The Corner of Jennings and Illona

At 5:07 am on Friday, August 9th, 1963, patrolman Jack Leach was traveling north- west down Japonica Drive in one of the two patrol cars owned by the Greenhills Police department. As he turned left at the corner of Jennings Road and Illona Drive his headlights swept across Alphonse Udry’s side yard and he saw what he described as a “peculiar-looking mound.” He stopped his car, grabbed his flashlight, walked across the dew-covered lawn and found the body of 15 year-old Patricia Ann Rebholz...

—November 19th, 2019. Unclassified


Some previous entries:

The XB-70 was “so unlike other aircraft that comparisons are almost meaningless,” and my dad designed a tiny part of it. So this is the story of the plane and the Cold War, but mostly the story of my dad.

If you were anywhere near Willow Grove in the spring and summer of 1910, then going out to the Williamson farm to see the stranded Virginia was apparently the thing to do. The Steamboat and the Cornfield.

I always thought that there had to be an interesting story in William's box of travel ephemera—his Box of Vacations—and there was. It just wasn't anything like the story I had imagined.

In what has to be the most famous design brief in electronics history, Bill Hewlett asked his team to shrink the 9100 into something he could fit in his pocket. The result—the HP-35—was the beginning of modern consumer electronics.

Pernkopf’s Topographische Anatomie des Menschen was the most beautiful and detailed anatomy atlas ever published. Today it is effectively banned—hidden away in library archives after its horrific past became apparent.

The Paige Compositor was either “one of the most remarkable pieces of mechanism ever put together” or “a remorseless Frankenstein monster.” Whatever it was, it eventually ruined Mark Twain.

Ault & Wiborg, once the largest ink company in the world, employed the most important artists of the day, including Will Bradley. In 1903 they collated their ads into an Art Nouveau masterpiece—The Ault & Wiborg Poster Album.

“I don’t want anyone in or out of my family to see any part of me,” Evelyn McHale wrote in her suicide note, but the strangely serene photo of her death has become one of the most iconic images of the 20th century.