The Architectural History of the Louvre: 800 Years in Three Minutes

in Architecture, History | February 20th, 2025

Set­ting aside just one day for the Lou­vre is a clas­sic first-time Paris vis­i­tor’s mis­take. The place is sim­ply too big to com­pre­hend on one vis­it, or indeed on ten vis­its. To grow so vast has tak­en eight cen­turies, a process explained in under three min­utes by the offi­cial video ani­mat­ed above. First con­struct­ed around the turn of the thir­teenth cen­tu­ry as a defen­sive fortress, it was con­vert­ed into a roy­al res­i­dence a cen­tu­ry and a half lat­er. It gained its first mod­ern wing in 1559, under Hen­ri II; lat­er, his wid­ow Cather­ine de’ Medici com­mis­sioned the Tui­leries palace and gar­dens, which Hen­ri IV had joined up to the Lou­vre with the Grande Galerie in 1610.

In the sev­en­teen-tens, Louis XVI com­plet­ed the Cour Car­rée, the Lou­vre’s main court­yard, before decamp­ing to Ver­sailles. It was only dur­ing the French Rev­o­lu­tion, toward the end of that cen­tu­ry, that the Nation­al Assem­bly declared it a muse­um.

The project of unit­ing it into an archi­tec­tur­al whole con­tin­ued under Napoleon I and III, the lat­ter of whom final­ly com­plet­ed it (and in the process dou­bled its size). The Tui­leries Palace was torched dur­ing the unpleas­ant­ness over the Paris Com­mune, but the rest of the Lou­vre sur­vived. Since then, its most notable alter­ation has been the addi­tion of I. M. Pei’s glass pyra­mid in 1989.

The pyra­mid may still have an air of con­tro­ver­sy these three and a half decades lat­er, but you can hard­ly deny that it at least improves upon the Cour Car­rée’s years as a park­ing lot. It stands, in any case, as just one of the count­less fea­tures that make the Lou­vre an archi­tec­tur­al palimpsest of French his­to­ry prac­ti­cal­ly as com­pelling as the col­lec­tion of art it con­tains. (Fran­coph­o­nes can learn much more about it from the longer-form doc­u­men­taries post­ed by Des Racines et des Ailes and Notre His­toire.) And how did I approach this most famous of all French insti­tu­tions on my own first trip to Paris, you ask? By not going at all. On my next trip to Paris, how­ev­er, I plan to go nowhere else.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Louvre’s Entire Col­lec­tion Goes Online: View and Down­load 480,00 Works of Art

A 3D Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Paris: Take a Visu­al Jour­ney from Ancient Times to 1900

How France Hid the Mona Lisa & Oth­er Lou­vre Mas­ter­pieces Dur­ing World War II

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

Japan­ese Guid­ed Tours of the Lou­vre, Ver­sailles, the Marais & Oth­er Famous French Places (Eng­lish Sub­ti­tles Includ­ed)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Optical Poems by Oskar Fischinger: Discover the Avant-Garde Animator Despised by Hitler & Dissed by Disney

in Animation, Art, History | February 19th, 2025

At a time when much of ani­ma­tion was con­sumed with lit­tle anthro­po­mor­phized ani­mals sport­ing white gloves, Oskar Fischinger went in a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent direc­tion. His work is all about danc­ing geo­met­ric shapes and abstract forms spin­ning around a flat fea­ture­less back­ground. Think of a Mon­dri­an or Male­vich paint­ing that moves, often in time to the music. Fischinger’s movies have a mes­mer­iz­ing ele­gance to them. Check out his 1938 short An Opti­cal Poem above. Cir­cles pop, sway and dart across the screen, all in time to Franz Liszt’s 2nd Hun­gar­i­an Rhap­sody. This is, of course, well before the days of dig­i­tal. While it might be rel­a­tive­ly sim­ple to manip­u­late a shape in a com­put­er, Fischinger’s tech­nique was decid­ed­ly more low tech. Using bits of paper and fish­ing line, he indi­vid­u­al­ly pho­tographed each frame, some­how doing it all in sync with Liszt’s com­po­si­tion. Think of the hours of mind-numb­ing work that must have entailed.

(Note: The copy of the film above has become fad­ed, dis­tort­ing some of the orig­i­nal vibrant col­ors used in Fischinger’s films. Nonethe­less it gives you a taste of his cre­ative work–of how he mix­es ani­ma­tion with music. The clips below give you a more accu­rate sense of Fischinger’s orig­i­nal col­ors.)

Born in 1900 near Frank­furt, Fischinger trained as a musi­cian and an archi­tect before dis­cov­er­ing film. In the 1930s, he moved to Berlin and start­ed pro­duc­ing more and more abstract ani­ma­tions that ran before fea­ture films. They proved to be pop­u­lar too, at least until the Nation­al Social­ists came to pow­er. The Nazis were some of the most fanat­i­cal art crit­ics of the 20th Cen­tu­ry, and they hat­ed any­thing non-rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al. The likes of Paul Klee, Oskar Kokosch­ka and Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky among oth­ers were writ­ten off as “degen­er­ate.” (By stark con­trast, the CIA report­ed­ly loved Abstract Expres­sion­ism, but that’s a dif­fer­ent sto­ry.) Fischinger fled Ger­many in 1936 for the sun and glam­our of Hol­ly­wood.

The prob­lem was that Hol­ly­wood was real­ly not ready for Fischinger. Pro­duc­ers saw the obvi­ous tal­ent in his work, and they feared that it was too ahead of its time for broad audi­ences. “[Fischinger] was going in a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent direc­tion than any oth­er ani­ma­tor at the time,” said famed graph­ic design­er Chip Kidd in an inter­view with NPR. “He was real­ly explor­ing abstract pat­terns, but with a pur­pose to them — pio­neer­ing what tech­ni­cal­ly is the music video.”

Fischinger’s most wide­ly seen Amer­i­can work was his short con­tri­bu­tion to Walt Disney’s Fan­ta­sia. Fischinger cre­at­ed con­cept draw­ings for Fan­ta­sia, but most were not used, and only one short scene fea­tures his actu­al draw­ings. “The film is not real­ly my work,” he lat­er recalled. “Rather, it is the most inartis­tic prod­uct of a fac­to­ry. …One thing I def­i­nite­ly found out: that no true work of art can be made with that pro­ce­dure used in the Dis­ney stu­dio.” Fischinger didn’t work with Dis­ney again and instead retreat­ed into the art world.

There he found admir­ers who were recep­tive to his vision. John Cage, for one, con­sid­ered the Ger­man animator’s exper­i­ments to be a major influ­ence on his own work. Cage recalled his first meet­ing with Fischinger in an inter­view with Daniel Charles in 1968.

One day I was intro­duced to Oscar Fischinger who made abstract films quite pre­cise­ly artic­u­lat­ed on pieces of tra­di­tion­al music. When I was intro­duced to him, he began to talk with me about the spir­it, which is inside each of the objects of this world. So, he told me, all we need to do to lib­er­ate that spir­it is to brush past the object, and to draw forth its sound. That’s the idea which led me to per­cus­sion.

You can find excerpts of oth­er Fischinger films over at Vimeo.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in Sep­tem­ber, 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Avant-Garde Ani­mat­ed Films of Wal­ter Ruttmann, Still Strik­ing­ly Fresh a Cen­tu­ry Lat­er (1921–1925)

Night on Bald Moun­tain: An Eery, Avant-Garde Pin­screen Ani­ma­tion Based on Mussorgsky’s Mas­ter­piece (1933)

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

How the CIA Secret­ly Fund­ed Abstract Expres­sion­ism Dur­ing the Cold War

Watch Dzi­ga Vertov’s Unset­tling Sovi­et Toys: The First Sovi­et Ani­mat­ed Movie Ever (1924)

Jonathan Crow is a writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. 

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Why Are the Names of British Towns & Cities So Hard to Pronounce?: A Humorous But Informative Primer

in History, Language, Travel | February 18th, 2025

When they make their first transocean­ic voy­age, more than a few Amer­i­cans choose to go to Eng­land, on the assump­tion that, what­ev­er cul­ture shock they might expe­ri­ence, at least none of the dif­fi­cul­ties will be lin­guis­tic. Only when it’s too late do they dis­cov­er the true mean­ing of the old line about being sep­a­rat­ed by a com­mon lan­guage. Take place names, not just in Eng­land but even more so across the whole of Great Britain. How would you pro­nounce, for instance, Beaulieu, Ramp­isham, Mouse­hole, Tow­ces­ter, Gotham, Quern­more, Alnwick, or Frome?

There’s a good chance that you got most of those wrong, even if you’re not Amer­i­can. But as explained in the Map Men video above, bona fide Brits also have trou­ble with some of them: a few years ago, the decep­tive­ly straight­for­ward-look­ing Frome came out on top of a domes­tic sur­vey of the most mis­pro­nounced names. If you’re keen on mak­ing your expe­ri­ence in Great Britain some­what less embar­rass­ing, what­ev­er your nation­al­i­ty, the Map Men have put togeth­er a humor­ous guide to the rules of “prop­er” place-name pro­nun­ci­a­tion — such as they exist — as well as an expla­na­tion of the his­tor­i­cal fac­tors that orig­i­nal­ly made it so coun­ter­in­tu­itive.

The evo­lu­tion of the Eng­lish lan­guage itself has some­thing to do with it, involv­ing as it does “a base of Ger­man­ic Anglo-Sax­on,” a “healthy dash of Old Norse,” a “huge dol­lop of Nor­man French,” and “just a fair­ly detectable hint of Celtic.” British place names reflect its his­to­ry of set­tle­ment and inva­sion, the old­est of them being Celtic in ori­gin (the dread­ed Frome, for exam­ple), fol­lowed by Latin, then Ger­man­ic Anglo-Sax­on (result­ing in cities with names like Nor­wich, whose silent W I nev­er seem to pro­nounce silent­ly enough to sat­is­fy an Eng­lish­man), then Norse.

After cen­turies and cen­turies of sub­se­quent shifts in pro­nun­ci­a­tion with­out cor­re­spond­ing changes in spelling, you arrive in a coun­try “lit­tered with pho­net­ic boo­by traps.” It could all seem like a reflec­tion of the char­ac­ter­is­tic British anti-log­ic diag­nosed, not with­out a note of pride, by George Orwell. But trav­el­ing Amer­i­cans gassed up on their per­cep­tions of their own rel­a­tive prac­ti­cal­i­ty should take a long, hard look at a map of the Unit­ed States some time. Hav­ing grown up in Wash­ing­ton State, I ask this: who among you dares to pro­nounce the names of towns like Marysville, Puyallup, Yaki­ma, or Sequim?

Relat­ed con­tent:

Wel­come to Llan­fair­p­wll­gwyn­gyll­gogerych­wyrn­drob­wl­l­l­lan­tysil­i­o­gogogoc, the Town with the Longest Name in Europe

The Growth of Lon­don, from the Romans to the 21st Cen­tu­ry, Visu­al­ized in a Time-Lapse Ani­mat­ed Map

How Lon­dini­um Became Lon­don, Lute­tia Became Paris, and Oth­er Roman Cities Got Their Mod­ern Names

Hear the Evo­lu­tion of the Lon­don Accent Over 660 Years: From 1346 to 2006

The Entire His­to­ry of the British Isles Ani­mat­ed: 42,000 BCE to Today

The Atlas of True Names Restores Mod­ern Cities to Their Mid­dle Earth-ish Roots

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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How the Fairlight CMI Synthesizer Revolutionized Music

in History, Music, Technology | February 13th, 2025

In the cred­its of Phil Collins’ No Jack­et Required appears the dis­claimer that “there is no Fairlight on this record.” Cryp­tic though it may have appeared to most of that album’s many buy­ers, tech­nol­o­gy-mind­ed musi­cians would’ve got it. In the half-decades since its intro­duc­tion, the Fairlight Com­put­er Musi­cal Instru­ment, or CMI, had reshaped the sound of pop music — or at least the pop music cre­at­ed by acts who could afford one. The device may have cost as much as a house, but for those who under­stood the poten­tial of play­ing and manip­u­lat­ing the sounds of real-life instru­ments (or of any­thing else besides) dig­i­tal­ly, mon­ey was no object.

The his­to­ry of the Fairlight CMI is told in the video above from the Syd­ney Morn­ing Her­ald and The Age, incor­po­rat­ing inter­views from its Aus­tralian inven­tors Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie. Accord­ing to Ryrie, No Jack­et Required actu­al­ly did use the Fairlight, in the sense that one of its musi­cians sam­pled a sound from the Fairlight’s library. To musi­cians, using the tech­nol­o­gy not yet wide­ly known as dig­i­tal sam­pling would have felt like mag­ic; to lis­ten­ers, it meant a whole range of sounds they’d nev­er heard before, or at least nev­er used in that way. Take the “orches­tra hit” orig­i­nal­ly sam­pled from a record of Stravin­sky’s The Fire­bird (and whose sto­ry is told in the Vox video just above), which soon became prac­ti­cal­ly inescapable.

We might call the orches­tra hit the Fairlight’s “killer app,” though its breathy, faint­ly vocal sam­ple known as “ARR1” also saw a lot of action across gen­res. A desire for those par­tic­u­lar effects brought a lot of musi­cians and pro­duc­ers onto the band­wag­on through­out the eight­ies, but it was the ear­ly adopters who used the Fairlight most cre­ative­ly. The ear­li­est among them was Peter Gabriel, who appears in the clip from the French doc­u­men­tary above gath­er­ing sounds to sam­ple, blow­ing wind through pipes and smash­ing up tele­vi­sions in a junk­yard. Kate Bush embraced the Fairlight with a spe­cial fer­vor, using not just its sam­pling capa­bil­i­ties but also its ground­break­ing sequenc­ing soft­ware (includ­ed from the Series II onward) to cre­ate her 1985 hit “Run­ning Up That Hill,” which made a sur­prise return to pop­u­lar­i­ty just a few years ago.

The Fairlight’s high-pro­file Amer­i­can users includ­ed Ste­vie Won­der, Todd Rund­gren, and Her­bie Han­cock, who demon­strates his own mod­el along­side the late Quin­cy Jones in the doc­u­men­tary clip above. With its green-on-black mon­i­tor, its gigan­tic flop­py disks, and its futur­is­tic-look­ing “light pen” (as nat­ur­al a point­ing device as any in an era when most of human­i­ty had nev­er laid eyes on a mouse), it resem­bles less a musi­cal instru­ment than an ear­ly per­son­al com­put­er with a piano key­board attached. It had its cum­ber­some qual­i­ties, and some leaned rather too heav­i­ly on its packed-in sounds, but as Han­cock points out, a tool is a tool, and it’s all down to the human being in con­trol to get pleas­ing results out of it: “It does­n’t plug itself in. It does­n’t pro­gram itself… yet.” To which the always-pre­scient Jones adds: “It’s on the way, though.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch Her­bie Han­cock Demo a Fairlight CMI Syn­the­siz­er on Sesame Street (1983)

How the Yama­ha DX7 Dig­i­tal Syn­the­siz­er Defined the Sound of 1980s Music

Thomas Dol­by Explains How a Syn­the­siz­er Works on a Jim Hen­son Kids Show (1989)

How the Moog Syn­the­siz­er Changed the Sound of Music

Every­thing Thing You Ever Want­ed to Know About the Syn­the­siz­er: A Vin­tage Three-Hour Crash Course

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music, 1800–2015: Free Web Project Cat­a­logues the Theremin, Fairlight & Oth­er Instru­ments That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Music

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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What It Was Like to Get a Meal at a Medieval Tavern

in Food & Drink, History | February 12th, 2025

At least since The Can­ter­bury Tales, the set­ting of the medieval tav­ern has held out the promise of adven­ture. For their cus­tomer base dur­ing the actu­al Mid­dle Ages, how­ev­er, they had more util­i­tar­i­an virtues. “If you ever find your­self in the late medieval peri­od, and you are in need of food and drink, you’d bet­ter find your­self an inn, tav­ern, or ale­house,” says Tast­ing His­to­ry host Max Miller in the video above. The dif­fer­ences between them had to do with qual­i­ty: the tav­erns were nicer than the ale­hous­es, and the inns were nicer than the tav­erns, hav­ing begun as full-ser­vice estab­lish­ments where cus­tomers could stay the night.

As for what inn‑, tavern‑, or ale­house-goers would actu­al­ly con­sume, Miller men­tions that the local avail­abil­i­ty of ingre­di­ents would always be a fac­tor. “You might just get a veg­etable potage; in some places it would just be beans and cab­bage.”

Else­where, though, it could be “a fish stew, or some­thing with real­ly qual­i­ty meat in it.” For the recipe of the episode — this being a cook­ing show, after all — Miller choos­es a com­mon medieval meat stew called buke­nade or bok­nade. The actu­al instruc­tions he reads con­tain words reveal­ing of their time peri­od: the Bib­li­cal sound­ing smyte for cut, for instance, or eyroun, the Mid­dle Eng­lish term that ulti­mate­ly lost favor to eggs.

The cus­tomers of tav­erns would orig­i­nal­ly have drunk wine, which in Eng­land was import­ed from France at some expense. As they grew more pop­u­lar, these busi­ness­es diver­si­fied their menus, offer­ing “cider from apples and per­ry from pears,” as well as the pre­mi­um option of mead made with hon­ey. Ale­hous­es, as their name would sug­gest, began as pri­vate homes whose wives sold ale, at least the excess that the fam­i­ly itself could­n’t drink. How­ev­er infor­mal they sound, they were still sub­ject to the same reg­u­la­tions as oth­er drink­ing spots, and alewives found to be sell­ing an infe­ri­or prod­uct were sub­ject to the same kind of pub­lic humil­i­a­tions inflict­ed upon any medieval mis­cre­ant — the likes of whom we might rec­og­nize from any num­ber of the high-fan­ta­sy tales we read today.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Medieval Tav­erns: Learn the His­to­ry of These Rough-and-Tum­ble Ances­tors of the Mod­ern Pub

Tast­ing His­to­ry: A Hit YouTube Series Shows How to Cook the Foods of Ancient Greece & Rome, Medieval Europe, and Oth­er Places & Peri­ods

How to Make Medieval Mead: A 13th Cen­tu­ry Recipe

How to Make Ancient Mesopotami­an Beer: See the 4,000-Year-Old Brew­ing Method Put to the Test

The Entire Man­u­script Col­lec­tion of Geof­frey Chaucer Gets Dig­i­tized: A New Archive Fea­tures 25,000 Images of The Can­ter­bury Tales & Oth­er Illus­trat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Tracing English Back to Its Oldest Known Ancestor: An Introduction to Proto-Indo-European

in History, Language | February 11th, 2025

Peo­ple under­stand evo­lu­tion in all sorts of dif­fer­ent ways. We’ve all heard a vari­ety of folk expla­na­tions of that all-impor­tant phe­nom­e­non, from “sur­vival of the fittest” to “humans come from mon­keys,” that run the spec­trum from broad­ly cor­rect to bad­ly man­gled. One less often heard but more ele­gant way to put it is that all species, liv­ing or extinct, share a com­mon ances­tor. This is true of evo­lu­tion as Dar­win knew it, and it could well be true of oth­er forms of “evo­lu­tion” out­side the bio­log­i­cal realm as well. Take lan­guages, which we know full well have changed and split into dif­fer­ent vari­eties over time: do they, too, all share a sin­gle ances­tor?

In the Rob­Words video above, lan­guage Youtu­ber Rob Watts starts with his native Eng­lish and traces its roots back as far as pos­si­ble. He ascends up the fam­i­ly tree past Low West Ger­man, past Pro­to-Ger­man­ic — “a lan­guage that was the­o­ret­i­cal­ly spo­ken by a sin­gle group of peo­ple who would even­tu­al­ly go on to become the Swedes, the Ger­mans, the Dutch, the Eng­lish, and more” — back to an ances­tor of not just Eng­lish and the Ger­man­ic lan­guages, but almost all the Euro­pean lan­guages, as well as of Asian lan­guages like Hin­di, Pash­tu, Kur­dish, Far­si, and Ben­gali. Its name? Pro­to-Indo-Euro­pean.

Watts quotes the eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry philol­o­gist Sir William Jones, who wrote that the ancient Asian lan­guage of San­skrit has a struc­ture “more per­fect than the Greek, more copi­ous than the Latin, and more exquis­ite­ly refined than either, yet bear­ing to both of them a stronger affin­i­ty, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of gram­mar, than could pos­si­bly have been pro­duced by acci­dent.” As with such con­spic­u­ous­ly shared traits observed in dis­parate species of plant or ani­mal, no expert “could exam­ine all three with­out believ­ing them to have sprung from some com­mon source, which, per­haps, no longer exists.”

The evi­dence is every­where, if you pay atten­tion to the sort of unex­pect­ed cog­nates and very-near­ly-cog­nates Watts points out span­ning geo­graph­i­cal­ly and tem­po­ral­ly var­i­ous lan­guages. Take the Eng­lish hun­dred, the Latin cen­tum, the Ancient Greek heka­ton, the Russ­ian sto, and the San­skrit Shatam; or the more deeply buried resem­blances of Eng­lish heart, the Latin cordis, the Russ­ian serd­ce, and the san­skrit hrd. In some cas­es, lin­guists have actu­al­ly used these com­mon­al­i­ties to reverse-engi­neer Pro­to-Indo-Euro­pean words, though always with the caveat that the whole thing “is a recon­struct­ed lan­guage; it’s our best guess of what a com­mon ances­tral lan­guage could have been like.” Was there a still old­er lan­guage from which the non-Pro­to-Indo-Euro­pean-descend­ed lan­guages also descend­ed? That’s a ques­tion to push the lin­guis­tic imag­i­na­tion to its very lim­its.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Was There a First Human Lan­guage?: The­o­ries from the Enlight­en­ment Through Noam Chom­sky

How Lan­guages Evolve: Explained in a Win­ning TED-Ed Ani­ma­tion

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

The Alpha­bet Explained: The Ori­gin of Every Let­ter

The Tree of Lan­guages Illus­trat­ed in a Big, Beau­ti­ful Info­graph­ic

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains Who Was the Greatest Scientific Mind in History

in History, Science | February 10th, 2025

Neil deGrasse Tyson has spent his career talk­ing up not just sci­ence itself, but also its prac­ti­tion­ers. If asked to name the great­est sci­en­tist of all time, one might expect him to need a minute to think about it — or even to find him­self unable to choose. But that’s hard­ly Tyson’s style, as evi­denced by the clip above from his 92nd Street Y con­ver­sa­tion with Fareed Zakaria. “Who do you think is the most extra­or­di­nary sci­en­tif­ic mind that human­i­ty has pro­duced?” Zakaria asks. “There’s no con­test,” Tyson imme­di­ate­ly responds. “Isaac New­ton.”

Those famil­iar with Tyson will know he would be pre­pared for the fol­low-up. By way of expla­na­tion, he nar­rates cer­tain events of New­ton’s life: “He, work­ing alone, dis­cov­ers the laws of motion. Then he dis­cov­ers the law of grav­i­ty.” Faced with the ques­tion of why plan­ets orbit in ellipses rather than per­fect cir­cles, he first invents inte­gral and dif­fer­en­tial cal­cu­lus in order to deter­mine the answer. Then he dis­cov­ers the laws of optics. “Then he turns 26.” At this point in the sto­ry, young lis­ten­ers who aspire to sci­en­tif­ic careers of their own will be ner­vous­ly recal­cu­lat­ing their own intel­lec­tu­al and pro­fes­sion­al tra­jec­to­ries.

They must remem­ber that New­ton was a man of his place and time, specif­i­cal­ly the Eng­land of the late sev­en­teenth and ear­ly eigh­teenth cen­turies. And even there, he was an out­lier the likes of which his­to­ry has hard­ly known, whose eccen­tric ten­den­cies also inspired him to come up with pow­dered toad-vom­it lozenges and pre­dict the date of the apoc­a­lypse (not that he’s yet been proven wrong on that score). But in our time as in his, future (or cur­rent) sci­en­tists would do well to inter­nal­ize New­ton’s spir­it of inquiry, which got him pre­scient­ly won­der­ing whether, for instance, “the stars of the night sky are just like our sun, but just much, much far­ther away.”

“Great sci­en­tists are not marked by their answers, but by how great their ques­tions are.” To find such ques­tions, one needs not just curios­i­ty, but also humil­i­ty before the expanse of one’s own igno­rance. “I do not know what I may appear to the world,” New­ton once wrote, “but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy play­ing on the seashore, and divert­ing myself in now and then find­ing a smoother peb­ble or a pret­ti­er shell than ordi­nary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undis­cov­ered before me.” Near­ly three cen­turies after his death, that ocean remains for­bid­ding­ly but promis­ing­ly vast — at least to those who know how to look at it.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Neil deGrasse Tyson on the Stag­ger­ing Genius of Isaac New­ton

Isaac New­ton Con­ceived of His Most Ground­break­ing Ideas Dur­ing the Great Plague of 1665

Neil deGrasse Tyson Presents a Brief His­to­ry of Every­thing in an 8.5 Minute Ani­ma­tion

In 1704, Isaac New­ton Pre­dict­ed That the World Will End in 2060

Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intel­li­gent Per­son Should Read

Isaac New­ton Cre­ates a List of His 57 Sins (Cir­ca 1662)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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How Japanese Masters Turn Sand Into Swords: The Art of Traditional Sword Making from Start to Finish

in History, Science | February 5th, 2025

We made sand think: this phrase is used from time to time to evoke the par­tic­u­lar tech­no­log­i­cal won­ders of our age, espe­cial­ly since arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence seems to be back on the slate of pos­si­bil­i­ties. While there would be no Sil­i­con Val­ley with­out sil­i­ca sand, semi­con­duc­tors are hard­ly the first mar­vel human­i­ty has forged out of that kind of mate­r­i­al. Con­sid­er the three mil­len­nia of his­to­ry behind the tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese sword, long known even out­side the Japan­ese lan­guage as the katana (lit­er­al­ly “one-sided blade”) — or, more to the point of the Ver­i­ta­si­um video above, the 1,200 years in which such weapons have been made out of steel. How Japan­ese Mas­ters Turn Sand Into Swords

In explain­ing the sci­ence of the katana, Ver­i­ta­si­um host Derek Muller begins more than two and a half bil­lion years ago, when Earth­’s oceans were “rich with dis­solved iron.” But then, cyanobac­te­ria start­ed pho­to­syn­the­siz­ing that iron and cre­at­ing oxy­gen as a by-prod­uct. This process dropped lay­ers of iron onto the sea floor, which even­tu­al­ly hard­ened into lay­ers of sed­i­men­ta­ry rock.

With few such for­ma­tions of its own, the geo­log­i­cal­ly vol­canic Japan actu­al­ly came late to steel, import­ing it long before it could man­age domes­tic pro­duc­tion using the iron oxide that accu­mu­lat­ed in its rivers, recov­ered as “iron sand.”

By that time, iron swords would no longer cut it, as it were, but the addi­tion of char­coal in the heat­ing process could pro­duce the “incred­i­bly strong alloy” of steel. Cer­tain Japan­ese sword­smiths have con­tin­ued to use steel made with the more or less tra­di­tion­al smelt­ing process you can see per­formed in rur­al Shi­mane pre­fec­ture in the video. To the dis­ap­point­ment of its pro­duc­er, Petr Lebe­dev, who par­tic­i­pates in the whole process, the foot-oper­at­ed bel­lows of yore have been elec­tri­fied, but he hard­ly seems dis­ap­point­ed by his chance to take up a katana him­self. He may have yet to attain the skill of a mas­ter swords­man, but under­stand­ing every sci­en­tif­ic detail of the weapon he wields must make slic­ing bam­boo clean in half that much more sat­is­fy­ing.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Hyp­not­ic Look at How Japan­ese Samu­rai Swords Are Made

A Vin­tage Short Film about the Samu­rai Sword, Nar­rat­ed by George Takei (1969)

A Demon­stra­tion of Per­fect Samu­rai Swords­man­ship

An Origa­mi Samu­rai Made from a Sin­gle Sheet of Rice Paper, With­out Any Cut­ting

Watch the Old­est Japan­ese Ani­me Film, Jun’ichi Kōuchi’s The Dull Sword (1917)

How Japan­ese Things Are Made in 309 Videos: Bam­boo Tea Whisks, Hina Dolls, Steel Balls & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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