Surveillance footage timestamps the theft at 1:00 AM on Wednesday. For reasons still unclear, a silent alarm connected to the display never sounded. Authorities are investigating whether the alarm was intentionally disabled in some way or whether it simply malfunctioned. An attempted theft in 1979 was deterred by the silent alarm; the thief stole hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of nugget, but was caught by police just a few blocks away. After that theft, the glass was replaced with even thicker glass and a new alarm installed.

The County Treasurer/Tax Collector Wayne Hammar is the official in charge of the gold. He and his team will inventory the remaining gold to sort out exactly what is left. According to the Sheriff’s office, an estimated third to a half of the gold was stolen, including a famously huge nugget known as the “slipper” or “shoe” because of its shoe-like shape.

The Siskiyou County Courthouse gold was donated to the county over the years since 1851 by miners who lived and worked there. It is (was?) the largest gold display in the continental United States and was exhibited at the 1939 World’s Fair in San Francisco’s Treasure Island. The locals, many of whom have been involved in the mining industry for generations, are deeply connected to these artifacts so dazzlingly symbolic of their history.

That connection is so profound that when faced with a dismal economy the county refused to cash in on their gigantic hoard. They had 20% unemployment in 2010; the county budget was getting slashed left and right. Still, even under that kind of pressure they refused to sell their gold display, worth almost $1,300,000 in gold weight alone and estimated to be worth $3,000,000 because of its historical significance and because the gold is in its natural form rather than melted down into generic ingots.

There’s a very-sad-in-hindsight video of the gold display at the courthouse from 2007 when the Huell Howser PBS show “California’s Gold” filmed a segment there:

Here’s the surveillance video from Wednesday night:

If you have any information about the theft, please contact the Sheriff’s office at 530-841-2900.

Prado experts thought it was painted relatively early in the 16th century by an anonymous artist, but with its black painted background, bright red sleeves, and relatively flat shadowing compared to the velvety depth of da Vinci’s original, the Prado’s Mona Lisa didn’t get much attention. They also thought the wood was oak, which was used by northern European artists.

Last year curators took a closer look in anticipation of an upcoming loan to the Louvre. They found that the panel was actually walnut, a commonly used wood for oil paintings in 16th century Italy. Using infrared reflectography, they then found that underneath that dull black background was a beautiful Tuscan landscape almost identical to the one behind Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.

IR also revealed the copy’s underdrawings, sketches that painters make before they start with the paint. The Louvre took IR images of the Mona Lisa in 2004. When the Prado curators compared the two sets of underdrawings, they found that they matched, suggesting that the copy was made contemporaneously with the original, following the changes to the composition as the master drew them before the final version was painted. There are documentary sources that attest to Leonardo having his students paint alongside him in the studio, but this is the first time we have IR evidence that strongly indicates contemporaneous painting.

Conservators have spent the past year removing the black overpaint — probably added in the 18th century to make it match other pieces with a black background in a gallery setting — and revealed the refreshed Mona Lisa copy in a presentation two weeks ago at London’s National Gallery.

The Prado’s technical specialist Ana González Mozo describes the Madrid replica as “a high quality work,” and in the paper she presented at the London conference, she provided evidence that the picture was done in Leonardo’s studio. The precise date of the original is uncertain, although the Louvre states it was between 1503 and 1506.

Bruno Mottin, the head conservator at the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France, believes that the most likely painter of the Prado copy was one of Leonardo’s two favourite pupils.

Mottin proposes that it was either Andrea Salai, who originally joined Leonardo’s studio in 1490 and probably became his lover, or Francesco Melzi, who joined around 1506. If the Prado replica is eventually attributed to Melzi, it suggests a late date for the original.

There is at least one other copy of Mona Lisa attributed to Salai and it doesn’t look as good as the Prado’s copy to my eye, although that could be the picture. He also painted Monna Vanna, a nude parody of Mona Lisa.

Salai’s reputation was more about his bad boy living than about the skill of his painting. Leonardo complained about Salai all the time in his notebooks, describing him as a “ladro, bugiardo, ostinato, ghiotto” (thief, liar, obstinate, glutton) whom Leonardo had to bail out of scrape after scrape. Still, he must have had something going for him since da Vinci lived with the youth from the time he was 10 years old until he was 35. Leonardo even left his enfant terrible property and paintings after his death in 1519, including the real Mona Lisa which Salai sold to King Francis I of France.

The Prado’s discovery might shed some light on details of the original. There are areas of the Prado Mona Lisa that are in much better condition than on the original — the spindles of the chair, for example, and the veil around her left arm — and Lisa herself looks considerably younger without that yellow cracked varnish that darkens and muddies her facial features in the original.

The copy is in the final stages of conservation. It will be displayed at the Prado in a few weeks, then it will go on loan to the Louvre for its exhibition with Leonardo’s Saint Anne (March 19 – June 25) where it will be back in the same room with Leonardo’s Mona Lisa for the first time in 500 years or so.

The guillotine was crafted by a prisoner of war, probably French, who was held in Britain between 1805 and 1815 during the Napoleonic wars. He collected sheep bones from the trash, carved them and put them together with impeccable attention to detail to make the 20-inch high model of an execution. An elaborate superstructure crowns the decapitation machine which rests on a platform with a victim lying horizontally waiting for the blade to fall. The victim is surrounded by armed guards on the platform, and the base of the structure is also manned by armed guards and cannons. Each figure has a hand-painted face, the blade of the guillotine drops and the soldiers holding weapons have moveable arms.

Amy Brenan describes its rarity:

“Napoleonic prisoner of war models made from bone and ivory are hard to come by. Many designs such as the model battle ships, spinning jennies and guillotines are so intricate that they disintegrate overtime and this makes any surviving examples extremely rare.

The sheer skill in creating a working model of the guillotine coupled with its social significance at the time, has made the guillotine models particularly desirable.”

Britain held approximately 100,000 prisoners of war over the course of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. The Revolutionary government decreed in 1793-4 that prisoners would no longer be ransomed, or even taken, and Napoleon would later also eschew traditional prisoner exchanges. Since Britain was at war with France for pretty much the whole time from 1793 until 1815, they soon had more prisoners than they could stuff into their prison hulks. Enemy officers were allowed parole and housed in various towns across England, but most of the prisoners enjoyed no such privileges.

The first permanent camp built intentionally to house prisoners of war was built in Norman Cross, near Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, in 1797. From 1797 to 1816, about 10,000 prisoners were held at the Norman Cross POW camp.

Conditions were miserable — prisoners were crammed into barracks on rows of hammocks, disease was rampant, England was cold and wet — albeit comparatively humane. (French soldiers were known to voluntarily surrender to the British because they treated their prisoners better than anyone else.) Typhus cut a swath through the population in 1800 and 1801 killing 1021 prisoners. At least another 770 more died during the camp’s 17 years of existence.

Many of these soldiers and sailors had been conscripted into the Napoleonic military machine. They had crafting skills from their civilian lives, and desperate to make a little money to pad their meager subsistence, they made models of bone, ivory, wood scraps, even straw which they used to create marquetry baskets. Many of them are signed with the artists/prisoners’ names. The prisoners would then be allowed to sell their crafts to the local inhabitants. (They also fabricated counterfeit banknotes and porn, but the authorities weren’t so supportive of those creative endeavors.)

A British soldier describes being dispatched along with his regiment in 1799:

“….to Norman Cross for the purpose of guarding some thousands of unhappy Frenchmen, cooped up in that place and clothed in yellow (the prison dress), to expiate their revolutionary sins by many years captivity and exile in loathsome prison, cut off from family and friends.

Their necessities forced them to exert their ingenuity in making various curious toys which the disposed of at a very low rate to enable them to procure a few comforts to alleviate their extreme wretchedness…..for want of clothes many of them suffered every privation rather than be clad in a conspicuous and humiliating colour.”

The Peterborough Museum has a large collection of these models from the Norman Cross prisoners, and many of them are in deteriorating condition due to their inherent fragility. A working Napoleonic prisoner guillotine with all the parts moving and all the paint still attached, therefore, is a museum-quality find.

The guillotine will be sold at Duke’s on February 9 with an estimated price tag of £4000 – £8000 (about $6300 – $12,600).

Two [of the wax cylinders] preserve the voice of Helmuth von Moltke, a venerable German military strategist, reciting lines from Shakespeare and from Goethe’s “Faust” into a phonograph horn. (Moltke was 89 when he made the recordings — the only ones known to survive from someone born as early as 1800.) Other records found in the collection hold musical treasures — lieder and rhapsodies performed by German and Hungarian singers and pianists at the apex of the Romantic era, including what is thought to be the first recording of a work by Chopin.

Since they weren’t labeled or cataloged, nobody had any idea what was on them until last year when Edison laboratory curator Jerry Fabris used an Archeophone device to trace the grooves on 12 of the cylinders and convert them to audible wav files. The recordings were very faint, too faint for Fabris to identify, so he enlisted the aid of sound historians Patrick Feaster of Indiana University and Stephan Puille of the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin to try to determine who and what were on the cylinders.

They had a starting point: the words “Wangemann. Edison” carved into the lid of the wooden container in which the cylinders had been found. Adelbert Theodor Edward Wangemann had been hired by Edison in 1888 to market his newly invented wax cylinder phonograph. Wangemann quickly became adept at recording with the phonograph and was sent to Europe in June of 1889 to supervise the operation of the Edison phonographs on exhibit at the Paris World’s Fair.

The assignment was only supposed to last two weeks, but after the World’s Fair was over Edison expanded his brief and allowed him to travel Europe collecting quality recordings to use for exhibitions. After Paris he went to his native country of Germany where he set up displays of the technology for scientists and luminaries. In Berlin, Wangemann set up his equipment in a room loaned to him by the Siemens Corporation. He carried the cylinders and accessories to the exhibition room in a lockable wooden box. It’s that box that was discovered back at Edison’s New Jersey lab in 1957.

Edison joined Wangemann in Germany to make a splash during the phonograph exhibits to scientists. While he was there, Edison asked to meet the three most important people in Germany, Bismarck, von Moltke and Kaiser Wilhelm II, but none of them were available. They all replied that they wanted to see the phonograph, though, so Edison sent Wangemann to show them the new toy and get their voices recorded for posterity. He did meet with them all, but although Wilhelm II greatly enjoyed Wangemann’s musical recordings, he never did get his own voice carved in wax. Three of his sons, the eldest just seven years old, did get recorded.

In Friedrichsruh on Oct. 7, 1889, Wangemann recorded Chancellor Otto von Bismarck reciting verses from several ditties in four languages. The first is “In Good Old Colony Times,” a British folk song that was altered after the American Revolution to give it an anti-monarchist spin. The second is “Die Schwäbische Kunde” (The Swabian Customer), an 1814 German ballad by Ludwig Uhland about Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa going on the Third Crusade. The third is the Latin song “Gaudeamus igitur,” a popular graduation song in Europe at the time with your classic “carpe diem” message. The fourth is the first verse of “La Marseillaise,” which is something of an enormous iceburn on the French given their ignominious defeat by Bismarck’s Prussia in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71.

The last lines Bismarck speaks are a direct appeal to his son Herbert who would listen to it on a phonograph in Budapest a few weeks later and recognize his father’s voice. “Do everything in moderation and morality, namely work, but then also eating, and apart from that especially drinking. Advice of a father to his son.” Solid Junker advice, that.

Read about all of the newly converted Edison/Wangemann wax cylinders, listen to the recordings and read the original text and transcripts of the spoken parts on the National Park Service website.

This particular barn design, a long nave with a high roof supported by rows of posts, requires a great many internal braces to ensure the wind doesn’t knock it down. Those exposed buttresses and the central nave with side aisles and bays give the structure a cathedral-like look, and in fact the construction techniques required to build this barn were also used in the building of cathedrals at that time. It’s likely that Master Kypping’s crew included experienced cathedral builders. No wonder, then, that Poet Laureate and passionate historical preservation advocate Sir John Betjeman dubbed Harmondsworth Great Barn the “Cathedral of Middlesex.”

The building used to be even bigger, but a north wing was demolished in 1774. It had a close encounter with a German bomb during World War II, but survived with just a few roof tiles askew. The barn was granted Grade I listed building status — the same grade as Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament — in 1950, and then designated a Scheduled Ancient Monument on top of that. It continued to be used for agricultural purposes until the 1970s when the encroaching sprawl of London made it the only Medieval barn in the area to survive its absorption into the west London suburbs.

In 1986, the barn was purchased by property developers the John Wiltshier Group who planned a full restoration. When the John Wiltshier Group went into receivership in 2006, the receiver offered the barn to the National Trust, English Heritage and Hillingdon Council for a token £1, but amazingly all three declined to purchase, probably intimidated by the daunting process of dealing with a Scheduled Ancient Monument (every change, even necessary repairs to a leaking roof, say, requires a literal act of Parliament) and the large sums of money they’ve had to spend every year to maintain such venerable carpentry.

Instead, in 2006 a shady anonymous offshore trust registered in Gibraltar and named Harmondsworth Barn Ltd. purchased the barn for £1 and proceeded to do nothing at all to it. They let it rot and closed it to the public except for one open weekend a year. English Heritage wrote them increasingly concerned letters about the condition of the barn, even going so far as to offer them grants to help fund necessary repairs. Harmondsworth Barn Ltd. didn’t respond. It seems their sole interest in the property was how a proposed expansion of Heathrow Airport would bring a new runway just yards away from the barn. If the Heathrow build had gone through and the barn had been damaged or demolished, then the owners would have been due compensation.

The airport expansion plans were abandoned. Obviously the “investors” didn’t exactly spend big money to buy the property and they certainly had no interest in spending the tens of thousands of pounds a year required just to keep a 15th century barn from falling apart. Finally last year English Heritage got the barn delisted as a Scheduled Ancient Monument smoothing the way for them to step in and save the day. Those dirty offshore rats actually had the testes to protest the delisting because they preferred to keep their £1 investment in a state of increasing decay.

English Heritage immediately spent £30,000 on emergency repairs, primarily to the roof which had holes in it from slipped and broken tiles. They also did some repair work to the weatherboard siding, most of which is also original, a very rare thing for barn siding.

Once the worst holes were plugged, EH took Harmondsworth Barn Ltd. to court to recover the public moneys they were forced to spend. Again the offshore corporation protested and rejected any attempts to settle out of court. Almost a year later, a settlement has been reached: English Heritage pays £20,000 to Harmondsworth Barn Ltd. and becomes the new owner.

Last week, English Heritage, which sees the purchase of the Great Barn as a welcome victory after a long series of drastic cuts in its budget, told the Independent that the building is “a supreme example of late-medieval craftsmanship – a masterpiece of carpentry containing one of the best and most intact interiors of its age and type in all of Europe”.

English Heritage will be handing over the running of Harmondsworth’s Great Barn to members of local campaign group The Friends of the Great Barn at Harmondsworth. It is expected to be open to the public from this April.

I can’t help but resent that those land speculator groinpulls managed to convert their single pound into 20,000 despite their shameless and deliberate neglect of the place. I bet English Heritage wishes they’d fished through their couch cushions for that pound back in 2006.