Atlas Obscura
99% Invisible20 Apr 2022

Atlas Obscura

Standing on Beechey island, a peninsula off Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic, are four lonely graves: three members of an ill-fated expedition to the Northwest Passage, and one of the men who went looking for them. In 1845, Sir John Franklin led an expedition to find the Northwest Passage, a direct route from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean across the arctic, on two ships that were called "unstoppable" at the time. They were stopped, though the exact circumstances remain murky.

The story of the graves is chronicled on the Atlas Obscura Podcast, a short, daily celebration of the world's strange and wondrous places. The podcast has a mission similar to 99pi, which is to inspire wonder and curiosity about the world. Today we're featuring two stories from the show.

The second story visits the Unclaimed Baggage Center in Scottsboro, Alabama, which bills itself as "the nation's only retailer of lost luggage." If you've ever lost a bag during air travel, it probably wound up there, along with many other treasures and oddities.

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Episoder(779)

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Lessons from Las Vegas

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To this day, architects tend to turn their noses up at Las Vegas, or simply dismiss it as irrelevant to serious design theory. But as Denise Scott Brown discovered in the mid-1960s, there is so much t...

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Making it Rain

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Airships and the Future that Never Was

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27 Mar 201819min

Gerrymandering

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21 Mar 201844min

Miss Manhattan Redux

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All around the country, there stands a figure so much a part of historical architecture and urban landscapes that she is rarely noticed. She has gone by many names, from Star Maiden to Priestess of Cu...

14 Mar 201824min

Fordlandia

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In the late 1920s, the Ford Motor Company bought up millions of acres of land in Brazil. They loaded boats with machinery and supplies, and shipped them deep into the Amazon rainforest. Workers cut do...

7 Mar 201830min

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