A collection of apothecary jars for storing oil of earthworms, plus recipes for making your own disgusting worm syrup
Categories: Curiosities, history, Museums • Tags: apothecary, curiosities, drugs, medicine, science, worms
Categories: Curiosities, history, Museums • Tags: 17th century, death, face, gold, history, jewelry, memento mori, museum, ring, skull, unsettling
Categories: Curiosities, history • Tags: face, heart, love, nostalgia, photography, vintage
Tipu’s (or Tippoo’s) Tiger is a life-sized wooden mechanical organ made around 1793, depicting a tiger mauling a man in European clothing. When the crank is turned, a hidden mechanism causes the man’s arm to goes up and down, and plays his wails of agony along the growls of the tiger. Under a flap on the tiger’s body there is also a small pipe organ, which can play 18 notes.
Categories: Curiosities, history, Museums • Tags: animal, art, automaton, colonialism, figurine, grotesque, history, india, music, sculpture, tiger
This is the ultimate piece of toast: a loaf of bread made in the first century AD, which was discovered at Pompeii, preserved for centuries in the volcanic ashes of Mount Vesuvius.
Categories: Curiosities, history • Tags: archaeology, bread, history, pompeii, preserved, toast
Alphonse Bertillon was a French police officer and biometrics researcher who was responsible for standardizing the modern mug shot. (Fun fact: the profile shot was included because Bertillon thought our ear shape might become a unique identifier, in the days before fingerprinting). This cute mug shot features his two-year old son François Bertillon, a hardened criminal who was caught nibbling all the pears from a basket on 17 October 1893. This mug shot is adorable, but it is also a […]
Categories: Curiosities, history • Tags: children, criminal, cute, face, humor, images, mug shot, photography, victorian era
When I was a kid, my weird and wonderful mother used to amuse us by picking up the cat and pretending to play it like a bagpipe, using its tail as a mouthpiece. Her improvised feline instrument has, sadly, been upstaged by my discovery of the Katzenklavier, a Cat-Piano (also known as a cat organ) dreamed up in the 16th century.
Categories: Curiosities, history, Ideas • Tags: animal, cat, curiosities, history, instrument, music, piano, psychiatry, unsettling
This very rare doll from the early nineteenth century demonstrates a very innovative design for its day: a wheel of legs which allow the doll to ‘walk’ when it is pushed across the floor. The doll would have originally been costumed in a long dress to hide the leg mechanism, so only two walking feet would have shown at a time. The value of this remarkable hand-carved doll, with its enamel eyes, coiled chignon, jointed arms and delicately painted features, […]
Categories: history, Ideas • Tags: 19th century, body, doll, figurine, history, rare, toy, walking
