How to Shop Online & Check Your E‑Mail on the Go: A 1980s British TV Show Demonstrates

“Links between com­put­ers and tele­vi­sion sets are, it is always threat­ened, about to her­ald in an age of unbe­liev­able con­ve­nience,” announces tele­vi­sion pre­sen­ter Tony Bastable in the 1984 clip above, “where all the socia­bil­i­ty of going down to your cor­ner shop to order the week’s gro­ceries will be replaced with an order over the air­waves.” Do tell. Live though we increas­ing­ly do with inter­net-con­nect­ed “smart TVs,” the only unfa­mil­iar-sound­ing part of that pre­dic­tion is its ref­er­ence to tele­vi­sion sets. But back then, most every home com­put­er used them as dis­plays, and when also plugged into the tele­phone line they grant­ed users the pre­vi­ous­ly unthink­able abil­i­ty to make instant finan­cial trans­ac­tions at any hour of the day or night, with­out leav­ing the house.

Mun­dane though it sounds now that many of us both do all our work and get all our enter­tain­ment online, pay­ing bills was a draw for ear­ly adopters, who could come from unlike­ly places: Not­ting­ham, for instance, the Not­ting­ham Build­ing Soci­ety being one of the first finan­cial insti­tu­tions in the world to offer online bank­ing to its mem­bers.

Clos­er to Thames Head­quar­ters, North Lon­don cou­ple Pat and Julian Green appear in the clip above to demon­strate how to use some­thing called “e‑mail.” But first they must hook up their modem and con­nect to Pres­tel (a nation­al online net­work that in the Unit­ed King­dom played some­thing like the role Mini­tel did in France), an “extreme­ly sim­ple” process that will look ago­niz­ing­ly com­pli­cat­ed to any­one who grew up in the age of wi-fi.

I myself grew up using the TRS-80 Mod­el 100, an ear­ly lap­top inher­it­ed from my technophile grand­fa­ther. Bastable whips out the very same com­put­er in the seg­ment above, shot dur­ing Data­base’s trip to Japan. “The big advan­tage of a piece of equip­ment like this is to be able to cou­ple it up back to my home base over the tele­phone line using one of these,” he says from his seat on a train, hold­ing up the acoustic cou­pler designed to con­nect the Mod­el 100 direct­ly to a stan­dard hand­set, in this case the pay phone in the front of the car­riage. Alas, Bastable finds that “none of us have got enough change to make the call to Eng­land,” forc­ing him to check his mes­sages from his hotel room instead. Would that I could send him a vision of my effort­less expe­ri­ence con­nect­ing to wi-fi onboard a train cross­ing South Korea just yes­ter­day. The future, to coin a phrase, is now.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How to Send an E‑mail: A 1984 British Tele­vi­sion Broad­cast Explains This “Sim­ple” Process

How France Invent­ed a Pop­u­lar, Prof­itable Inter­net of Its Own in the 80s: The Rise and Fall of Mini­tel

From the Annals of Opti­mism: The News­pa­per Indus­try in 1981 Imag­ines its Dig­i­tal Future

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 or on Face­book.

Watch Accurate Recreations of Medieval Italian Longsword Fighting Techniques, All Based on a Manuscript from 1404

Giv­en recent events, the prospect of hun­dreds of young men meet­ing on Face­book, then trav­el­ing from around the coun­try to a cen­tral U.S. loca­tion might sound like rea­son­able cause for alarm. Yet a recent con­ven­tion fit­ting that descrip­tion had noth­ing to do with polit­i­cal vio­lence but, rather, a cel­e­bra­tion and appre­ci­a­tion of the name “Josh” (full dis­clo­sure: this writer did not attend). The gath­er­ing of the Josh­es this past April in Nebras­ka could not have been more peace­ful, includ­ing its fin­ish­ing bat­tle royale, con­duct­ed with pool noo­dles. (Win­ner: adorable 4‑year-old Josh Vin­son, Jr., or “Lit­tle Josh,” from Lin­coln, NE).

The Josh­es had no con­cern for prop­er pool-noo­dle-wield­ing tech­nique, if there is such a thing. But groups of peo­ple who gath­er around the coun­try to stage medieval-style bat­tles in live-action role play­ing (LARP) games with weapons both real and fake might ben­e­fit from point­ers.

So, too, might those who chore­o­graph sword fights on stage and screen. Where can seri­ous his­tor­i­cal re-cre­ators learn how to wield a real blade in his­tor­i­cal­ly accu­rate com­bat? One resource can be found at Wik­te­nauer, a wiki devot­ed to col­lect­ing “all of the pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary source lit­er­a­ture that makes up the text of his­tor­i­cal Euro­pean Mar­tial arts (HEMA) research.”

The Fior di Battaglia (“Flower of Bat­tle”) — an Ital­ian fenc­ing man­u­al by Fiore de’i Liberi dat­ing from cir­ca 1404 — offers rich­ly- and copi­ous­ly-illus­trat­ed demon­stra­tions of medieval Ital­ian longsword fight­ing tech­niques. In the orig­i­nal man­u­script, seen here and at The Get­ty, “the illus­tra­tions are inked sketch­es with gold leaf­ing on the crowns and garters,” notes the Wik­te­nauer entry. They dom­i­nate the text, which “takes the form of descrip­tive para­graphs set in poor Ital­ian verse, which are nev­er­the­less fair­ly clear and infor­ma­tive.” So clear, indeed, the brood­ing young men of Akademia Szer­mierzy — a Pol­ish group that recre­ates medieval sword-fight­ing tech­niques — can more than con­vinc­ing­ly mim­ic the moves in the video at the top.

Once they get going, after some req­ui­site pre-fight riga­ma­role, it’s impres­sive stuff, maybe already famil­iar to mod­ern fencers and cer­tain mem­bers of the Soci­ety for Cre­ative Anachro­nism, the LARP-ing orga­ni­za­tion of ama­teurs recre­at­ing every­thing from the Mid­dle Ages and the Renais­sance. But for those who think all live-action role-play­ing is the equiv­a­lent of the Bat­tle of the Josh­es (or off-brand Nazis run­ning through the streets in home­made armor), the sheer bal­let of his­tor­i­cal sword-fight­ing may come as a sur­prise — and maybe inspire a few more peo­ple to pull on the dou­blet and hose. See more medieval sword-fight­ing recre­ations from Akademia Szer­mierzy here, and the full text of the Fior di Battaglia here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Renais­sance Knives Had Music Engraved on the Blades; Now Hear the Songs Per­formed by Mod­ern Singers

A Hyp­not­ic Look at How Japan­ese Samu­rai Swords Are Made

The Last Duel Took Place in France in 1967, and It’s Caught on Film

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

Rick Steves Tells the Story of Fascism’s Rise & Fall in Germany

“Healthy, vig­or­ous, respectable: every­one’s favorite uncle.” How many of us hear these words and think of that most beloved of all Amer­i­can trav­el-tele­vi­sion per­son­al­i­ties, Rick Steves? Indeed, in the video above they’re spo­ken by Steves, though to describe a fig­ure very dif­fer­ent from him­self: Adolf Hitler, who con­vinced his peo­ple not to tour Europe but to invade it, spark­ing the dead­liest con­flict of all time. How and why this hap­pened has been a his­tor­i­cal ques­tion writ­ten about per­haps more volu­mi­nous­ly than any oth­er. But the Stevesian method of under­stand­ing demands first-hand expe­ri­ence of Ger­many, the land in which the Nazi par­ty came to pow­er.

Hence “Ger­many’s Fas­cist Sto­ry,” a 2020 episode of Rick Steves’ Europe whose itin­er­ary includes such des­ti­na­tions as Nurem­berg, site of the epony­mous Nazi ral­lies; Hitler’s moun­tain retreat in Bercht­es­gaden; the Gestapo and SS head­quar­ters in Berlin. We’re a long way indeed from Steves’ usu­al cir­cuit of cathe­drals, mar­kets, and bed-and-break­fasts.

Enriched with the his­tor­i­cal footage and the reflec­tions of Ger­man inter­vie­wees, this trav­el­ogue explains the rise in the 1930s and fall in the 1940s of a pow­er­ful Euro­pean strain of fas­cism. This man­i­fest­ed in pop­u­lar capit­u­la­tion to race-based, nation­al­is­tic, and ulti­mate­ly total­i­tar­i­an state pow­er, not just in Ger­many but oth­er coun­tries also once regard­ed as the cen­ter of Euro­pean civ­i­liza­tion.

We all know how World War II end­ed, and the blue-jeaned Steves sums up the rel­e­vant chap­ter of the sto­ry while stand­ing atop the under­ground bunker in which Hitler killed him­self. But such a defeat can nev­er tru­ly be con­sid­ered final, an idea that under­lies the con­tin­u­ing encour­age­ment of tourism to places like Berlin’s Memo­r­i­al to the Mur­dered Jews of Europe and the con­cen­tra­tion camp of Auschwitz-Birke­nau, which fig­ures briefly into this episode despite being locat­ed in Poland. As any ded­i­cat­ed “Rick­nick” knows, the pur­suit of any giv­en cul­tur­al or his­tor­i­cal inter­est inevitably leads the trav­el­er through a vari­ety of lands. Hence a project like The Sto­ry of Fas­cism, Steves’ hour­long doc­u­men­tary on that ide­ol­o­gy’s traces as found all through­out his favorite con­ti­nent. As he him­self has put it, trav­el is a polit­i­cal act — and it’s one nec­es­sary to under­stand­ing both the pol­i­tics you like and the pol­i­tics you don’t.

For those inter­est­ed in how Steves built his trav­el empire, we’d rec­om­mend lis­ten­ing to Guy Raz’s lengthy inter­view with Steves, one episode in his How I Built This pod­cast.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sto­ry of Fas­cism: Rick Steves’ Doc­u­men­tary Helps Us Learn from the Hard Lessons of the 20th Cen­tu­ry

Rick Steves’ Europe: Binge Watch 9 Sea­sons of America’s Favorite Trav­el­er Free Online

20 Lessons from the 20th Cen­tu­ry About How to Defend Democ­ra­cy from Author­i­tar­i­an­ism, Accord­ing to Yale His­to­ri­an Tim­o­thy Sny­der

How Did Hitler Rise to Pow­er? : New TED-ED Ani­ma­tion Pro­vides a Case Study in How Fas­cists Get Demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly Elect­ed

Umber­to Eco Makes a List of the 14 Com­mon Fea­tures of Fas­cism

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 or on Face­book.

Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebooks Get Digitized: Where to Read the Renaissance Man’s Manuscripts Online

From the hand of Leonar­do da Vin­ci came the Mona Lisa and The Last Sup­per, among oth­er art objects of intense rev­er­ence and even wor­ship. But to under­stand the mind of Leonar­do da Vin­ci, one must immerse one­self in his note­books. Total­ing some 13,000 pages of notes and draw­ings, they record some­thing of every aspect of the Renais­sance man’s intel­lec­tu­al and dai­ly life: stud­ies for art­works, designs for ele­gant build­ings and fan­tas­ti­cal machines, obser­va­tions of the world around him, lists of his gro­ceries and his debtors. Intend­ing their even­tu­al pub­li­ca­tion, Leonar­do left his note­books to his pupil Francesco Melzi, by the time of whose own death half a cen­tu­ry lat­er lit­tle had been done with them.

Absent a prop­er stew­ard, Leonar­do’s note­books scat­tered across the world. Six cen­turies lat­er, their sur­viv­ing pages con­sti­tute a series of codices in the pos­ses­sion of such enti­ties as the Bib­liote­ca Ambrosiana, the British Muse­um, the Insti­tut de France, and Bill Gates.

In recent years, they and their col­lab­o­rat­ing orga­ni­za­tions have made efforts to open Leonar­do’s note­books to the world, dig­i­tiz­ing them, trans­lat­ing them, and orga­niz­ing them for con­ve­nient brows­ing on the web. Here on Open Cul­ture, we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured the Codex Arun­del as made avail­able to the pub­lic by the British Library, Codex Atlanti­cus by the Visu­al Agency, and the three-part Codex Forster by the Vic­to­ria & Albert Muse­um.

Oth­er col­lec­tions of Leonar­do’s note­books made avail­able to view online include the Madrid Codices at the Bib­liote­ca Nacional de España, the Codex Trivulzianus at the Archi­vo Stori­co Civi­co e Bib­liote­ca Trivulziana, and the Codex on the Flight of Birds at the Smith­son­ian Nation­al Air and Space Muse­um. (Pub­lished as a stand­alone book, his Trea­tise on Paint­ing is avail­able to down­load at Project Guten­berg.) Even so, many of the pages Leonar­do wrote haven’t yet made it to the inter­net, and even when they do, gen­er­a­tions of inter­pre­tive work — well beyond revers­ing his “mir­ror writ­ing” — will sure­ly remain. Much as human­i­ty is only now putting some of his inven­tions to the test, the full pub­li­ca­tion of his note­books remains a work in progress. Leonar­do him­self would sure­ly under­stand: after all, one can’t cul­ti­vate a mind like his with­out patience.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Ele­gant Math­e­mat­ics of Vit­ru­vian Man, Leonar­do da Vinci’s Most Famous Draw­ing: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

Down­load the Sub­lime Anato­my Draw­ings of Leonar­do da Vin­ci: Avail­able Online, or in a Great iPad App

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Bizarre Car­i­ca­tures & Mon­ster Draw­ings

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Hand­writ­ten Resume (1482)

Leonar­do Da Vinci’s To Do List (Cir­ca 1490) Is Much Cool­er Than Yours

Why Did Leonar­do da Vin­ci Write Back­wards? A Look Into the Ulti­mate Renais­sance Man’s “Mir­ror Writ­ing”

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 or on Face­book.

In 1926, Nikola Tesla Predicts the World of 2026

Not long after Niko­la Tes­la died in 1943, the world seemed to for­get him. The first pub­lic trib­ute paid to his con­sid­er­able research and devel­op­ment in the realm of elec­tric­i­ty there­after came in 1960 with the intro­duc­tion of the tes­la, the SI unit of mag­net­ic flux den­si­ty. But in the decades since Tes­la has enjoyed an after­life as an icon of under-appre­ci­at­ed pre­science. Some of this rep­u­ta­tion is based on inter­views giv­en in the 1920s and 1930s, when he was still a celebri­ty. Take the short Col­liers mag­a­zine pro­file from 1926 in which he fore­sees the emer­gence of devices that will allow us “to com­mu­ni­cate with one anoth­er instant­ly, irre­spec­tive of dis­tance”; a man, Tes­la pre­dicts, “will be able to car­ry one in his vest pock­et.”

This arti­cle is one source of the words spo­ken in the Voic­es of the Past video above. In it, Tes­la also speaks of a future huge­ly enriched by the “wire­less ener­gy” he spent much of his career pur­su­ing. It will pow­er “fly­ing machines” in which “we shall ride from New York to Europe in a few hours.” A house­hold’s dai­ly news­pa­per “will be print­ed ‘wire­less­ly’ in the home dur­ing the night.”

Thanks to instant world­wide com­mu­ni­ca­tion, “inter­na­tion­al bound­aries will be large­ly oblit­er­at­ed and a great step will be made toward the uni­fi­ca­tion and har­mo­nious exis­tence of the var­i­ous races inhab­it­ing the globe.” All the while, new gen­er­a­tions of ever bet­ter-edu­cat­ed women “will ignore prece­dent and star­tle civ­i­liza­tion with their progress.”

Many will applaud Tes­la’s views on the advance­ment of women, though here his think­ing takes a turn that may give pause even to the most for­ward-think­ing among us today: “The acqui­si­tion of new fields of endeav­or by women, their grad­ual usurpa­tion of lead­er­ship, will dull and final­ly dis­si­pate fem­i­nine sen­si­bil­i­ties, will choke the mater­nal instinct, so that mar­riage and moth­er­hood may become abhor­rent and human civ­i­liza­tion draw clos­er and clos­er to the per­fect civ­i­liza­tion of the bee.” The inven­tor of alter­nat­ing cur­rent has much to say in favor of api­an soci­ety, “the most high­ly orga­nized and intel­li­gent­ly coor­di­nat­ed sys­tem of any form of non­ra­tional ani­mal life.” And so why not restruc­ture human civ­i­liza­tion around a sin­gle queen?

This video also draws on a 1937 inter­view with Tes­la in Lib­er­ty mag­a­zine, which fea­tures even more dis­com­fit­ing propo­si­tions. “The only method com­pat­i­ble with our notions of civ­i­liza­tion and the race is to pre­vent the breed­ing of the unfit by ster­il­iza­tion and the delib­er­ate guid­ance of the mat­ing instinct,” Tes­la insists. “The Sec­re­tary of Hygiene or Phys­i­cal Cul­ture will be far more impor­tant in the cab­i­net of the Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States who holds office in the year 2035 than the Sec­re­tary of War.” Despite per­haps hav­ing crossed the line into mad-sci­en­tism, Tes­la remained inci­sive about the per­sis­tent con­di­tion of humans under high tech­nol­o­gy. “We suf­fer from the derange­ment of our civ­i­liza­tion because we have not yet com­plete­ly adjust­ed our­selves to the machine age,” he claims. “The solu­tion of our prob­lems does not lie in destroy­ing but in mas­ter­ing the machine.” Here in the 21st cen­tu­ry, of course, many of us would be con­tent sim­ply to gain mas­tery over the one in our vest pock­et.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Niko­la Tes­la Accu­rate­ly Pre­dict­ed the Rise of the Inter­net & Smart Phone in 1926

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

The Elec­tric Rise and Fall of Niko­la Tes­la: As Told by Tech­noil­lu­sion­ist Mar­co Tem­pest

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

A 1947 French Film Accu­rate­ly Pre­dict­ed Our 21st-Cen­tu­ry Addic­tion to Smart­phones

Hear an Ancient Chi­nese His­to­ri­an Describe The Roman Empire (and Oth­er Voic­es of the Past)

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 or on Face­book.

The History of the Guitar: See the Evolution of the Guitar in 7 Instruments

A thor­ough­ly mod­ern instru­ment with an ancient her­itage, the gui­tar dates back some 500-plus years. If we take into account sim­i­lar stringed instru­ments with sim­i­lar designs, we can push that date back a few thou­sand years, but there is some schol­ar­ly dis­agree­ment over when the gui­tar emerged as an instru­ment dis­tinct from the lute. In any case, stringed instru­ment his­to­ri­an Bran­don Ack­er is here to walk us through some of the sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ences, with “sev­en check­points along the way of the his­to­ry of the gui­tar,” he says above in a guest vis­it to Rob Scallon’s YouTube chan­nel.

The gui­tar is part of the lute fam­i­ly, which dates back some “5,000 years ago, in Mesopotamia.” Sim­i­lar instru­ments exist­ed all over the ancient world. Which of these even­tu­al­ly becomes the gui­tar? That is a ques­tion, says Ack­er, for anoth­er day, but the first instru­ment actu­al­ly iden­ti­fied as a gui­tar dates from around 1500. Ack­er doesn’t toe a strict musi­co­log­i­cal line and begins with an oud from around 700 CE, the bowl-like stringed instru­ment still played today in Turkey, the Mid­dle East, and North Africa. Like near­ly all gui­tar pre­cur­sors, the oud has strings that run in cours­es, mean­ing they are dou­bled up in pitch as in a man­dolin.

Strings would have been made of gut — sheep intestines, to be exact — not met­al or nylon. The larg­er oud is not much dif­fer­ent in shape and con­struc­tion from the Renais­sance lute, which Ack­er demon­strates next, show­ing how polypho­ny led to the advent of fin­ger­pick­ing. (He plays a bit of Eng­lish com­pos­er John Dowland’s “Flow My Tears” as an exam­ple.) We’re a long way from coun­try and blues, but maybe not as far you might think. The lute was ide­al both for solo accom­pa­ni­ment as an ensem­ble instru­ment in bands and helped ush­er in the era of sec­u­lar song.

The lute set the course for oth­er instru­ments to fol­low, such as the Renais­sance gui­tar, the first instru­ment in the tour that resem­bles a mod­ern guitar’s hour­glass shape and straight head­stock. Tuned like a ukulele (it is, in fact, the ori­gin of ukulele tun­ing), the Renais­sance gui­tars of Spain and Por­tu­gal also came in dif­fer­ent sizes like the Poly­ne­sian ver­sion. A ver­sa­tile instru­ment, it worked equal­ly well for strum­ming easy chords or play­ing com­plex, fin­ger­picked melodies, sort of like… well, the mod­ern gui­tar. Through a few changes in tun­ing, size, and num­ber of strings, it doesn’t take us long to get there.

The gui­tar is so sim­ple in con­struc­tion it can be built with house­hold items, and so old its ances­tors pre­date most of the instru­ments in the orches­tra. But it also rev­o­lu­tion­ized mod­ern music and remains one of the pri­ma­ry com­po­si­tion­al tools of singers and song­writ­ers every­where. Ever since Les Paul elec­tri­fied the gui­tar, high-tech exper­i­men­tal designs pop up every few years, incor­po­rat­ing all kinds of keys, dials, but­tons, and extra cir­cuit­ry. But the instru­ments that stick around are still the most tra­di­tion­al­ly styled and eas­i­est to learn and play. Acker’s sur­vey of its his­to­ry above gives us a bet­ter under­stand­ing of the instru­men­t’s stay­ing pow­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Kei­th Richards Demon­strates His Famous 5‑String Tech­nique (Used on Clas­sic Stones Songs Like “Start Me Up,” “Honky Tonk Women” & More)

What Gui­tars Were Like 400 Years Ago: An Intro­duc­tion to the 9 String Baroque Gui­tar

The His­to­ry of the Gui­tar & Gui­tar Leg­ends: From 1929 to 1979

The His­to­ry of Rock Mapped Out on the Cir­cuit Board of a Gui­tar Ampli­fi­er: 1400 Musi­cians, Song­writ­ers & Pro­duc­ers

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

Watch the Most Expensive Scene in Silent Film History: The Train Wreck From Buster Keaton “The General” (1926)

Were it filmed today, the set piece of Buster Keaton’s The Gen­er­al (watch it online here) would sure­ly be com­put­er gen­er­at­ed.

The stu­dio would insist upon that.

We like to think Keaton, who both direct­ed and starred, would fight them tooth and nail.

Elab­o­rate stunts thrilled him, and what could be more thrilling — or cost­ly — than send­ing a 26-ton loco­mo­tive over a burn­ing train tres­tle in hopes the struc­ture would crum­ble, plung­ing the loco­mo­tive into the riv­er below?

The fact that he had but one chance to get it right must’ve upped the ante in a good way.

The Cot­tage Grove, Ore­gon Sen­tinel report­ed that the silent leg­end, hav­ing spent the sum­mer film­ing on loca­tion in and around town, was “hap­py as a kid” to have nailed this most chal­leng­ing shot.

The mak­ing of silent film’s most expen­sive stunt seems like it would make an excel­lent sub­ject for a movie, but for the fact there was very lit­tle dra­ma sur­round­ing it.

Keaton ingra­ti­at­ed him­self with the res­i­dents of Cot­tage Grove, host­ing week­ly base­ball games and pre­sid­ing over the wed­ding recep­tion of a local and a crew mem­ber. 1500 locals — half the town’s pop­u­la­tion — found work behind the scenes or as extras.

His rela­tion­ship with his his 24-year-old costar, Sen­nett Bathing Beau­ty Mar­i­on Mack, was strict­ly pro­fes­sion­al.

When his wife raised objec­tions to his plans to ride the loco­mo­tive across the tres­tle as cam­eras rolled, he capit­u­lat­ed, installing a papi­er-mâche dum­my as engi­neer. (At least one of the 3000 spec­ta­tors who lined the banks to wit­ness the stunt was fooled, when the dummy’s sev­ered head float­ed past.)

And although the sequence cost a shock­ing­ly expen­sive $42,000 — rough­ly $600,000 in today’s mon­ey — it left lit­tle to chance. Car­pen­ters spent two weeks build­ing a 215-foot-long tres­tle 34 feet above the Row Riv­er, then sawed part­way through the sup­port­ing struc­tures to make them extra vul­ner­a­ble to the explo­sive charge that would be trig­gered soon after action was called. Engi­neers con­struct­ed a down­stream dam so the water lev­el would be high enough to receive the train.

The com­mu­ni­ty was so invest­ed by the time cam­eras rolled, the local gov­ern­ment declared July 23 a hol­i­day, so the entire town would be free to attend. (The Sen­tinel not­ed how ear­li­er in the sum­mer Keaton him­self approached overzeal­ous onlook­ers to “cour­te­ous­ly request, ‘Will you please stand back so as not to cast a shad­ow on the pic­ture?’”)

The stunt went off with­out a hitch, its one and only take cap­tured by six strate­gi­cal­ly posi­tioned cam­era­men, but The Gen­er­al, one of the Amer­i­can Film Insti­tute’s top 20 films of all time and Keaton’s per­son­al favorite, flopped with both crit­ics and the pub­lic. Its domes­tic box office returns were a mere $50,000 above the $750,000 it cost to make. It caused stu­dios to rethink how much con­trol to grant Keaton.

The train remained where it had land­ed until WWII, when it was fished up and sal­vaged for its iron. Accord­ing to a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the Cot­tage Grove His­tor­i­cal Soci­ety, a few left­over pieces of track and steel were still vis­i­ble as recent­ly as 2006. A mur­al in town com­mem­o­rates The Gen­er­al, its star, and the 10 weeks of 1926 when Cot­tage Grove was the “HOLLYWOOD OF OREGON” (or so the Cot­tage Grove Sen­tinel claimed at the time.)

The Gen­er­al enjoys a ster­ling rep­u­ta­tion with silent film buffs, though its Civ­il War sto­ry­line is out of step with 2021 — Keaton’s char­ac­ter aspires to join the Con­fed­er­a­cy, and the Union sol­diers are the bad guys whose train plum­mets into the Row.

Per­haps nos­tal­gia will shift to Cot­tage Grove’s role in Stand By Me — anoth­er pic­ture in which trains loom large.

Fail­ing that, the Cham­ber of Com­merce has a repli­ca of Ani­mal House’s Death­mo­bile they could put on dis­play …

Learn more about the film­ing of The General’s most cel­e­brat­ed scene and Keaton’s vis­it to Cot­tage Grove in Julien Smith’s fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle for the Alta Jour­nal.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

31 Buster Keaton Films: “The Great­est of All Com­ic Actors,” “One of the Great­est Film­mak­ers of All Time”

A Super­cut of Buster Keaton’s Most Amaz­ing Stunts

Some of Buster Keaton’s Great, Death-Defy­ing Stunts Cap­tured in Ani­mat­ed Gifs

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

An Immersive Pink Floyd Museum Exhibition Is Coming to the U.S.: Get Tickets Online

While it’s not tech­ni­cal­ly incor­rect to call Pink Floyd a rock band, the term feels some­how unequal to the descrip­tive task at hand. One does­n’t so much lis­ten to albums like The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall as expe­ri­ence them, and this went even more so for their elab­o­rate, increas­ing­ly colos­sal live per­for­mances. A ret­ro­spec­tive of Pink Floy­d’s his­to­ry, which stretched back to 1965, must do jus­tice to Pink Floy­d’s tran­scen­dent ambi­tion: this was the goal of Pink Floyd: Their Mor­tal Remains, an exhi­bi­tion that first opened at Lon­don’s Vic­to­ria and Albert Muse­um in 2017 and is now prepar­ing to make its Unit­ed States debut at Los Ange­les’ Vogue Mul­ti­cul­tur­al Muse­um this sum­mer.

“You arrive into Their Mor­tal Remains via a life-size repli­ca of the band’s Bed­ford van, their black-and-white tour­ing vehi­cle in the mid-Six­ties,” Rolling Stone’s Emi­ly Zem­ler writes of the V&A show. “The sto­ry is told by let­ters, draw­ings, posters, video footage, news­pa­per clip­pings, music instru­ments, tick­et stubs and odd objects, some of them repli­cas.”

The items on dis­play come not just from the pro­fes­sion­al life of the band but the per­son­al lives of it mem­bers as well: “Syd Barrett’s red-orange bicy­cle,” for instance, or “the actu­al cane used on Waters dur­ing his ear­ly years” to deliv­er pun­ish­ment for mis­be­hav­ior at school.

Also on dis­play are no few notable musi­cal instru­ments, includ­ing a kit paint­ed for drum­mer Nick Mason with ukiyo‑e artist Kat­sushi­ka Hoku­sai’s The Great Wave off Kana­gawa. “Once it’s behind glass, it just looks a mil­lion dol­lars,” Mason says in one of Their Mor­tal Remains’ trail­ers, appear­ing in his capac­i­ty as a con­sul­tant to the project. It main cura­tor, graph­ic design­er Aubrey “Po” Pow­ell, co-cre­at­ed the cov­er art for The Dark Side of the Moon, and brings to bear a thor­ough knowl­edge of Pink Floy­d’s music, their his­to­ry, and their sen­si­bil­i­ty. “It’s way out of scale to any­thing that you’ve ever seen before,” he says of the exhi­bi­tion’s design, “and that sort of jour­ney is very rem­i­nis­cent of psy­che­delia, of being on psy­che­del­ic drugs.”

In its way, the alter­ation of con­scious­ness is as essen­tial to the Pink Floyd phe­nom­e­non as the incor­po­ra­tion of tech­nol­o­gy (sub­ject of a recent Mason-host­ed BBC pod­cast series) and the expan­sion of rock music’s son­ic ter­ri­to­ry. On a deep­er lev­el, there’s also what V&A direc­tor Tris­tram Hunt calls “an Eng­lish pas­toral idiom,” which will cer­tain­ly make for an intrigu­ing jux­ta­po­si­tion when Their Mor­tal Remains com­pletes its instal­la­tion in the thick of Hol­ly­wood Boule­vard. There it will run from August 3rd to Novem­ber 28th, though tick­ets are already on sale at the Vogue Mul­ti­cul­tur­al Muse­um’s web site. Though in Los Ange­les the con­scious­ness-alter­ing sub­stances that have tra­di­tion­al­ly accom­pa­nied their music are now more legal than ever, be warned that what Sal­vador Dalí said of him­self also holds true for Pink Floyd: they are drugs.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Hour-Long Col­lec­tion of Live Footage Doc­u­ments the Ear­ly Days of Pink Floyd (1967–1972)

The Dark Side of the Moon Project: Watch an 8‑Part Video Essay on Pink Floyd’s Clas­sic Album

“The Dark Side of the Moon” and Oth­er Pink Floyd Songs Glo­ri­ous­ly Per­formed by Irish & Ger­man Orches­tras

Pink Floyd Drum­mer Nick Mason Presents the His­to­ry of Music & Tech­nol­o­gy in a Nine-Part BBC Pod­cast

Bruce Spring­steen and Pink Floyd Get Their First Schol­ar­ly Jour­nals and Aca­d­e­m­ic Con­fer­ences

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 or on Face­book.

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