D – Opus

Dashrath Manjhi

After his wife died following delayed access to medical care, Dashrath Manjhi decided the mountain itself was the problem. From 1960 to 1982, the labourer used a hammer and chisel to cut a 110-metre road through a quartzite ridge in Bihar, India. Villagers who initially dismissed him eventually brought food and tools. His passage reduced the journey to the nearest town from roughly 55 kilometres to 15. India Post placed him on a commemorative stamp in 2016. The mountain remained; the detour did not.

Dusit Thani

Dusit Thani was a miniature democratic kingdom built by King Vajiravudh of Siam (the historical name for the country of Thailand) inside his palace grounds. Courtiers purchased tiny plots, elected representatives, joined rival political parties and read two competing newspapers. The king participated as an ordinary citizen under the name “Mr. Rama.” Siam remained an absolute monarchy; democracy was permitted at one-fifteenth scale.

Denmark Strait Cataract

The Denmark Strait Cataract is an underwater waterfall between Greenland and Iceland, and the largest on Earth. Cold Arctic water meets the warmer Atlantic and, being denser, plunges more than three kilometres down the continental slope. Its drop is over three times the height of Angel Falls, while millions of cubic metres of water pass through it every second. The greatest waterfall on the planet proceeds in complete darkness beneath an apparently calm sea.

Désert de Retz

Désert de Retz was the private world of an eighteenth-century French aristocrat who treated landscape gardening as autobiography. He designed the estate himself and disguised his house as the shattered base of an impossibly large classical column. It was less a garden than one man’s attempt to build the ruins of a civilisation that had never existed.

Drone-hunting eagles

In 2016, Dutch police began training eagles to intercept unauthorized drones. The birds were taught to recognize the machines as prey, seize them in mid-air and carry them away in their talons. France followed with four golden eagles named after the Three Musketeers, raised around drones and rewarded with meat placed on them. The idea offered a remarkably medieval answer to a modern problem, but both programs were eventually abandoned in favour of electronic detection and jamming.

Dìshū

Dìshū is the practice of writing Chinese calligraphy on pavement with large brushes dipped in water. Commonly performed by older people in public parks, it uses the ground as an endless sheet of paper. Poems, sayings and enormous characters remain visible only until the water evaporates, clearing the surface for the next writer. The finished work usually disappears within minutes.

Dynasphere

The Dynasphere was a ten-foot motorized wheel patented by British inventor J. A. Purves in 1930. The driver sat inside its iron latticework while the entire structure rolled around them. Purves imagined it as the future of transport and even built an eight-passenger version. It could reach roughly 25 miles per hour, although steering and braking remained unconvincing.

DKNY mural

From 1992 to 2009, a six-storey DKNY mural overlooked Broadway and Houston Street in SoHo. Designed by Peter Arnell and painted directly onto brick, it placed the company’s initials over the Manhattan skyline and Statue of Liberty. It appeared in the opening credits of NYPD Blue and gradually became an unofficial city landmark. When Hollister acquired the wall’s advertising rights and painted over it, New Yorkers mourned the loss of an advertisement.

Dornier Do X

The Dornier Do X was a three-storey flying boat built in 1929, then the largest aircraft in the world. Its twelve engines sat in pairs above the wing and were controlled by an engineer, who received instructions from the pilots through a ship-style engine telegraph. Inside were sleeping berths, a dining room and a lounge. On one demonstration flight it carried 169 people, including nine stowaways, setting a record that lasted twenty years. The Do X later flew from Germany to New York, though fires, repairs and repeated stops stretched the journey to nearly ten months. It crossed the Atlantic successfully, provided nobody was in a hurry.

Dodge Power Wagon

Introduced in 1946, the Dodge Power Wagon was the first mass-produced four-wheel-drive medium-duty truck offered by a major American manufacturer. Derived from Dodge’s wartime vehicles, it retained their flat fenders, upright cab and general expectation that the bridge ahead might be missing.

Opus

Encyclopædia of the sublime

Delta