The Decimal Point Is 150 Years Older Than We Thought, Emerging in Renaissance Italy

in History, Math | March 5th, 2024

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.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Trigonom­e­try Dis­cov­ered on a 3700-Year-Old Ancient Baby­lon­ian Tablet

How the Ancient Greeks Shaped Mod­ern Math­e­mat­ics: A Short, Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

The Map of Math­e­mat­ics: An Ani­mat­ed Video Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Fields in Math Fit Togeth­er

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Watch the Film That Invented Cinema: Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon (1895)

in Film, History | February 29th, 2024

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.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch the Films of the Lumière Broth­ers & the Birth of Cin­e­ma (1895)

Icon­ic Film from 1896 Restored with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: Watch an AI-Upscaled Ver­sion of the Lumière Broth­ers’ The Arrival of a Train at La Cio­tat Sta­tion

Pris­tine Footage Lets You Revis­it Life in Paris in the 1890s: Watch Footage Shot by the Lumière Broth­ers

See 21 His­toric Films by Lumière Broth­ers, Col­orized and Enhanced with Machine Learn­ing (1895–1902)

The Ear­li­est Known Motion Pic­ture, 1888’s Round­hay Gar­den Scene, Restored with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

The His­to­ry of the Movie Cam­era in Four Min­utes: From the Lumière Broth­ers to Google Glass

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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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The Armored-Knight “Robot” Designed by Leonardo da Vinci (circa 1495)

in History, Technology | February 28th, 2024

Image by Erik Möller, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

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.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Explore the Largest Online Archive Explor­ing the Genius of Leonard da Vin­ci

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Ele­gant Design for a Per­pet­u­al Motion Machine

The Inge­nious Inven­tions of Leonar­do da Vin­ci Recre­at­ed with 3D Ani­ma­tion

Watch Leonar­do da Vinci’s Musi­cal Inven­tion, the Vio­la Organ­ista, Being Played for the Very First Time

The Amaz­ing Engi­neer­ing of Gauntlets (Armored Gloves) from the 16th Cen­tu­ry

200-Year-Old Robots That Play Music, Shoot Arrows & Even Write Poems: Watch Automa­tons in Action

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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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Discover the World’s Oldest University, Which Opened in 427 CE, Housed 9 Million Manuscripts, and Then Educated Students for 800 Years

in Education, History, Religion | February 22nd, 2024

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.”

Image by Sum­it­surai, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

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.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Intro­duc­tion to Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Online Course

The Most Dis­tant Places Vis­it­ed by the Romans: Africa, Scan­di­navia, Chi­na, India, Ara­bia & Oth­er Far-Flung Lands

Learn the His­to­ry of Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy in a 62 Episode Series from The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps: The Bud­dha, Bha­gavad-Gita, Non Vio­lence & More

One of the Old­est Bud­dhist Man­u­scripts Has Been Dig­i­tized & Put Online: Explore the Gand­hara Scroll

How 99% of Ancient Lit­er­a­ture Was Lost

The Largest Free Kitchen in the World: Dis­cov­er India’s Gold­en Tem­ple Which Serves 100,000 Free Meals Per Day

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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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Isaac Asimov Predicts the Future in 1982: Computers Will Be “at the Center of Everything;” Robots Will Take Human Jobs

in History, Technology, Television | February 21st, 2024

Four decades ago, our civ­i­liza­tion seemed to stand on the brink of a great trans­for­ma­tion. The Cold War had stoked around 35 years of every-inten­si­fy­ing devel­op­ments, includ­ing but not lim­it­ed to the Space Race. The per­son­al com­put­er had been on the mar­ket just long enough for most Amer­i­cans to, if not actu­al­ly own one, then at least to won­der if they might soon find them­selves in need of one. On New Year’s Eve of 1982, The Mac­Neil-Lehrer News Hour offered its view­ers a glimpse of the shape of things to come by invit­ing a trio of for­ward-look­ing guests, Was­n’t the Future Won­der­ful author Tim Onosko; Omni mag­a­zine edi­tor Dick Tere­si; and, most dis­tin­guished of all, Isaac Asi­mov.

As the “author of more than 250 books, light and heavy, fic­tion and non-fic­tion, some of the most notable being about the future,” Asi­mov had long been a go-to inter­vie­wee for media out­lets in need of long-range pre­dic­tions about tech­nol­o­gy, soci­ety, and the dynam­ic rela­tion­ship between the two. (Here on Open Cul­ture, we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured his spec­u­la­tions from 1983, 1980, 1978, 1967, and 1964.) Robert Mac­Neil opens with a nat­ur­al sub­ject for any sci­ence-fic­tion writer: mankind’s for­ays into out­er space, and whether Asi­mov sees “any­thing left out there.” Asi­mov’s response: “Oh, every­thing.”

In the ear­ly eight­ies, the man who wrote the Foun­da­tion series saw human­i­ty as “still in the Christo­pher Colum­bus stage as far as space is con­cerned,” fore­see­ing not just space sta­tions but “solar pow­er sta­tions,” “lab­o­ra­to­ries and fac­to­ries that can do things in space that are dif­fi­cult or impos­si­ble to do on Earth,” and even “space set­tle­ments in which thou­sands of peo­ple can be housed more or less per­ma­nent­ly.” In the full­ness of time, the goal would be to “build a larg­er and more elab­o­rate civ­i­liza­tion and one which does not depend upon the resources of one world.”

As for “the com­put­er age,” asks Jim Lehrer; “have we crest­ed on that one as well”? Asi­mov knew full well that the com­put­er would be “at the cen­ter of every­thing.” Just as had hap­pened with tele­vi­sion over the pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tion, “com­put­ers are going to be nec­es­sary in the house to do a great many things, some in the way of enter­tain­ment, some in the way of mak­ing life a lit­tle eas­i­er, and every­one will want it.” There were many, even then, who could feel real excite­ment at the prospect of such a future. But what of robots, which, as even Asi­mov knew, would come to “replace human beings?”

“It’s not that they kill them, but they kill their jobs,” he explains, and those who lose the old jobs may not be equipped to take on any of the new ones. “We are going to have to accept an impor­tant role — soci­ety as a whole — in mak­ing sure that the tran­si­tion peri­od from the pre-robot­ic tech­nol­o­gy to the post-robot­ic tech­nol­o­gy is as pain­less as pos­si­ble. We have to make sure that peo­ple aren’t treat­ed as though they’re used up dishrags, that they have to be allowed to live and retain their self-respect.” Today, the tech­nol­o­gy of the moment is arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, which the news media haven’t hes­i­tat­ed to pay near-obses­sive atten­tion to. (I’m trav­el­ing in Japan at the moment, and saw just such a broad­cast on my hotel TV this morn­ing.) Would that they still had an Asi­mov to dis­cuss it with a lev­el-head­ed, far-sight­ed per­spec­tive.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts in 1983 What the World Will Look Like in 2019: Com­put­er­i­za­tion, Glob­al Co-oper­a­tion, Leisure Time & Moon Min­ing

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts the Future on The David Let­ter­man Show (1980)

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts the Future of Civ­i­liza­tion — and Rec­om­mends Ways to Ensure That It Sur­vives (1978)

Buck­min­ster Fuller, Isaac Asi­mov & Oth­er Futur­ists Make Pre­dic­tions About the 21st Cen­tu­ry in 1967: What They Got Right & Wrong

In 1964, Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts What the World Will Look Like Today: Self-Dri­ving Cars, Video Calls, Fake Meats & More

Nine Sci­ence-Fic­tion Authors Pre­dict the Future: How Jules Verne, Isaac Asi­mov, William Gib­son, Philip K. Dick & More Imag­ined the World Ahead

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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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Scenes from Life in Paris During the 1920s, Colorized and Restored: Cafés, Notre Dame, Street Life & More

in Film, History | February 20th, 2024

Few cities have been as roman­ti­cized as Paris, and few eras in Paris have been as roman­ti­cized as the nine­teen-twen­ties. This owes much to the famous expa­tri­ate artis­tic and lit­er­ary fig­ures resid­ing there in that decade: Ernest Hem­ing­way, Sal­vador Dalí, F. Scott and Zel­da Fitzger­ald, Pablo Picas­so, Gertrude Stein, and Man Ray, to name just a few of the fig­ures revived in Woody Allen’s Mid­night in Paris. It’s still dif­fi­cult, a cen­tu­ry lat­er, not to feel at least some curios­i­ty about the real Paris in the twen­ties, footage of which you can see col­orized and enhanced to play at a smooth 60 frames per sec­ond in the video above.

In some respects, Paris has­n’t changed much over the past hun­dred or so years. Notre-Dame, the bridges across the Seine, and the colonne Vendôme will be imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­niz­able to any­one who’s been there.

And though the attire of Parisians may be unrec­og­niz­able, their habits cer­tain­ly aren’t: then as now, they clear­ly spent con­sid­er­able amounts of time on les ter­rass­es of their cafés of choice. (And in some cas­es, they’re just the same cafés, as in the case of Le Dôme and Le Café de la Paix.) And though a few of them still read news­pa­pers there in the twen­ty-twen­ties, many more did in the nine­teen twen­ties, the inven­tion of the smart­phone lying about eighty years in the future.

For some of us, the absence of screens alone may feel like rea­son enough to time-trav­el back, as Owen Wilson’s dis­af­fect­ed Hol­ly­wood screen­writer does in Mid­night in Paris. If we con­sid­er the state of plumb­ing, heat­ing and den­tistry in the France after World War I, we may have sec­ond thoughts, and sure­ly our fore­knowl­edge of World War II would also put a damper on the expe­ri­ence. But romance is romance, and if we could suc­cess­ful­ly man­age to inte­grate our­selves into the urban life cap­tured by these film clips, we might just get used to it, and even want to stick around for a few more decades after Hem­ing­way, Picas­so, the Fitzger­alds, et al leave the scene. After all, les Trente Glo­rieuses were still to come.

via MyMod­ern­Met

Relat­ed con­tent:

Pris­tine Footage Lets You Revis­it Life in Paris in the 1890s: Watch Footage Shot by the Lumière Broth­ers

Beau­ti­ful, Col­or Pho­tographs of Paris Tak­en 100 Years Ago — at the Begin­ning of World War I & the End of La Belle Époque

Watch Scenes from Belle Époque Paris Vivid­ly Restored with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence (Cir­ca 1890)

Paris, New York & Havana Come to Life in Col­orized Films Shot Between 1890 and 1931

Vis­it Great Cities in the 1920s in Restored Col­or Film: New York City, Lon­don, Berlin, Paris, Venice & More

Col­or Footage of the Lib­er­a­tion of Paris, Shot by Hol­ly­wood Direc­tor George Stevens (1944)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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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A Web Site That Lets You Find Your Home Address on Pangea

in History, Maps | February 19th, 2024

A cool tool. Soft­ware engi­neer Ian Web­ster has cre­at­ed a web­site that lets you see how the land mass­es on plan­et Earth have changed over the course of 750 mil­lion years. And it has the added bonus of let­ting you plot mod­ern address­es on these ancient land for­ma­tions. Ergo, you can see where your home was locat­ed on the Big Blue Mar­ble some 20, 100, 500, or 750 mil­lion years ago. Web­ster’s project (access it here) is open source. Have fun.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Map Show­ing Where Today’s Coun­tries Would Be Locat­ed on Pangea

A Bil­lion Years of Tec­ton­ic-Plate Move­ment in 40 Sec­onds: A Quick Glimpse of How Our World Took Shape

The Plate Tec­ton­ic Evo­lu­tion of the Earth Over 500 Mil­lion Years: Ani­mat­ed Video Takes You from Pangea, to 250 Mil­lion Years in the Future

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A 3D Animation Shows the Evolution of New York City (1524 — 2023)

in Architecture, History | February 14th, 2024

Near­ly two and a half cen­turies after its found­ing, the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca is still both cel­e­brat­ed and derid­ed as a young coun­try. Exam­ined on the whole, the US may or may not seem less mature than oth­er lands in any obvi­ous way, but the dif­fer­ence man­i­fests much more clear­ly on the lev­el of cities. For even among those found­ed before the inde­pen­dence of the coun­try itself, no Amer­i­can city has yet attained 500 offi­cial years of age. But in the case of New York City, we can trace its for­ma­tion through half a mil­len­ni­um of his­to­ry, as ren­dered in the 3D ani­mat­ed video from Info­Geek above.

The long ver­sion of New York’s sto­ry begins in 1524, the year Gio­van­ni da Ver­raz­zano com­mand­ed the French ship La Dauphine into what we now know as New York Har­bor. While he and his crew did not, of course, get the dra­mat­ic for­est-of-sky­scrap­ers view for which that approach would lat­er be cel­e­brat­ed, they would, per­haps, have seen an actu­al for­est, as well as oth­er ele­ments of a nat­ur­al land­scape that would have appeared sub­lime­ly untouched. A cen­tu­ry lat­er, the Dutch there found­ed the trad­ing out­post of New Ams­ter­dam, which com­menced the writ­ten his­to­ry of New York — as well as the aggres­sive devel­op­ment that would even­tu­al­ly come to char­ac­ter­ize the city and its cul­ture.

New Ams­ter­dam became New York in 1664, one of the many his­tor­i­cal events that scroll past in the win­dow at the video’s low­er-left cor­ner. At that point in time, the pop­u­la­tion had grown to about 3,600, a fig­ure count­ed at the bot­tom of the frame. Yet even as we see streets roll out, build­ings rise, and trees sprout rapid­ly around us over the next 150 or so years of our stroll, and even after New York becomes Amer­i­ca’s largest city in 1790, we must bear in mind that its cen­tu­ry has­n’t even begun. It’s some­thing of an irony that the huge­ly destruc­tive Great Fire of 1835 pre­cedes a devel­op­men­tal push that makes the city, even to our twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry eyes, look almost mod­ern.

Lat­er in the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, we wit­ness the appear­ance of Cen­tral Park and the intro­duc­tion of motor­cars; by the turn of the twen­ti­eth, New York’s pop­u­la­tion approach­es three and a half mil­lion. Walk­ing down Wall Street (and into the Great Depres­sion), we pass just-mate­ri­al­iz­ing land­marks that remain icon­ic today, like the Chrysler Build­ing, the Empire State Build­ing and — after a some­what dra­mat­ic fast-for­ward in time — Frank Lloyd Wright’s Solomon R. Guggen­heim Muse­um and Minoru Yamasak­i’s ill-fat­ed World Trade Cen­ter. We’re now well into the New York of liv­ing mem­o­ry, and even when the ani­ma­tion has passed the cre­ative decrepi­tude of the sev­en­ties and eight­ies and arrives at the city as it was last year (pop­u­la­tion: 7,888,120), we sense that its evo­lu­tion has only just begun.

Relat­ed con­tent:

New York City: A Social His­to­ry (A Free Online Course from N.Y.U.)

Immac­u­late­ly Restored Film Lets You Revis­it Life in New York City in 1911

Scenes of New York City in 1945 Col­orized & Revived with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

The Lost Neigh­bor­hood Buried Under New York City’s Cen­tral Park

How Cen­tral Park Was Cre­at­ed Entire­ly By Design & Not By Nature: An Archi­tect Breaks Down America’s Great­est Urban Park

An Archi­tect Demys­ti­fies the Art Deco Design of the Icon­ic Chrysler Build­ing (1930)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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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