The Polygraph: The Proto-Photocopy Machine Machine Invented in 1803 That Changed Thomas Jefferson’s Life

in History, Technology, Writing | November 24th, 2020

Today we asso­ciate the word poly­graph main­ly with the devices we call “lie detec­tors.” The unhid­den Greek terms from which it orig­i­nates sim­ply mean “mul­ti­ple writ­ing,” which seems apt enough in light of all those movie inter­ro­ga­tion scenes with their jud­der­ing par­al­lel nee­dles. But the first “poly­graph machine” mer­it­ing the name long pre­dates such cin­e­mat­ic clichés, and indeed cin­e­ma itself. Patent­ed in 1803 by an Eng­lish­man named John Isaac Hawkins, it con­sist­ed essen­tial­ly of twin pens, mount­ed side-by-side and con­nect­ed by means of levers and springs so as always to move in uni­son. The result, in the­o­ry, was that it would make an iden­ti­cal copy of a let­ter even as the writer wrote it.

“The poly­graph was push­ing tech­nol­o­gy to the absolute lim­it,” but for years “it was near­ly impos­si­ble to make it work cor­rect­ly.” So says Charles Mor­rill, a guide at Thomas Jef­fer­son­’s estate Mon­ti­cel­lo, in the video above.

Despite the pro­longed tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties, the third pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca fell in love with the poly­graph, “a device to dupli­cate let­ters, just the thing if you’re car­ry­ing on mul­ti­ple con­ver­sa­tions with dif­fer­ent peo­ple all over the world. You want to keep a copy of the let­ter to catch your­self up, to see what you had writ­ten to cause a response” — and, of spe­cial con­cern to a nation­al politi­cian, to check on the exact degree to which the press was mis­quot­ing you.

Image by the Smith­son­ian, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Jef­fer­son wrote near­ly 20,000 let­ters, one of them a com­plaint to John Adams about suf­fer­ing “under the per­se­cu­tion of Let­ters,” a con­di­tion ensur­ing that “from sun-rise to one or two o’clock, I am drudg­ing at the writ­ing table.” That the poly­graph reduced this drudgery some­what made it, in Jef­fer­son­’s words, “the finest inven­tion of the present age.” Like tech­no­log­i­cal ear­ly adopters today, Jef­fer­son acquired each new mod­el as it came out, the device hav­ing been con­tin­u­al­ly retooled by Amer­i­can rights-hold­er Charles Will­son Peale. By 1809 Peale had improved the poly­graph to the point that Jef­fer­son could write that it “has spoiled me for the old copy­ing press the copies of which are hard­ly ever leg­i­ble … I could not, now there­fore, live with­out the Poly­graph.” Imag­ine how he would’ve felt had Mon­ti­cel­lo been wired for e‑mail.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dis­cov­er Thomas Jefferson’s Cut-and-Paste Ver­sion of the Bible, and Read the Curi­ous Edi­tion Online

Thomas Jefferson’s Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great Grand­son Pos­es for a Pres­i­den­tial Por­trait

Thomas Jefferson’s Hand­writ­ten Vanil­la Ice Cream Recipe

Dis­cov­er Friedrich Nietzsche’s Curi­ous Type­writer, the “Malling-Hansen Writ­ing Ball” (Cir­ca 1881)

The First Music Stream­ing Ser­vice Was Invent­ed in 1881: Dis­cov­er the Théâtro­phone

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 Curious Herbal: 500 Beautiful Illustrations of Medicinal Plants Drawn by Elizabeth Blackwell in 1737 (to Save Her Family from Financial Ruin)

in Art, Books, History, Science | November 23rd, 2020

Some­times beau­ti­ful things come out of ter­ri­ble cir­cum­stances. This does not jus­ti­fy more ter­ri­ble cir­cum­stances. But as evi­dence of the resilience, resource­ful­ness, and cre­ativ­i­ty of human beings—and more specif­i­cal­ly of moth­ers in dire straits—we offer the fol­low­ing: A Curi­ous Herbal, Eliz­a­beth Blackwell’s fine­ly illus­trat­ed, engraved, and col­ored “herbal,” the term for a “book of plants, describ­ing their appear­ance, their prop­er­ties and how they may be used for prepar­ing oint­ments,” the British Library writes.

Born some­time around 1700 to a suc­cess­ful mer­chant fam­i­ly in Scot­land, Eliz­a­beth mar­ried Alexan­der Black­well, a “shady char­ac­ter” who pro­ceed­ed to drag her through a series of mis­ad­ven­tures involv­ing him pos­ing as a doc­tor and a print­er, despite the fact that he’d had no train­ing in either pro­fes­sion.

Black­well incurred sev­er­al hefty fines from the author­i­ties, which he could not pay, and he was final­ly remand­ed to debtor’s prison, an insti­tu­tion that often left women with young chil­dren to fend for them­selves.

“With Alexan­der in prison, Eliz­a­beth was forced to rely on her own resources to keep her­self and her child.” For­tu­nate­ly, she had been pre­pared with life skills dur­ing her pros­per­ous upbring­ing, hav­ing learned a thing or two about busi­ness and “received tuition in draw­ing and paint­ing, as many well-to-do young women then did.” Black­well real­ized a pub­lish­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty: find­ing no high-qual­i­ty herbals avail­able, she decid­ed to make her own in “a rare tri­umph of turn­ing des­per­a­tion into inspi­ra­tion,” Maria Popo­va writes.

After befriend­ing the head cura­tor Chelsea Physic Gar­den — a teach­ing facil­i­ty for appren­tice apothe­caries estab­lished sev­er­al decades ear­li­er — she real­ized that there was a need for a hand­book depict­ing and describ­ing the garden’s new col­lec­tion of mys­te­ri­ous plants from the New World. A keen observ­er, a gift­ed artist, and an entre­pre­neur by nature, she set about bridg­ing the world’s need and her own.

The gor­geous book, A Curi­ous Herbal (1737–39), was not all Blackwell’s work, though she com­plet­ed all of the illus­tra­tions from start to fin­ish. She also enlist­ed her husband’s help, vis­it­ing his cell to have him “sup­ply each plant’s name in Latin, Greek, Ital­ian, Span­ish, Dutch, and Ger­man.” Black­well pro­duced 500 illus­tra­tions in total. She adver­tised “by word of mouth,” notes the British Library, “and in sev­er­al jour­nals” and “showed her­self an adept busi­ness­woman, strik­ing mutu­al­ly advan­ta­geous deals with book­sellers that ensured the finan­cial suc­cess of the herbal.”

Black­well not only ben­e­fit­ed her fam­i­ly and her read­ers, but she also gave her book to posterity—though she couldn’t have known it at the time. Her herbal has been dig­i­tized in full by the Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library. The herbal will also give back to the nat­ur­al world she lov­ing­ly ren­dered (includ­ing plants that have since gone extinct). Popo­va has made a selec­tion of the illus­tra­tions avail­able as prints to ben­e­fit The Nature Con­ser­van­cy. See Blackwell’s dig­i­tized book in full here and order prints at Brain Pick­ings.

via Brain­Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Dis­cov­er Emi­ly Dickinson’s Herbar­i­um: A Beau­ti­ful Dig­i­tal Edi­tion of the Poet’s Col­lec­tion of Pressed Plants & Flow­ers Is Now Online

His­toric Man­u­script Filled with Beau­ti­ful Illus­tra­tions of Cuban Flow­ers & Plants Is Now Online (1826)

The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library Makes 150,000 High-Res Illus­tra­tions of the Nat­ur­al World Free to Down­load

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

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How Errol Morris Became Obsessed with — and Figured Out — the Truth of a Famous War Photograph

in History, Photography | November 19th, 2020

Errol Mor­ris did­n’t go all the way to the Crimean Penin­su­la just because of a sen­tence writ­ten by Susan Son­tag. “No,” he once explained to a friend, “it was actu­al­ly two sen­tences.” Found in Regard­ing the Pain of Oth­ers, Son­tag’s late book-length essay on war pho­tog­ra­phy, these lines deal with the fact that “many of the canon­i­cal images of ear­ly war pho­tog­ra­phy turn out to have been staged, or to have had their sub­jects tam­pered with.” Take Val­ley of the Shad­ow of Death, pio­neer­ing war pho­tog­ra­ph­er Roger Fen­ton’s famous­ly des­o­late 1855 image from the Crimean War. Fen­ton actu­al­ly shot this land­scape twice: in one pic­ture, “can­non­balls are thick on the ground to the left of the road, but before tak­ing the sec­ond pic­ture — the one that is always repro­duced — he over­saw the scat­ter­ing of the can­non­balls on the road itself.”

Or did he? Mor­ris had his doubts — and, as the mak­er of such acclaimed doc­u­men­taries on the nature of truth and its rep­re­sen­ta­tion as The Thin Blue Line and Stan­dard Oper­at­ing Pro­ce­dure and the author of the book Believ­ing is See­ing: Obser­va­tions on the Mys­ter­ies of Pho­tog­ra­phy — he clear­ly has an intel­lec­tu­al invest­ment in the sub­ject.

“I spent a con­sid­er­able amount of time look­ing at the two pho­tographs and think­ing about the two sen­tences,” Mor­ris writes in a 2007 New York Times blog post. “How did Son­tag know that Fen­ton altered the land­scape or, for that mat­ter, ‘over­saw the scat­ter­ing of the can­non­balls on the road itself?’ ” How, for that mat­ter, “did Son­tag know the sequence of the pho­tographs? How did she know which pho­to­graph came first?”

Unable to turn up any per­sua­sive evi­dence, Mor­ris launched an inves­ti­ga­tion of his own, inter­view­ing experts, dig­ging into Fen­ton’s let­ters, and even­tu­al­ly mak­ing his way to the Val­ley of the Shad­ow of Death itself (not to be con­fused with the oth­er, bet­ter-known val­ley across which Ten­nyson’s Light Brigade charged). All of this Mor­ris did in the name of find­ing out which came first, the pho­to with the can­non­balls beside the road, or the one with the can­non­balls on the road. You can hear him dis­cuss this increas­ing­ly obses­sive quest for the truth in the video above from Vox’s Dark­room, the series that pre­vi­ous­ly gave us a break­down of the very first faked pho­to­graph. But then, as this and oth­er inves­ti­ga­tions by Mor­ris into the rela­tion­ship between images, lan­guage, and real­i­ty have under­scored, there is no such thing as a true pho­to­graph.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Errol Mor­ris: Two Essen­tial Truths About Pho­tog­ra­phy

Errol Mor­ris Med­i­tates on the Mean­ing and His­to­ry of Abra­ham Lincoln’s Last Pho­to­graph

How the “First Pho­to­jour­nal­ist,” Math­ew Brady, Shocked the Nation with Pho­tos from the Civ­il War

Why the Sovi­ets Doc­tored Their Most Icon­ic World War II Vic­to­ry Pho­to, “Rais­ing a Flag Over the Reich­stag”

The First Faked Pho­to­graph (1840)

Errol Mor­ris Makes His Ground­break­ing Series, First Per­son, Free to Watch Online: Binge Watch His Inter­views with Genius­es, Eccentrics, Obses­sives & Oth­er Unusu­al Types

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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Experience Blade Runner Like You Never Have Before Through a Feature-Length Remastered Soundtrack

in Film, History, Music | November 18th, 2020

There is no one Blade Run­ner. Rid­ley Scot­t’s influ­en­tial “neo-noir” has appeared in sev­er­al dif­fer­ent ver­sions over the past 38 years, both offi­cial — the “direc­tor’s cut,” the “final cut,” and lest we for­get, the now-derid­ed first the­atri­cal cut — and unof­fi­cial. So has Blade Run­ner’s sound­track, the first offi­cial release of which lagged the film by about a dozen years, and even then did­n’t include all the music so inte­gral to the unprece­dent­ed aes­thet­ic rich­ness of the futur­is­tic set­ting. Then, about a dozen more years lat­er, fol­lowed an expand­ed sound­track album, which for many fans still proved unsat­is­fy­ing. In the name of com­plete­ness and son­ic fideli­ty, at least five wide­ly dis­trib­uted bootlegs have attempt­ed to fill the gap.

Now, in our 21st-cen­tu­ry age of stream­ing, we have fan-made “remas­ters” of the Blade Run­ner sound­track like the above, the 5.7‑million-times-viewed work of a user called Greendragon861. Run­ning just over one hour and 52 min­utes — near­ly the length of the var­i­ous cuts of Blade Run­ner itself — this son­ic expe­ri­ence includes, of course, the well-known elec­tron­ic pieces by com­pos­er Van­ge­lis, those that come right to mind when you envi­sion the flame-belch­ing indus­tri­al land­scape of 21st-cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les or a police “spin­ner” tak­ing to the skies. But it also incor­po­rates back­ground music, sound effects, and even snatch­es of dia­logue from the movie. The result feels a great deal like watch­ing Blade Run­ner with­out actu­al­ly watch­ing Blade Run­ner.

Despite ini­tial­ly flop­ping, at least in the West, Blade Run­ner has exert­ed an enor­mous influ­ence on oth­er art and media — indeed, on the way human­i­ty envi­sions the future — and one still spread­ing near­ly four decades lat­er. The film seems unsur­pass­able in that regard, an achieve­ment cred­itable to a range of cre­ators: direc­tor Rid­ley Scott, of course; but also Philip K. Dick, author of its source mate­r­i­al; the late Syd Mead, who as a “visu­al futur­ist” gave focus to the world’s look and feel; mod­el mas­ter Dou­glas Trum­bull, thanks in part to whom its built and mechan­i­cal envi­ron­ment has aged so well. The list goes on, and it should­n’t fail to include Van­ge­lis as well as every­one else respon­si­ble for this intri­cate sound­scape, with­out which Blade Run­ner would­n’t be Blade Run­ner, no mat­ter the cut.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Blade Run­ner Cap­tured the Imag­i­na­tion of a Gen­er­a­tion of Elec­tron­ic Musi­cians

Sean Con­nery (RIP) Reads C.P. Cavafy’s Epic Poem “Itha­ca,” Set to the Music of Van­ge­lis

The Sounds of Blade Run­ner: How Music & Sound Effects Became Part of the DNA of Rid­ley Scott’s Futur­is­tic World

Stream 72 Hours of Ambi­ent Sounds from Blade Run­ner: Relax, Go to Sleep in a Dystopi­an Future

Drone Footage of San Fran­cis­co Set to the Music of Blade Run­ner 2049

The City in Cin­e­ma Mini-Doc­u­men­taries Reveal the Los Ange­les of Blade Run­ner, Her, Dri­ve, Repo Man, and More

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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Constantly Wrong: Filmmaker Kirby Ferguson Makes the Case Against Conspiracy Theories

in Current Affairs, History, Politics | November 16th, 2020

Dis­cor­dian writer and prankster Robert Anton Wil­son cel­e­brat­ed con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries as decen­tral­ized pow­er incar­nate. “Con­spir­a­cy is just anoth­er name for coali­tion,” he has a char­ac­ter say in The His­tor­i­cal Illu­mi­na­tus Chron­i­cles. Accord­ing to Wil­son, any suf­fi­cient­ly imag­i­na­tive group of peo­ple can make a fic­tion real. Anoth­er state­ment of his sounds more omi­nous, read in the light of how we usu­al­ly think about con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry: “Real­i­ty is what you can get away with.”

When his­to­ri­an Richard Hof­s­tadter diag­nosed what he called “the para­noid style in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics,” he was quick to point out that it pre­dat­ed the “extreme right-wingers” of his time by sev­er­al hun­dred years. Where Wil­son thinks of con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry as a shin­ing exam­ple of ratio­nal thought against a con­spir­a­cy of Kings and Popes, Hof­s­tadter saw it as anti-Enlight­en­ment, an extreme reac­tion in the U.S. to Illu­min­ism, “a some­what naive and utopi­an move­ment,” Hof­s­tadter writes dis­mis­sive­ly.

Per­haps the utopi­an and the para­noid style are not so eas­i­ly dis­tin­guish­able, in that they both “promise to deliv­er pow­er­ful insights, promise to trans­form how you see for the bet­ter,” says Kir­by Fer­gu­son, cre­ator of the Every­thing is a Remix Series episode below. But no mat­ter how dark or illu­mi­nat­ed they may be, he sug­gests, all con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries share the com­mon fea­ture of being “con­stant­ly wrong.” Ferguson’s new film series, This is Not a Con­spir­a­cy The­o­ry digs deep­er into the “role of con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries in Amer­i­can cul­ture,” he writes on his site.

Despite its osten­si­ble sub­ject, the project’s “ulti­mate pur­pose is to intro­duce peo­ple to the realms of sys­tems sci­ence, which is where we can bet­ter under­stand the hid­den forces that shape our lives.” Pro­duced over eight years in an enter­tain­ing “con­spir­a­cy-like style,” the film cham­pi­ons skep­ti­cism and com­plex­i­ty over the cer­tain­ty and pat, closed-cir­cle nar­ra­tives offered by con­spir­acists. Con­spir­a­cy theories—like the innu­mer­able per­mu­ta­tions of the JFK assas­si­na­tion, Chem­trails, or Roswell—are “too much like movies,” he says, to con­tain very much real­i­ty.

Ferguson’s vision of the world resem­bles Wilson’s, who wrote most of his work before the inter­net. Real­i­ty, he says, is a “mas­sive, decen­tral­ized hive of activ­i­ty.” Pow­er and con­trol exist, of course, but there is no man behind the cur­tain, no secret hier­ar­chies. Just bil­lions of peo­ple pulling their own levers to make things hap­pen, cre­at­ing a real­i­ty that is a sum, at any giv­en moment, of all those lever-pulls. Are there no such thing as con­spir­a­cies? “To be sure,” as Michael Par­en­ti argues, “con­spir­a­cy is a legit­i­mate con­cept in law,” and actu­al con­spir­a­cies, like Water­gate or Iran-Con­tra, “are a mat­ter of pub­lic record.”

What dif­fer­en­ti­ates sus­pi­cion about events like these from what Par­en­ti calls “wacko con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries”? Maybe a sec­tion Fer­gu­son left out of his “Con­stant­ly Wrong” episode at the top will illu­mi­nate. A con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry, he writes, “is a claim of secret crimes by a hid­den group, and this claim is dri­ven by a com­mu­ni­ty of ama­teurs” who are more eager to believe than to apply crit­i­cal think­ing. Learn more about Ferguson’s new film here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Every­thing is a Remix: The Full Series, Explor­ing the Sources of Cre­ativ­i­ty, Released in One Pol­ished HD Video on Its 5th Anniver­sary

Neil Arm­strong Sets Straight an Inter­net Truther Who Accused Him of Fak­ing the Moon Land­ing (2000)

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Daugh­ter Vivian Debunks the Age-Old Moon Land­ing Con­spir­a­cy The­o­ry

The Paul McCart­ney is Dead Con­spir­a­cy The­o­ry, Explained

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

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The Five Minute Museum: A Stop Motion Animation Shows the History of Civilization at Breakneck Speed

in Animation, Comedy, Fashion, History, Museums | November 13th, 2020

Exper­i­men­tal direc­tor and ani­ma­tor Paul Bush’s 2015 short film The Five-Minute Muse­um, above, is the dizzy­ing anti­dote to stand­ing, foot­sore, in front of a vit­rine crowd­ed with Ancient Greek amphoras or exquis­ite­ly craft­ed pock­et watch­es and won­der­ing, not about his­to­ry, cul­ture or the nature of time, but whether you can jus­ti­fy spend­ing $15 for an under­whelm­ing cheese and toma­to sand­wich in the muse­um cafe.

It’s a break­neck stop motion jour­ney through the his­to­ry of civ­i­liza­tion via six muse­um collections—three in Lon­don and three in Switzer­land.

Pre­sent­ed pri­mar­i­ly as stills that flash by at a rate of 24 per sec­ond, Bush groups like objects togeth­er, “there­by allow­ing the tri­umphs of human endeav­or to be seen even in far cor­ners of the land, by the bedrid­den, the infirm and the lazy.”

His sense of humor asserts itself the minute an assort­ment of ancient shards appear to ren­der them­selves into not just a state of whole­ness, but an entire up close soci­ety in close-up. It doesn’t take long for these ves­sels’ clash­ing of war­riors to give way to a com­pos­ite por­trait of idle youth, whose flir­ta­tions are stoked by a num­ber of man­ic pipers in rapid suc­ces­sion, and Andy Cow­ton’s orig­i­nal music and sound design.

It’s a shock when Bush slows down and pulls back to show the source objects in their muse­um cas­es, qui­et as a tomb, the sort of dis­play most vis­i­tors blow past en route to some­thing sex­i­er, like a dinosaur or a block­buster exhib­it requir­ing timed entry tick­ets.

Oth­er high­lights include a live­ly assort­ments of guns, hats, chairs, and plas­tic toys.

If you start feel­ing over­whelmed by the visu­al inten­si­ty, don’t wor­ry. Bush builds in a bit of a breather once you hit the clocks, the bulk of which pre­sum­ably hail from the Bey­er Clock and Watch Muse­um in Zurich.

The inge­nious ani­mat­ed short was 10 years in the mak­ing, a fact the artist mod­est­ly down­plays:

It’s very sim­ple. Sim­ple sto­ry, a sim­ple tech­nique and that’s what I like. Poet­ry should be a lit­tle bit stu­pid. This is what Pushkin says, and I try and make my films a lit­tle bit stu­pid as well.

In addi­tion to the Bey­er Clock and Watch Muse­um, you’ll find the fea­tured arti­facts housed in the British Muse­um, the Vic­to­ria and Albert Muse­um, London’s Muse­um of the Home (for­mer­ly known as the Gef­frye Muse­um) as well as the Lucerne His­tor­i­cal Muse­um and the Bern His­tor­i­cal Muse­um.

Expect a much slow­er expe­ri­ence.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

A Vir­tu­al Tour Inside the Hayao Miyazaki’s Stu­dio Ghi­b­li Muse­um

Watch Art on Ancient Greek Vas­es Come to Life with 21st Cen­tu­ry Ani­ma­tion

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of 30 World-Class Muse­ums & Safe­ly Vis­it 2 Mil­lion Works of Fine Art

Take Immer­sive Vir­tu­al Tours of the World’s Great Muse­ums: The Lou­vre, Her­mitage, Van Gogh Muse­um & Much More

Where to Find Free Art Images & Books from Great Muse­ums, and Free Books from Uni­ver­si­ty Press­es

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Help your­self to her free down­load­able poster series, encour­ag­ing cit­i­zens to wear masks. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Futurist from 1901 Describes the World of 2001: Opera by Telephone, Free College & Pneumatic Tubes Aplenty

in History, Magazines, Technology | November 12th, 2020

Just shy of 120 years ago, “the wis­est and most care­ful men in our great­est insti­tu­tions of sci­ence and learn­ing” told Amer­i­ca what would change by the far-flung dawn of 2001. C, X and Q gone from the alpha­bet; “Air-Ships” in the skies, strict­ly for mil­i­tary pur­pos­es (pas­sen­ger traf­fic being han­dled by “fast elec­tric ships”); straw­ber­ries as large as apples; uni­ver­si­ty edu­ca­tion “free to every man and woman”: these are just a few of the details of life in the com­ing 21st cen­tu­ry. We for whom the year 2001 is now firm­ly in the past will get a laugh out of all this. But as with any set of pre­dic­tions, amid the miss­es come par­tial hits. We don’t get our “hot and cold air from spig­ots,” but we do get it from air-con­di­tion­ing and heat­ing sys­tems. We don’t send pho­tographs across the world by tele­graph, but the device we all keep in our pock­ets does the job well enough.

Writ­ten by a civ­il engi­neer named John Elfreth Watkins, Jr. (pre­sum­ably the son of Smith­son­ian Cura­tor of Mechan­i­cal Tech­nol­o­gy John Elfreth Watkins, Sr.), “What May Hap­pen in the Next Hun­dred Years” ran in the Decem­ber 1900 issue of that renowned futur­o­log­i­cal organ Ladies’ Home Jour­nal. You can hear it read aloud, and see it accom­pa­nied by his­tor­i­cal film clips, in the Voic­es of the Past video above.

A few years ago the piece came back into cir­cu­la­tion on the inter­net (which goes unmen­tioned by its experts, more con­cerned as they were with pro­lif­er­a­tion of tele­phone lines and pneu­mat­ic tubes) and its pre­dic­tions were put to the test. At the Sat­ur­day Evening Post, Jeff Nils­son gives Watkins (once a Post con­trib­u­tor him­self) points for less out­landish prophe­cies, such as a rise in human­i­ty’s life expectan­cy and aver­age height.

Watkins describes his sources as “the most learned and con­ser­v­a­tive minds in Amer­i­ca.” In some areas they were too con­ser­v­a­tive: they fore­see “Trains One Hun­dred and Fifty Miles an Hour,” but as Nils­son notes, today’s “high-speed trains are trav­el­ing over 300 mph. Just not in the Unit­ed States.” Amer­i­cans did lose their street­cars as pre­dict­ed, but not due to their replace­ment by sub­ways and mov­ing side­walks — and what would these experts make of the street­car’s 21st-cen­tu­ry renais­sance? When Watkins writes that “grand opera will be tele­phoned to pri­vate homes,” we may think of the Met’s cur­rent COVID-prompt­ed stream­ing, a sce­nario that would have occurred to few in a world yet to expe­ri­ence even the Span­ish flu pan­dem­ic of 1918. But then, the future’s defin­ing qual­i­ty has always been its very unknowa­bil­i­ty: con­sid­er how much has come to pass since we last post­ed about these pre­dic­tions here on Open Cul­ture — not least the end of Ladies Home Jour­nal itself.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

In 1900, Ladies’ Home Jour­nal Pub­lish­es 28 Pre­dic­tions for the Year 2000

1902 French Trad­ing Cards Imag­ine “Women of the Future”

In 1911, Thomas Edi­son Pre­dicts What the World Will Look Like in 2011: Smart Phones, No Pover­ty, Libraries That Fit in One Book

Niko­la Tesla’s Pre­dic­tions for the 21st Cen­tu­ry: The Rise of Smart Phones & Wire­less, The Demise of Cof­fee, The Rule of Eugen­ics (1926/35)

How French Artists in 1899 Envi­sioned Life in the Year 2000: Draw­ing the Future

9 Sci­ence-Fic­tion Authors Pre­dict the Future: How Jules Verne, Isaac Asi­mov, William Gib­son, Philip K. Dick & More Imag­ined the World Ahead

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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How the Beach Boys Created Their Pop Masterpieces: “Good Vibrations,” Pet Sounds, and More

in History, Music | November 11th, 2020

If you ever decide to lis­ten through the Beach Boys’ entire stu­dio discog­ra­phy, one album per week, it will take about six months. I know because I just fin­ished doing it myself, begin­ning with their sim­ple celebration/exploitation of ear­ly-60s youth beach-and-car cul­ture Surfin’ Safari and end­ing, six months yet half a cen­tu­ry lat­er, with the lush­ly ele­giac That’s Why God Made the Radio. Between those points, of course, came the songs every­one knows, the hits that made the Beach Boys “Amer­i­ca’s Band.” But as many times as we hap­pen to have heard them, how well do we real­ly know, say, “Good Vibra­tions” or “God Only Knows” — let alone the defin­i­tive artis­tic state­ment of an album that is Pet Sounds?

We can get to know them bet­ter through the work of the music-ori­ent­ed video essay­ists of Youtube, who in recent years have turned their atten­tion to the Beach Boys cat­a­log. Not that true pop-music obses­sives ever real­ly turned away from it: sure­ly, at some point in your life, you’ve met the kind of exegete intent on con­vinc­ing you of the artis­tic glo­ries of the minia­ture sym­phonies to teenage long­ing com­posed by the band’s mas­ter­mind Bri­an Wil­son. But today they can incor­po­rate visu­als into their argu­ment, as well as pas­sages from and ele­ments of the music itself, to more clear­ly reveal the for­mi­da­ble inspi­ra­tion and crafts­man­ship that went into these osten­si­bly straight­for­ward odes to love and good times.

Whether in 1966 or today, even an inat­ten­tive lis­ten­er can sense the scale of ambi­tion present in a song like “Good Vibra­tions.” As not­ed in Poly­phon­ic’s analy­sis, its pro­duc­tion cost between $50,000 and $75,000 ($370,000-$550,000 today), mak­ing it the most expen­sive sin­gle record­ing to date. But in its three min­utes and 39 sec­onds, “Bri­an Wil­son man­aged to put togeth­er a song dense enough that you could teach an entire course on it, all while main­tain­ing a devo­tion to radio-friend­ly, ear-catch­ing hooks.” The moti­va­tion to do this, so the leg­end has it, came from the Bea­t­les, who ear­li­er that year had rede­fined the very form of the album with Revolver — a response in part to Pet Sounds, itself fired by the ear­li­er inno­va­tions of the Bea­t­les’ Rub­ber Soul.

This friend­ly (if high-stakes) com­pe­ti­tion con­sti­tutes the back­ground of the nor­mal­ly Bea­t­les-ori­ent­ed chan­nel The Hol­ly­Hobs’ video essay on “God Only Knows,” a song so glo­ri­ous that even Paul McCart­ney names it among the best of all time. And it counts as but one of the high­lights on Pet Sounds, an overview of which you can hear in this Pitch­fork “Lin­er Notes” video. That video empha­sizes Wilson’s cen­tral role in the pro­duc­tion, some­thing that would be dif­fi­cult to over-empha­size: when for­mer Bea­t­les pub­li­cist Derek Tay­lor signed on with with Beach Boys, he based his whole cam­paign on the claim that “Bri­an Wil­son is a genius.”

What makes that true is the sub­ject of the video above by music-and-film Youtu­ber Jef­frey Still­well (He’s also cre­at­ed anoth­er video look­ing at the “lost years,” when a psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly strug­gling Wil­son began to with­draw from the band, but kept on mak­ing music.) Only those who lis­ten to the the entire Beach Boys discog­ra­phy can ful­ly appre­ci­ate what Wil­son brought to the band, and per­haps more impor­tant­ly, how his work was enriched by the con­tri­bu­tions of the oth­er mem­bers. These include, among oth­ers, the orig­i­nal core of Wilson’s broth­ers Carl and Den­nis, Al Jar­dine, and even the oft-vil­i­fied yet ulti­mate­ly indis­pens­able Mike Love — not that “Koko­mo” is going to inspire a video essay any time soon.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Enter Bri­an Wilson’s Cre­ative Process While Mak­ing The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds 50 Years Ago: A Fly-on-the Wall View

Hear the Beach Boys’ Angel­ic Vocal Har­monies in Four Iso­lat­ed Tracks from Pet Sounds: “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “God Only Knows,” “Sloop John B” & “Good Vibra­tions”

John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd Get Bri­an Wil­son Out of Bed and Force Him to Go Surf­ing, 1976

The Sto­ry of “Wipe Out,” the Clas­sic Surf Rock Instru­men­tal

How “Straw­ber­ry Fields For­ev­er” Con­tains “the Cra­zi­est Edit” in Bea­t­les His­to­ry

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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