From Scientific American, Feb 1847
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apparently in 1857 “I have been informed by a European acquaintance” was sufficient sourcing for something to be published in Scientific American :)
somewhat relatedly, it’s 2025 now so you can actually link to a thing instead of just posting a screenshot of it: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/that-giant-sucking-sound-doesnt-exist/
i wonder why this screenshot (and OP’s text which includes the fact that this comes from scientific american, which is not included in the screenshot) both say 1847 while the text on the SciAm website says it’s actually from 1857 🤔
“I have been informed by a European acquaintance”
Victorian ‘peer review’
Are you to imply you doubt the word of a gentleman?
also the maelstrom in question actually does exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moskstraumen
He was a gentleman of good standing!
Thank you for the proper link and info, and apologies for the confusion.
I am a SciAm supporter and got this in their newsletter. I would have linked but all the URLs in their emails are to a tracker (!$#^%!$) “ctrk.klclick1.com”
More context for “1847”:
looking closer I see the earliest archive.org snapshot of this URL (from Feb 27, 2020, the day it was published) also says 1857 so it seems like the transposition to 1847 must have happened somewhere else - and yet the attribution to SciAm (external to the screenshot) was somehow preserved. @nymnympseudonym@lemmy.world can you shed any light on this mystery? where did you obtain this image (and know to attribute it to SciAm)?
“whirlpool on the coast of Norway […] appointed by the King of Denmark […] as smooth as any other part of the German ocean”
This sounds very badly hallucinated. Did the words and territories change since 1847?
The names Norway and Denmark are old and predate 1847 by centuries. “German Ocean” is an old term for the North Sea.
Norway was independent from Denmark at that point in time. So it was off the coast of Norway in the German Ocean (North Sea). And the expedition was sent by the king of Denmark, a nearby seafaring nation.
Thanks for the additional context. It sounded utterly ridiculous at first. Like, of course they didn’t find the Maelstrom in the German Sea.
