French astronomer Camille Flammarion was the benefactor of a remarkable coincidence in the late 1800s. For many months he had been working on a major book about the Earth’s atmosphere – L’Atmosphère. As he was laboring over a chapter on the wind, oddly enough, a strong gust blew in his window, lifted his just-written pages off the desk and carried them out the window and out of sight. Flammarion was disheartened over the loss of his work. This was an age without computers or even carbon paper, of course, and Flammarion was resigned to rewrite the missing pages. He was more than startled, however, when a few days later he received typeset page proofs from his publisher that contained the lost pages! How could this be? He later learned what had happened. The wind had carried the pages to the street below where a courier for the publisher just happened to be passing. He simply picked up the scattered pages and took them to the publisher... as usual.
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