Less well known is his diagram of the Apocalypse. Between 1877 and 1890, notes the Red Cross Museum website, Henry Dunant “produced a series of diagrams reflecting his distinctive understanding of humanity’s past and future. Inspired by Christian revivalism, the drawings depict a timeline from the Flood of Noah to what Dunant believed was an impending Apocalypse. The diagrams fuse mystical references with biblical, historic and scientific events, while also setting up a clear opposition between Geneva, as the centre of the Reformation, and the Catholic Church.”
The image above is the first drawing out of a series of four, made with colored pencils, ink, India ink, wax crayons, and watercolors. Writes Messy Nessy, Dunant “spent considerable time on the drawings, organising the symbolic elements according to a strict logic, making preparatory sketches and painstakingly incorporating drawings and colourings into his chronology.” All along, he was driven by the belief that the Apocalypse was in the offing, just a short time way.
A beautiful early example of visualizing the flow of history, Sebastian C. Adams’ Synchronological Chart of Universal History outlines the evolution of mankind from Adam and Eve to 1871, the year of its first edition.
A recreation can be found and closely examined at the David Rumsey Map Collection, which allows you to zoom in on any part of the original timeline, which stretched to 23 feet in length and was designed for schoolhouses as a one-stop shop for all of history.
As Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton describe it in their book Cartographies of Time:
The Synchronological Chart is a great work of outsider thinking and a template for autodidact study; it attempts to rise above the station of a mere historical summary and to draw a picture of history rich enough to serve as a textbook in itself.
Adams was a voracious reader and a good Christian, and in the top half of the chart he attempts to untangle the spaghetti-like genealogy of Adam and Eve’s children from Abel (“The First Martyr”) through to Solomon (whose temple looks very Gothic), all the way through to Jesus and beyond.
At the same time he presents a detailed description of archaeological history “after the flood,” from Stone Age tools through the earliest civilizations, mentioning major battles, inventions, philosophers, and advances in science. Adams’ starting date of all history comes from the Irish Archbishop James Ussher, who, in 1654 declared, after years of study, that the earth was created on “nightfall on 22 October 4004 BC.” (Now that’s certainty!)
The map is colorful and filled with beautiful illustrations from the self-taught Adams, from a drawing of Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream to the current world leaders and a list of United States Presidents up to James Garfield. There’s even a section at the far end for “Eminent Men not elsewhere mentioned on the Chart,” the sign of a true completist (except for the part where he leaves out women).
Adams lived far from the epicenters of American education. He grew up in a Presbyterian family in Ohio, and, when he showed a skill for teaching later in life, he made the trek out west, nearly dying on the Oregon Trail. He settled in Salem, Oregon and began teaching while also working on his chart. When it was ready to print, he traveled back to Cincinnati to hire the esteemed lithographers Strobridge & Co., who published Civil War scenes, maps, and circus posters. Initially he sold the chart himself, but its popularity led to several American and British printers producing copies into the 20th century. Even Horror writer H.P. Lovecraft owned a copy.
It remains a riotous work of art, history, religion, and self-determination, and facsimiles can still be purchased online. Adams later left teaching to become president of an insurance company, and died of “la grippe” (i.e. the flu) in 1898.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Construction on the Tower of Pisa first began in the year 1173. By 1178, the architects knew they had a problem on their hands. Built on an unsteady foundation, the tower began to sink under its own weight and soon started to lean. Medieval architects tried to address the tilt. However, it persisted and incrementally worsened over the next eight centuries. Then, in 1990, Italian authorities closed the tower to the public, fearing it might collapse. For the next 11 years, engineers worked to stabilize the structure. How did they put the tower on a better footing, as it were, while still preserving some of its iconic lean? That’s the subject of this intriguing video by the YouTube channel Practical Engineering. Watch it above.
Few of us grow up drinking coffee, but once we start drinking it, even fewer of us ever stop. According to legend, the earliest such case was a ninth-century Ethiopian goatherd named Kaldi, who noticed how much energy his ruminant charges seemed to draw from eating particular red berries. After chewing a few of them himself, he experienced the first caffeine buzz in human history. Despite almost certainly never having existed, Kaldi now lends his name to a variety of coffee shops around the world, everywhere from Addis Ababa to Seoul, where I live.
His story also opens the animated TED-Ed video above, “How Humanity Got Hooked on Coffee.” We do know, explains its narrator, that “at some point before the fourteen-hundreds, in what’s now Ethiopia, people began foraging for wild coffee in the forest undergrowth.” Early on, people consumed coffee plants by drinking tea made with their leaves, eating their berries with butter and salt, and — in what proved to be the most enduring method — “drying, roasting, and simmering its cherries into an energizing elixir.” Over the years, demand for this elixir spread throughout the Ottoman Empire, and in the fullness of time made its way outward to both Asia and Europe.
In no European city did coffee catch on as aggressively as it did in London, whose coffee houses proliferated in the mid-seventeenth-century and became “social and intellectual hotbeds.” Later, “Paris’ coffee houses hosted Enlightenment figures like Diderot and Voltaire, who allegedly drank 50 cups of coffee a day.” (In fairness, it was a lot weaker back then.) Producing and transporting the ever-increasing amounts of coffee imbibed in these and other centers of human civilization required world-spanning imperial operations, which were commanded with just the degree of caution and sensitivity one might imagine.
The world’s first commercial espresso machine was showcased in Milan in 1906, a signal moment in the industrialization and mechanization of the coffee experience. By the mid-nineteen-fifties, “about 60 percent of U.S. factories incorporated coffee breaks.” More recent trends have emphasized “specialty coffees with an emphasis on quality beans and brewing methods,” as well as certification for coffee production using “minimum wage and sustainable farming.” Whatever our considerations when buying coffee, many of us have made it an irreplaceable element of our rituals both personal and professional. Not to say what we’re addicted: this is the 3,170th Open Culture post I’ve written, but only the 3,150th or so that I’ve written while drinking coffee.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Historians have long thought that the decimal point first came into use in 1593, when the German mathematician Christopher Clavius wrote an astronomy text called Astrolabium. It turns out, however, that the history of the decimal point stretches back another 150 years–to the work of the Venetian merchant Giovanni Bianchini. In his text Tabulae primi mobilis, written during the 1440s, Bianchini used the decimal point to calculate the coordinates of planets. In so doing, he invented a system of decimal fractions, which, in turn, made the calculations underpinning modern science more efficient and less complex, notes Scientific American.
Glen Van Brummelen, a historian of mathematics, recently recounted to NPR how he discovered Bianchini’s innovation:
I was working on the manuscript of this astronomer, Giovanni Bianchini. I saw the dots inside of a table — in a numerical table. And when he explained his calculations, it became clear that what he was doing was exactly the same thing as we do with the decimal point. And I’m afraid I got rather excited at that point. I grabbed my computer, ran up and down the dorm hallway looking for colleagues who still hadn’t gone to bed, saying, this person’s working with the decimal point in the 1440s. I think they probably thought I was crazy.
In a new article appearing in the journal Historia Mathematica, Van Brummelen explains the historical significance of the decimal point, and what this discovery means for the historical development of mathematics. You can read it online.
The brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière are often referred to as pioneers of cinema, and their 45-second La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon, or Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon (1895), is often referred to as the first film. But history turns out to present a more complicated picture. As previously featured here on Open Culture, Louis Le Prince’s Roundhay Garden Scene predates the Lumière brothers’ work by six and a half years. But it is La Sortie that cinema historians regard as the more important picture, and indeed, as “the invention of movies for mass audiences.”
So writes Ryan Lattanzio at IndieWire, who goes on to explain that “the Lumière brothers were among the first filmmakers in world history, pioneering cinematic technology as well as establishing the common grammar of film.”
In an essay re-printed on Senses of Cinema, the director Haroun Farocki frames La Sortie as having established the grand subjects like regimentation and individuality with which motion pictures have dealt ever since. “For over a century cinematography had been dealing with just one single theme,” he writes. “Like a child repeating for more than a hundred years the first words it has learned to speak in order to immortalize the joy of first speech.”
Farocki also draws an analogy with “painters of the Far East, always painting the same landscape until it becomes perfect and comes to include the painter within it.” And just as Hokusai painted several different versions of his famous The Great Wave off Kanagawa, the Lumière brothers didn’t shoot just one La Sortie, but three. Though each one may look the same at first glance to the eyes of twenty-first century viewers, they’re actually distinguished by many subtle differences, including the season-reflecting attire of the workers and the number of horses drawing the carriage. And so, if we choose to credit the Lumière brothers with inventing cinema as we know it, we must also credit them with a more dubious creation, one we’ve come to know all too well in recent decades: the remake.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Those of us who were playing video games in the nineteen-nineties may remember a fun little platformer, not technically unimpressive for its time, called Clockwork Knight. The concept of a clockwork knight turns out to have had some historical validity, or at least it could potentially have been justified by the then-current state of Leonardo da Vinci studies. Back in the fifties, writes Royal Montgomery at Unchained Robotics, “a team of scholars at the University of California were poring over a number of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, specifically the Codices Atlanticus and Madrid.” There they found plans for what turned out to be “a life-size mechanical knight inside a fifteenth-century German suit of armor.”
More than one generation of enthusiasts and robotics specialists have since set about re-creating Leonardo’s “automaton.” Before 2007, writes Montgomery, “most reconstructed plans included a mechanical device in the belly of the knight. It was later determined that this device had nothing to do with the knight at all — it was actually part of a clock!”
Even if it didn’t run on literal clockwork, Leonardo’s knight would’ve made quite a spectacle. It “appears to have been assembled and displayed for the first time at a ceremony held by the Prince of Milan, Ludovico Sforza in 1495,” and in this sole appearance “could sit and stand, lift its own visor, and move its arms. It was stiff, sure, but you try moving gracefully in 15th century armor.”
However much it amused its aristocratic audience, Leonardo’s surreptitiously pulley-and-cable-operated “robot” would also have offered working, integrated proof of the kind of mechanical systems to which he’d long put his formidable engineering mind. And today, as pointed out at the site of the Robotic Online Short Film Festival, “we are fascinated and terrified in equal parts by humanoid robots for military purposes like Atlas, created by the company Boston Dynamics for DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States). They are all heirs, with twenty-first century technology, to the robotic soldier designed by Leonardo.” The question of whether he also did any pioneering work on robot animals who could dance remains a matter of inquiry for future Leonardo scholars.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
In the Buddhist Asia of a dozen centuries ago, the equivalent of going off to study at an Ivy League school was going off to study at Nalanda. It was founded in the year 427 in what’s now the Indian state of Bihar, making it “the world’s first residential university,” as Sugato Mukherjee writes at BBC travel. As it developed, Nalanda became a “home to nine million books that attracted 10,000 students from across Eastern and Central Asia. They gathered here to learn medicine, logic, mathematics and – above all – Buddhist principles from some of the era’s most revered scholars.”
Alas, despite being much older than the famously venerable universities of Bologna, Oxford, or Cambridge, Nalanda can’t claim to have been in continuous operation since the fifth century. Destroyed by marauders during Turko-Afghan general Bakhtiyar Khilji’s conquest of northern and eastern India in the 1190s, its vast campus lay in obscure ruins until Scottish surveyor Francis Buchanan-Hamilton and British Army engineer Sir Alexander Cunningham rediscovered and identified it, respectively, in the nineteenth century.
In its nearly eight centuries of initial activity, writes Mukherjee, Nalanda attracted proto-international students from all over Asia, and “regularly sent some of its best scholars and professors to places like China, Korea, Japan, Indonesia and Sri Lanka to propagate Buddhist teachings and philosophy.” Its notable faculty members included Aryabhata, “the father of Indian mathematics,” who may have been its head in the sixth century, and Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who returned to his homeland in 645 with “a wagonload of 657 Buddhist scriptures from Nalanda.” Later “he would translate a portion of these volumes into Chinese to create his life’s treatise.”
Of the nine million handwritten Buddhist manuscripts in Nalanda’s library at the time of its destruction, “only a handful” survived. Some of them eventually made their way to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a fitting enough tribute to the world-spanning outlook of the institution. Not far from its original location, now a UNESCO World Heritage site, Nalanda is making a comeback as an international place of learning for the twenty-first century. You can get a sense of how that project is shaping up from the BBC Reel video above. “I think we are already a university of the future,” says its Vice Chancellor Sunaina Singh, and indeed, a promising vision of the future needs nothing quite so much as a sufficiently deep past.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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