Gas mantle

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A Coleman white gas lantern mantle glowing at full brightness

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Before electricity, a mesh sock soaked in radioactive thorium dioxide burned inside every middle-class parlour lamp. The mantles crumbled to radioactive dust when touched. Millions were sold; none came with warnings.

He rode a full circuit around Caesar's tribunal chair in gleaming armor, then dismounted and threw his weapons at Caesar's feet. Six years later, after rotting in a Roman dungeon, Vercingetorix was strangled.

Greenwood, Tulsa's 'Black Wall Street,' burned for 18 hours in June 1921 while residents fired back from rooftops. Over 1,200 homes were destroyed. The official death toll was never confirmed — possibly 300.

Tod Frye had five weeks to port Pac-Man to the Atari 2600 — constrained to a 4KB cartridge — and shipped a version so degraded that 12 million units moved but consumer trust in Atari never recovered.

A $2.4 billion telescope was stopped cold by Native Hawaiian protectors on Mauna Kea — elevation 4,205 meters, home of 13 existing observatories and a mountain the Kanaka Maoli consider a living ancestor.

Four bullets hit Tupac Shakur in a Las Vegas BMW on September 7, 1996; he died six days later at 25. No shooter was ever charged. The case remains open, the silence institutional.

Marshall Applewhite convinced 38 members to voluntarily castrate themselves, then drink phenobarbital-laced pudding to 'shed their containers' and board a spacecraft trailing Comet Hale-Bopp. Five had already been surgically castrated.

Andres Serrano submerged a plastic crucifix in his own urine, photographed it glowing amber, and won a $15,000 National Endowment for the Arts award — igniting a Senate floor denunciation by Jesse Helms.

South Africa's most beloved cricket captain Hansie Cronje confessed he fixed matches partly for a leather jacket. The man who led his country's post-apartheid sporting resurrection died in a plane crash two years later.