The word wireless is going the way of computerized and portable, and for much the same reasons. We no longer regard wireless devices that require no physical connections to anything else as marvels, but as something close to necessities. But our age, with its increasingly common assumptions that information just travels through the air, owes its existence to wires — and, in a historical sense, to one set of wires in particular, whose story is told in the Primal Space video above. Woven into a mighty 2,000-mile-long cable, it was laid across the Atlantic Ocean 168 years ago, enabling the first direct communication link between North America and Europe. Not that intercontinental video sharing was just around the corner.
No, the height of communication technology at the time was the telegraph: the Victorian Internet, if you like, to borrow the title of the book by Economist editor Tom Standage that inspired the video. As a technology, telegraphy itself is quite a bit older than the aforementioned transatlantic cable. One possible starting point is 1746, when scientist Jean-Antoine Nollet managed to send a jolt of static electricity all the way down a line of 200 monks.
Another is 1792, when inventor Claude Chappe’s system of semaphoric towers was first implemented. Though described as a telegraph, it used no electricity: if a human operator up in one of the towers spotted a change in the signal of the previous one, he’d rearrange his own semaphores to match it, and so on down the line. In 1800, Alessandro Volta’s chemical battery helped make the electric telegraph viable, but nobody was sure how best to transmit intelligible messages in the form of electrical pulses.
Nobody was sure, that is, until the eighteen-thirties, when a painter named Samuel Morse came up with the dot-and-dash code that now bears his name, as well as the devices used to encode and decode communications made with it. At the same time, English inventors William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone had come up with their own telegraph system that didn’t require a codebook, though its five wires made it more expensive and technologically complex. Within a few years, the U.S. and the U.K. had independently built thousands of miles of telegraph lines, making the next step of linking them together obvious, if easier said than done. Though the cable laid in 1858 failed within months, its basic concept has proven unusually robust. Without the roughly 600 undersea cables through which global internet traffic now flows, after all, you wouldn’t be reading this post — to say nothing of watching the video.
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.
The history of the printed word is full of bibliographic twists and turns, major historical moments, and the significant printing of books now so obscure no one has read them since their publication. Most of us have only the sketchiest notion of how mass-produced printed books came into being—a few scattered dates and names. But every schoolchild can tell you the first book ever printed, and everyone knows the first words of that book: “In the beginning….”
The first Gutenberg Bible, printed in 1454 by Johannes Gutenberg, introduced the world to movable type, history tells us. It is “universally acknowledged as the most important of all printed books,” writes Margaret Leslie Davis, author of the 2019 book, The Lost Gutenberg: The Astounding Story of One Book’s Five-Hundred-Year Odyssey. In 1900, Mark Twain expressed the sentiment in a letter “commenting on the opening of the Gutenberg Museum,” writes M. Sophia Newman at Lithub. “What the world is to-day,” he declared, “good and bad, it owes to Gutenberg. Everything can be traced to this source.”
There is kind of an oversimplified truth in the statement. The printed word (and the printed Bible, at that) did, in large part, determine the course of European history, which, through empire, determined the course of global events after the “Gutenberg revolution.” But there is another story of print entirely independent of book history in Europe, one that also determined world history with the preservation of Buddhist, Chinese dynastic, and Islamic texts. And one that begins “before Johannes Gutenberg was even born,” Newman points out.
The oldest extant text ever printed with movable type predates Gutenberg himself (born in 1400) by 23 years, and predates the printing of his Bible by 77 years. It is the Jikji, printed in Korea, a collection of Buddhist teachings by Seon master Baegun and printed in movable type by his students Seok-chan and Daijam in 1377. (Seon is a Korean form of Chan or Zen Buddhism.) Only the second volume of the printing has survived, and you can see several images from it here.
Impressive as this may be, the Jikji does not have the honor of being the first book printed with movable type, only the oldest surviving example. The technology could go back two centuries earlier. Margaret Davis nods to this history, Newman concedes, writing that “movable type was an 11th century Chinese invention, refined in Korea in 1230, before meeting conditions in Europe that would allow it to flourish.” This is more than most popular accounts of the printed word say on the matter, but it’s still an inaccurate and highly cursory summary of the evidence.
Newman herself says quite a lot more. In essays at Lithub and Tricycle, she describes how printing techniques developed in Asia and were taken up in Korea in the 1200s by the Goryeo dynasty, who commissioned a printer named Choe Yun-ui to reconstruct a woodblock print of the massive collection of ancient Buddhist texts called the Tipitaka after the Mongols burned the only Korean copy. By casting “individual characters in metal” and arranging them in a frame—the same process Gutenberg used—he was able to complete the project by 1250, 200 years before Gutenberg’s press.
This text, however, did not survive, nor did the countless number of others printed when the technology spread across the Mongol empire on the Silk Road and took root with the Muslim Uyghurs. It is possible, though “no clear historical evidence” yet supports the contention, that movable type spread to Europe from Asia along trade routes. “If there was any connection,” wrote Joseph Needham in Science and Civilization in China, “in the spread of printing between Asia and the West, the Uyghurs, who used both block printing and movable type, had good opportunities to play an important role in this introduction.”
Without surviving documentation, this early history of printing in Asia relies on secondary sources. But “the entire history of the printing press” in Europe” is likewise “riddled with gaps,” Newman writes. What we do know is that Jikji, a collection of Korean Zen Buddhist teachings, is the world’s oldest extant book printed with movable type. The myth of Johannes Gutenberg as “a lone genius who transformed human culture,” as Davis writes, “endures because the sweep of what followed is so vast that it feels almost mythic and needs an origin story to match.” But this is one inventive individual in the history of printing, not the original, godlike source of movable type.
Gutenberg makes sense as a convenient starting point for the growth and worldwide spread of capitalism and European Christianity. His innovation worked much faster than earlier systems, and others that developed around the same time, in which frames were pressed by hand against the paper. Flows of new capital enabled the rapid spread of his machine across Europe. The achievement of the Gutenberg Bible is not diminished by a fuller history. But “what gets left out” of the usual story, as Newman tells us in great detail, “is startlingly rich.”
“Only very recently” has the long history of printing in Asia been “acknowledged at all” in popular culture, though scholars in both the East and West have long known it. Korea has regarded Jikji “and other ancient volumes as national points of pride that rank among the most important of books.” Yet UNESCO only certifiedJikji as the “oldest movable metal type printing evidence” in 2001. The recognition may be late in coming, but it matters a great deal, nonetheless. Learn much more about the history, content, and provenance of Jikji at this site created by “cyber diplomats” in Korea after UNESCO bestowed World Heritage status on the book. And see a fully digitized copy of the book here.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.
The idea of a youngster vacillating between whether to become a magician or join the Central Intelligence Agency may sound implausible, but those two working environments have deeper commonalities than it would seem. So, in any case, believes John McLaughlin, whose more than 30 years at the CIA included periods as its deputy director and acting director. He also describes himself as a lifelong amateur magician, an avocation that owes much to his boyhood discovery of Quicker Than the Eye, a magic manual from 1932 by one John Mulholland. Around the same time the young McLaughlin came across that book in the library, Mulholland was writing the more specialized guidebooks Some Operational Applications of the Art of Deception and Recognition Signals — though nobody without a serious security clearance would have known it.
In 1953, Mulholland left his position as editor of the magicians’ trade magazine The Sphinx, ostensibly for health reasons, but actually to go to work for the CIA. Formed just six years before, the organization was still determining what its mission of preventing surprise foreign attacks against the U.S. and countering the global advance of communism would entail on the ground. To anyone who’s made enough of a habit of novels and films dealing with Cold War espionage, it may come as no surprise that the arts of disguise, misdirection, and sleight of hand practiced by master magicians would look useful indeed to the CIA. “Just as a magician’s methods must elude detection in front of a closely attentive audience,” writes McLaughlin, “so an intelligence officer doing espionage work must elude close surveillance and pass messages and materiel without detection.”
Additionally, “analysts must be as familiar as magicians with methods of deception, because analysts are almost always working with incomplete information and in circumstances where an adversary is seeking to mislead them — or in the magician’s term, misdirect them.” The Company’s specialists in counterintelligence described their subfield as a “wilderness of mirrors,” an expression professional illusionists must find especially evocative. Commissioned in the time of the CIA’s human-experimentation program MKULTRA, previously featured here on Open Culture, Mulholland’s manuals were long assumed officially destroyed along with many other of its documents in 1973. After they unexpectedly resurfaced during declassification in the two-thousands, they were published in The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception by Agency historians H. Keith Melton and Robert Wallace. You can find a copy over at the Internet Archive.
At that time, the Boston Globe published illustrated explanations of some of Mulholland’s techniques, such as transporting spies using a mechanism similar to the one that conceals an apparently sawed-in-half stagehand, or surreptitiously dropping into a drink a pill affixed to the back of a book of matches. Amid “the superpower struggle for power and influence around the world,” writes Tom Scocca, “both the ideas and techniques of secret war pervaded the culture — the corrosive belief in hidden conspiracy and the nifty thrill of spycraft itself, the codes and disguises and miniature cameras.” Today, “Mulholland’s account of real-world stagecraft amounts to an etiquette manual for a lost moment of history. The matchbook trick depends on people smoking and drinking. There is a survey of the many pockets found in every man’s suit, and which ones are most natural for casually slipping objects into.” However much of the romance has drained out of espionage — as it has from so much else since the mid-twentieth century — the best magicians know that old tricks can always be re-enchanted for a new world. You can read The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deceptionhere.
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.
The field of psychology is very different than it used to be. Nowadays, the American Psychological Association has a code of conduct for experiments that ensures a subject’s confidentiality, consent,and general mental well-being. In the old days, it wasn’t the case.
Back then, you could, for instance, con subjects into thinking that they were electrocuting a man to death, as they did in the infamous 1961 Milgram experiment, which left people traumatized and humbled in the knowledge that deep down they are little more than weak-willed puppets in the face of authority. You could also try to turn a group of unsuspecting orphans into stutterers by methodically undermining their self-esteem as the folks who ran the aptly named Monster Study of 1939 tried to do. But, if you really want to get into the swamp of moral dubiousness, look no further than the Little Albert experiments, which traumatized a baby into hating dogs, Santa Claus, and all things fuzzy.
In 1920, Johns Hopkins professor John B. Watson was fascinated with Ivan Pavlov’s research on conditioned stimulus. Pavlov famously rang a bell every time he fed his dogs. At first the food caused the dogs to salivate, but after a spell of pairing the bell with dinner, the dogs would eventually salivate at just the sound of the bell. That’s called a conditioned response. Watson wanted to see if he could create a conditioned response in a baby.
Enter 9‑month-old Albert B., AKA Little Albert. At the beginning of the experiment, Albert was presented with a white rat, a dog, a white rabbit, and a mask of Santa Claus among other things. The lad was unafraid of everything and was, in fact, really taken with the rat. Then every time the baby touched the animals, scientists struck a metal bar behind him, creating a startlingly loud bang. The sound freaked out the child and soon, like Pavlov’s dogs, Little Albert grew terrified of the rat and the mask of Santa and even a fur coat. The particularly messed up thing about the experiment was that Watson didn’t even bother to reverse the psychological trauma he inflicted.
What happened to poor baby Albert is hard to say, in part because no one is really sure of the child’s true identity. He might have been Douglas Merritte, as psychologists Hall P. Beck and Sharman Levinson argued in 2009. If that’s the case, then the child died at the age of 6 in 1925 of hydrocephalus. Or he might have been William Albert Barger, as Russ Powell and Nancy Digdon argued in 2012. He passed away in 2007 at the age of 87. He reportedly had a lifelong aversion to dogs, though it cannot be determined if it was a lasting effect of the experiment.
Later in life, Watson left academicia for advertising. You can watch a video of the experiment above.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
Before she became a composer of electronic music, Else Marie Pade was a sick child listening to the radio. Frequent kidney inflammations consigned her to bed for long periods of time, which would constitute neither her last nor her harshest experience of confinement. She was still young when the Nazis occupied her homeland of Denmark during World War II, and perhaps her youth explains her decision to spit on a column of marching German soldiers. She escaped capture that day, running right into the Danish Resistance, for which she distributed underground newspapers and trained in the use of explosives to cut off the enemy’s telephone lines in the event of an Allied invasion. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1944, she never did get to execute that plan, but her real ambitions turned out to be much larger.
“I screamed out loud in fear and helplessness in my solitary cell — but no one came,” Pade wrote in an essay published in The Wire. “It was then I promised myself that if I survived this I would work with music for the rest of my life. And then I felt a strange calm: light, warmth and love were all around me. I was no longer alone. This was the turning point in my life.” The very next day, “I started scratching staves on the prison wall with my garter belt fastener, and wrote out the theme that had come to me, inspired by the vision of the night.” Though infuriated at first, the Commandant in charge told her he would “make sure that the Red Cross brought me music paper and writing utensils so I would refrain from violence and would not dirty the wall any more.”
Pade did all she could to compose during her time as a prisoner of war. After her transfer to the Frøslevlejren internment camp, she was reunited with her piano teacher Karen Brieg, who’d brought her into the Resistance in the first place. “Karen wrote out Danish songs for a three-part women’s choir, and I wrote schlagers — with which I wanted to earn money for music studies when we were released.” Her compatriots in the women’s barracks promised to give her the opportunity to study at the Royal Danish Academy of Music after the war’s end, which is exactly what she did. Though she entered the school with thoughts of becoming a pianist, a 1952 Danmarks Radio broadcast on Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète permanently changed the course of her artistic life.
Those sound collages turned musical experiences sent Pade back to her bouts of childhood sickness, during which her chief pleasures came from listening to the world around her. The result of this inspiration was the first work of electronic musique concrète composed in Denmark, A Day at Dyrehavsbakken. Learning from Schaeffer, and later from other electronic-music pioneers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, György Ligeti and Pierre Boulez, Pade developed the ability to realize the musical worlds she’s been exploring in her head all along. Their austere soundscapes could hardly be farther from the sentimental schlager ballads she’d written to keep spirits up in the barracks, but as you can hear in the selection from 1985 to 1995 presented in the compilation above, the sonic imagination that heard an ambient symphony in dripping sponges, whistling kettles, singing birds, and trotting horses remains exhilarating 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.
We have any number of reasons for difficulty getting to sleep, not least worries about the future. This is hardly a recent phenomenon, and indeed practices meant to clarify the nature of events to come may be older than civilization itself. In fact, many of us moderns trust the old ways of fortune-telling more than the new. Take the cards of the Tarot, often featured here on Open Culture, whose recognizable European form dates back to at least the fourteenth century. But as explained in the new video above from YouTube channel Bedtime & Historian, their pre-history begins longer ago and farther away, with the invention of the playing card itself in Tang-Dynasty China. For Tarot decks weren’t originally a means of glimpsing the future, but of passing time in the present.
In the 400 years or so between the civilizational journey playing cards made along the Silk Road and their first employment as a divination tool by French occultists, many a game of Tarot — or tarocchi, Tarock, and so on — took place in Europe. Monetary stakes, and sometimes considerable ones, were not unknown, which drew the ire of both state and Church authorities.
Yet not only did the cards survive these attempts at repression, they evolved along numerous long and winding cultural paths, taking artistically elaborate and evocative forms that still capture the imagination today. At the same time, the structure of the Tarot deck used by esotericists has remained remarkably stable, with its 78 cards consisting of 22 Major Arcana and 56 Minor Arcana, the latter divided into four suits (like the standard deck used for poker or blackjack).
If you aren’t sure what some of those terms mean, know that all is clarified over the course of the video’s nearly three-hour runtime, the final third of which is dedicated to explaining the identities, characteristics, and meanings of the cards themselves. It’s worth a listen as a kind of advance preparation if you’ve considered going in to get a Tarot reading done by one of the professionals who still ply their trade all around the world. (In Korea, where I live, they even work out of booths set up on the sidewalk, a true convenience for commuters in need of spiritual guidance on the way home.) True to Bedtime & Historian’s concept, the narrator speaks as slowly and calmly as possible, with a fire crackling in the background. You’ll learn a lot about Tarot, certainly, but you may also find that your sleep troubles have been solved before you’ve drawn your first card.
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.
Many a foreigner has visited England and found it an unexpectedly surreal place. Some of that effect has to do with encountering familiar icons — Big Ben, double-decker Routemaster buses, Marmite — in cold, damp reality. More of it may be induced by the country’s simultaneously thoroughgoing cultures of normality and eccentricity, an endless source of inspiration for Monty Python’s Flying Circus and much other British comedy since. Yet England came relatively late to Surrealism, or rather, Surrealism came late to England. When the International Surrealist Exhibition opened at the New Burlington Galleries behind London’s Royal Academy in the summer of 1936, the Manchester Evening News decried it as “a travesty of everything that’s decent.” Naturally, the show was a smash hit.
On display was work by artists including Pablo Picasso, René Magritte, Max Ernst, Alexander Calder, Giorgio de Chirico, Marcel Duchamp, Alberto Giacometti, Paul Klee, Man Ray, and Salvador Dalí, who turned up in person to deliver a lecture on “Authentic Paranoiac Phantoms.” In order to “descend to the subconscious” with a properly Surrealist literalism, he rented a diving suit and helmet from a local outfitter for his appearance. (You can see an actual image from 1936 here.) “The diving suit had extremely heavy lead shoes which I could barely lift,” he writes in his autobiography, as translated by Haakon Chevalier. “I therefore had to walk very slowly, leaning on friends who helped to move me, as though I were completely paralyzed, and thus I appeared before the audience holding two luxurious white Russian wolfhounds on a leash.”
Only after he’d been talking for a few minutes did Dalí realize that “it would be impossible for me to deliver my speech through the glass window of my helmet. Moreover, I had been shut up in this thing for ten minutes and became heated from the exertions I had made in walking across the stage to reach my chair, so that I was dripping with perspiration, and felt faint and on the point of suffocating.” With the technician who’d screwed the helmet on in the first place nowhere to be found, his wife Gala and friend Edward James worked desperately to free him, eventually taking a hammer to the bolts. “At each blow I thought I would faint.” When Dalí finally emerged, the audience, having assumed it had all been an act, “was impressed by my really deathly pallor, which constituted the accurate gauge of that Dalinian dramatic element which never fails to attend my most trivial acts and undertakings.”
As uncompromisingly as they made their declarations to change the world through sheer force of nonsense, the Surrealists also understood that the show must go on. Dalí moved on to the visual portion of his lecture, presenting slides out of order and, for the most part, upside down. This was just one of the attractions with which the International Surrealist Exhibition drew 30,000 visitors during its three-week run, and “had it not been for the gathering storm clouds of war in Europe,” writes the Guardian’s Joanna Moorhead, “it might have gone on to achieve far more.” The old English intolerance for Gallic self-seriousness would also have made things difficult for Surrealism as the likes of Dalí, Duchamp, and André Breton conceived it. Or perhaps the domestic variety was simply enough: as critic and poet Herbert Read puts it in the exhibition’s catalog, a nation that has produced both William Blake and Lewis Carroll is to the manner born.
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.
There was a time when you could just go out and buy an Enigma machine. In the early nineteen-twenties, any organization with a need to keep its communications secret could order a few of those brand-new devices from Germany and rest assured that any messages encoded using them would be safe from prying eyes. It didn’t take long for the military to catch on to the Enigma’s usefulness. Just a few years after the machine came on the market, it had been adopted by the German Navy, Army, and Air Force, and made possible the rapid, secret coordination central to the technique we now call blitzkrieg. When World War II began, Axis forces were confident, as anyone in possession of an unbreakable code might well be.
As history played out, of course, that code turned out to be breakable. That this came as a surprise to the Nazis makes sense if you watch the new video above from Veritasium, which opens up an actual Enigma machine and explains its inner workings. Each letter typed into its keyboard passes through a series of interchangeable rotors wired together, then comes back through in the opposite direction, resulting in a particular substitute letter.
Each character entered advances at least one of the rotors, each of which turns at a different speed, meaning that the already complex substitution cipher constantly changes. To make it even trickier, the Nazis made modifications to their Enigma machines, including a telephone-operator-style plugboard that expanded the possible encryption keys to 7 x 1018: an infinite-seeming number that fairly cried out for the mathematical services of Alan Turing.
Already famous for having come up with the “Turing machine,” which could theoretically manipulate strings of symbols in what we’d now call an algorithmic fashion, he was recruited by Britain’s wartime codebreaking headquarters at Bletchley Park, where experts were already hard at work reverse-engineering the Enigma machine. There he considered flaws in the design of the device, such as its inability to encrypt any given letter as itself, and the ways in which its human operators used it, such as making predictable weather reports. Exploiting these weaknesses required building a non-theoretical computation engine, the Bombe, to grind through all possibilities at what would then have seemed an unfathomable speed. The intelligence the Bombe produced contributed to the success of the surprise D‑Day invasion and may have taken years off the potential ravages of World War II. It wouldn’t have happened without Turing’s formidable intelligence — or his understanding that you need a machine to outsmart a machine.
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.
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