The Hertella Coffee Machine Mounted on a Volkswagen Dashboard (1959): The Most European Car Accessory Ever Made

in Food & Drink, History, Technology | December 8th, 2020

Cur­rent auto-indus­try wis­dom holds that no car with­out cup hold­ers will sell in Amer­i­ca. Though this also seems to have become increas­ing­ly true across the rest of the world, I like to imag­ine there still exists a coun­try or two whose dri­ving pub­lic holds fast against that par­tic­u­lar design vul­gar­ism. Such places would, of course, lie deep in unre­con­struct­ed Europe, where nobody can go long with­out cof­fee. The solu­tion? The Hertel­la Auto Kaf­feema­chine, the first and only known dash­board-mount­ed cof­fee mak­er.

Man­u­fac­tured specif­i­cal­ly for the Volk­swa­gen Bee­tle, this high­ly civ­i­lized auto­mo­bile acces­so­ry has, 60 years after its intro­duc­tion, near­ly van­ished from exis­tence. Judg­ing by the few known exam­ples, it nev­er had the time to evolve past its tech­ni­cal short­com­ings. For one, it lacks a pow­er switch: “As soon as you plug it into the cig­a­rette lighter, it just gets hot,” writes The Dri­ve’s Peter Holderith. “And as far as the type of cof­fee machine that it is, well, you would have to be pret­ty des­per­ate for caf­feine to make cof­fee in this thing.”

“I always thought they were a per­co­la­tor, or espres­so machine like a Moka… but nope,” says Dave Hord of Clas­sic Car Adven­tures, who pur­chased his own Hertel­la Auto Kaf­feema­chine from an own­er in Ser­bia. It seems “you fill the ves­sel with water, put your cof­fee in the (dou­ble lay­er) screen, and heat up the unit. I pre­sume you heat the unit up with the cof­fee in it, which means this basi­cal­ly brews cof­fee as though it’s tea.” Per­haps only a transcon­ti­nen­tal road-trip­per in 1959 would grow des­per­ate enough to drink it.

Still, as Holderith notes, “the machine does have a few clever fea­tures. The porce­lain cups that came with it appar­ent­ly had a met­al disc on the bot­tom of them that allowed them to stick to the machine mag­net­i­cal­ly” and the unit itself “mounts to the dash with a sim­ple brack­et, allow­ing for the pot to quick­ly be removed and cleaned when nec­es­sary.” Per­haps today’s car design­ers, a group once again look­ing to the past for inspi­ra­tion, will resume the pur­suit of dash­board brew­ing begun by the Hertel­la Auto Kaf­feema­chine. If not, Wes Ander­son can sure­ly find a use for the thing.

via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Espres­so Mak­er Made in Le Corbusier’s Bru­tal­ist Archi­tec­tur­al Style: Raw Con­crete on the Out­side, High-End Parts on the Inside

The Cof­fee Pot That Fueled Hon­oré de Balzac’s Cof­fee Addic­tion

Wake Up & Smell the Cof­fee: The New All-in-One Cof­fee-Mak­er/Alarm Clock is Final­ly Here!

The Time­less Beau­ty of the Cit­roën DS, the Car Mythol­o­gized by Roland Barthes (1957)

178,000 Images Doc­u­ment­ing the His­to­ry of the Car Now Avail­able on a New Stan­ford Web Site

10 Essen­tial Tips for Mak­ing Great Cof­fee at Home

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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The Sistine Chapel of the Ancients: Archaeologists Discover 8 Miles of Art Painted on Rock Walls in the Amazon

in Art, History | December 8th, 2020

All images by José Iri­arte

Over twelve thou­sand years ago, some of the first humans in the Ama­zon hunt­ed, paint­ed, and danced with the mas­sive extinct mam­mals of the ice age: giant sloths and armadil­los, ice-age hors­es, and mastodons…. How do we know? We have pic­tures, or rock paint­ings, rather–many thou­sands of them made around 12,500 years ago and only recent­ly “found on an eight-mile rock sur­face along the Guayabero Riv­er the Colom­bian Ama­zon,” Hakim Bishara reports at Hyper­al­ler­gic. The pre­his­toric won­der has been dubbed the “Sis­tine Chapel of the ancients.”

The dis­cov­ery, made last year, was kept secret until the release of a new doc­u­men­tary air­ing this month called Jun­gle Mys­tery: Lost King­doms of the Ama­zon. Palaeo-anthro­pol­o­gist Ella Al-Shamahi, pre­sen­ter of the Chan­nel 4 series and a mem­ber of the team that found the site, explains why it may be hard to imag­ine such great pre­his­toric beasts lum­ber­ing through the rain­for­est.

Their exis­tence in this rock art offers a clue to major cli­ma­to­log­i­cal shifts that have occurred in the region over mil­len­nia. As Al-Shamahi tells The Observ­er:

One of the most fas­ci­nat­ing things was see­ing ice age megafau­na because that’s a mark­er of time. I don’t think peo­ple realise that the Ama­zon has shift­ed in the way it looks. It hasn’t always been this rain­for­est. When you look at a horse or mastodon in these paint­ings, of course they weren’t going to live in a for­est. They’re too big. Not only are they giv­ing clues about when they were paint­ed by some of the ear­li­est peo­ple – that in itself is just mind-bog­gling – but they are also giv­ing clues about what this very spot might have looked like: more savan­nah-like.

“We’re talk­ing about sev­er­al tens of thou­sands of paint­ings,” says the team’s leader, José Iri­arte, pro­fes­sor of archae­ol­o­gy at Exeter Uni­ver­si­ty. “It’s going to take gen­er­a­tions to record them.” The rock wall art illus­trates many extinct species, includ­ing pre­his­toric lama and three-toed hoofed mam­mals with trunks, as well as real­is­tic depic­tions of mon­keys, bats, snakes, tur­tles, tapirs, birds, lizards, fish, and deer. Remains found near the site offer clues to the ancient peo­ples’ diets, which includ­ed piran­ha, alli­ga­tors, snakes, frogs, and “rodents such as paca, capy­bara, and armadil­los,” Bishara notes.

Many of the images are paint­ed to the scale of hand­prints left in many places along the wall, and some are much larg­er. Researchers were par­tic­u­lar­ly sur­prised by the method of com­po­si­tion. Some of the art is so high up it can only be seen by drone. “I’m 5ft 10in,” says Shamahi, “and I would be break­ing my neck look­ing up. How were they scal­ing those walls?” It appears the artists used some form of rap­pelling. There are “depic­tions of wood­en tow­ers among the paint­ings,” reports The Guardian, “includ­ing fig­ures appear­ing to bungee jump from them.”

Fur­ther study in the com­ing decades, and cen­turies, will reveal much more about how the paint­ings were made. The why, how­ev­er, will prove more elu­sive. Iri­arte spec­u­lates they served a sacred pur­pose. “It’s inter­est­ing to see that many of these large ani­mals appear sur­round­ed by small men with their arms raised, almost wor­ship­ping these ani­mals.” The pres­ence of hal­lu­cino­genic plants among the paint­ings leads him to com­pare the paint­ings with con­tem­po­rary Ama­zon­ian peo­ple, for whom “non-humans like ani­mals and plants have souls, and they com­mu­ni­cate and engage with peo­ple in coop­er­a­tive or hos­tile ways through the rit­u­als and shaman­ic prac­tices that we see depict­ed in the rock art.”

What­ev­er their pur­pose, the over 100,000 paint­ings on the eight-mile wall con­tain an immea­sur­able store of infor­ma­tion about ancient Ama­zo­ni­ans’ cre­ativ­i­ty and inge­nu­ity. They also add, per­haps, to the moun­tain of rock art evi­dence sug­gest­ing, Bar­bara Ehren­re­ich argued recent­ly, that before orga­nized war became the dom­i­nant prac­tice of civ­i­liza­tions, “humans once had bet­ter ways to spend their time.” The pub­li­ca­tion of the research team’s find­ings is avail­able here. See more images of the site at Hyper­al­ler­gic and Design­boom and watch the first two episodes of Jun­gle Mys­tery: Lost King­doms of the Ama­zon here.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Recent­ly-Dis­cov­ered 44,000-Year-Old Cave Paint­ing Tells the Old­est Known Sto­ry

Archae­ol­o­gists Dis­cov­er the World’s First “Art Stu­dio” Cre­at­ed in an Ethiopi­an Cave 43,000 Years Ago

Was a 32,000-Year-Old Cave Paint­ing the Ear­li­est Form of Cin­e­ma?

40,000-Year-Old Sym­bols Found in Caves World­wide May Be the Ear­li­est Writ­ten Lan­guage

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

 

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Why Butt Trumpets & Other Bizarre Images Appeared in Illuminated Medieval Manuscripts

in Art, Books, History | December 8th, 2020

In illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­scripts, Medieval Europe can seem more like Mon­ty Python and the Holy Grail than the grim tales of grey-faced, mildewed kings, monks, knights, and peas­ants turned out by the Hol­ly­wood dozen. Yes, life could be bru­tal, bloody, dis­ease-rid­den, but it could also be absur­dist and unin­ten­tion­al­ly hilar­i­ous, qual­i­ties that reach their apex in the weird­ness of Hierony­mus Bosch’s “painful, hor­ri­ble” musi­cal instru­ments in his Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights.

While Bosch paint­ed his night­mar­ish cacoph­o­nies, Medieval scribes’ cats peed and left inky foot­prints on 15th cen­tu­ry man­u­scripts, with­in whose illus­trat­ed pages, rab­bits play church organs, valiant knights do bat­tle with giant snails, and a naked man blows a trum­pet with his rear end (a pre­cur­sor to the man in Bosch’s paint­ing with a flute stuck in his rear.) “These bizarre images,” TED Ed notes, “paint­ed with squir­rel-hair brush­es on vel­lum or parch­ment by monks, nuns, and urban crafts­peo­ple, pop­u­late the mar­gins of the most prized books from the Mid­dle Ages.”

The ani­mat­ed video les­son at the top by Michelle Brown “explores the rich his­to­ry and tra­di­tion of illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­scripts” in their eccen­tric­i­ty and seem­ing silli­ness. The ani­mal motifs in mar­gin­al illus­tra­tions were nei­ther aim­less doo­dles nor inside jokes. They were alle­gor­i­cal fig­ures descend­ed from the menageries of Medieval bes­tiaries, repeat­ed the­mat­i­cal­ly to rep­re­sent human vices and virtues. Rab­bits, for exam­ple, rep­re­sent­ed lust, and their music-mak­ing was a vir­tu­ous sub­li­ma­tion of the same.

These asso­ci­a­tions weren’t always so clear, espe­cial­ly when they were explic­it­ly reli­gious. The por­cu­pine pick­ing fruit from its spine could rep­re­sent either dev­il or sav­ior, depend­ing on con­text. The uni­corn, which can only be killed with its head in the lap of a vir­gin, might stand for sex­u­al temp­ta­tion or the sac­ri­fice of Christ. But the few read­ers in this man­u­script cul­ture would have rec­og­nized the ref­er­ences and allu­sions, although, like all signs, the illus­tra­tions com­mu­ni­cate sev­er­al dif­fer­ent, even con­tra­dic­to­ry, mean­ings at once.

And what of the butt trum­pet? It is “like­ly short­hand to express dis­ap­proval with, or add an iron­ic spin to, the action in the text.” The butt trum­pet, ladies and gen­tle­men, is as adver­tised: that most ven­er­a­ble of expres­sions, the fart joke, to which there is no wit­ty reply and which—as scat­o­log­i­cal humor can do—might be sly­ly sub­ver­sive polit­i­cal cri­tique. Lit­er­ate or not, Medieval Euro­peans spoke a lan­guage of sym­bols that stood in for whole folk tra­di­tions and the­olo­gies. The butt trum­pet, how­ev­er, is just objec­tive­ly, crude­ly fun­ny, prob­a­bly as much to the artists who drew them as to those of us, hun­dreds of years lat­er, encoun­ter­ing them for the first time. See sev­er­al more exam­ples here and learn more about Medieval and Renais­sance man­u­scripts here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to a Record­ing of a Song Writ­ten on a Man’s Butt in a 15-Cen­tu­ry Hierony­mus Bosch Paint­ing

The Flute of Shame: Dis­cov­er the Instrument/Device Used to Pub­licly Humil­i­ate Bad Musi­cians Dur­ing the Medieval Peri­od

Why Knights Fought Snails in Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Why Japan Has the Oldest Businesses in the World?: Hōshi, a 1300-Year-Old Hotel, Offers Clues

in History, Travel | December 7th, 2020

Per­haps, when the state of the world once again per­mits rea­son­ably con­ve­nient trav­el, you plan to vis­it Japan. If so, you’d do well to con­sid­er stay­ing at one of the coun­try’s ryokan, the tra­di­tion­al inns often locat­ed at hot springs. No accom­mo­da­tions could appeal more deeply to those in search of “old Japan,” and many ryokan deliv­er on that adjec­tive in the most lit­er­al sense. Take the Nisiya­ma Onsen Keiunkan, whose 1300 years of oper­a­tion at its hot spring in Yamanashi Pre­fec­ture make it the old­est hotel in the world. But it has yet to get the doc­u­men­tary treat­ment by Fritz Schu­mann, a Ger­man film­mak­er with an eye for Japan pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for his video on the “moun­tain monks” of Yam­a­ga­ta.

Schu­mann has, how­ev­er, made a sub­ject of the sec­ond-old­est hotel in the world, Komat­su’s Hōshi ryokan, found­ed in the year 718.  That Japan boasts both the word’s old­est and sec­ond-old­est hotels should sur­prise nobody who knows the nature of its busi­ness­es. “The coun­try is home to more than 33,000 with at least 100 years of his­to­ry — over 40 per­cent of the world’s total, accord­ing to a study by the Tokyo-based Research Insti­tute of Cen­ten­ni­al Man­age­ment,” write The New York Times’ Ben Doo­ley and Hisako Ueno.

“Over 3,100 have been run­ning for at least two cen­turies. Around 140 have exist­ed for more than 500 years. And at least 19 claim to have been con­tin­u­ous­ly oper­at­ing since the first mil­len­ni­um.” These shinise, or “old shops,” include brands like Nin­ten­do, found­ed as a play­ing-card com­pa­ny, and soy-sauce mak­er Kikko­man.

Doo­ley and Uneo high­light Ichi­wa, a shop that has sold mochi — those slight­ly sweet rice-based con­fec­tions often mold­ed into aes­thet­i­cal­ly pleas­ing shapes — for over a mil­len­ni­um. “Like many busi­ness­es in Japan,” Ichi­wa “takes the long view — albeit longer than most. By putting tra­di­tion and sta­bil­i­ty over prof­it and growth, Ichi­wa has weath­ered wars, plagues, nat­ur­al dis­as­ters, and the rise and fall of empires. Through it all, its rice flour cakes have remained the same.” At BBC’s Work­life, Bryan Lufkin exam­ines Tsuen Tea, a fix­ture of sub­ur­ban Kyoto since the year 1160, back when Kyoto was still Japan’s cap­i­tal, a his­to­ry that grants the city pride of place among tra­di­tion­al­ists. There, writes Lufkin, “many long-stand­ing busi­ness­es also tout a ded­i­ca­tion to good cus­tomer ser­vice as an ele­ment that keeps them thriv­ing.”

In Kyoto, or any­where else in Japan, this is “espe­cial­ly the case with ryokan,” which “treat guests like fam­i­ly.” Like many things Japan­ese, this aspect of the ryokan expe­ri­ence will both sur­prise first-time vis­i­tors and be just what they expect­ed. Whether in their look and feel, their set­tings, their stan­dard of ser­vice — or rather, in a com­bi­na­tion of all those qual­i­ties and oth­ers besides — ryokan offer some­thing avail­able nowhere else in the world. So do Japan’s oth­er shinise, which also set them­selves apart by hav­ing amassed the resources (finan­cial, famil­ial, and oth­er­wise) to keep going through hard times. This past year has been anoth­er such hard time, and with the ongo­ing pan­dem­ic still caus­ing a great deal of human and eco­nom­ic dam­age around the world, we might look to Hōshi and its long-lived kind for lessons on how do to busi­ness in the future.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Soy Sauce Has Been Made in Japan for Over 220 Years: An Inside View

Moun­tain Monks: A Vivid Short Doc­u­men­tary on the Monks Who Prac­tice an Ancient, Once-For­bid­den Reli­gion in Japan

Dis­cov­er the Japan­ese Muse­um Ded­i­cat­ed to Col­lect­ing Rocks That Look Like Human Faces

The Japan­ese Tra­di­tions of Sashiko & Boro: The Cen­turies-Old Craft That Mends Clothes in a Sus­tain­able, Artis­tic Way

Wabi-Sabi: A Short Film on the Beau­ty of Tra­di­tion­al Japan

20 Mes­mer­iz­ing Videos of Japan­ese Arti­sans Cre­at­ing Tra­di­tion­al Hand­i­crafts

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Why Humans Are Obsessed with Cats

in Biology, History, K-12, Life, Nature, Science | December 4th, 2020

A house cat is not real­ly a fur baby, but it is some­thing rather more remark­able: a tiny con­quis­ta­dor with the whole plan­et at its feet —Abi­gail Tuck­er

As part of its Annals of Obses­sion video series, The New York­er invit­ed sci­ence jour­nal­ist Abi­gail Tuck­er, author of The Lion in the Liv­ing Room, to reflect on “how felines took over the Inter­net, our homes, and our lives.”

It goes with­out say­ing that cats and humans have co-exist­ed for a very long time.

Most of us are acquaint­ed with the high regard in which Ancient Egyp­tians held Felis catus.

And we may know some­thing of their sea­far­ing his­to­ry, begin­ning with the Vikings and con­tin­u­ing on through Unsink­able Sam and oth­er cel­e­brat­ed ship’s cats.

An over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of us have spent the last decade or so glued to online exam­ples of their antics—rid­ing robot vac­u­ums, react­ing with ter­ror to cucum­bers, and pounc­ing on humans, some of whom have had the temer­i­ty to write and record voiceovers that sug­gest they have insight as to what goes on inside a cat’s hat. (As if!)

It’s grat­i­fy­ing to hear Tuck­er echo what cat lovers have long sus­pect­ed (and embla­zoned on t‑shirts, cof­fee mugs, and dec­o­ra­tive pillows)—the cats, not the own­ers, are the ones run­ning the show.

For­give us. Dogs have own­ers. Cats have staff.

Cats took a com­men­sal path to domes­ti­ca­tion, moti­vat­ed, then as now, by the food they knew to be stored in our set­tle­ments.

Tuck­er describes it as a series of cat con­trolled takeovers—a process of arti­fi­cial selec­tion, under­tak­en on the cats’ own ini­tia­tive:

House cats are supreme­ly adapt­able. They can live any­where and, while they must have plen­ty of pro­tein, they eat prac­ti­cal­ly any­thing that moves, from pel­i­cans to crick­ets, and many things that don’t, like hot dogs. (Some of their imper­iled feline rel­a­tives, by con­trast, are adapt­ed to hunt only a rare species of chin­chilla.) House cats can tweak their sleep­ing sched­ules and social lives. They can breed like crazy.

In cer­tain ways the house cat’s rise is trag­ic, for the same forces that favor them have destroyed many oth­er crea­tures. House cats are car­pet­bag­gers, arriv­istes, and they’re among the most trans­for­ma­tive invaders the world has ever seen—except for Homo sapi­ens, of course. It’s no coin­ci­dence that when they show up in ecosys­tems, lions and oth­er megafau­na are usu­al­ly on their way out.

Aloof as many of their num­ber may be, cats have engi­neered things in such a way as to be phys­i­cal­ly irre­sistible to most humans:

Their big heads and big eyes are so cute!

Their fur is so soft!

We can car­ry them around!

Dress them in doll clothes (some­times)!

Their cries mim­ic the cries of hun­gry human babies, and elic­it a sim­i­lar response from their human care­givers.

We may not love lit­ter box duty, but with 1 in 3 humans infect­ed by Tox­o­plas­ma gondii, we’ll like­ly be teth­ered to them for all eter­ni­ty.

For bet­ter or worse, we love them. And so do dog lovers. They just don’t know it yet.

But do not ever imag­ine that the feel­ing is rec­i­p­ro­cal.

They’re arch­car­ni­vores who can­not open their own cans. As Tuck­er wry­ly observes:

I think it’s fair to say that we are obsessed and they are not.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Cats: How Over 10,000 Years the Cat Went from Wild Preda­tor to Sofa Side­kick

GPS Track­ing Reveals the Secret Lives of Out­door Cats

In 1183, a Chi­nese Poet Describes Being Domes­ti­cat­ed by His Own Cats

How Humans Domes­ti­cat­ed Cats (Twice)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. She loves cats, but most recent­ly appeared as a French Cana­di­an bear who trav­els to New York City in search of food and mean­ing in Greg Kotis’ short film, L’Ourse.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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A 1913 Children’s Book Lampoons Duchamp, Picasso & Other Avant-Garde Artists: Read The Cubies’ ABC Online

in Art, Books, History | December 3rd, 2020

Igor Stravin­sky’s The Rite of Spring pre­miered in 1913, and its vio­lent break from musi­cal and chore­o­graph­ic tra­di­tion, so the sto­ry goes, pushed the gen­teel Parisian audi­ence to vio­lent rebel­lion. That tale may have grown taller over the past cen­tu­ry, but pub­lic dis­taste for then-nov­el trends in all forms of “mod­ern art” has left a paper trail. Here we have a par­tic­u­lar­ly amus­ing exhib­it, and long an obscure one: The Cubies’ ABC, a pic­ture book by a cou­ple named Mary Mills and Earl Har­vey Lyall. They were inspired by anoth­er major cul­tur­al event of 1913, the Inter­na­tion­al Exhi­bi­tion of Mod­ern Art, or “Armory Show,” which offered the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca its first look at ground­break­ing work by Mar­cel Duchamp, Pablo Picas­so, and Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky, among a host of oth­er for­eign artists.

The Lyalls, evi­dent­ly, were not impressed. In order to ridicule what they seem to have con­sid­ered the pre­ten­sions of the avant-garde, they came up with the Cubies, a trio of angu­lar, wild-haired trou­ble­mak­ers bent on dis­card­ing all estab­lished con­ven­tions in the name of Ego, the Future, and Intu­ition.

Those three con­cepts get their own pages in this alpha­bet­i­cal­ly orga­nized book, as do artists — not that the authors would uniron­i­cal­ly grant them the title — like Duchamp, “the Deep-Dyed Deceiv­er, who, draw­ing accor­dions, labels them stairs”; Kandin­sky, painter of “Kute ‘impro­vi­sa­tions’ ”; and even Gertrude Stein, “elo­quent scribe of the Futur­ist soul.” X stands, of course, for “the Xit,” a direc­tion “Xtreme­ly allur­ing when Cubies invite us to study their Art.”

“We tend to for­get, now that the Cubists and Futur­ists have become as inte­gral to the his­to­ry of art as the painters of the Dutch Gold­en Age and the Ital­ian Renais­sance, how hos­tile most peo­ple — even most artists — felt toward the non-rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al inno­va­tions of the artists on dis­play at the Armory,” says the Pub­lic Domain Review, where you can read The Cubies’ ABC in full.

You can also buy a copy of the reprint orga­nized by gal­lerist Fran­cis Nau­mann in com­mem­o­ra­tion of the Armory show’s cen­te­nary. “Peo­ple in those days thought that they could stop mod­ern art in its tracks,” says Nau­mann in a New York­er piece on the book. Did the Lyalls think the Cubies’ antics would land a deci­sive blow against abstrac­tion and sub­jec­tiv­i­ty? Then again, could they have imag­ined us enjoy­ing them more than a hun­dred years lat­er, in a time unknow­able to even the most far-sight­ed Futur­ist?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of the 1913 Exhi­bi­tion That Intro­duced Avant-Garde Art to Amer­i­ca

The Nazi’s Philis­tine Grudge Against Abstract Art and The “Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tion” of 1937

The Guggen­heim Puts Online 1700 Great Works of Mod­ern Art from 625 Artists

24,000 Vin­tage Car­toons from the Library of Con­gress Illus­trate the His­to­ry of This Mod­ern Art Form (1780–1977)

The Anti-Slav­ery Alpha­bet: 1846 Book Teach­es Kids the ABCs of Slavery’s Evils

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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What Ancient Egyptian Sounded Like & How We Know It

in History | December 2nd, 2020

If you’ve seen any Hol­ly­wood movie set in ancient Egypt, you already know how its lan­guage sound­ed: just like Eng­lish, but spo­ken with a more for­mal dic­tion and a range of broad­ly Mid­dle-East­ern accents. But then there are many com­pet­ing the­o­ries about life that long ago, and per­haps you’d pre­fer to believe the lin­guis­tic-his­tor­i­cal take pro­vid­ed in the video above. A pro­duc­tion of Joshua Rud­der’s NativLang, a Youtube chan­nel pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for its videos on ancient Latin and Chi­nese, it tells the sto­ry of “the many forms of the long-lived Egypt­ian lan­guages,” as well as its “ances­tors and rel­a­tives,” and how they’ve helped lin­guists deter­mine just how the ancient Egyp­tians real­ly spoke.

Rud­der begins with a cer­tain arti­fact called — per­haps you’ve heard of it — the Roset­ta Stone. Dis­cov­ered in 1799 dur­ing Napoleon’s cam­paign in Egypt, it “bore two Egypt­ian scripts and, aus­pi­cious­ly, a rough trans­la­tion in per­fect­ly read­able Greek.” Using this infor­ma­tion, the schol­ar Jean-François Cham­pol­lion became the first to deci­pher ancient Egypt­ian hiero­glyphs. But as to the ques­tion of what they sound­ed like when pro­nounced, the stone had no answers. Cham­pol­lion even­tu­al­ly became con­vinced that the still-liv­ing Cop­tic lan­guage was “the Egypt­ian lan­guage, the very same one that stretch­es back con­tin­u­ous­ly for thou­sands of years.”

Though Cop­tic sounds and gram­mar could pro­vide clues about spo­ken ancient Egypt­ian, it could­n’t get Cham­pol­lion all the way to accu­rate pro­nun­ci­a­tion. One press­ing goal was to fill in the lan­guage’s miss­ing vow­els, an essen­tial type of sound that nev­er­the­less went unrecord­ed by hiero­glyphs. To the archives, then, which in Egypt were espe­cial­ly vast and con­tained doc­u­ments dat­ing far back into his­to­ry. These enabled a process of “inter­nal recon­struc­tion,” which involved com­par­ing dif­fer­ent ver­sions of the Egypt­ian lan­guage to each oth­er, and which ulti­mate­ly “result­ed in an explo­sion of hiero­glyph­ic knowl­edge.”

But the jour­ney to recon­struct the speak­ing of this “longest writ­ten lan­guage on Earth” does­n’t stop there: it there­after makes such side quests as one to a “pock­et of Ethiopia” where peo­ple speak “a clus­ter of lan­guages grouped togeth­er under the label Omot­ic.” Along with the Semit­ic, the Amazigh, the Chadic, and oth­ers, trace­able with Egypt­ian to a com­mon ances­tor, these lan­guages pro­vid­ed infor­ma­tion essen­tial to the state of ancient Egypt­ian lin­guis­tic knowl­edge today. Giv­en the enor­mous amount of schol­ar­ship required to let us know what to call them, it’s enough to make you want ankhs to come back into fash­ion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Ancient Chi­nese Sound­ed Like — and How We Know It: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

What Ancient Latin Sound­ed Like, And How We Know It

What Did Etr­uscan Sound Like? An Ani­mat­ed Video Pro­nounces the Ancient Lan­guage That We Still Don’t Ful­ly Under­stand

What Did Old Eng­lish Sound Like? Hear Recon­struc­tions of Beowulf, The Bible, and Casu­al Con­ver­sa­tions

Hear The Epic of Gil­gamesh Read in the Orig­i­nal Akka­di­an and Enjoy the Sounds of Mesopotamia

Hear What the Lan­guage Spo­ken by Our Ances­tors 6,000 Years Ago Might Have Sound­ed Like: A Recon­struc­tion of the Pro­to-Indo-Euro­pean Lan­guage

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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A Flying Car Took to the Skies Back in 1949: See the Taylor Aerocar in Action

in History, Technology | November 26th, 2020

“A secret ques­tion hov­ers over us, a sense of dis­ap­point­ment, a bro­ken promise we were giv­en as chil­dren about what our adult world was sup­posed to be like,” the late anthro­pol­o­gist David Grae­ber once wrote in the Baf­fler. This refers to “a par­tic­u­lar gen­er­a­tional promise — giv­en to those who were chil­dren in the fifties, six­ties, sev­en­ties, or eight­ies — one that was nev­er quite artic­u­lat­ed as a promise but rather as a set of assump­tions about what our adult world would be like.” In the con­fus­ing­ly dis­ap­point­ing future we now inhab­it, one ques­tion hov­ers above them all: “Where, in short, are the fly­ing cars?”

Even those of us not yet born in the mid-20th cen­tu­ry can sense the cul­tur­al import of the fly­ing car to that era, and not just from its sci­ence fic­tion. Chuck Berry was singing about fly­ing cars back in 1956: His song “You Can’t Catch Me” tells of rac­ing down the New Jer­sey Turn­pike in a cus­tom-made “air­mo­bile,” a “Flight DeV­ille with a pow­er­ful motor and some hide­away wings.”


This was­n’t whol­ly fan­tas­ti­cal, giv­en that an actu­al fly­ing car had been built sev­en years ear­li­er. Demon­strat­ed in the news­reel from that year at the top of  the post, the Aero­car came designed and built by a solo inven­tor, for­mer World War II pilot Moul­ton Tay­lor of Longview, Wash­ing­ton, who in 1959 would appear on the pop­u­lar game show I’ve Got a Secret.

The pro­gram’s pan­elists attempt to guess the nature of Tay­lor’s inven­tion as he puts it togeth­er onstage, for the Aero­car required some assem­bly. Though con­sid­er­ably more com­pli­cat­ed than the push-but­ton mech­a­nism imag­ined by Berry, the process took only five min­utes to con­vert from auto­mo­bile to air­plane, or so the inven­tor promised. Despite secur­ing the Civ­il Avi­a­tion Author­i­ty’s approval for mass pro­duc­tion, Tay­lor could­n’t find a suf­fi­cient num­ber of buy­ers, and in the end only built six Aero­cars. But one of them still flies, as seen on the first episode of the 2008 series James May’s Big Ideas. “I wouldn’t have flown it if I’d seen the wings were attached with elab­o­rate paper­clips,” writes the for­mer Top Gear co-host, “but by the time I real­ized this, we were already at 2,000 feet.”

“As an air­plane, it was actu­al­ly pret­ty good,” May admits, “but then, it would be, because an air­plane is what it was.” As a car, “it was dia­bol­i­cal. Worse than the Bee­tle, to be hon­est, and not helped by the require­ment to drag all the unwant­ed air­planey bits behind you on a trail­er.” Still, the expe­ri­ence of fly­ing in the Aero­car clear­ly thrilled him, as it would any car or plane enthu­si­ast. Even in a non-air­wor­thy state the Aero­car cer­tain­ly thrills Matthew Burchette, cura­tor at Seat­tle’s Muse­um of Flight. In the video above he intro­duces the muse­um’s Aero­car III, the last one Tay­lor built. “If you’re about my age, you real­ly want­ed your jet­pack,” says the gray-haired Burchette, though a fly­ing car would also have done the trick. Alas, more than half a cen­tu­ry after Tay­lor’s ambi­tious project, human­i­ty seems to have made no appar­ent progress in that depart­ment; jet­packs, how­ev­er, seem to be com­ing along nice­ly.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

New­ly Unearthed Footage Shows Albert Ein­stein Dri­ving a Fly­ing Car (1931)

The Time­less Beau­ty of the Cit­roën DS, the Car Mythol­o­gized by Roland Barthes (1957)

A Har­row­ing Test Dri­ve of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s 1933 Dymax­ion Car: Art That Is Scary to Ride

178,000 Images Doc­u­ment­ing the His­to­ry of the Car Now Avail­able on a New Stan­ford Web Site

NASA Puts 400+ His­toric Exper­i­men­tal Flight Videos on YouTube

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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