Your Daily Awesome

1724 C.E.

Though born without the benefit of hands or legs, and standing only twenty-nine inches tall, Matthew Buchinger was a proficient bagpiper, trumpeter, and dulcimerist, as well as a talented magician and accomplished artist. Among his many impressive skills was micrographic illustration. In this four-by-six-inch self-portrait, Buchinger forms the individual curls of his wig out of seven psalms and the Lord’s Prayer.

1870 C.E.

With the Prussian army besieging Paris and all other means of communication with the outside world cut off, passenger pigeons become the primary means of transporting mail into the city. However, weighted down by even the thinnest paper, the pigeons are easy shots for German gunners and their specially trained hawks. René Dagron, a Parisian photographer, proposes a solution: to print news and letters in large sheets, which can then be shrunk using the new technology of microphotography. By this method, approximately 54,000 messages can be condensed to a weight of less than one gram, easily carried by any pigeon. On November 12, Dagron makes a harrowing escape from Paris by balloon, and establishes the headquarters of French microphotography in Tours. Over the course of the war, some two and a half million messages return with the pigeons to their Parisian dovecotes.

1894 C.E.

Miniature book collector George Salomon of Paris disperses his seven-hundred-title collection, a library that reportedly “could be carried in a moderate-sized portmanteau.” His spirit lives on today in the Miniature Book Society, an organization whose interests extend only to printed works three inches or smaller.

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