How the Hoover Dam Works: A 3D Animated Introduction

in History, Technology | March 25th, 2026

When it comes to tourist pilgrimage sites in the United States, the Hoover Dam may not quite rank up there with the Statue of Liberty, the Lincoln Memorial, Mount Rushmore, the Grand Canyon, or Disneyland. But that’s not due to a lack of importance, nor even a lack of impressiveness. Proper appreciation of its man-made majesty, however, requires an understanding of not just the vital function it serves, but the enormous task of its construction. The guides at the Hoover Dam have been trained to explain just that to its many visitors, of course, but all of us could benefit from going in prepared with a little knowledge. Watch the hour-long video on the dam’s design and construction from Animagraffs above, and you may be prepared with enough knowledge to tell the guides a thing or two.

Animagraffs is the YoTtube channel of Jacob O’Neal, which we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture for its acclaimed explanations on a sixteenth-century explorer’s sailing ship and the Golden Gate Bridge, another iconic construction project of the Great Depression. Like those, his Hoover Dam video uses detailed 3D models based on serious research, not least into the project’s original design documents.

This allows O’Neal to show each element of the dam and its complex system of supporting infrastructure in detail and from every angle, as well as in a kind of x‑ray vision. We’ve all seen photographs of the Hoover Dam, and maybe even bought some from its gift shop, but even the most sublime aerial view doesn’t reveal as much about its ambition as a look into its inner workings.

And the ambition of the Hoover Dam is one aspect guaranteed to impress any viewers. It required thousands of workers about five years to re-shape the Nevada and Arizona landscape at a grand enough scale to make possible human control of the mighty — and, more to the point, mightily unpredictable — Colorado River. With its large turbines, the engineering and installation of which O’Neal explains in full, it managed to generate enough electricity to repay its construction cost of more than $811 million in today’s dollars by 1987, just over 50 years after it opened. And in an achievement almost impossible to believe today, it opened more than two years ahead of schedule. We hear a good deal today about the concept of “state capacity,” and how the U.S. could regain it. At the Hoover Dam, we behold state capacity quite literally made concrete.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Fascinating Engineering of the Titanic: How the Great Ocean Liner Was Built

in History, Technology | March 16th, 2026

When many of us first learned of the RMS Titanic, it was presented first as one of history’s greatest ironies: the “unsinkable” ocean liner that went down on its maiden voyage. Of course, there’s a great deal more to the story, as anyone who becomes obsessed with the ill-fated ship (James Cameron being just one notable example) understands full well. Even apart from the many human experiences surrounding it, some of them told by the wreck’s survivors and preserved on film, the mechanical aspects of the Titanic hold out considerable fascination for anyone with an engineer’s cast of mind. Put aside, for the moment, the matter of the sinking, and consider just what went into making it one of the most glorious creations of man launched into the ocean to date — or rather, one of the three most glorious.

The Titanic was one of a trio of similar White Star Line ships completed in the early nineteen-tens. In the video above, Bill Hammack, known on YouTube as Engineerguy, tells the story of not just the Titanic, but also the Olympic and the HMHS Britannic. An engineering professor at the University of Illinois, he found in the campus library issues of the journal The Engineer published between 1909 and 1911 that contain detailed photographs of the construction of both the Titanic and Olympic, sister ships that were built side-by-side.

One element highlighted that we may not much consider today is the sheer scale of the things: each was held together by three million rivets, could contain 1.5 million gallons of ballast water, weighed 52,000 tons when fully fitted, required 23 tons of lubricant to slide from the dock into the water, and burned 650 tons of coal per day on a transatlantic crossing.

Alas, size alone wasn’t enough to prevent disaster. “Less than a year after the launch of these two giant ships, one suffered a collision that ripped a gaping hole in its side,” says Hammack. “That ship was of course, the Olympic.” Its sudden encounter with a passing warship necessitated patching with wood before it could return home for a full repair, but thereafter it remained in service for nearly a quarter-century. Its less lucky sibling ended up at the bottom of the ocean after running into trouble of its own: a mine and a torpedo spelled the end for the Britannic in 1916. As for the Titanic, we all know about its fateful encounter with the iceberg, and maybe we’ve even heard discussions of how its designers could have mitigated the impact: more or taller bulkheads, a double hull rather than just a double bottom, greater lifeboat capacity. As for whether and how those solutions would have worked, perhaps Hammack could still shoot a follow-up explaining it all to us.

See the First 8K Footage of the Titanic, the Highest-Quality Video of the Shipwreck Yet

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How the Long-Lost Body of Richard III Was Found Under a Parking Lot: Solving a 500-Year-Old Mystery

in History | March 12th, 2026

Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Richard the Third begins with the eponymous character uttering the famous line “Now is the winter of our discontent.” It ends at the Battle of Bosworth Field, by which point his villainous schemes have come to ruin and his desertion by Lord Stanley seems to have sealed his fate. “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse,” he cries out, coining another expression used four centuries later before being slain by the Earl of Richmond, the man who would be Henry VII. Though Shakespeare himself was writing more than 100 years after the historical events he dramatized, he included little after the event of Richard’s death, whose most fascinating mystery was in any case only solved in our own time.

You can see the story of Richard III’s long-unknown whereabouts in the Primal Space video above. According to records, says the narrator, “he was buried unceremoniously beneath the Greyfriars Church in Leicester, and a monument was eventually placed above his grave.” When Henry VIII ordered such houses of worship shut down forty years later, Greyfriars was among the institutions demolished.

Everyone eventually came to believe that, amid this destruction, Richard’s body had been exhumed and tossed off the Bow Bridge. Only in the early two-thousands did a search for his corpse commence in earnest, spearheaded by the Richard III Society. Having determined that the Bow Bridge story had been made up, the society’s members then had to pin down the long-confused former location of Greyfriars Church.

One of them, Philippa Langley, got the hunch to start looking under a Leicester parking lot. Budgetary limitations forced her team to try digging just three trenches across spaces likeliest to cross the church’s footprint. “Amazingly, just six hours into the first day, they came across a skeleton” with skull damage and spinal curvature. Richard was indeed described as a “hunchback” in his lifetime, but in the twenty-first century, only DNA evidence closes the case. Its acquisition necessitated both finding a couple unbroken female lines (the only means of transmitting mitochondrial DNA) from his sister down to living, testable individuals while carbon-dating the skeleton. Sure enough, Richard turned out to have been in eternal repose not just under that parking lot, but near a stenciled letter R — the kind of coincidence from which even the Bard himself might have shied away.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Who Would Be Emperor If the Roman Empire Still Existed Today?

in History, Politics | March 10th, 2026

During Wimbledon a few years ago, a thread about King Felipe VI of Spain went viral. It was posted to the social media platform formerly known as Twitter by Derek Guy, author of the menswear blog Die, Workwear! “Very rare to see this level of tailoring nowadays, even on the wealthy,” he commented on a photo of Felipe in the stands on the tournament’s last day. Even when not attending major sporting events, the king’s collars always hug his neck, his lapels are always well-proportioned, the lines of his coat always flow into his trousers, and his four-in-hand always has just the right asymmetry. For my money, such self-presentation befits not just a monarch, but indeed an emperor.

It so happens that Felipe is one of the most plausible candidates for that job, at least in the hypothetical scenario that the Roman Empire never declined and fell. He’s also the only actual sitting monarch among them, though each of the others can also make his own credible claim to the imperial throne.

So who would rightfully rule over a still-extant Roman Empire? Understanding that history buffs enjoy nothing more than a speculative but knowledge- and judgment-intensive debate of that kind, UsefulCharts creator Matt Baker (whose online store happens to offer a Roman emperors family tree poster) once invited thirteen history YouTubers to cast their votes — and, of course, explain their answers.

In addition to Felipe, the roster of potential modern-day Roman emperors includes Dündar Ali Osman, heir to the Ottoman dynasty, and Andrew Romanov, heir to the Russian throne (a choice for those who accept the onetime description of Moscow as the “third Rome”). Alas, both have died since the making of this video, but the claimants who could draw their legitimacy from the legacy of the Holy Roman Empire live on: the still relatively young Jean-Christophe Napoléon, a descendant of Bonaparte’s brother, and Karl von Habsburg, the undisputed current head of the eponymous house. In favor of each candidate, one can make a variety of arguments political, cultural, and geographical. Nor, as some of us would insist, can we reasonably ignore the sartorial.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 8 ) |

AI Figures Out the Rules of a Mysterious 2,000-Year-Old Board Game from Ancient Rome

in Games, History | March 9th, 2026

Image by Walter Crist

As far as enthusiasm for board games goes, no continent has yet outdone Europe. Its advantage could lie in the highly developed culture of low-cost leisure evident in quite a few of its societies; it could also owe to the fact that board games seem to have been played there continuously since antiquity. We’ve long had evidence of examples like the “Roman mill game,” better known today as nine men’s morris, which Ovid appears to mention in his Ars Amatoria of the very early first century. Not that modern knowledge of Roman tabletop gaming is complete. In one puzzling case, the stone board above was unearthed in a former Roman town in the Netherlands, but how a game was played on it remained a mystery — until machine learning came along.

“To examine whether the object may have been used as a game board, we performed use-wear analysis to identify evidence for gameplay and we simulated play using artificial intelligence (AI),” write the team of researchers who recently published a paper on the subject in the journal Antiquity. They used a system called Ludii, engineered to analyze board-game rules.

“This software allows for AI-driven playout simulation, where two AI agents play a game against one another, which can generate quantitative data on gameplay. In this instance, we explored whether the rules of a game would produce the wear pattern seen on the stone.” The idea, in other words, was to let the computer play against itself using different rules until it came upon a game that would continue to abrade away the surface of the board in the same fashion as it already was.

This process narrowed it down to games “in which the goal is to block the opponent from moving, and those in which the goal is to place three pieces in a row.” These have a fairly long documented history, from Scandinavia’s haretavl, to Italy’s gioco dell’orso to Spain’s liebre perseguida, to Greece’s kinégi tou lagoú. You can download what the research suggests is the most plausible rule set for this particular Roman board game here, board design included. One player takes the side of the “hunter,” with four pieces, and the other the side of the “prey,” with two. The former tries to trap the latter’s pieces, moving only along the board’s lines; in the next round, the roles reverse. The hunter who does the job in the fewest moves wins. Why not invite friends over to spend an evening playing like a Roman? For a thoroughly ancient good time, first reconstruct as best you can the ambience of the thermopolium at home.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Inside the Automats Where Coin-Operated Machines Created a Modern, Democratic Dining Experience

in Food & Drink, History | March 9th, 2026

“Good evening,” said Alfred Hitchcock to the television viewers of America on March 25, 1959. “Tonight I’m dining at my favorite club. There are many advantages here. As you can see, informality is the rule. There is also the stimulation of intellectual companionship without the deafening quiet that pervades most clubs. Best of all, I like its privacy: only four persons are allowed at a table, and, of course, no one pays any attention to you.” This was an example of the deadpan irony with which the filmmaker introduced each broadcast of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, for the “club” of which he spoke was clearly an automat. Today, many readers under about 50 will never have heard the word, but at the time, it referred to a seemingly permanent institution in American life.

Or rather, an institution of urban American life, and above all in two cities, Philadelphia and New York. There, no one could think of automats without thinking of Horn & Hardart, in its heyday the largest restaurant chain in the world. The concept, which co-founder Joseph Horn imported over from Berlin in the early nineteen-tens, was of a restaurant with no waiters: rather, you could choose your dish à la carte from a wall of coin-operated compartments, paying the nickel or two that would allow you to take the food inside.

Salisbury steak, creamed spinach, baked beans, a ham-and-cheese sandwich, macaroni and cheese, chocolate pudding, strawberry rhubarb pie: whatever it was, the behind-the-scenes staff would replace it just as soon as you put the last one on your tray.

Smack of modernity though it once did (and in a way, still does), the term automat is somewhat misleading. We might describe the experience of visiting one as dining inside a giant vending machine, but the actual running of the operation was quite labor-intensive. Most of the work was performed out of the customer’s sight, as far away as in the large central commissaries that prepared many of the dishes to be transported daily to Horn & Hardart’s 88 locations. This sheer scale of operation allowed the chain to offer some of the cheapest meals commercially available, with the result that its automats boomed even — indeed, especially — during the Great Depression. Their economic barrier was low, and of sex and race, nonexistent; those who remember them describe them becoming some of the most democratic institutions in postwar America.

You can hear such memories recalled in the recent documentary The Automat by figures like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Colin Powell, and Mel Brooks, who rhapsodizes about Horn & Hardart’s coffee, dispensed for just a nickel from elaborate dolphin-headed spigots. That degree of detail was standard in the interiors, whose marble, chrome, and glass look palatial by the standards of the fast-food joints that ultimately replaced the automat. That glory was one casualty of postwar suburbanization and hollowing-out of central cities that resulted. What with the American urban renaissance of the past few decades, attempts have been made to revive the automat concept, but perhaps, as Brooks puts it, “the logistics and the economics of today won’t allow anything that simple, naïve, and eloquent and beautiful to flourish again.” Ordering a meal brought straight to your door may be more convenient, but even delivery-app addicts have to admit that it will never have the same romance.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Roman Statues Weren’t White; They Were Once Painted in Vivid, Bright Colors

in Art, History | March 6th, 2026

The idea of the classical period—the time of ancient Greece and Rome—as an elegantly unified collection of superior aesthetic and philosophical cultural traits has its own history, one that comes in large part from the era of the Neoclassical. The rediscovery of antiquity took some time to reach the pitch it would during the 18th century, when references to Greek and Latin rhetoric, architecture, and sculpture were inescapable. But from the Renaissance onward, the classical achieved the status of cultural dogma.

One tenet of classical idealism is the idea that Roman and Greek statuary embodied an ideal of pure whiteness—a misconception modern sculptors perpetuated for hundreds of years by making busts and statues in polished white marble. But the truth is that both Greek statues and their Roman counterparts—as you’ll learn in the Vox video above—were originally brightly painted in riotous color.

This includes the 1st century A.D. Augustus of Prima Porta, the famous figure of the Emperor standing triumphantly with one hand raised. Rather than left as blank white marble, the statue would have had bronzed skin, brown hair, and a fire-engine red toga. “Ancient Greece and Rome were really colorful,” we learn. So how did everyone come to believe otherwise?

It’s partly an honest mistake. After the fall of Rome, ancient sculptures were buried or left out in the open air for hundreds of years. By the time the Renaissance began in the 1300s, their paint had faded away. As a result, the artists unearthing, and copying ancient art didn’t realize how colorful it was supposed to be.

But white marble couldn’t have become the norm without some willful ignorance. Even though there was a bunch of evidence that ancient sculpture was painted, artists, art historians and the general public chose to disregard it. Western culture seemed to collectively accept that white marble was simply prettier.

White statuary symbolized a classical ideal that “depends highly on the greatest possible decontextualization,” writes James I. Porter, professor of Rhetoric and Classics at the University of California, Berkeley. “Only so can the values it cherishes be isolated: simplicity, tranquility, balanced proportions, restraint, purity of form… all of these are features that underscore the timeless quality of the highest possible expression of art, like a breath held indefinitely.” These ideals became inseparable from the development of racial theory.

Learning to see the past as it was requires us to put aside historically acquired blinders. This can be exceedingly difficult when our ideas about the past come from hundreds of years of inherited tradition, from every period of art history since the time of Michelangelo. But we must acknowledge this tradition as fabricated. Influential art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, for example, extolled the value of classical sculpture because, in his opinion, “the whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is.”

Winckelmann also, Vox notes, “went out of his way to ignore obvious evidence of colored marble, and there was a lot of it.” He dismissed frescoes of colored statuary found in Pompeii and judged one painted sculpture discovered there as “too primitive” to have been made by ancient Romans. “Evidence wasn’t just ignored, some of it may have been destroyed” to enforce an ideal of whiteness. While many statues were denuded by the elements over hundreds of years, the first archaeologists to discover the Augustus of Prima Porta in the 1860s described its color scheme in detail.

Critiques of classical idealism don’t originate in a politically correct present. As Porter shows at length in his article “What Is ‘Classical’ About Classical Antiquity?,” they date back at least to 19th century philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, who called Winckelmann’s ideas about Roman statues “an empty figment of the imagination.” But these ideas are “for the most part taken for granted rather than questioned,” Porter argues, “or else clung to for fear of losing a powerful cachet that, even in the beleaguered present, continues to translate into cultural prestige, authority, elitist satisfactions, and economic power.”

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Seven Wonders of the Ancient World: From the Walls of Babylon to the Sewers of Rome

in History | March 5th, 2026

You may not be able to name all, or even most, of the seven wonders of the ancient world. But you almost certainly know that there were seven of them. In a way, that aligns well enough with the worldview of the Greeks who first made reference to such a list, given their near-reverence for that number. Seven were the strings of the lyre (unless there happened to be eight or nine), seven were the gates of Thebes, and seven were the “wandering stars” in the night sky (if you count the sun and moon). The identity of the wonders was less important than the length of their list, and indeed, as ancient-history YouTuber Garrett Ryan explains in his Told in Stone video above, additions and changes were proposed since the beginning.

The classic seven-wonders roster includes the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, and the Great Pyramid of Giza, that last being the only one still in existence today.

Ryan’s alternative list includes the Egyptian labyrinth at Hawara, which Herodotus considered superior even to the Pyramids; the Temple of Zeus at Cyzicus, which Pliny the Elder described as lined by gold tubes to let in the sunlight (surely stripped out as soon as the place fell into disuse); the sewers of Rome, a civilizational achievement unto themselves; and the Theater of Scaurus, which, though constructed out of wood for temporary use, seated an astonishing 80,000 people.

Ryan completes his seven other wonders with the Altar of Horns at Delos, held in myth to have been built by Apollo himself; the Walls of Babylon, which actually appear on the earliest known version of the list; and, finally, the good old Colosseum. As over-familiar (not to mention over-toured) as it may be, the Flavian Amphitheater, as the Colosseum was known in its day, does make for a welcome presence among the ancient wonders, being the only other one apart from the Great Pyramid that we can still visit today. But if you get into the mood to go marvel at thaumata, to borrow the Greek word, by no means limit yourself to selections already curated by others. The world is full of wonders, and your own personal seven may not be far away.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How the Hoover Dam Works: A 3D Animated Introduction

The Fascinating Engineering of the Titanic: How the Great Ocean Liner Was Built

How the Long-Lost Body of Richard III Was Found Under a Parking Lot: Solving a 500-Year-Old Mystery

Who Would Be Emperor If the Roman Empire Still Existed Today?

AI Figures Out the Rules of a Mysterious 2,000-Year-Old Board Game from Ancient Rome

Inside the Automats Where Coin-Operated Machines Created a Modern, Democratic Dining Experience

Roman Statues Weren’t White; They Were Once Painted in Vivid, Bright Colors

Seven Wonders of the Ancient World: From the Walls of Babylon to the Sewers of Rome

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