Animator Josh Rudder of NativLang did a fair amount of digging in service of finding out What Latin Sounded Like, above.
(And he seems to have done so without the help of Derek Jarman’s NSFW Sebastiane, the only feature film to be filmed entirely in sermo vulgaris or vulgar Latin.)
Instead, he draws from ancient rhetorician Quintilian and Virgil’s poetic meter. Scroll backward through the Romance languages, and you’ll see Germanic tribes trading with and fighting ancient Roman troops.
The result is not so much a reconstructive pronunciation guide as a linguistic detective story.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
Any reader of Victorian literature will wonder how much a ha’penny was actually worth in those days. For a little more than a year at the very end of that period, it could buy you a cup of coffee, cocoa, milk, tea, or “fluid beef” — which would pour out of a lamppost on the corner. The Pluto Lamp, as it was branded, made its debut at the Victorian Era Exhibition, which was held in 1897 to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Amid such attractions as a 360-degree panorama of ancient Rome, Pepper’s ghost illusions, and over 1,200 works of art by the likes of J. M. W. Turner, John Constable, and 180 specially selected female artists, a beverage-dispensing streetlight might seem mundane. Yet apart from being a technological marvel in its own way, it also presaged the technology-saturated streets one day to come.
Not long after the Victorian Era Exhibition, Pluto Lamps appeared in several London locations, including Exmouth Street in Clerkenwell, Leicester Square, and Rosebery Avenue. In addition to the illumination of their surroundings, and the drinks warmed by the excess heat thus generated, they in some cases offered postcards and four-to-the-penny cigarettes for sale as well.
However much attention the Pluto Lamps attracted as a novelty, this was still the infancy of the modern vending machine, whose deficiencies had yet to be fully worked out. It proved impossible, at the time, to defeat the enterprising scoundrels who used round pieces of tin in place of genuine currency, and in any case, maintenance costs seem to have proven unexpectedly high. (To say nothing of the prospect of drinking out of an enamel cup on a chain, shared with the entire public, which surely put off even some Victorians.)
All of the Pluto Lamps were decommissioned before the end of the nineteenth century, but they’d done their bit to expand public ideas of what was possible in the urban public realm. “For over a century, lamp posts would again do little more than shine light on to the city streets below,” writes Lukas Neckermann in Smart Cities, Smart Mobility. “But by the early twenty-first century, the spirit of the Pluto Lamps returned. City infrastructure and street furniture would once again become multi-purpose, multi-use, entrepreneurial, and connected.” And indeed, though talk of “smart cities” may now sound as dated and unappealing as that of fluid beef, lampposts have more recently been given such side jobs as vehicle charging, environmental protection, and even crime prevention. That last brings back to mind the Clerkenwell Pluto Lamp, equipped as it was with a telegraph recorder connected straight to Scotland Yard: a device that, had it lasted longer, might have inspired many a Victorian novelist.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Two of the books that most shaped American culture both happened to bear the nickname “The Big Book.” While the second of these, the A.A. Manual, published in 1939, changed the country with 12-Step recovery groups, the first of these, the Sears Catalog, transformed America with mass consumption, offering customers in every part of the country access to modern conveniences and retail goods of all kinds at unheard of prices. Beginning in 1908, Sears started selling entire houses, in approximately 25-ton kits transported by railroad, consisting of 30,000 pre-cut parts, plumbing and electrical fixtures, and up to 750 pounds of nails.
“In an era before commercial aviation and long-haul trucking,” Curbed marvels, “Sears, Roebuck & Co. set up an operation that would package and ship more than 400 different types of homes and buildings to anybody who had the cash and access to a catalog.”
They started small, and just as they didn’t come up with the concept of the mail order catalog, Sears didn’t invent the kit house, though they suggest as much in their telling of the story. Instead they may have taken the idea from another company called Aladdin. Aladdin houses have been forgotten, however, and even Sears’ main competitor, Montgomery Ward, didn’t catch up until 1921 and only lasted ten years in the kit house business.
Sears houses, on the other hand, are celebrated and sought out as models of the early 20th century American home, and for good reason. Between 1908 and 1939, Sears sold 70–75,000 houses in 447 different styles all over the country. “From Craftsman to Cape Cods, they offered a custom home at budgets and sizes that could accommodate any size family,” writes Popular Mechanics.
These Sears homes weren’t cheap low-end houses. Many of them were built using the finest quality building materials available during that time. It’s not uncommon to find Sears homes today with oak floors, cypress siding, and cedar shingles.
What’s even more extraordinary is that 50% of these were built by the homeowners themselves, usually, as in a barn-raising, with the generous help of family, friends, and neighbors. The other half sold were built professionally. “Often,” writes Messy Nessy, “local builders and carpentry companies purchased homes from Sears to build as model homes and market their services to potential customers.”
These houses could have a significant effect on the character of a neighborhood. Not only could potential buyers see firsthand, and participate in, the construction. They could also order the same or a similar model, customize it, and even—as the company tells us in its own short history of the “Sears Modern Home”—design their own homes and “submit the blueprints to Sears, which would then ship off the appropriate precut and fitted materials.”
Sears sounds modest about its impact. The company writes it was not “an innovative home designer” but instead “a very able follower of popular home designs but with the added advantage of modifying houses and hardware according to buyer tastes.” Yet Sears houses aren’t beloved for their forward-looking designs, but for their sturdiness and variety, as well as for their impact on “the emotional lives of rural folk,” as Messy Nessy puts it.
“The Sears mail-order catalogues were sitting on kitchen countertops inside millions of American homes, allowing potential homeowners to both visualize their new home and purchase it as easily as they might have bought a new toaster.” Building a house required a little more investment than plugging in a toaster, and required a 75-page instruction book, but that’s another part of why Sears house hunters are such a dedicated bunch, awestruck at each still-standing model they’re able to photograph and match up with its catalog illustrations and floor plans.
In its first year of production, 1908, Sears sold only one model, number 125, an Eight-Room Bungalow Style House for $945, advertised as “the finest cottage ever constructed at a price less than $1500.” In 1918, the company moved from a numbering system to named models, most of which sound like the names of cozy small towns and bedroom communities: Adeline, Belmont, Maplewood, Avalon, Kilbourne, Del Ray, Stone Ridge…. (See a full list of these models at The Arts & Crafts Society website.)
In the years Sears sold houses, between 54 and 44 percent of Americans lived in rural areas, and these constituted Sears’ most loyal customers, given that the catalog allowed them to purchase things they could buy nowhere else, including ten room colonial mansions like The Magnolia, available from 1913 to 1922 for $6,488, or roughly $88,000—a steal if you can put in the work. This was the largest and most expensive model the company offered, “a three-story, eight room neo-Georgian with a two-story columned portico, porte-cochere, and sleeping porches.” (Mint juleps and servants’ quarters not included.)
Sears eventually offered three build qualities, Honor Bilt, Standard Built, and Simplex Sectional. At the lowest end of the price and build spectrum, the company notes, “Simplex houses were frequently only a couple of rooms and were ideal for summer cottages.” Many of its low-end and early models did not include bathrooms, and the company sold outhouses separately. But due to innovative construction methods, even the least expensive houses held up well.
Because the company lost most of the records after its kit house business folded, it can be difficult to identify a Sears house. And because even the “youngest of Sears homes,” Popular Mechanics points out, is now going on nine decades old, they all require a significant amount of care.” The blog Kit House Hunters has found over 18,000 Sears houses still standing across the country, most of them in the Northeast and Midwest, where they sold best. (One community in Elgin, IL has over 200 verified Sears homes.)
In the video at the top, you can see a few of those well-built Sears houses still lived in today. The short How to Architect video above points out that “Sears had a massive impact on the business of home-building, and… the business of pre-fabrication, is alive and well today.” For a look at the variety and intricacy of the Sears Modern Home designs, see this Flickr gallery with over 80 images of catalog pages, illustrated homes, and floor plans. And if you think you might be living in one of these houses, many of which have been granted historic status, find out with this handy 9‑step guide for identifying a Sears Kit Home.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018.
In the Halloween season, one American writer comes to mind more often than any other: Edgar Allan Poe. That owes in large part to his famously macabre tales like “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The Masque of the Red Death,” written though they may have been with barely concealed contempt for their sensation-seeking magazine readership. But it also has to do with the image of the man himself. Or rather, it has to do with one image in particular: a daguerreotype photograph taken on November 9, 1848, at a Providence studio that has inspired practically every representation of Poe in popular culture since.
Known as Ultima Thule, this famous portrait was in fact just one of perhaps ten daguerreotypes for which Poe sat in his lifetime. Inventor Louis Daguerre’s early photographic process, which used silver-coated copper plates, fascinated Poe, who in an 1840 newspaper article called it “the most important, and perhaps the most extraordinary triumph of modern science.” He described its product as “infinitely more accurate in its representation than any painting by human hands,” though anyone sitting for a picture did have to sit still for minutes on end, resulting in not just the unsmiling visages we associate with nineteenth-century photography, but also in a combination of discomfort and slight blurring that can look vaguely otherworldly.
That quality may actually have enhanced the aura of Ultima Thule, which painter Michael J. Deas calls “the image of the tragic romantic poet: solemn, detached, consumed by his own wildly self-destructive nature.” It surely also made a difference that the portrait was made, in the words of poet Hervey Allen, “probably at the very hour when he looked the worst that he had ever looked in his life.” He’d been taken to the studio by a stranger with whom he’d spent the previous night binge-drinking. Just four days before that, he’d unsuccessfully attempted suicide by laudanum overdose, a rash action taken after the rejection of his marriage proposal by Sarah Helen Whitman, a widowed poet he hadn’t known long — and who would give her suitor’s immortal portrait its Latin name, borrowed from his poem “Dream-Land.”
The original daguerreotype, for which the studio probably paid the by-then notable, still perpetually hard-up Poe to sit, remained with its makers until it vanished around 1860, and its whereabouts have remained unknown ever since. But copies have allowed generation after generation of readers to behold Poe’s troubled visage when what Whitman called “all the stormy grandeur of that via Dolorosa had left its sullen shadow on his brow.” Through the drunken chaos and poverty of his life, the writer himself could see things to come. “The consequences of any new scientific invention will, at the present day exceed, by very much, the wildest expectations of the most imaginative,” he wrote, an observation true enough of photography 178 years ago, and no doubt even truer of what we use to make images today.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
No artist, no matter how solitary by nature, becomes a cultural phenomenon alone. That’s even true of such an isolated figure as Vincent van Gogh, whose death in obscurity at the age of 37 left open the question of who, if anyone, would vouchsafe his paintings to posterity. The support of the artist’s younger brother Theo is often given a good deal of credit for making his work possible, and not without reason. What’s somewhat less widely known is that Theo, who’d long been in poor health, died less than a year after Vincent’s suicide. The work of ensuring the latter’s legacy then fell to the former’s widow Johanna Bonger — or perhaps she understood that if she didn’t steward it, nobody else would.
As Cindy Poh explains in the Newsthink video above, Bonger inherited a great many of van Gogh’s works and stored them away while devising a plan to make them famous. Practically going door-to-door — and sometimes, it seems, literally going door-to-door — she stayed engaged with the late Theo’s art-world contacts. She cut sweetheart deals with museums and even donated artworks outright, increasing their chance of public exposure. She organized exhibitions everywhere from Paris to Berlin to London to New York, the most pivotal being one held at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum in 1905. The 484 works put on display made it the largest van Gogh show in history, a record it still holds today.
At that time, well before The Starry Night and Sunflowers adorned coffee mugs in suburban households the world over, van Gogh’s art could still shock some critics with its unconventionality. Others, however, showed signs of the enrapturement that Bonger must have suspected would one day be possible. Thinking strategically, she preferred to sell fewer pieces for higher prices, preserving the value of his work and limiting its availability on the market. After her second husband’s death, she redoubled her dedication to the art that had become her life’s mission, even translating and publishing the hundreds of letters he’d left behind, most of which were sent to Theo. We’ve heard many artists described as married to their work, a cliché that applies well enough to Vincent van Gogh himself. But to be married to one’s brother-in-law’s work is a rarer thing indeed — and sometimes a more important one.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Some would call the United States of America the mightiest empire the world has ever known. Yet over the past half-century or so, it has shown a strange inability to build domestic infrastructure, at least at the efficiency or on the scale seen elsewhere in the world. (This will not come as news to American enthusiasts of high-speed rail.) Here on Open Culture, we’ve previously featured history YouTuber Garrett Ryan’s take on the question of whether the U.S. is now declining like the ancient Roman Empire. On a more recent video for his channel Told in Stone, he’s highlighted the megaprojects that even the Romans — who managed the Pantheon, the Colosseum, and the Pont du Gard, to say nothing of their uniquely long-lasting concrete itself — couldn’t pull off.
The Tiber may seem like a tame river today, but it wasn’t always so placid. In antiquity, rains caused it to flood every year. Senator-historian Cassius Dio recorded an incident in 54 BC when the suddenly rising waters caused not just houses but whole neighborhoods to collapse. The Tiber’s flooding worsened over time, inspiring Julius Caesar to propose re-routing it either around Rome or into a tunnel running beneath the city. Unfortunately, the Ides of March came before work could get underway. Augustus opted to dredge the river channel, and Tiberius championed diverting its tributaries. Only the construction of modern embankments in the nineteenth century brought the regular fluvial disasters under control, ensuring peace for strollers in search of their own dolce vita.
Roman ships sailing to Greece had to make their way around the Peloponnese, the south of the Greek peninsula. The dangers of that stretch were many, and did their part to sink the ship carrying the Antikythera Mechanism. The Isthmus of Corinth held out the promise of safer passage, at least for those willing to drag their laden ships over a bit of land. Digging a canal was, in some sense, the obvious solution, considered by both Julius Caesar and Caligula, but “only Nero was megalomaniacal enough to actually begin the project.” A decent amount of progress had been made before another instance of regicide (or perhaps, in this particular case, tyrannicide) put a stop to the work. Rather than being resumed by a later emperor, the canal “became a byword for hubris” — at least until the job was finally done in the uncommonly ambitious nineteenth century.
In central Germany, near where the village of Waldgirmes is today, Romans founded a city with many features of an imperial settlement, such as a classic street grid, pipes running from a central aqueduct, and a forum, at the center of which a gilded statue of Augustus on horseback once stood. Dating to the year 4 BC, the city was intended as a new capital for what the Romans called Germania, though it ended up abandoned after the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest only about a decade after its founding. “The buildings were burned,” Ryan says. “The head of Augustus’ equestrian statue was thrown down a well,” only to be discovered nineteen centuries later. That image could inspire a meditation on what may be the way of all empires — or serve as a warning to any American leader considering immortalizing himself and his horse in gold.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
A few years ago, we featured here on Open Culture the Freedmen’s Bureau Project database, which contains searchable information on formerly enslaved people in the United States after its Civil War. With nearly 1.8 million men, women, and children registered there when it first opened to the public, it has remained a valuable resource for many Americans researching their own heritage, not just descendants of former slaves but of other Civil War refugees as well. But of course, the U.S. was hardly the only country where slavery existed. Countless people here in the twenty-first century have ancestors who were enslaved in other former British colonies, and now they’ve got a portal through which to do genealogical searches of their own.
Launched by a partnership between the genealogy company Ancestry and the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London, the online Former British Colonies Enslavement Registers makes available records on nearly four million individuals enslaved between 1813 and 1840 in a host of countries from the Bahamas to Mauritius to South Africa.
First created by the British government during the process of abolishing the transatlantic slave trade in 1807 — much as the Freedmen’s Bureau organized its registry of former slaves during Reconstruction under Abraham Lincoln — the original papers contain not just their names and ages, but also maternal family connections, physical descriptions, and sometimes details about their place of African origin.
In the video above, genealogist and Ancestry Senior Story Producer Nicka Sewell-Smith provides an introduction to the Former British Colonies Enslavement Registers, which you can access here. If you’re curious about whether your own ancestors may appear in its records, you can search by details like name, approximate date, or location to narrow down the potential matches. The modern descendants of people enslaved in the 20 countries covered by the database by no means live exclusively, or even primarily, in those countries or in Great Britain itself. More than two centuries later, their descendants live all over the world, including in Latin America and the United States, leading lives very different from those of their enslaved ancestors — but the reconstruction of their family stories has only just begun. Enter the database here.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
I am sure that many an Open Culture reader has a Bialetti Moka Express in their kitchen. I know I do, but I must add that I knew little about its history and apparently even less about how to properly use one. Coffee expert and author of The World Atlas of Coffee James Hoffmann introduces us to the appliance we think we know in the above video.
Alfonso Bialetti didn’t originally get into the coffee business. In 1919, the Bialetti company was an aluminum manufacturer, with the Moka Express invented somewhere around 1933 by Luigi de Ponti, who worked for the company. According to Deconstructing Product Design by William Lidwell and Gerry Manacsa, the inspiration came from Bialetti’s wife’s old-fashioned washing machine: “a fire, a bucket, and a lid with a tube coming out of it. The bucket was filled with soapy water, sealed with the lid, and then brought to a boil over the fire, at which point the vaporized soapy water was pushed up through the tube and expelled on to the laundry.”
As Hoffmann shows, earlier coffee-makers did use steam and a drip technique, but the Moka Express was the first all-in-one maker that could sit on the stove top and do the work. All the user had to listen for was the tell-tale gurgle when it finished brewing.
In 1945, Alfonso’s son Renato returned from a prisoner-of-war camp and took over the family business. He was instrumental in focusing on the Moka Express and turning it into an international coffee brand. He hired cartoonist Paul Campani to design l’omino coi baffi, “the mustachioed little man” whose image is on the side of every Moka Express, and who, during the 1950s, was in a series of humorous animated commercials. Bialetti was the pride of Italy, and for Italian immigrants living abroad, it was a treasured object in the kitchen.
Such was the identification of Renato Bialetti with the Moka Express that when he died in 2016, his ashes were interred in a giant replica pot. Hoffmann details the fate of the company afterwards, how it has fared against competitors in Italy and outside. Will it still be around in decades? Who knows. But it does make a great cup of coffee.
And he shows the correct way to brew a cup with the Moka Express in this other video. Here are a few things I was doing wrong: not using hot water in the bottom to start; trying to pack in the ground coffee like I was making an espresso; using too fine a grind; and not cooling the bottom as soon as it’s done working its magic. (Note: a Moka Express coffee is somewhere between an espresso and a pour-over.) All these tips I’m going to try tomorrow morning. Maybe you have been making your Bialetti cup the right way all along. Let me know in the comments. I’ll read them over a freshly brewed cup.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2022.
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