Department No. X · Room 10 · Floor 1 · True Wonders Only
History, left to itself, behaves with sufficient impropriety. This Department keeps twelve authenticated wonders. Each happened. Each is proved. None required embellishment.
In other departments, marvels must be manufactured. Here they merely require filing. A city danced until it fell. Three men were thrown from a window and lived to complain about it. Treacle flooded Boston. These are not fables. They are the minutes of the species.
The Institute holds that a true wonder is superior to an invented one in exactly one respect: it occurred. Verification is therefore our only extravagance. Belief is permitted. Checking is compulsory.
Australia. Soldiers versus 20,000 emus.
The emus retained the field.
Wonder 01
In July 1518 a woman began to dance in the street and did not stop. Within a month the chronicles count some four hundred. The city hired musicians and cleared halls, on the theory that the afflicted should dance it out. Several died of exhaustion. The dancing ceased in September, for no satisfactory reason. The city's account books still record the hire of the musicians.
Papers. Strasbourg city chronicles and council records; parish burial registers.
Wonder 04
On 13 September 1848 an explosion drove Gage's tamping iron — 1.1 metres long — clean through his skull. He stood up, spoke, and walked to the cart. He lived twelve further years, carrying the iron with him as documentation. His skull and iron are preserved at Harvard, where sceptics may measure them at leisure.
Papers. Dr John Martyn Harlow's reports (1848, 1868); skull and iron, Warren Anatomical Museum.
Wonder 07
On 15 January 1919 a steel tank burst and released a wave of molasses some 4.5 metres high at an estimated 56 kilometres per hour. Twenty-one persons were killed; 150 injured. An elevated railway girder was bent. The particulars were settled in court, at considerable expense to the United States Industrial Alcohol Company.
Papers. Boston Post and Boston Globe, January 1919; Massachusetts Superior Court records, 1920–1925.