6 Artifacts That Let You Directly Experience The Past

The wax cylinders produced by Edison's National Phonograph Company contained two-minute snippets of recording and retailed for 50 cents, which is the equivalent of paying like 20 bucks for a single MP3 download today. Additionally, early cylinders had to be inscribed one at a time with a stylus, meaning that "mass production" involved musicians performing continuously until either enough copies had been produced or everyone ran out of opium. In 1901, the company realized cylinders could be produced en masse using a mold, and so began the era of "gold moulding," so named for the golden vapors given off during the process that were almost certainly violently toxic.

You can absolutely listen to the recordings today, which is like jumping into the world's most specific time machine to experience a snapshot of bygone entertainment designed exclusively for horrible people. You see, in addition to benign genres like brass bands, opera singers, and Spanish lessons, there were also fantastically horrific comedy records which seemingly consisted entirely of bad puns, fat jokes, and infanticide. Here's a typical joke recorded in 1899. If you can't listen to the audio at the link, we've transcribed it for your pleasure:

Billy: Hey Sammy, can you tell me how to make a lean baby fat?
Sammy: Why no, Billy, how would you make a lean baby fat?
Billy: Drop him out of a third-story window, and he'll come down plump!

Honestly, no one should be surprised that this is the type of joke Edison would preserve for history. And then there's this 1904 comedy bit that is basically anti-automobile propaganda (something that was common in that era, when cars were seen as toys for reckless rich assholes). In this bit, a nervous man, Reuben, goes for a ride in a newfangled Cyclone automobile, only to have the wealthy driver turn out to be a psychopath who enjoys how clearly deadly his new contraption is:

Reuben: Hey, are you going faster than the limit?
Driver: Hold your breath and I'll show you MY limit!

Reuben: Hey, look out for that chicken! You killed him!
Driver: That was a fowl!
Reuben: Say, there's old constable Skinner and his setter dog.
Driver: Setter, eh? He'll lay flat after I hit him!

Reuben: You killed him, too! Why, this is worse than murder!
Driver: Why no, it prevents murder. How can anyone commit a murder after an auto hits them?

Damn it, when will the world wise up and prevent these "automobile" owners from playing god!

Mummy Dog is a card-carrying member of a Pleistocene species that went extinct thousands of years ago. Despite being 12,400 years old -- 8,000 years older than the Great Pyramid, for perspective -- the puppy was surprisingly intact, looking for better or worse like an overdone rotisserie chicken from Boston Market.

As researchers chipped away at many millennia of frozen filth, they got ever more excited as fur, a snout, and a mouth full of perfectly preserved teeth gradually poked through. What's more, an MRI revealed that the puppy's organs were remarkably unharmed, with its brain estimated to be about 80 percent preserved.

Consequently, South Korean scientist and certifiable madman Hwang Woo-Suk has added the Pleistocene puppy to the extinct cave lion and the wooly mammoth on his "prehistoric monsters to clone" list. Meanwhile, his less, um, ambitious peers hope to extract samples of ancient bacteria from the dog's intestines -- a move that we're positive won't resurrect an ancient, ice-bound shapeshifting alien.

We're all familiar with the Apollo 11 Moon landing, because we have Neil Armstrong's unforgettable quip and NASA's live space footage to remember it by. What we're not quite as familiar with, however, is the trip there and back. What must it have been like for three men to cram themselves into the space equivalent of a VW Beetle and bear the entire weight of history's shithouse-craziest mission upon their shoulders?

Well, thanks to the Smithsonian's recent up close and personal tour of the Columbia Command Module (the first in more than 40 years), we now know that the crew's time was largely spent scrawling on-the-fly calculations all over the walls like questionably sane characters from a Stanley Kubrick film (such as the Moon landing).

The chicken scratch above was made by Michael Collins as he circled above the Moon's surface, attempting (and failing) to pinpoint the location of the Eagle Lunar Module, where his crew mates were stabbing the Moon with American flags.

Moving along, here's a locker full of pee:

Before the craft's waste management systems went active, the astronauts had to store their launch day urine bags somewhere, so naturally they wanted to put them someplace where they could not possibly be confused for anything else. In another area, a handwritten calendar kept track of the eight days of the mission. The only date that isn't scratched off is the very last one, during which they landed in the Pacific Ocean upon their return to Earth. It was a hectic day.

The best part of all this is that the in-depth tour we mentioned earlier was done for the purpose of constructing a minutely detailed 3D recreation of the Columbia, thereby allowing people to get a virtual tour of the vehicle that lugged humanity to its greatest achievement, no right stuff required. You can see an in-progress version here:

If you've ever seen a crate of Civil War rifles looking as if they were eaten and subsequently shat out by a kraken with a serious case of the asshole-barnacles, you know that shipwrecks aren't normally a great source of pristine artifacts. But then, you've probably never seen the literal treasure trove recovered from the Arabia, a mid-19th-Century steamboat tasked with delivering goods to numerous frontier towns along the Missouri River. On September 5, 1856, the ship fell victim to a particularly dickish tree root and sank six miles north of Kansas City.

Fast forward to 1987. The Missouri River had diverted in the years since the calamity, and the treasure-hunting Hawley family determined that the Arabia now rested smack dab beneath a Kansas cornfield. When they painstakingly released the ship from its muddy grave, the Hawleys discovered that the oxygen-free tomb had kept it in relatively tip-top shape.

In even better condition was her nearly million-item cargo, with valuables ranging from guns to beaver hats to kitchen utensils to pre-Civil-War pickles, looking as fresh as the day they were shoved into a bottle by centuries-dead racists.

But that's far from the tastiest thing to be found in the deep. Proving that even archaeology is more fun in Finland, a team led by Professor Philippe Jeandet of the University of Reims in France dredged up 168 bottles of nearly 200-year-old champagne from a Baltic Sea shipwreck and reported that, apart from having lost most of its bubbliness, the wine had been perfectly preserved. How do they know this? Because they tasted it, of course.

Jeandet reported that the champagne was far sweeter than modern vintages, with flavors of leather and tobacco that remained on his palate for "two or three hours." If spending an afternoon feeling like you chewed on your grandpa's shoe sounds appealing to you, you can possibly pick up one of the bottles that didn't get slurped by professor-types at a European auction, where they tend to sell for tens of thousands of dollars.

That is an inconceivably distant relative of the modern narrow-leafed campion, and it was recently resurrected by scientists after a 32,000-year absence from the planet. How is this possible? Well, it's all thanks to opportunistic antediluvian ground squirrels.

While chipping through the aforementioned Siberian permafrost to recover mammoth skeletons, Russian scientists stumbled upon an ancient network of 70 burrows, where the prehistoric squirrels had buried an ice king's ransom of fruits and seeds, which were in turn gradually reburied to a depth of around 100 feet by successive ice sheets. All in all, researchers recovered more than half a million individual seeds -- which, if the narrow-leafed campion above is any indication, might one day lead to a veritable Ice Age salad of sedge, Arctic dock, and the alpine bearberry (for those who always wanted a fruit that eats you back).

The scientists eventually succeeded in growing the long-gone plant by cultivating its placenta (fun fact: plants have placentas) in vitro. The resulting flower produced a whole new generation of fresh viable seeds, despite having been pummeled by radioactive subterranean rocks for countless millennia. Thankfully (and against all perfectly reasonable expectations to the contrary), the pretty little flowers ultimately emerged tentacle-free and harboring no obvious hatred toward mankind.