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Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Alcatraz's Only Successful Prison Break Was Inspired By an Article in Popular Mechanics. Here's How It Happened.
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Part I 'Like insurance, lifesaving devices are hard to value. If you don't need them, they're useless, even a bother. If you do need them, they're priceless.'—POPULAR MECHANICS, 1962 DECEMBER IN CHICAGO and there's some loon pretending to drown in the Sheraton Towers Hotel pool. It's an indoor pool, but still. This guy is floating in there in a white T-shirt and jeans, upright, with his head lolled back and his eyes closed, sneakers just grazing the bottom. An inflatable plaid life vest barely holds his face out of the water. Later, he grabs for a floating cushion, but that slips out of his hands and he sinks up to his forehead reaching for it. This man's name is Bayard Richard, and you shouldn't worry about him. He swam backstroke for the University of Wisconsin and can make it to the edge of the pool and climb out whenever he wants. Richard is thirty years old and works at Popular Mechanics in the promotions department. Mostly he comes up with ideas to get companies interested in buying ads—mailers, meetings, stuff like that. It's a great job: He makes about $5,000 a year, and the office, on East Ontario Street, has a coffee cart and two secretaries. Besides, if you offer yourself up to help the editors execute some scheme like testing life jackets in a hotel swimming pool, you get paid a dollar. Richard climbs out of the pool to try another device. He's testing them one at a time—a vest, a second vest, a belt, a floating jacket, that useless cushion. Each time, the outdoors editor pushes Richard into the pool and watches to see how he comes up. Richard plays it up for the camera, closing his eyes, holding his breath for a second or two, flopping back, playing dead. File photo The shoot takes about two hours, and then Richard changes into dry clothes and a warm jacket and gets his dollar from petty cash. He takes the train home to the house he just bought in Park Forest, and that's the end of it. He doesn't see the article, 'Your Life Preserver—How will it behave if you need it?' when it comes out in March 1962. He doesn't even realize the editors used (and misspelled) his name. In fact, Richard doesn't think about the article again for forty-five years, until his grown son Paul is drinking a cup of coffee and turns on a documentary on the History Channel about the 1962 escape from Alcatraz. The host talks about the frigid waters of San Francisco Bay, a major deterrent to potential jailbreakers—and how the infamous 1962 escapees found a solution in an edition of Popular Mechanics in the prison library. The host holds a copy up to the camera. There in the grainy photos, recognizable from the crew cut everyone in the family jokes about and the nose Paul and his brother David share, is a thirty-year-old Bayard Richard. Paul nearly chokes on his coffee. As David remembers it, 'Paul's looking at the television going, wait a minute, that's my dad!' Alcatraz Prison Part II 'I just thought to myself, that's one of the most incredible stories I've ever heard.'—RICHARD TUGGLE, screenwriter, Escape From Alcatraz ONCE THE CHICAGO-BASED editorial department completed the life jacket article, the story went with the rest of the March 1962 issue to a printing production facility in midtown Manhattan. Just one copy made it from there to Alcatraz's dedicated post office at 7th and Mission Street in San Francisco (no zip code, as these did not exist until July 1, 1963). A mail vehicle brought the magazine to the Pacific Street Wharf, where it boarded a steamship that ran to Alcatraz twice a day, every day except Sunday. Popular Mechanics Inside the prison, the issue would have gone straight to an administration office, where censors would remove any content that might help convicts escape. But the story on life jackets, with the photos of Richard, survived, and the magazine reached the library intact. There it was added to a delivery cart that a prisoner pushed from cell to cell. Like all Alcatraz residents, Frank Morris had about four hours of free time after dinner until lights out. That's likely when he saw the issue for the first time, sitting in his dank cell about the size of a pool table. He may have lain on his bed and put his feet up on the toilet, listening to the seagulls and the sounds of life floating across San Francisco Bay from the city, and imagined how he himself would float over the bay like a seagull, to drink in bars and meet a girl and procure a car to drive to Mexico. And then, looking at Bayard Richard there in that pool in Chicago, Frank Morris had an idea. The story of the escape is legend, thanks in part to the 1979 movie Escape From Alcatraz starring Clint Eastwood as Morris. What happened: Morris (imprisoned for bank robbery), along with brothers John and Clarence Anglin (also bank robbers) and Allen West, a fourth coconspirator who ended up staying behind, chipped out the disintegrating concrete around the air vents at the back of their cells, expanding the holes until they were large enough to accommodate a person. They crawled through the holes into a utility corridor, and then established a secret workshop above their own cellblock, hanging blankets to hide themselves from patrolling guards. Over time, using more than eighty tools they created or stole, the four men made dummy papier-mâché heads to fool the guards into thinking they were still in their beds. Then, on June 11, 1962, Morris and the Anglins climbed a broken utility shaft, ran across the roof, and left. They were never seen again. Even people who have studied the escape for years will never know whether Popular Mechanics gave Morris the idea to attempt it, or simply provided a method. The magazine certainly contributed to the likelihood of success. Even the FBI and the Federal Bureau of Prisons seemed to think so. Screenwriter Richard Tuggle noticed references to this publication in both agencies' files while researching the screenplay that would become the Eastwood movie. 'I think it's safe to say that if those guys had not had Popular Mechanics, they never would have tried to escape,' he says. 'The magazine gave them the final key that they needed to be able to try this crazy thing.' In the movie, Tuggle included just one line to explain how Popular Mechanics might have inspired the convicts. In the lunchroom with the Anglins, Morris (Eastwood) whispers his plan to tunnel through the concrete at the back of his cell and then build something to carry them through the frigid, roiling bay to the mainland. 'You're gonna steal some raincoats, some contact cement,' Eastwood-as-Morris says. 'We'll make a life raft and some life preservers out of it. I read how to do it in Popular Mechanics.' File photo Part III 'When you have all the time in the world, like these fellas did, it's amazing what a person can do.'—DON EBERLE, FBI agent in charge of 1962 Alcatraz escape investigation THERE ARE ACTUALLY two issues of Popular Mechanics in the Alcatraz file at the Park Archives and Records Center in San Francisco's Presidio National Park, and both are in remarkable condition considering how many prisoners, law enforcement officers, and historians have pawed through them over the years. The corners are ruffled and the paper has gone soft, as if it's been conditioned by sea breeze. But the covers are still bright—headlines promising a 'Go-Anywhere Boat,' 'All the '61 Cars in Color,' and a 'Power Tower for Toting Tools' over photos of Chevys and speedboats in washed-out turquoise and red and yellow. If they weren't marred by the signatures of FBI agents, you could frame the covers and hang them on a wall. Popular Mechanics The other issue is from November 1960. In it is an article about a hunter who builds his own goose decoys out of found rubber using a technique called vulcanizing. To people who think about vulcanizing at all—which is to say, almost nobody—this is a fairly boring process by which sulfur or other curatives create water-resistant links between rubber molecules. To Morris and the Anglins, though, it was information worth its weight in government pardons. 'Step one—cut the pattern from an old rubber inner tube.' It was a common belief at Alcatraz that if anybody beat the prison's escape-proof reputation, the government would close the facility. So when Morris and the Anglins came asking for raincoats, lots of convicts obliged, happy to play even a small part in shutting down the Rock. They wore their own rubber coats out to the yard and then dropped them so the would-be escapees could casually pick them up and carry them back to the secret workshop. Morris, the Anglins, and West amassed at least fifty raincoats this way. 'Step two—seam edges are buffed and spread with solvent, then vulcanized with thin raw rubber strips.' Over several months, the four prisoners secreted rubber cement (many varieties of which include vulcanizing agents) from Alcatraz's cobbling and glovemaking shops, and then spread it on the seams of the raincoats to join them into a raft. 'Vulcanizing takes about 15 minutes, and welds the nine cut-out sections into an airtight shape.' By March 1962 the raft was nearing completion, but the prisoners weren't ready to leave just yet. A new issue of Popular Mechanics had just arrived. And wouldn't you know it, there was a life vest demonstration inside. Part IV "Alcatraz sells."—John Cantwell, Alcatraz ranger THERE IS ONE PERSON who has spent more time inside Alcatraz than any criminal: National Park Service Ranger John Cantwell. On a blustery day in 2021, near the end of 30-plus years on the island, he opens the gates to the Anglin brothers' cells so a TV journalist can stick her head into the enlarged air vent. The anniversary of the escape is coming up, and she needs a teaser shot for a segment she's producing. 'I got an inside look at the infamous cells,' she says in an on-camera journalist voice, 'which are normally off-limits to the public.' Tourists crowd around, many of them families with young boys who, for the moment, have put away their video games and cellphones and even removed the headphones that come with the audio tour to stare into the concrete boxes where bad men lived squalid little lives. The boys jockey for position. 'Did they leave from there?' one asks. 'Did they make that hole?' 'Can we see the raft?' No one looks bored. Even the dads, in their shorts and ball caps and performance fleece, have questions for Cantwell. It's been this way since soon after Tuggle's movie was released. 'I think Don Siegel told me that Paramount spent $1 million, which was a lot of money back then, in fixing up the prison to be what it was in the old days,' Tuggle says. Today, about 1.5 million people visit the prison every year, peering into cells stocked with period-specific reading materials—Life, Sports Illustrated, and many copies of Popular Mechanics. They listen to the audio tour, which urges them to imagine eking out day after miserable day there. To imagine the creativity and dedication it would take to escape. Cantwell has watched many thousands of them, and he sees their emotional states transform as the tour brings them deeper and deeper inside the prison walls. 'People are fascinated with the macabre,' he says. With irony, and hubris, and wrestling with the fat thumb of institutional power. When you take the tour of this lonely buoy in the middle of San Francisco Bay, part of you feels like, just maybe, Morris and the Anglins earned their freedom. Maybe even deserved it. And that's a strange feeling. 'That's the difficulty in being a writer of a true event,' says Tuggle. 'In reality, Morris and the Anglins were probably bad guys... but for a movie, you can't have that. I wanted to show what these guys did, and the only way to have the audience behind them was to make the characters nicer than they were in real life.' As for Bayard Richard, whose one-off stunt in a hotel pool launched a butterfly effect that led to a prison escape, a movie, and the revitalization of a historic landmark, a question remains: Does he feel he played a part in creating a cult of personality around a trio of dudes you wouldn't want to encounter in a San Francisco alley? 'No,' he says. 'It's just the kind of thing you do when you're in the magazine business.' File photo Popular Mechanics tells its readers how to make things. Always has, since 1902. When that information gets used illegally, there's not much we can do about it. On one hand, the magazine doesn't condone prison escapes. But there's something about the way Morris and the Anglins went about it—they were nonviolent offenders who broke out of the most notorious prison in the world without harming so much as a seagull—that seems in the spirit of the magazine: decent, almost charming lawlessness, more Ocean's 11 than Scarface. We'd rather hear a story about how that life jacket article kept a whole family safe during an afternoon boat ride, but who would make a movie about that? You Might Also Like
Yahoo
05-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
'Bioelectric bacteria on steroids' could aid in pollutant cleanup and energy renewal
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. A recently discovered species of bacteria is lighting up the scientific space. The organism is capable of conducting electricity effectively, almost like a cable wire. The bacteria could be used in the field of bioelectrics and also has the potential to help clean up pollution. A new species of bacteria has the ability to act as electric wiring, according to a study published in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology. Ca. Electrothrix yaqonensis is a cable bacteria, meaning it is "built from rod-shaped cells attached end to end," said Popular Mechanics. The bacteria's electrical conductivity is an unusual trait and is likely an "adaptation that optimizes their metabolic processes in the sediment environments in which they live," said a press statement about the study. While Ca. Electrothrix yaqonensis are not the only bacteria able to conduct electricity, they are considered "bioelectric bacteria on steroids," said Popular Mechanics. The species "stands out from all other described cable bacteria species in terms of its metabolic potential," Cheng Li, a postdoctoral researcher at Oregon State University and co-author of the study, said in the press statement. They have "distinctive structural features, including pronounced surface ridges, up to three times wider than those seen in other species, that house highly conductive fibers made of unique, nickel-based molecules." Specifically, the species is "transferring electrons along its body," and "shuttling charges through sediments in its environment," said BGR. The species also contains genes and metabolic pathways that are a mix of two different bacterial genera. "This new species seems to be a bridge, an early branch within the Ca. Electrothrix clade, which suggests it could provide new insights into how these bacteria evolved and how they might function in different environments," Li said. Ca. Electrothrix yaqonensis could be "ushering in a new era of bioelectronic devices for use in medicine, industry, food safety and environmental monitoring and cleanup," said the press release. "These bacteria can transfer electrons to clean up pollutants, so they could be used to remove harmful substances from sediments," said Li. This may be especially beneficial as remediation — defined as the act of reversing or stopping environmental damage — "can be one of the most time-consuming and costly aspects of infrastructure projects," said Popular Mechanics. "Particularly if a former brownfield site hopes to be reclaimed as a park or another public space." Using bacteria to clean up soil is a sustainable form of remediation because they are "made of proteins and self-replicating cells," said BGR. The applications of this bacteria go beyond pollution cleanup. Its discovery "expands our understanding of the genetic and morphological diversity of cable bacteria," said the study. The bacteria's nickel proteins can also "serve as a model for developing new materials in clean energy or sensor technology," said BGR. "Combined with other advancements in generating electricity — like with the Earth's rotation or by capturing energy from falling rain — this discovery could help power a new generation of renewable energy."
Yahoo
24-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Archaeologists Discovered Hidden Messages at the Site of Jesus' Last Supper
This story is a collaboration with Popular Mechanics. The Last Supper is one of the most venerated events in the story of the Christian faith. Depicted in all three Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, as well as the Gospel of John (though this latter account creates issues with the established timeline), it's at this meal that Jesus Christ purportedly reveals his foreknowledge of Judas Iscariot's betrayal, and where, through the symbolic consumption of bread and wine, Jesus establishes the tradition of the Eucharist: 'The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, 'This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.' In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, 'This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.'' 1 Corinthians 11:23–25 Although no Gospel provides a precise location for the site of The Last Supper—only that disciples were led by a man in the city to 'a large upper room furnished and ready' (Mark 14:13–15)—later tradition would hold that the event occurred on Mount Sinai, outside the Old City of Jerusalem. The site of Jesus's Last Supper was likely held a synagogue. But after what Heritage Daily describes as 'cycles of destruction and reconstruction,' there came to be, in the time of the Crusades, a structure built referred to as the Cenacle, which still stands to this day. The Cenacle has attracted religious pilgrims for centuries, from impoverished worshippers to kings and conquerors. And now, a study published in Studium Biblicum Franciscanum has revealed that some of those pilgrims left messages behind on the very walls that surround this sacred site. In the study, scientists deployed advanced digital photography within the confines of the Cenacle and discovered 'hidden inscriptions, coats of arms, and sketches etched into the Cenacle's centuries-old stone,' per Heritage Daily. The inscriptions included one that belonged to Johannes Poloner of Regensburg, sometimes written as John Poloner. He is known to have visited the site, having chronicled his travels in the 1421–1422 work John Poloner's Description of the Holy Land, wherein he wrote of the Cenacle: 'Now in the church of Mount Sion where the high altar now stands in that very place Christ supped with His disciples giving them His own body and blood wherefore it was called by Christ the Great Supper room.' The scientists also identified 'coats of arms belonging to Tristram von Teuffenbach, a Styrian nobleman who was part of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1436, led by Archduke Frederick of Habsburg (later the Holy Roman Emperor),' according to Heritage Daily, as well as an inscription that read 'Christmas 1300.' They assessed it as being written 'in a style typical of Armenian nobility.' If true, this lends credence to the widely held belief that the Armenian king Het'um II and his forces entered Jerusalem after fighting alongside the Kingdom of Georgia and the Mongol Ilkhanate to defeat the Mamluks in Syria on December 22, 1299, in the Battle of Wad al-Khaznadar. None of these inscriptions definitively prove that this site was the location of the Last Supper; the area's history of relentless destruction and reconstruction makes that practically impossible to confirm. But, as study co-author Ilya Berkovich points out, a discovery like this can broaden our understanding of the places made sacred by centuries of tradition. 'These graffiti shed new light on the geographical diversity and international pilgrimage movement to Jerusalem in the Middle Ages,' Berkovich told Heritage Daily, 'far beyond the Western-dominated research perspective.' You Might Also Like Nicole Richie's Surprising Adoption Story The Story of Gypsy Rose Blanchard and Her Mother Queen Camilla's Life in Photos
Yahoo
21-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Engineers debut gravity-powered technology that could reshape energy systems worldwide: 'It's a way to give these sites new life'
Energy innovators around the world plan to harvest more power from abandoned coal mines, but not by digging up dirty deposits. Instead, this concept utilizes gravity and renewable energy to transform the defunct locations into next-generation power sites, according to reports from Reasons to be Cheerful and Popular Mechanics. The method is fairly simple. Excess renewable energy powers winches that lift weights, which, in this case, are located in old mine shafts. The suspended bulk represents stored energy, crucial to utilizing sun or wind power at night and when the breeze is slow. It's a process similar to so-called water batteries, where renewable-powered pumps send water to a reservoir as stored power. In both cases, the weight or water is dropped or released into a lower reservoir, generating electricity, according to the reports and a description from the World Economic Forum. "This approach not only gives these disused mines a second life, but also offers economic and environmental benefits to communities once reliant on coal," RTBC wrote. As the world transitions to cleaner energy sources — now accounting for 29% of generation worldwide, per the United Nations — storage is becoming a bigger hurdle. Lithium-ion batteries like Tesla's Megapacks or a giant sodium-ion unit storing energy in China are among other options. But those units require expensive and hard-to-gather materials to build or, at this stage of development, come with other logistical challenges. Sustainability by Numbers estimated that tens of millions of tons of deposits will need to be harvested to sustain the energy transformation by 2040, much of it for batteries. But that's far short of the 16.5 billion tons of heat-trapping dirty fuels pulled from Earth annually, per the report. Gravity batteries could be a cleaner bridge from our dirtier energy past to a sustainable future, key to avoiding worst-case scenarios triggered by our warming world. Increased risks for severe weather and wildfires are among the changes already being felt, per NASA. In the U.S., there are 550,000 abandoned mines, representing lost jobs and causing environmental hazards, according to RTBC and other reports. The abandoned shafts and more idle industrial sites can become clean-energy hubs, with solar installation potential sufficient to power 200 million U.S homes annually, per the story. RTBC added that a mine-based gravity battery is already supplying enough energy to power nine homes for a year in China — all with suspended weight. Projects in Australia, Switzerland, and Finland are also in development. "Many mines shut down in the '80s and '90s, and while environmental issues remain, using these sites to create new energy brings a sense of continuity," Edinburgh University geosciences Professor Christopher McDermott said in the RTBC report. Should the U.S. invest more in battery innovations? Absolutely Depends on the project We're investing enough We should invest less Click your choice to see results and speak your mind. Among challenges are harmful substances in old mines like asbestos that sometimes need to be mitigated, and the process can be costly, per the article. But the right investment and approach could turn them into ample power vaults if successfully developed. "It's a way to give these sites new life while respecting the local history and legacy," McDermott said in the story. What's more, tax breaks are still available to add solar power at home, a move that will likely save you up to $700 annually, even after expenses, per a government study. Adding a small home-based battery can expand the financial benefits. Join our free newsletter for good news and useful tips, and don't miss this cool list of easy ways to help yourself while helping the planet.
Yahoo
10-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
A Bombshell New Study Suggests Shakespeare Might Not Have Written 15 of His Famous Plays
This story is a collaboration with Popular Mechanics William Shakespeare is undeniably one of the most famous writers in human history. The 39 shows attributed to the 'Bard of Avon' have been performed, adapted, and studied innumerable times in the centuries since they debuted, and his 154 sonnets are some of the most quoted poems in the world. The very name Shakespeare has become synonymous with the dramatic arts. But for a segment of the literary community, it shouldn't be. Not because they believe the plays themselves, like Hamlet and Julius Caesar, are incorrectly placed within the literary canon. Rather, they think they're simply incorrectly labeled—specifically on the author page. This contingency, known as the Anti-Stratfordians (in reference to Shakespeare's home of Stratford-upon-Avon), argue that The Bard's lack of education and modest upbringing doesn't line up with the vast vocabulary on display in Shakespeare's celebrated plays. 'They note that both of Shakespeare's parents were likely illiterate,' previously explained about the stance of the Anti-Stratfordians, 'and it seems as if his surviving children were as well, leading to skepticism that a noted man of letters would neglect the education of his own children.' The Anti-Stratfordians also claim that 'none of the letters and business documents that survive give any hint of Shakespeare as an author,' and raise questions like, 'Why was there no public mourning for him when he died?' But these claims can all be refuted to one degree or another by people who believe in Shakespeare's authorship. Shakespeare's modest background is ultimately not dissimilar to that of Christopher Marlowe, a peer of Shakespeare's whose authorship of celebrated plays like Doctor Faustus has never been in doubt. In response to the claim of a lack of contemporary records, noted before that, 'Tudor officials responsible for ascertaining authorship of plays attributed several works to Shakespeare.' And the claim of a lack of mourning is undercut by no less than Jacobean author Ben Jonson, whose esteemed poem 'To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, William Shakespeare' reads: 'To draw no envy, Shakespeare, on thy name,Am I thus ample to thy book and fame;While I confess thy writings to be suchAs neither man nor muse can praise too much' These debates of authorship tend to treat inference as evidence, and as such, can never really be conclusive. But a new study published by Oxford University Press offers new insight into the authorship debate—and it does so by taking the human element out entirely. The study from Zeev Volkovich and Renata Avros, titled 'Comprehension of the Shakespeare authorship question through deep impostors approach,' set out to see if a deep neural network could do what centuries of scholars could not: conclusively identify works attributed to, but not written by, William Shakespeare. The duo refer to their methodology for the analysis as 'Deep Imposter': 'The approach uses a set of known impostor texts to analyze the origin of a target text collection. Both the target texts and impostors are divided into an equal number of word segments. A deep neural network, either a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) or a pre-trained BERT transformer, is then trained and fine-tuned to differentiate between impostor segments.' After a process which converted these segments into numerical signals, the tested texts were clustered into two groups, which can be simplified into a score of 1 or 2. Those works in cluster 1 would be labeled as 'imposter texts' not composed by the author in question. When Shakespeare's works were run through the aforementioned CNN neural network, a staggering 15 titles were placed into cluster 1. This included not just the usual suspects of 'Shakespeare Apocrypha' (works with no clear author sometimes attributed to Shakespeare) like A Yorkshire Tragedy and Arden of Faversham, but also some of the most beloved staples of the Shakespeare canon like The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. But before you go scribbling out Shakespeare's name from your copy of King John, understand that this isn't an ironclad system, nor do the study's authors claim it is. Instead, they note that this study was intended to introduce 'a novel methodology for investigating the stylistic fingerprints of authorship' in a way that 'goes beyond analyzing isolated words, encompassing intricate patterns across multiple linguistic structures.' Earlier tests the authors cite in their study show that a work appearing in cluster 1 doesn't mean with absolute certainty that it's not written by its attributed author. For example, an early test fed the neural network some works by the authors Charles Dickens and John Galsworthy. 'The distribution of works within the clusters accurately reflects their original authorship,' the team behind the study wrote. 'Specifically, two of the three sections of A Christmas Carol are attributed to Charles Dickens.... In contrast, only one of the six parts of Flowering Wilderness is included in this category.' But nobody should come away from reading this study becoming a 'one-third of A Christmas Carol' truthers or anything like that. Dickens' authorship of that famous story isn't in doubt, nor is the aforementioned Galsworthy's of Flowering Wilderness. So, what could be causing this misidentification? The study cites another test run, this one feeding the neural network the works of essayist Francis Bacon and Shakespeare's contemporary Marlowe, also a playwright. This found a number of Bacon's essays falling into cluster 1. Their explanation? Not some second, false author posing as Bacon, but rather Bacon's own 'literary journey.' Bacon reworked and refined his Essays from 1597 to 1625, such that they 'span a spectrum of styles, from the straightforward and unadorned to the epigrammatic.' Therefore, a departure in literary style from one work to another doesn't necessarily mean a different authorial hand but rather an artistic development playing out over years of trial and error, as well as personal growth. Few authors with any prolific volume will sound identical to themselves from years earlier, especially if their work undergoes heavy revisions over time. Particularly in the case of a dramatist, revisions, rewordings, and entire reworkings of plays can occur based on rehearsals, collaborator suggestions, and audience reactions. So, while this method can point out that A Midsummer Night's Dream is linguistically distinct from the bulk of Shakespeare's other work, it can't say for sure whether that's because the play was written by an unknown second author or just a case of throwing in a riff on Apuleius' The Golden Ass to get an extra giggle or two out of an audience—even if it wasn't Shakespeare's usual style. You Might Also Like Nicole Richie's Surprising Adoption Story The Story of Gypsy Rose Blanchard and Her Mother Queen Camilla's Life in Photos
