Opus – Page 10 – Encyclopædia of the sublime

Bennie Railplane

The Bennie Railplane was a propeller-driven train suspended above an ordinary railway. Scottish inventor George Bennie imagined fast passengers travelling overhead while slow freight continued underneath. In 1930, he demonstrated a single Art Deco carriage on a 130-metre track near Glasgow, propelled by enormous blades at either end. Bennie claimed a full-sized system could reach 120 miles per hour, and proposed routes across Britain and beyond. None found funding. He went bankrupt in 1937, and his only Railplane remained beside the tracks until it was scrapped in 1956. For twenty-six years, the future rusted in a field.

Club-winged manakin

The club-winged manakin is a small bird from the cloud forests of Colombia and Ecuador. To attract females, the male produces a clear, ringing note—not with his voice, but by playing his wings. One feather is ridged like a comb, while another acts as a pick, scraping across it as the wings shake more than 100 times per second. Even his wing bones have become unusually solid to withstand the performance. The bird is less a singer than a musical instrument that flies.

Wood’s Cycad

Wood’s cycad was discovered in South Africa’s oNgoye Forest in 1895 as a single clump of male plants. No other wild specimen—and no female—has ever been found. The original clump was gradually removed, while its offsets were propagated in botanical gardens worldwide. Because cycads have separate male and female plants, the species cannot reproduce naturally. Encephalartos woodii survives not as a population, but as one male plant copied many times.

Villa Garzoni

The Villa Garzoni garden in Tuscany, climbs a hillside so steeply that it resembles stage scenery more than landscape.

John C. Lilly

John C. Lilly was an American physician and neuroscientist who developed the first modern isolation tank in 1954 to study a mind deprived of external stimulation. He later established a partially flooded laboratory in the Virgin Islands, where NASA-supported researchers attempted to teach dolphins spoken English. Lilly believed communication with another species might prepare humanity for contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. His later investigations became increasingly cosmic, including reported contact with an organization he called the Earth Coincidence Control Office. The isolation tank survived as a wellness device. The dolphin-English programme did not.

Eton wall game

The Eton Wall Game is a form of football played only at Eton College, squeezed against a brick wall on a strip of ground barely five metres wide. Players gather in a dense, slow-moving mass and spend much of the match advancing the ball a few feet. Scoring exists, but largely as a historical possibility. In the traditional St Andrew’s Day match, only three goals have ever been recorded, the last in 1909.

Rhizanthella

Rhizanthella is a genus of five rare Australian orchids that have abandoned nearly everything expected of an orchid. They have no leaves or chlorophyll, live underground and, in most species, flower there as well.

Codex Rotondus

The Codex Rotundus is a late-15th-century Book of Hours whose parchment pages and cover were cut into circles just 9.3 centimetres across. Its 266 pages contain prayers in Latin and French, three full-page miniatures and thirty illustrated initials.

Morning Glory clouds

The Morning Glory is a vast tubular cloud that regularly crosses northern Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria at dawn. It can extend for 1,000 kilometres while travelling at speeds of up to 60 kilometres per hour. The cloud forms inside a moving atmospheric wave created by opposing sea breezes: moisture condenses along its leading edge and evaporates behind it, making the entire cylinder appear to roll across the sky. Near Burketown, glider pilots gather each spring to surf the rising air along its front for hundreds of kilometres.

Scraper bikes

Scraper bikes are ordinary bicycles transformed with brightly coloured tape, foil and paint, usually arranged in geometric patterns across the wheels. The style emerged in East Oakland in the mid-2000s.