Flappers & Fiction

In 1886, Dr. Felix Oswald took his readers on a tour of wonders that no ticket could purchase: glass globes flung into the Cairo sky that never came down, a Parsee juggler in Batavia who killed dogs at arm’s length without leaving a mark, and a sourceless luminous mist at the foot of the Himalayas bright enough to read by. His conclusion, delivered with the serene confidence of a man who has seen too much to be surprised, is that humanity’s appetite for the miraculous is simply unkillable.