Saturday Scenes

On the 29th of October in 1964, thieves unlocked a restroom window at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and crept into the museum after it closed. They stole over $2 million in gems from the J.P. Morgan collection.

They got the idea from the film Topkapi, “the theft of the century,” a fantastic heist film about the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul, Turkey. The thieves lowered themselves with a rope from the upper floor and raked the gems from the cases.

Their inside information that the displays did not have alarms was not quite correct. The Star of India display was actually set up with an alarm but the battery had died. Having got away with the theft, the men were caught because they bragged of their sensational heist. Most of the gems were found in a locker in a Miami bus station but one of the most famous gems, the Eagle Diamond, was never recovered. At the time of the gem’s discovery, it had been the largest diamond found in the continental United States.

Eagle Diamond – Wikipedia

The Eagle Diamond was discovered in Eagle, Wisconsin in 1876 by a man named Charles Woods while he was digging a well. The land in which he was digging was not his own; it belonged, rather, to Thomas Deveraux, and Charles and his wife Clarissa were merely renters. Woods did not think the stone was very valuable, and believed it to be a topaz, because the color of the 16.25 carat (3.25 g) crystal was a “warm sunny color”. Some years later, when the Woods family fell on hard times, Clarissa sold the stone for $1.00 to a Samuel B. Boynton of Milwaukee.

And on the 29th of October in 2011, these priceless gems were submitted as Saturday Scenes:

And these are the brilliant, multi-faceted people who took them:

• raumsinn
• DorindaDorinda
• RAFairman
• Pewari
• akrabat
• kyleorchid
• sahfenn
• carocat
• pendrift
• fluttabyz
• noirem
• SockYarnShop
• robdavies
• annemnicholas
• Krautie
• nottherealjon
• JeannieKelly
• HeideSpruck
• dudleypj
• jamesnnb
• timewind
• LukaIsntLuka
• UKMelia
• ernmander
• drewbenn
• CallumDG
• thermalhound
• JanetIsserlis
• Vinjii
• Korwhai
• fembat
• akaSylvia
• sparc
• pixelfreund

Wouldn’t you like to join us?

It’s easy to take part!

1) Take a photo on a Saturday and upload it to a photo site like Flickr or Twitpic
2) Tweet the url for your photograph to @SatScenes
3) Watch for the next post here to see a great set of all the photographs together.

I’m looking forward to seeing your scenes!