Today in History - August 29: The moment popular song would play, innocent people would suffer violent deaths
Finnish soldiers recaptured the city of Vyborg, also known as Viipuri, from Soviet troops on August 29, 1941.
But in the days following, the city was plagued by unexpected explosions from mines.
The mines were not being triggered by movement, baffling Finnish troops who were suffering serious casualties.
But engineers soon figured out what was triggering the mines.
Each mine had three tuning forks which would oscillate when specific frequencies would play, detonating them.
The frequencies were found in a chord sequence in a popular Finnish folk song called the Säkkijärven Polkka.
When the hit song as recorded by Viljo Vesterinen was played in earshot of the mines, they would explode.
To stop Soviet combat engineers in the city from planting any more of the mines, the Finnish army set up a truck to loudly blare the song on loop for days.
An interference frequency jamming the remaining mines was played on loop for six months until the mines' batteries ran out.
What is believed to be the last uncontacted Native American man made himself known on August 29, 1911.
Starving and alone, he emerged from the wilderness outside a slaughterhouse in California.
In the tradition of his Yahi people, a person cannot reveal their name, with someone else required to do the formal introduction.
As the last living member of the Yahi, he could not identify himself.
Anthropologist Alfred Krober (left) named him Ishi, which just means "man" in his language.
The Yahi people had been wiped out by violence and disease, save for Ishi.
He spent the remaining five years of his life speaking to anthropologists about this culture and language, as well as working as a university cleaner.
Businessman and inventor Whitcomb L Judson received a US patent on August 29, 1893 for a "clasp locker," which evolved into the modern zipper.
Judson made his invention to save people the trouble of buttoning and unbuttoning their shoes every day.
Share a tip-off, video or photo with us
