All posts tagged: Longlost

Shakespeare’s long-lost London home is finally found

Shakespeare’s long-lost London home is finally found

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By the end of his career, William Shakespeare was a bona fide celebrity boasting multiple homes across England. Historical documents indicate the legendary playwright spent the majority of his later years in the town of his youth, Stratford-upon-Avon, but he also owned property in the Blackfriars precinct. Named after the Dominican friary dating back to the 13th century, the region is located in east London not far from Millennium Bridge—and about 100 miles southeast of the playwright’s hometown. There’s even a plaque located at 5 St. Andrew’s Hill commemorating the latter real estate transaction: On 10th March 1613 William Shakespeare purchased lodgings in the Blackfriars Gatehouse located near this site. “Near this site” is a pivotal detail, however. Archival evidence shows Shakespeare’s granddaughter, Elizabeth Hall Nash Barnard, sold the property in 1665, but the home burned down along with around 15 percent of the city’s housing during the Great Fire of London the following year. Over the ensuing centuries, …

Long-lost page from Greek manuscript discovered in French art museum

Long-lost page from Greek manuscript discovered in French art museum

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. The Archimedes Palimpsest is a Byzantine prayerbook written in 1229, but the artifact holds more than what immediately meets the eye. The original writing on its pages was erased and replaced—making it a palimpsest—a common practice during the medieval period for expensive writing materials made from animal-skin like parchment. In other words, the scribes reused parchment from other books.  As such, the palimpsest hosts a number of 10th century treatises by the Greek mathematician and inventor Archimedes of Syracuse (though the original texts would have been centuries older). Notably, among the palimpsest’s earlier erased works are the only known texts of two of Archimedes’ treatises in existence, The Method and Stomachion.  Today, the Archimedes Palimpsest is housed at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland and owned by a private collector. It’s “one of the most important surviving manuscripts of antiquity,” according to the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). There’s just one problem. The manuscript was photographed …

How the Long-Lost Body of Richard III Was Found Under a Parking Lot: Solving a 500-Year-Old Mystery

How the Long-Lost Body of Richard III Was Found Under a Parking Lot: Solving a 500-Year-Old Mystery

Published by José Betancourt

Shake­speare’s The Tragedy of Richard the Third begins with the epony­mous char­ac­ter utter­ing the famous line “Now is the win­ter of our dis­con­tent.” It ends at the Bat­tle of Bosworth Field, by which point his vil­lain­ous schemes have come to ruin and his deser­tion by Lord Stan­ley seems to have sealed his fate. “A horse, a horse, my king­dom for a horse,” he cries out, coin­ing anoth­er expres­sion used four cen­turies lat­er before being slain by the Earl of Rich­mond, the man who would be Hen­ry VII. Though Shake­speare him­self was writ­ing more than 100 years after the his­tor­i­cal events he dra­ma­tized, he includ­ed lit­tle after the event of Richard’s death, whose most fas­ci­nat­ing mys­tery was in any case only solved in our own time. You can see the sto­ry of Richard III’s long-unknown where­abouts in the Pri­mal Space video above. Accord­ing to records, says the nar­ra­tor, “he was buried uncer­e­mo­ni­ous­ly beneath the Greyfri­ars Church in Leices­ter, and a mon­u­ment was even­tu­al­ly placed above his grave.” When Hen­ry VIII ordered such hous­es of wor­ship shut …

Long-lost silent film depicts first ‘robot’ in cinema

Long-lost silent film depicts first ‘robot’ in cinema

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Archivists at the Library of Congress believe they may have discovered the first depiction of a robot in cinemas, thanks to a 127-year-old reel that had been gathering dust in a garage for decades. The artifact in question is called Gugusse And The Automaton, a 45-second-long reel made by pioneering French filmmaker Georges MĂ©liĂšs sometime around 1897. Though appearing more than 20 years before the word robot was officially coined, it still manages to touch on an enduring theme reoccurring in sci-fi movies to this day. A fear of the robots fighting back. “This is one of the collections that makes you realize why you do this,” Library of Congress archive technician Courtney Holschuh said in a statement.  Gugusse et l’Automate In the brief silent film, MĂ©liĂšs portrays a magician named Gugusse who is showing off an “automaton” in what looks like a proto–robot manufacturing facility. The automaton is dressed as a clown and stands on top of a pedestal. After …

Astronomers close in on long-lost Soviet lunar lander

Astronomers close in on long-lost Soviet lunar lander

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. For nearly 60 years, the first humanmade object to successfully land on the moon has been missing. However, researchers may now be closer than ever to finding the Soviet Union’s Luna 9 spacecraft. Using an advanced machine learning program, an international team of scientists believe they have finally narrowed down a list of finalists for Luna 9’s location. Their evidence is laid out in a study recently published in the journal npj Space Exploration. The case of the missing lunar lander While the United States beat the USSR to landing a human on the moon on July 20, 1969, that outcome was anything-but-certain only three years earlier. For a moment, the Soviets even appeared on their way to victory after engineers successfully achieved a soft lunar landing with their Luna 9 spacecraft on February 3, 1966. Luna 9 was also the first to send back photographs from another celestial object. However, unlike Neil Armstrong or Buzz Aldrin’s footprints, no …

A Long-Lost Henry Raeburn Painting Goes on View in Scotland

A Long-Lost Henry Raeburn Painting Goes on View in Scotland

Published by José Betancourt

A long-lost portrait of Robert Burns by Sir Henry Raeburn is now on view at the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh. The painting was discovered at a London house sale last year. Scotland’s most famous bard, Robert Burns (1759–1796) is perhaps best known for songs such as “A Red, Red Rose” (1794) and “Auld Lang Syne” (1788), which he based on traditional Scottish ballads. While they lived on the same street, Burns seems to have never sat for his contemporary, the Scottish portraitist Sir Henry Raeburn (1756–1823). But it has long been known from Raeburn’s letters that seven years after Burns’s death, Raeburn made a copy of 1787 painting of him by Alexander Nasmyth. Related Articles The copy was commissioned by London publishers Cadell & Davies to be used as the frontispiece for a new edition of Burns’s works. Shortly after the painting was completed, however, it disappeared. The Raeburn work reappeared during a house clearance in England last year. Consigned to Wimbledon Auctions in London, it was offered as being “in the manner of …

British soldier’s long-lost memoir rediscovered in Cleveland

British soldier’s long-lost memoir rediscovered in Cleveland

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. A long-lost second memoir penned by a famed 19th-century British soldier named Shadlock Byfield resurfaced in a rather unexpected place—Cleveland, Ohio. As explained in a study recently published in the Journal of British Studies, Byfield’s second book depicts a very different war veteran than the one described in his first autobiography written 11 years earlier. Who was Shadrack Byfield? Although he may not be a household name, many early American history buffs are well acquainted with Shadrack Byfield. The British soldier served at Fort George near the Niagara River during the War of 1812, fighting in multiple battles over the course of the roughly three year-long conflict.  At one point, a musket ball wound forced doctors to amputate Byfield’s left forearm—without anesthesia. After learning his limb had been tossed into a “dung-heap,” the recuperating soldier reportedly retrieved it himself so he could bury it in a makeshift coffin. Byfield returned to England after the war, but his disability prevented …

Long-lost Bertoia Sculpture Is Installed in GM’s Global Headquarters

Long-lost Bertoia Sculpture Is Installed in GM’s Global Headquarters

Published by José Betancourt

This past December, following an extensive restoration, a 1970 masterwork by sculptor and designer Harry Bertoia (1915–1978) was installed in the atrium of General Motors’s new global headquarters in Detroit, Michigan. General Motors announced the news in December, and the Detroit Free Press reported on the sculpture this month. In 1970, the J.L. Hudson Company, an anchor store for the Genesee Valley Mall in Flint, Michigan, commissioned Bertoia, already famous for his furniture designs for Knoll and his later public sculptures, to create an artwork for the mall’s open court. The 26-foot-tall hanging sculpture comprises two cloud-like aggregations of brazed steel rods—a technique Bertoia called “sunlit straw”—one suspended below the other. Related Articles The Genesee Valley Mall closed in 1980 for renovations, and the Bertoia was moved to the Northland Mall in Southfield, Michigan. It never went on view, and the Northland Mall closed in 2015. Six years later, the mall was demolished. In 2017, appraisers from the Southfield Arts Commission discovered the sculpture, now badly damaged and covered in dust, in the basement of …