 km. That’s either a little too horribly perfect to be true, an outrageous coincidence, or possible proof that The Omen deserves its reputation as one of the most supposedly haunted productions ever.
Of course, nothing quite bolsters a horror movie’s reputation like grim stories of hauntings and mysterious accidents. Over time, several incidents have been said to be part of the curse, including a tragic situation regarding the plane the team was to use for an aerial shot. In a last-minute change of plans, the aircraft they were slated to fly was switched out. The Omen’s original aircraft was used by a group of businessmen instead—all of whom were killed when the plane crashed immediately after taking off!
Naturally, it’s impossible to know whether there were truly malevolent forces at work here. All that can be said for sure is that The Omen is still one of the most iconic films in horror history, and the chilling tales that surround its production have only helped to cement that legacy.
By Chris Littlechild, contributor for Ripleys.com
EXPLORE THE ODD IN PERSON!
Discover hundreds of strange and unusual artifacts and get hands-on with unbelievable interactives when you visit a Ripley’s Odditorium!
Source: The Stranger Than Fiction Stories Surrounding “The Omen”
August 11, 2020
The Ecological Benefits Of Pablo Escobar’s Hippos
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
Pablo wanted hippos.
And, as a general rule, when Pablo wanted something, he got it.
The year was 1981, and the man in question was international drug czar, Pablo Escobar. The location was his private zoo in Antioquia, Colombia. Located on eight square miles of land, the estate’s zoo included antelope, giraffes, elephants, and ponies.
Now, he wanted hippos. So, in 1981, he acquired four of the animals from America. It was said he enjoyed his zoo immensely for years.
But by 1993, Escobar had been shot and killed, and his drug business was over. The national government was running his property, but the zoo became too much to manage. The animals were sent off to refuges and sanctuaries.
Hippos, however, are difficult to handle. They are herbivores, or plant-eaters, that happen to weigh an average of 3,000 pounds. And they’re some of the most unpredictable, temperamental creatures on the planet.
The testy animals were too difficult to move, so they were left to roam the river ecosystems of the countryside and breed. Today they number at about 100. With no predators, they’ve had the rule of the land for 40 years.
For experts, the debate continues: are the animals beneficial to the environment or harmful?
“To residents, they are a threatening menace, but among scientists, their presence is the source of spirited debate,” Robert Gebelhoff of The Washington Post wrote in March. “Are Escobar’s hippos ‘invasive’? Or are they ‘introduced’? Are they threatening the local ecological community? Or are they helping to ‘rewild’ the area? The answer is far from clear, but the debate could change the way we think about preserving habitats.”
It’s true that hippos do a lot of good for the environment. They eat grass and defecate in water sources which, in turn, feeds fish and populates lakes and streams. Unfortunately, these hippos may be doing it a bit too much, which could result in algae blooms that kill fish.
As always, too much of anything is a bad thing.
But a new study suggests the addition of hippos to the Columbian ecosystem could be just what the doctor ordered. Turns out the hippos could be filling a need that the locale hasn’t had since other large, now-extinct river animals roamed around long ago.
Still, scientists say that ecosystems are living, breathing things, constantly evolving. And because of that, the effects of hippos can’t accurately be predicted.
Yet.
“Indeed, researchers previously noted that in Kenya, river runoff saturated with hippo poo led to 13 mass die-offs in fish, in which fish suffocated in oxygen-poor water,” Live Science’s Mindy Weisberger reported. “The findings were published online March 23 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.”
Could it be that Pablo Escobar inadvertently helped his country’s environment by introducing hippos to it?
It is more than possible. And no matter the effect, the strange naturalist legacy of Escobar lives on in the form of 100 roaming, wild Colombian hippopotami.
By Ryan Clark, contributor for Ripleys.com and host of Ripley’s Believe It or Notcast
EXPLORE THE ODD IN PERSON!
Discover hundreds of strange and unusual artifacts and get hands-on with unbelievable interactives when you visit a Ripley’s Odditorium!
August 10, 2020
August 9, 2020
August 8, 2020
Ripley Entertainment Inc.'s Blog
- Ripley Entertainment Inc.'s profile
- 52 followers
