Professor Einstein was surprised tonight into loud and long laughter.
Hollywood demonstrated its principles of “relativity,” how it makes things seem what they are not, by use of a dilapidated motor car.
At the First National studio, German technicians persuaded Professor Einstein to change his mind about not being photographed and photographed him in the old car with Frau Elsa, his wife. He cannot drive a car.
Tonight the German technicians brought the film to the Einstein bungalow. The lights went out.
Then the ancient automobile appeared on the screen with Einstein at the wheel, driving Frau Elsa on a sight-seeing tour.
Down Broadway, Los Angeles they drove, then to the beaches. Suddenly the car rose like an airplane, and as Einstein took one hand from the wheel to point out the scenery, the Rocky Mountains appeared below. Then the car landed on familiar soil and the drive continued through Germany.
It was just a Hollywood trick of double exposure and a thrilling comedy, but not for the public. The master film was destroyed, and the only copy was given to the Einsteins.
That one surviving copy of the film eventually ended up in the archives at Lincoln Center, where it sat unnoticed for decades, until Becca Bender, an archivist, stumbled up on it last year. And fortunately now we can all enjoy that light moment shot so long ago.
To learn more about the discovery of the 1931 film, watch the video below. Or read this article over at From the Grapevine.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
From time to time, Americans will talk about the mass killing, treaty-breaking, impoverishment, and forced removal or assimilation of Native peoples in the U.S. as “a shameful period in our history.” While this may sound like the noble acknowledgement of a genocidal crime, it is far too half-hearted and disingenuous, since these acts are central to the entirety of U.S. history, from the first landing of European ships on North American shores to the recent events at Standing Rock and beyond. An enormous body of scholarly and popular literature testifies to the facts.
For a thorough one-volume survey, see Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Indigenous Peoples’ History of the Unites States, a book that exhaustively cites several hundred years of well-documented events, like orders for extermination and land theft under military leaders George Washington, Andrew Jackson, and Army general Thomas S. Jesup. Dunbar-Ortiz shows how many U.S. military practices and terms (such as the phrase “in country”) came directly from the so-called “Indian Wars.”
Take the practice of “scalp hunting,” encouraged during the Pequot War and becoming routine throughout the period of New England settlement in the late 1600’s:
Bounties for Indigenous scalps were honored even in absence of war. Scalps and Indigenous children became means of exchange, currency, and this development may even have created a black market. Scalp hunting was not only a profitable privatized enterprise but also a means to eradicate or subjugate the Indigenous population of the Anglo-American Atlantic seaboard. The settlers gave a name to the mutilated and bloody corpses they left in the wake of scalp-hunts: redskins.
The American football team currently bearing that name and representing the nation’s capital, as Baxter Holmes shows at Esquire, pays tribute to the extreme brutality of murdering Indigenous people and using their scalps as cash. “This way of war,” writes Dunbar-Ortiz, “became the basis for the wars against the Indigenous across the continent into the late nineteenth century.”
In the GIF above, we see a dramatically telescoped visualization of the “violent seizing of Native Americans’ land” after 1776, writes Dylan Matthews at Vox, documented by historians like Dunbar-Ortiz and University of Georgia’s Claudio Saunt, who, along with Slate’s Rebecca Onion, created the graphic as a supplement for his book West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776. “The project’s source data,” write Saunt and Onion, “is a set of maps produced in 1899 by the Bureau of American Ethnology,” a Smithsonian research unit that “published and collected anthropological, archaeological, and linguistic research… as the nineteenth century drew to a close.”
Blue areas show Indigenous homelands, red areas show reservations. The “time-lapse function,” note the map’s creators, “is the most visually impressive aspect of this interactive,” but you can access a “deep level of detail” at the map’s site, such as the names of the hundreds of dispossessed and displaced nations and links to the historical documentation of their land “cession.”
Many of the boundaries are vague, write Saunt and Onion, “a broad approach that left a lot of room for creative implementation.” As Saunt puts it, “greater legality and more precision would have made it impossible to seize so much land in so short a time,” just over 100 years shown here, from the 1776 founding to 1887, during which over 1.5 billion acres were seized and occupied by frontier settlers and the U.S. army in what Saunt calls in the map’s title the “Invasion of America.”
In 1975, the philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend published his highly contrarian Against Method, a book in which he argued that “science is essentially an anarchic enterprise,” and as such, ought to be accorded no more privilege than any other way of knowing in a democratic society. Motivated by concerns about science as a domineering ideology, he argued the historical messiness of scientific practice, in which theories come about not through elegant logical thinking but often by complete accident, through copious trial and error, intuition, imagination, etc. Only in hindsight do we impose restrictions and tidy rules and narratives on revolutionary discoveries.
Several years later, in the third, 1993 edition of the book, Feyerebend observed with alarm the same widespread anti-science bias that Carl Sagan wrote of two years later in Demon-Haunted World. “Times have changed,” he wrote, “Considering some tendencies in U.S. education… and in the world at large I think that reason should now be given greater weight.”
Feyerabend died the following year, but I wonder how he might revise or qualify a 2018 edition of the book, or whether he would republish it at all. Politically-motivated science denialism reigns. Indeed, a blithe denial of any observable reality, aided by digital technology, has become a dystopian new norm. But as the philosopher also commented, such circumstances may “occur frequently today… but may disappear tomorrow.”
In the recorded history of human inquiry across cultures and civilizations, we see ideas we call scientific co-existing with what we recognize as pseudo- and anti-scientific notions. The differences aren’t always very clear at the time. And then, sometimes, they are. During the so-called Age of Reason, when the development of the modern sciences in Europe slowly eclipsed other modes of explanation, one obscure group of contrarians persisted in almost comically stubborn unreason. Calling themselves the Muggletonians, the Protestant sect—like those today who deny climate change and evolution—resisted an overwhelming consensus of empirical science, the Copernican view of the solar system, despite all available evidence the contrary. In so doing, they left behind a series of “beautiful celestial maps,” notes Greg Miller at National Geographic, some of which resemble William Blake’s visual poetry.
The sect began in 1651, when a London tailor named John Reeve “claimed to have received a message from God” naming his cousin Lodowicke Muggleton as the “’last messenger for a great work unto this bloody unbelieving world.’… One of the main principles of their faith, a later observer wrote, was that ‘There is no Devil but the unclean Reason of men.’” Their view of the universe, based, of course, on scripture, resembles the Medieval Catholic view that Galileo attempted to correct, but their principle antagonist was not the Italian polymath or the earlier Renaissance astronomer Copernicus, but the great scientific mind of the time, Isaac Newton, whom Muggletonians railed against into the 19th and even 20th century. Muggletonians, Miller writes,” had remarkable longevity—the last known member died in 1979 after donating the sect’s archive of books and papers… to the British Library.”
These plates come from an 1846 book called Two Systems of Astronomy. Written by Muggletonian Isaac Frost, it “pitted the scientific system of Isaac Newton—which held that the gravitational pull of the sun holds the Earth and other planets in orbit around it—against an Earth-centered universe based on a literal interpretation of the Bible.” The plate above, for example, “attempts to show the absurdity of the Newtonian system by depicting our solar system as one of many in an infinite and godless universe.” Ironically, in attempting to ridicule Newton (who was himself a pseudo-scientist and Biblical literalist in other ways), the Muggletonians stumbled upon the view of modern astronomers, who extrapolate a mind-boggling number of possible solar systems in an observable universe of over 100 billion galaxies (though these systems are not enclosed cells crammed together side-by-side). Another plate, below, shows Frost’s depiction of the hated Newtonian system, with the Earth, Mars, and Jupiter orbiting the Sun.
The other maps, further up, all represent the Muggletonian view. Historian of science Francis Reid describes it thus:
According to Frost, Scripture clearly states that the Sun, the Moon and the Stars are embedded in a firmament made of congealed water and revolve around the Earth, that Heaven has a physical reality above and beyond the stars, and that the planets and the Moon do not reflect the Sun’s rays but are themselves independent sources of light.
Frost gave lectures at “establishments set up for the education of artisans and other workmen.” It seems he didn’t attract much attention and was frequently heckled by audience members. Like flat earthers, Muggletonians were treated as cranks, and unlike today’s religious anti-science crusaders, they never had the power to influence public policy or education. For this reason, perhaps, it is easy to see them as quaintly humorous. Frost’s maps, as Miller writes, “remain strangely alluring” for both their artistic quality and their astonishingly determined credulity. The plates are now part of the massive David Rumsey collection, which houses thousands of rare historical maps. For another fascinating look at religious cartography, see Miller’s National Geographic post “mapping the Apocalypse.”
Back in 1915, French filmmakers decided to revisit the evolution of the bicycle during the 19th century, moving from the invention of the bicycle in 1818, to the bikes that emerged during the 1890s. As the resulting film above shows, the bike went from being clunky, cumbersome and seemingly perilous to ride, to taking on the tried and true shape that we still recognize today.
This film was preserved by the Netherlands’ EYE Film Institute. Hence the subtitles are in Dutch. But thanks to Aeon Magazine, you can read English translations below:
1. The draisine was invented only a century ago, in 1818 by Baron Drais de Sauerbrun.
2. [This subtitle never appears in the film.
3. The vehicle that lies between the draisine and the 1850 bicycle has an improved steering wheel and a fitted brake.
4. In 1863, Pierre Lallement invented pedals that worked on the front wheel.
5. Around 1868, a third wheel was added. Although these tricycles were heavier than the two-wheelers, they were safer.
6. Between 1867 and 1870, various improvements were made, including the increased use of rubber tyres.
7. In 1875, following an invention by the engineer Trieffault, the frame was made of hollow pipes.
8. Following the fashion of the day, the front wheel was made as large as possible.
9. In 1878, Renard created a bicycle with a wheel circumference of more than 7 feet. Just sitting down on one of these was an athletic feat!
11. At the beginning of 1879, Rousseau replaced the large front wheel with a smaller one, and the chain was introduced on the front wheel for driving power.
12. The bicycle of today.
For another look at the Birth of the Bike, you can watch a 1937 newsreel that gives its own narrative account. It comes the from British Pathé film archives.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
Somewhere within the Vatican exists the Vatican Secret Archives, whose 53 miles of shelving contains more than 600 collections of account books, official acts, papal correspondence, and other historical documents. Though its holdings date back to the eighth century, it has in the past few weeks come to worldwide attention. This has brought about all manner of jokes about the plot of Dan Brown’s next novel, but also important news about the technology of manuscript digitization. It seems a project to get the contents of the Vatican Secret Archives digitized and online has made great progress cracking a problem that once seemed impossibly difficult: turning handwriting into computer-searchable text.
In Codice Ratio is “developing a full-fledged system to automatically transcribe the contents of the manuscripts” that uses not the standard method of optical character recognition (OCR), which looks for the spaces between words, but a new way that can handle connected cursive and calligraphic letters. Their method, in the lingo of the field, “is to govern imprecise character segmentation by considering that correct segments are those that give rise to a sequence of characters that more likely compose a Latin word. We have designed a principled solution that relies on convolutional neural networks and statistical language models.”
This is a job, in other words, for artificial intelligence, but in partnership with human intelligence, a seldom-tapped source of which the scientists behind In Codice Ratio have harnessed: that of high-school students. Their special OCR software, writes the Atlantic’s Sam Kean, works by “dividing each word into a series of vertical and horizontal bands and looking for local minimums—the thinner portions, where there’s less ink (or really, fewer pixels). The software then carves the letters at these joints.” But the software “needs to know which groups of chunks represent real letters and which are bogus,” and so “the team recruited students at 24 schools in Italy to build the projects’ memory banks,” manually separating the letters the system had properly recognized from those over which it had stumbled.
And so the students became the system’s “teachers,” improving its ability to extract the content of handwriting, and not just handwriting but vast quantities of archaic handwriting, with every click they made. The encouraging results thus far mean that it probably won’t be long before large portions of the Vatican Secret Archives (which, contrary to its awkwardly translated name, is such a non-secret it even has its own official web site) will finally become easy to browse, search, copy, paste, and analyze. So they may, in the fullness of time, prove a fruitful resource indeed to writers of Catholicism-centric thrillers like Brown — who, after all, has already gone public with his enthusiasm for manuscript digitization.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include 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.
Growing up, I had a box set of Egyptian hieroglyphic stamps from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For a few weeks I used it to write coded letters to a friend, possessed of the same box set, who lived elsewhere in the neighborhood. Today’s smartphone-toting kids, of course, prefer text messaging, a medium which to date has offered little in the way of hieroglyphics, especially compared to the vast and ever-growing quasi-logographic library of emoji, all of them approved by the official emoji subcommittee of the Unicode Consortium. But Unicode itself, the industry-standard system for digitally encoding, representing, and handling text in the various writing systems of the world, may soon expand to include more than 2,000 hieroglyphics.
“Between 750 and 1,000 Hieroglyphs were used by Egyptian authors during the periods of the Old, Middle, and then New Kingdom (2687 BCE–1081 BCE),” writes Hyperallergic’s Sarah E. Bond. “That number later greatly increased during the Greco-Roman period, likely to around 7,000.”
During that time under Alexander the Great, the Ptolemies, and the Roman Empire, “the language grew, changed, and diversified over the course of thousands of years, a fact which can now be reflected through its digital encoding. Although Egyptian Hieroglyphs have been defined within Unicode since version 5.2, released in 2009, the glyphs were highly limited in number and did not stretch into the Greco-Roman period.”
That situation could greatly improve if the Unicode Consortium approves its revised draft of standards for encoding Egyptian Hieroglyphs currently on the table, a scroll through which reveals how much more of the visual (not to mention semantic) richness of this ancient writing system that could soon come available to anyone with a digital device. Its rich variety of tools, animals, icons (in both the old and modern senses), humans, and elements of human anatomy could do much for the Egyptologists of the world needing to efficiently send the content of the texts they study to one another. And though I recall getting plenty communicated with those 24 rubber stamps, who dares predict to what use those texting kids will put these thousands of digital hieroglyphics when they get them at their fingertips?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include 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.
There are too many things people don’t know about Zora Neale Hurston, renowned primarily for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. That’s not to slight the novel or its significant influence on later writers like Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou, but to say that Hurston’s scholarly work deserves equal attention. A student of famed anthropologist Franz Boas while at Barnard College, Hurston became “the first African American to chronicle folklore and voodoo,” notes the Association for Feminist Anthropology. Before turning to fiction, she traveled the Caribbean and the American South, collecting stories, histories, and songs and publishing them in the collections Mules and Men and Tell My Horse.
Hurston’s work in ethnography informed her fiction and opened up the field to other African American scholars. It also produced one of the most important works of American nonfiction in the 20th century, a book that, until now, sat in manuscript form at Howard University’s library, where only academics could access it. Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”tells the story of Cudjo Lewis (1840–1935), the last known survivor of the Atlantic slave trade, in his own words. Hurston met Lewis—born Oluale Kossola in what is today the country of Benin—in 1927. She conducted three months of interviews and published a study, “Cudjo’s Own Story of the Last African Slaver,” that same year.
But when she tried to publish the interviews as a book in 1931, she was told she had to change Lewis’ language. “For at least two publishing houses,” writes Meagan Flynn, “Lewis’s heavily accented dialect was seen as too difficult to read.” Hurston refused. Now, the book has finally been published by HarperCollins, with Lewis’s speech intact as Hurston recorded it. HarperCollins editor Deborah Plant tells NPR, “We’re talking about a language that he had to fashion for himself in order to negotiate this new terrain he found himself in.”
As published excerpts of the book show, his speech is not hard to understand. He describes the kind of bewilderment all enslaved Africans must have felt after arriving on alien shores and forced to toil day in and day out under threat of whipping or worse: “We doan know why we be bring ’way from our country to work lak dis,” he says, “Everybody lookee at us strange. We want to talk wid de udder colored folkses but dey doan know whut we say.”
Lewis tells the story of his capture by the King of Dahomey, whose warriors raided his village of Takkoi and sold the captives to American Captain William Foster, operating an illegal operation (the slave trade had been outlawed for almost 60 years). Forced aboard the ship Clotilda with over 100 other African men and women, Lewis was transported to Mobile, Alabama and sold to a businessman named Timothy Meaher. “Cudjo and his fellow captives were forced to work on Meaher’s mill and shipyard,” Gabe Paoletti writes at All That’s Interesting. “As a slave, he started to go by the name ‘Cudjo,’ a day-named given to boys born on a Monday, as Meaher could not pronounce the name ‘Kossola.’”
Deborah Plant sees the rejection of Hurston’s book in the 30s as akin to Lewis’s loss of his name, country, and culture. “Embedded in his language is everything of his history,” she says. “To deny him his language is to deny his history, to deny his experience, which is ultimately to deny him period, to deny what happened to him.”
87 years after the book’s writing, Lewis’s story offers a timely reminder of the history of slavery. The book arrives just after the discovery of what historians and archaeologists believe to be the wreck of the Clotilda, a vessel owned and operated, says AL.com reporter Ben Raines in the video above, by two already wealthy men who smuggled slaves to prove that they could get away with it, then burned the evidence, the ship, to escape detection.
When police arrived at Meaher’s property to charge him with illegally smuggling enslaved people, he “had hidden away the captives,” writes Paoletti, “and had erased all trace of them having been there.” Thanks to Hurston, we have an invaluable firsthand account of what it was like for one West African man who not only endured war and capture at the hands of a rival tribe, but also sale at a slave market, the middle passage across the Atlantic, and forced labor in the deep South—and who lived through the Civil War, Emancipation, Reconstruction and well into the early 20th Century.
…he went away, and passing through what was called the house of Tiberius, went down into the forum, to where a gilded column stood, at which all the roads that intersect Italy terminate.”
No one can give you exact directions to Milliarium Aureum (aka the Golden Milestone). Just a few carved marble fragments of the gilded column’s base remain in the Roman Forum, where its original location is somewhat difficult to pinpoint.
But as the image above, from interactive map Roads to Rome, shows (view it here), the motto Emperor Caesar Augustus’ mighty mile marker inspired still holds true.
All roads lead to Rome.
To illustrate, designers Benedikt Groß and Philipp Schmitt worked with digital geographer Raphael Reimann to select 486,713 starting points on a 26,503,452 km² grid of Europe.
From there, they created an algorithm to calculate the best route from each point to Rome.
(It beats typing a street address into Google Maps 486,713 times.)
From afar, the resulting map looks like a delicate piece of sea lettuce or an early exploration in neuroanatomy.
Zoom in as tight as you can and things become more traditionally cartographic in appearance, names and spatial relations of cities asserting themselves. A bold line indicates a busy route.
Now you do, from 312,719 distinct starting points.
To help them in their labor, the creative team made good use of the GraphHopper route optimization tool and the Open Street Map wiki. In their own estimation, the project’s outcome is “somewhere between information visualization and data art, unveiling mobility on a very large scale.”
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
