So that we can watch our Storage Wars without a glitch, TV reception towers get built so high that they pierce the clouds. Because of that, the very tops need to be illuminated at all times, like lighthouses in the sky keeping planes from crashing into them. For those in charge of tower maintenance, changing that top light bulb isn't a household task; it's an extreme sport that requires abs of steel.

KDLT

KDLT

KDLT

Take the KLDT tower, which stands at a whopping 1,999 feet, making it one of the tallest structures in the world. Nick Wagner, a project manager of National Tower Controls, is responsible for what happens at the top. When he's summoned to the KLDT mast, his job entails riding a tiny lift for the first 1,900 feet straight up in the air. When he gets to this dizzying height, he has to climb the final hundred feet by hand with nothing but a few carabiners between him and an uncomfortably long fall.

Prairie Aerial

Prairie Aerial

So next time you flick a switch and nothing happens, don't sigh and moan. Give yourself some perspective by remembering that you can at least change the bulb while looking down and still seeing the planet you live on.

These guys put maximum effort into turning physics into their wheedling little bitch. Without stopping, pilots will drop a hook to grab a tree. The helicopter then flies to the other side of a field and, we really cannot overstate this, without stopping, drops the tree in a truck, and then it goes back for more. We bet these pilots got all the claw machine toys for their high school sweethearts.

Mountain climbers carry 176-pound trash bags, and once those are full, they're winched up to helicopters which whisk them away to a camp below. Which is a good thing, because otherwise sherpas would have to carry these them-sized bags by hand through somewhere called the Khumbu Icefall, which doesn't sound like a pleasant walk in the park.

And there's a grim reason these trash bags are, well, people-sized. It turns out that picking up trash is the best part of this job. Sometimes they have to collect the remains of camps whose occupants perished. Helicoptering possibly haunted trash isn't something you find on everyone's resume.

During the Great Depression, horse-mounted lady librarians roamed Kentucky, desperately looking for people who could read. Imagine riding your horse for days, covering hundreds of miles per month, all kinds of books strapped to you, as you make your way to the hill village nobody else visits. And out of all your books, your Bible is the most vital one -- not because you're super religious and need the Lord to get you through a good horseback adventure, but because you need to protect yourself from people who think you're some kind of reading carpetbagger.

Kentucky Digital Library

Some of the Kentucky mountain folk were really suspicious of book-slingers, and the sight of a Bible being waved around by a dangerous literate person was enough to soothe the hillbeasts to such an extent that they were willing to learn how to read. However, children would flock to these horse-riding book-wielding badasses. The mobile library initiative ended in 1943, as the government decided teaching folk how to shoot Germans was more important than teaching them how to read. After the war, the intellectual frontierswomen were replaced by the kind of motorized bookmobiles still in use today. Remember, not all progress is a good thing.

Seber was tasked with safeguarding details of the project from spies, political enemies, and sometimes her own bumbling staff. These numbskulls would leave classified documents laying out in the open, take out research books from the Santa Fe public library under their own names, and generally run their mouths off so often that she wound up working 75-hour weeks keeping the world's most dangerous weapon hidden.

Unfortunately, her hard work was rewarded with accusations of being a dirty communist for daring to be liberal-minded (she had once raised funds for anti-fascism during the Spanish Civil War, and had chaired a League of Women Voters in Urbana, Illinois). She wasn't booted off the project, but when it was over, she was doomed to become a production assistant at a theater, as her political affiliations kept her from getting another high-profile librarian job. Though becoming an actual librarian after being a bookish James Bond for so long probably would've driven her insane with boredom.

But by the time the big wars came along, knitting spies had kicked it up a stitch or two. Nobody suspected Phyllis Latour Doyle, knitter extraordinaire, who parachuted into Normandy during WWII, to be a secret agent working for Britain. Once there, she simply grabbed a bike and rode into enemy territory with a sunny smile and a helpful disposition, chatting with German soldiers like they were old neighbors. When she heard some juicy military intelligence gos, she used a variety of codes from her spy lexicon of about 2,000 knotted messages, which she would put into a silk yarn that she would wrap around a knitting needle. That needle would go into a flat shoelace, which she used to tie up her hair and simply bike right out of enemy territory again. That's artsy and crafty.

Which just goes to show that Philip J. Fry was right: Never trust grandmother types during times of war. They'll stab your right in the back with those needles.

You can challenge Dawn to a fist fight @dawnsmash, or do the same thing but with Dungeons & Dragons over on Discord.

Learn every stitch known to mankind so you too can knit wartime secrets!

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