Stephen Fry Takes Us Inside the Story of Johannes Gutenberg & the First Printing Press

in History, Technology | November 15th, 2021

Stephen Fry loves tech­nol­o­gy. Here on Open Cul­ture we’ve fea­tured his inves­ti­ga­tions into every­thing from cloud com­put­ing to nanoscience to arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and sim­u­la­tion the­o­ry. “I have nev­er seen a smart­phone I haven’t bought,” he wrote in 2007, the year Apple’s iPhone came out. But the iPhone would sure­ly nev­er have been if not for the Mac­in­tosh, the third of which ever sold in the Unit­ed King­dom went to Fry. (His fel­low British technophile Dou­glas Adams had already snagged the first two.) And there would­n’t have been a Mac­in­tosh — a stretch though this may seem — if not for the print­ing press, which by some reck­on­ings set off the tech­no­log­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion that car­ries us along to this day.

The his­to­ry of the print­ing press is thus, in a sense, a his­to­ry of tech­nol­o­gy in micro­cosm. In the hour­long doc­u­men­tary The Machine that Made Us, Fry seeks out an under­stand­ing of the inven­tion, the work­ings, and the evo­lu­tion of the device that, as he puts it, “shaped the mod­ern world.”

The use of mov­able type to run off many copies of a text goes back to 11th-cen­tu­ry Chi­na, strict­ly speak­ing, but only in Europe did it first flour­ish to the point of giv­ing rise to mass media. In order to place him­self at the begin­ning of that par­tic­u­lar sto­ry, Fry trav­els to Mainz in mod­ern-day Ger­many, birth­place of a cer­tain Johannes Guten­berg, whose edi­tion of the Bible from the 1450s isn’t just the ear­li­est mass-pro­duced book but the most impor­tant one as well.

Fry may not have a straight­for­ward rela­tion­ship with reli­gion, but he does under­stand well the ram­i­fi­ca­tions of Guten­berg’s Bible-print­ing enter­prise. And he comes to under­stand that enter­prise itself more deeply while fol­low­ing the “Guten­berg trail,” retrac­ing the steps of the man him­self as he assem­bled the resources to put his inven­tion into action. Since none of the press­es Guten­berg built sur­vive today (though at least one func­tion­ing approx­i­mate mod­el does exist), Fry involves him­self in recon­struct­ing an exam­ple. He also vis­its a paper mill and a type foundry whose crafts­men make their mate­ri­als with the same meth­ods used in the 15th cen­tu­ry. The fruit of these com­bined labors is a sin­gle repli­ca page of the Guten­berg Bible: a reminder of what brought about the eco­nom­ic, polit­i­cal, and cul­tur­al real­i­ty we still inhab­it these 570 years lat­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

See How The Guten­berg Press Worked: Demon­stra­tion Shows the Old­est Func­tion­ing Guten­berg Press in Action

Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Presents the 550-Year-Old Guten­berg Bible in Spec­tac­u­lar, High-Res Detail

The Old­est Book Print­ed with Mov­able Type is Not The Guten­berg Bible: Jikji, a Col­lec­tion of Kore­an Bud­dhist Teach­ings, Pre­dat­ed It By 78 Years and It’s Now Dig­i­tized Online

The Art of Col­lo­type: See a Near Extinct Print­ing Tech­nique, as Lov­ing­ly Prac­ticed by a Japan­ese Mas­ter Crafts­man

Stephen Fry Pro­files Six Russ­ian Writ­ers in the New Doc­u­men­tary Russia’s Open Book

Stephen Fry Intro­duces the Strange New World of Nanoscience

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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Meet the Mysterious Genius Who Patented the UFO

in Design, History | November 12th, 2021

Amer­i­can inven­tors nev­er met a phe­nom­e­non — nat­ur­al, man­made, or oth­er­wise — they couldn’t try to patent. From impos­si­ble tech­nolo­gies to pos­si­ble evi­dence of aliens vis­it­ing plan­et Earth, everything’s fair game if you can sell the idea. After high­ly-pub­li­cized UFO sight­ings in Wash­ing­ton State and Roswell, New Mex­i­co, for exam­ple, patents for fly­ing saucers began pour­ing into gov­ern­ment offices. “As soon as there was a pop­u­lar ‘spark,’” writes Ernie Smith at Atlas Obscu­ra, “the saucer was every­where.” It received its own clas­si­fi­ca­tion in the U.S. Patent Office, with the index­ing code B64C 39/001, for “fly­ing vehi­cles char­ac­ter­ized by sus­tain­ment with­out aero­dy­nam­ic lift, often fly­ing disks hav­ing a UFO-shape.”

Google Patents lists “around 192 items in this spe­cif­ic clas­si­fi­ca­tion,” with surges in appli­ca­tions between 1953–56, 1965–71, and  an “unusu­al­ly dra­mat­ic surge… between 2001 and 2004.” Make of that what you will. The sto­ry of the UFO gets both stranger and more mun­dane when we learn that Alexan­der Weygers, the very first per­son to file a patent for such a fly­ing vehi­cle, invent­ed it decades before UFO-mania and patent­ed it in 1945. He was not an Amer­i­can inven­tor but the Indone­sian-born son of a Dutch sug­ar plan­ta­tion fam­i­ly. He learned black­smithing on the farm, received an edu­ca­tion in Hol­land in mechan­i­cal engi­neer­ing and naval archi­tec­ture, and honed his mechan­i­cal skills while tak­ing long sea voy­ages alone.

In 1926, Weygers and his wife Jaco­ba Hut­ter moved to Seat­tle, Ash­lee Vance writes at Bloomberg Busi­ness­week, “where he pur­sued a career as a marine engi­neer and ship archi­tect and began ink­ing draw­ings of the Dis­copter” — the fly­ing-saucer-like vehi­cle he would patent after work­ing for many years as a painter and sculp­tor, mourn­ing the death of his wife, who died in child­birth in 1928. By the time Weygers was ready to revive the Dis­copter, the time was ripe, it seems, for a wave of tech­no­log­i­cal con­ver­gent evo­lu­tion — or a tech­no­log­i­cal theft. Per­haps, as Weygers’ claimed, UFOs real­ly were Army test planes: test pilots fly­ing some­thing based on the inventor’s design — which was not a UFO, but an attempt at a bet­ter heli­copter.

Sight­ings of strange objects in the sky did not begin in 1947. “Tales of mys­te­ri­ous fly­ing objects date to medieval times,” Vance writes, “and oth­er inven­tors and artists had pro­duced images of disk-shaped crafts. Hen­ri Coan­da, a Roman­ian inven­tor, even built a fly­ing saucer in the 1930s that looked sim­i­lar to what we now think of as the clas­sic craft from out­er space. His­to­ri­ans sus­pect that the designs of Coan­da and Weygers, float­ing around in the pub­lic sphere, com­bined with the post­war inter­est in sci-fi tech­nol­o­gy to cre­ate an atmos­phere that gave rise to a sud­den influx of UFO sight­ings.” In the 1950s, NASA and the U.S. Navy even began test­ing ver­ti­cal take­off vehi­cles that looked sus­pi­cious­ly like the patent­ed Dis­copter.

Weygers was livid and “con­vinced his designs had been stolen.” The press even picked up the sto­ry. In 1950 the San Fran­cis­co Chron­i­cle ran an arti­cle head­lined “Carmel Val­ley Artist Patent­ed Fly­ing Saucer Five Years Ago: ‘Dis­copter’ May Be What Peo­ple Have Seen Late­ly.” Although Weygers nev­er built a Dis­copter him­self, the arti­cle goes on to note that “the inven­tion became the pro­to­type for all disk-shaped ver­ti­cal take-off air­craft since built by the U.S. armed forces and pri­vate indus­try, both here and abroad.” Just how many such vehi­cles have been con­struct­ed, and have actu­al­ly been air-wor­thy, is impos­si­ble to say.

Smith sur­veys many of the patents for fly­ing saucers filed over the past 75 years by both indi­vid­u­als and large com­pa­nies. In the lat­ter cat­e­go­ry, we have com­pa­nies like Air­bus and star­tups cre­at­ed by Google co-founder Lar­ry Page cur­rent­ly work­ing on fly­ing saucer-like designs. The his­to­ry of such vehi­cles may not pro­vide suf­fi­cient evi­dence to dis­prove UFO sight­ings, but it may one day lead to the tech­nol­o­gy for fly­ing cars we thought would already have arrived this far into the space age. For that we have to thank, though he may nev­er get the cred­it, the mod­ern Renais­sance artist and inven­tor Alexan­der Weygers.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

What Do Aliens Look Like? Oxford Astro­bi­ol­o­gists Draw a Pic­ture, Based on Dar­win­ian The­o­ries of Evo­lu­tion

The CIA Has Declas­si­fied 2,780 Pages of UFO-Relat­ed Doc­u­ments, and They’re Now Free to Down­load

Carl Jung’s Fas­ci­nat­ing 1957 Let­ter on UFOs

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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What Is Sun Tzu’s The Art of War About?: A Short Introduction

in History, Literature, Philosophy | November 11th, 2021

After wars in Japan and Viet­nam, the U.S. mil­i­tary became quite keen on a slim vol­ume of ancient Chi­nese lit­er­a­ture known as The Art of War by a sup­pos­ed­ly his­tor­i­cal gen­er­al named Sun Tzu. This book became required read­ing at mil­i­tary acad­e­mies and a favorite of law enforce­ment, and has formed a basis for strat­e­gy in mod­ern wartime — as in the so-called “Shock and Awe” cam­paigns in Iraq. But some have argued that the West­ern adop­tion of this text — wide­ly read across East Asia for cen­turies — neglects the cru­cial con­text of the cul­ture that pro­duced it.

Despite his­tor­i­cal claims that Sun Tzu served as a gen­er­al dur­ing the Spring and Autumn peri­od, schol­ars have most­ly doubt­ed this his­to­ry and date the com­po­si­tion of the book to the War­ring States peri­od (cir­ca 475–221 B.C.E.) that pre­ced­ed the first empire, a time in which a few rapa­cious states gob­bled up their small­er neigh­bors and con­stant­ly fought each oth­er.

“Occa­sion­al­ly the rulers man­aged to arrange recess­es from the endem­ic wars,” trans­la­tor Samuel B. Grif­fith notes. Nonethe­less, “it is extreme­ly unlike­ly that many gen­er­als died in bed dur­ing the hun­dred and fifty years between 450 and 300 B.C.”

The author of The Art of War was pos­si­bly a gen­er­al, or one of the many mil­i­tary strate­gists for hire at the time, or as some schol­ars believe, a com­pil­er of an old­er oral tra­di­tion. In any case, con­stant war­fare was the norm at the time of the book’s com­po­si­tion. This tac­ti­cal guide dif­fers from oth­er such guides, and from those that came before it. Rather than coun­sel­ing div­ina­tion or the study of ancient author­i­ties, Sun Tzu’s advice is pure­ly prac­ti­cal and of-the-moment, requir­ing a thor­ough knowl­edge of the sit­u­a­tion, the ene­my, and one­self. Such knowl­edge is not eas­i­ly acquired. With­out it, defeat or dis­as­ter are near­ly cer­tain:

If you know the ene­my and know your­self, you need not fear the result of a hun­dred bat­tles. If you know your­self but not the ene­my, for every vic­to­ry gained you will also suf­fer a defeat. If you know nei­ther the ene­my nor your­self, you will suc­cumb in every bat­tle.

The kind of knowl­edge Sun Tzu rec­om­mends is prac­ti­cal intel­li­gence about troop deploy­ments, food sup­plies, etcetera. It is also knowl­edge of the Tao — in this case, the gen­er­al moral prin­ci­ple and its real­iza­tion through the sov­er­eign. In a time of War­ring States, Sun Tzu rec­og­nized that knowl­edge of war­fare was “a mat­ter of vital impor­tance”; and that states should under­take it as lit­tle as pos­si­ble.

“To sub­due the ene­my with­out fight­ing is the acme of skill,” The Art of War famous­ly advis­es. Diplo­ma­cy, decep­tion, and indi­rec­tion are all prefer­able to the mate­r­i­al waste and loss of life in war, not to men­tion the high odds of defeat if one goes into bat­tle unpre­pared. “The ide­al strat­e­gy of restraint, of win­ning with­out fight­ing… is char­ac­ter­is­tic of Tao­ism,” writes Rochelle Kaplan. “Both The Art of War and the Tao Te Ching were designed to help rulers and their assis­tants achieve vic­to­ry and clar­i­ty,” and “each of them may be viewed as anti-war tracts.”

Read a full trans­la­tion of The Art of War by Lionel Giles, in sev­er­al for­mats online here, and just above, hear the same trans­la­tion read aloud.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Life-Chang­ing Books: Your Picks

“The Phi­los­o­phy of “Flow”: A Brief Intro­duc­tion to Tao­ism

When Sci-Fi Leg­end Ursu­la K. Le Guin Trans­lat­ed the Chi­nese Clas­sic, the Tao Te Ching

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Life Magazine Predicts in 1914 How People Would Dress in the 1950s

in History, Life, Magazines | November 11th, 2021

Though still just with­in liv­ing mem­o­ry, 1950 now seems as if it belongs not just to the past but to a whol­ly bygone real­i­ty. Yet that year once stood for the future: that is to say, a time both dis­tant enough to fire up the imag­i­na­tion and near enough to instill a sense of trep­i­da­tion. It must have felt that way, at least, to the sub­scribers of Life mag­a­zine in Decem­ber of 1914, when they opened an issue of that mag­a­zine ded­i­cat­ed in part to pre­dict­ing the state of human­i­ty 36 years hence. Its bold cov­er depicts a man and woman of the 1950s amus­ed­ly regard­ing pic­tures of a man and woman in 1914: the lat­ter wear but­toned-up Euro­pean street cloth­ing, while the for­mer have on almost noth­ing at all.

As ren­dered by illus­tra­tor Otho Cush­ing, the thor­ough­ly mod­ern 1950s female wears a kind of slip, some­thing like a gar­ment from ancient Greece updat­ed by abbre­vi­a­tion. Her male coun­ter­part takes his inspi­ra­tion from an even ear­li­er stage of civ­i­liza­tion, his loin­cloth cov­er­ing as few as pos­si­ble of the abstract pat­terns paint­ed or tat­tooed all over his body. (About his choice to top it all off with a plumed hel­met, an entire PhD the­sis could sure­ly be writ­ten.)

Any cred­i­ble vision of the future must draw inspi­ra­tion from the past, and Cush­ing’s inter­ests equipped him well for the task: 28 years lat­er, his New York Times obit­u­ary would refer to his ear­ly spe­cial­iza­tion in depict­ing “hand­some young men and women in Greek or mod­ern cos­tumes.”

Even though fash­ions have yet to make a return to antiq­ui­ty, how many out­fits on the street of any major city today would scan­dal­ize the aver­age Life read­er of 1914? Of course, the cov­er is essen­tial­ly a gag, as is much of the osten­si­ble prog­nos­ti­ca­tion inside. As cir­cu­lat­ed again not long ago in a tweet thread by Andy Machals, it fore­sees mon­archs in the unem­ploy­ment line, boys’ jobs tak­en by girls, women acquir­ing harems of men, and the near-extinc­tion of mar­riage. But some pre­dic­tions, like 30 miles per hour becom­ing a slow enough dri­ving speed to be tick­etable, have come true. Anoth­er piece imag­ines peo­ple of the 1950s hir­ing musi­cians to accom­pa­ny them through­out each phase of the day. Few of us do that even in the 2020s, but liv­ing our dig­i­tal­ly sound­tracked lives, we may still won­der how our ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry ances­tors man­aged: “Between meals they lis­tened to almost absolute­ly noth­ing.”

via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Author Imag­ines in 1893 the Fash­ions That Would Appear Over the Next 100 Years

Fash­ion Design­ers in 1939 Pre­dict How Peo­ple Would Dress in the Year 2000

In 1900, Ladies’ Home Jour­nal Pub­lish­es 28 Pre­dic­tions for the Year 2000

How French Artists in 1899 Envi­sioned Life in the Year 2000: Draw­ing the Future

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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Rare Book Featuring the Concept Art for Jodorowsky’s Dune Goes Up for Auction (1975)

in Books, Film, History, Sci Fi | November 9th, 2021


Denis Vil­leneu­ve’s new adap­ta­tion of Frank Her­bert’s Dune has made a decent­ly promis­ing start to what looks set to shape up into an epic series of films. But how­ev­er many install­ments it final­ly com­pris­es, it’s unlike­ly to run any­where near as long as Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky’s ver­sion — had Jodor­owsky actu­al­ly made his ver­sion, that is. Pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, that project promised to unite the tal­ents of not just the cre­ator of the Dune uni­verse and the direc­tor of The Holy Moun­tain, but those of Mœbius, H.R. Giger, Sal­vador Dalí, Pink Floyd, Orson Welles, and Mick Jag­ger. Even David Lynch’s Dune, for all its large-scale weird­ness, would sure­ly play like My Din­ner with Andre by com­par­i­son.

Alas, none of us will ever get to see Jodor­owsky’s Dune, now one of the most sto­ried of all unmade films. But one of us — one of the deep-pock­et­ed among us, at least — now has a chance to own the book. Not Her­bert’s nov­el: the book assem­bled cir­ca 1985 as a pitch­ing aid, meant to show stu­dios the exten­sive pre-pro­duc­tion work Jodor­owsky, pro­duc­er Michel Sey­doux, and their col­lab­o­ra­tors had done.

“Filled with the script, sto­ry­boards, con­cept art, and more, the book is basi­cal­ly as close as any­one can get to see­ing Jodorowsky’s ver­sion of Dune,” writes io9’s Ger­main Lussier. “But, of course, the direc­tor and his team only cre­at­ed a hand­ful of copies and this was decades ago. This isn’t a book you can just get on Ama­zon.”


But you can get it at Christie’s, on whose auc­tion block it’s expect­ed to go for between €25,000 and €35,000 (around USD $30,000–40,000). Reck­on­ing that only ten to twen­ty copies were ever print­ed, the house­’s list­ing describes the book as “an extra­or­di­nary arti­fact” from “a doomed project which inspired legions of film-mak­ers and movie­go­ers alike.” Despite all of Hol­ly­wood ulti­mate­ly pass­ing on this enor­mous­ly ambi­tious adap­ta­tion, “all of this was not in vain.” Jodor­owsky him­self claims that, though unre­al­ized, his Dune set a prece­dent for “a larg­er-than-life sci­ence fic­tion movie, out­side of the sci­en­tif­ic rig­or of 2001: A Space Odyssey.” Its influ­ence, accord­ing to Christie’s, is present in 1970s films like Star Wars and Alien. Would it be too much to sense a trace of the Jodor­owskyan in Vil­leneu­ve’s Dune as well?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 14-Hour Epic Film, Dune, That Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky, Pink Floyd, Sal­vador Dalí, Moe­bius, Orson Welles & Mick Jag­ger Nev­er Made

Mœbius’ Sto­ry­boards & Con­cept Art for Jodorowsky’s Dune

Mœbius & Jodorowsky’s Sci-Fi Mas­ter­piece, The Incal, Brought to Life in a Tan­ta­liz­ing Ani­ma­tion

The Dune Graph­ic Nov­el: Expe­ri­ence Frank Herbert’s Epic Sci-Fi Saga as You’ve Nev­er Seen It Before

Ale­jan­dro Jodorowsky’s 82 Com­mand­ments For Liv­ing

Watch the First Trail­er for Dune, Denis Villeneuve’s Adap­ta­tion of Frank Herbert’s Clas­sic Sci-Fi Nov­el

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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How Martin Luther King, Jr. Wrote His Momentous “I Have a Dream” Speech (1963)

in History, Politics | November 9th, 2021

Mar­tin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech ranks as one of the most famous of Amer­i­can speech­es. As Evan Puschak, the Nerd­writer, says in his video above, it’s “arguably the most impor­tant and well-known speech of the 20th cen­tu­ry.” King’s pop­u­lar vision of a peace­ful, har­mo­nious, mul­tira­cial democ­ra­cy might explain why nine out of ten Amer­i­cans have a pos­i­tive atti­tude toward King now. That polling looks very dif­fer­ent by par­ty affil­i­a­tion. Even so, many more Amer­i­cans look fond­ly on King’s mem­o­ry than sup­port­ed (or now sup­port) the racial and eco­nom­ic jus­tice for which he fought. The cur­rent use of King as a white­washed mar­tyr fig­ure, Michael Har­riot argues, obscures the real­i­ty of “a dream yet unful­filled,” as King once called the U.S.

Even after King’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Wash­ing­ton and his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize win, only about 37% of Amer­i­cans approved of his mes­sage in 1966 Gallup polling, a num­ber that dropped even low­er when he came out against the Viet­nam war in 1967. Approval for MLK “only start­ed to shift after his assas­si­na­tion in 1968,” writes Senior Data Sci­en­tist Lin­ley Sanders at YouGov.  King’s “Dream” speech at the Lin­coln Memo­r­i­al may be posthu­mous­ly remem­bered as his finest hour by those who weren’t there. For thou­sands of peo­ple who were, his address was also a fiery sum­ma­tion of the major themes up to that point in dozens of speech­es and ser­mons.

“Rid­dled with big dif­fi­cult terms and full of rhetor­i­cal devices that are inten­tion­al and prac­ticed,” Puschak says, the speech elo­quent­ly explained “why ful­ly 100 years after… the Eman­ci­pa­tion Procla­ma­tion,” Black Amer­i­cans were still polit­i­cal­ly dis­en­fran­chised and eco­nom­i­cal­ly dis­ad­van­taged. It did so through a series of dense allu­sions to the Eman­ci­pa­tion Procla­ma­tion, the coun­try’s found­ing doc­u­ments, the song “My Coun­try ‘Tis of Thee,” and oth­er arti­facts of Amer­i­can nation­al iden­ti­ty, in an attempt to “frame civ­il rights in the larg­er Amer­i­can mythol­o­gy so that those who iden­ti­fy with that mythol­o­gy might incor­po­rate this strug­gle into that sto­ry.”

The Amer­i­can sto­ry has jus­ti­fied oppres­sion and fear of the same peo­ple fight­ing for full inte­gra­tion into the nation­al poli­ty dur­ing the Civ­il Rights move­ment, a prob­lem­at­ic irony of which King was hard­ly unaware. He also drew from tra­di­tions old­er than the U.S. found­ing — the human­ism of Shake­speare and the prophet­ic voic­es of the Old Tes­ta­ment, for exam­ple. These were indeed prac­ticed maneu­vers. (King very much lived down the C he once got in a pub­lic speak­ing class.) But the rous­ing refrains in his speech’s con­clu­sion — which gave the speech its title and spread its fame around the world — were ad-libbed.

“I start­ed out read­ing the speech, and I read it down to a point… the audi­ence response was won­der­ful that day” King lat­er remem­bered. “And all of a sud­den this thing came to me that… I’d used many times before… ‘I have a dream.’ ” The ref­er­ence did­n’t come out of nowhere, says Clarence Jones, who helped King write the speech’s text just hours before it was deliv­ered. Jones recalled that King’s favorite gospel singer Mahalia Jack­son called out for the then-famil­iar (to her) theme:

As he was read­ing from the text of his pre­pared remarks, there came a point when Mahalia Jack­son, who was sit­ting on the plat­form, said, “Tell them about the dream, Mar­tin! Tell them about the dream.”

Now I have often spec­u­lat­ed that she had heard him talk in oth­er places… and make ref­er­ence to the dream. On June 23, 1963, in Detroit, he had made very express ref­er­ence to the dream.

When Mahalia shout­ed to him, I was stand­ing about 50 feet behind him… and I saw it hap­pen­ing in real time. He just took the text of his speech and moved it to the left side of the lectern. … And I said to some­body stand­ing next to me: “These peo­ple don’t know it, but they’re about to go to church.”

Before cel­e­brat­ing a redeemed inter­pre­ta­tion of the Amer­i­can dream in his extem­po­ra­ne­ous finale, King’s speech con­demned the nation’s real­i­ty as moral­ly cor­rupt and ille­git­i­mate. He urged restraint among his fol­low­ers through non­vi­o­lent “direct action,” but fore­saw worse to come before the coun­try could real­ize its poten­tial.

It would be fatal for the nation to over­look the urgency of the moment. This swel­ter­ing sum­mer of the Negro’s legit­i­mate dis­con­tent will not pass until there is an invig­o­rat­ing autumn of free­dom and equal­i­ty. 1963 is not an end, but a begin­ning. Those who hope that the Negro need­ed to blow off steam and will now be con­tent will have a rude awak­en­ing if the nation returns to busi­ness as usu­al.

“There will be nei­ther rest nor tran­quil­i­ty in Amer­i­ca until the Negro is grant­ed his cit­i­zen­ship rights,” King con­tin­ued. “The whirl­winds of revolt will con­tin­ue to shake the foun­da­tions of our nation until the bright day of jus­tice emerges.” Maybe it’s lit­tle won­der many white Amer­i­cans, hear­ing these remarks, turned away from King’s vision of racial jus­tice, which required reck­on­ing with “the unspeak­able hor­rors of police bru­tal­i­ty.” End­ing the “unearned suf­fer­ing” of Black Amer­i­cans, King knew, would come at too great a cost to unearned priv­i­lege. Indeed, the FBI heard King’s words as a direct threat to the coun­try’s his­toric pow­er struc­ture. After the “I Have Dream” speech, the Bureau seri­ous­ly inten­si­fied its pro­gram to sur­veil, dis­cred­it, and destroy him.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How Mar­tin Luther King Jr. Got C’s in Pub­lic Speaking–Before Becom­ing a Straight‑A Stu­dent & a World Class Ora­tor

Mar­tin Luther King Jr. Explains the Impor­tance of Jazz: Hear the Speech He Gave at the First Berlin Jazz Fes­ti­val (1964)

Imag­in­ing the Mar­tin Luther King and Mal­colm X Debate That Nev­er Hap­pened

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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When Nikola Tesla Claimed to Have Invented a “Death Ray,” Capable of Destroying Enemies 250 Miles Away & Making War Obsolete

in History, Technology | November 8th, 2021

Just last week I vis­it­ed Nia­gara Falls and beheld the noble-look­ing stat­ue of Niko­la Tes­la installed there. It struck me as a fit­ting trib­ute to the inven­tor of the Death Ray. But then, its pres­ence prob­a­bly had more to do with Tes­la’s hav­ing advised the builders of the falls’ pow­er plant to use two-phase alter­nat­ing cur­rent, the form of elec­tric­i­ty of which he’s now remem­bered as a pio­neer. And in any case, Tes­la nev­er actu­al­ly invent­ed a death ray, or at least he nev­er demon­strat­ed one. He did, how­ev­er, claim to have been work­ing on a sys­tem he called “tele­force,” which shot what he described as a “death beam” — rays, he insist­ed, would nev­er be fea­si­ble — both “thin­ner than a hair” and pow­er­ful enough to “destroy any­thing approach­ing with­in 200 miles,” mak­ing war­fare effec­tive­ly obso­lete.

These pro­nounce­ments attract­ed spe­cial media atten­tion in the 1930s. “Hype about the weapon real­ly took off in the run-up to World War II as Nazi Ger­many assem­bled a fear­some air force,” writes Sam Kean at the Sci­ence His­to­ry Insti­tute. “Peo­ple in Tesla’s home­land, then called Yugoslavia, begged him to return home and install the rays to pro­tect them from the Nazi men­ace.” But no known evi­dence sug­gests that the elder­ly Tes­la had fig­ured out how to actu­al­ly make tele­force work.

At that point he had more press­ing prob­lems, not least the cost of the hotels in which he lived. “In 1915, his famous War­den­clyffe tow­er plant was sold to help pay off his $20,000 debt at the Wal­dorf-Asto­ria,” writes Men­tal Floss’ Sta­cy Con­radt, and lat­er he racked up a sim­i­lar­ly large bill at the Gov­er­nor Clin­ton. “He couldn’t afford the pay­ment, so instead, Tes­la offered the man­age­ment some­thing price­less: one of his inven­tions.”

That “inven­tion” may have been the box exam­ined after Tes­la’s death in 1943 by physi­cist John G. Trump (uncle of for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump). Left in a hotel vault, it was rumored to be “a pro­to­type of his death ray.” Tes­la had includ­ed a note, writes Kean, that “claimed the pro­to­type inside was worth $10,000. More omi­nous­ly, it said the box would det­o­nate if opened incor­rect­ly.” But when “the physi­cist steeled him­self and began tear­ing off the brown paper,” he “must have laughed at what he saw under­neath: a Wheat­stone bridge, a tool for mea­sur­ing elec­tri­cal resis­tance. It was a com­mon, mun­dane device — some old junk, real­ly. It was cer­tain­ly not a death ray, not even close.”

Though it must have been as pow­er­ful a dis­ap­point­ment as it was a relief, did that dis­cov­ery prove that Tes­la nev­er invent­ed a death ray? The U.S. gov­ern­ment did­n’t take its chances on the mat­ter: as History.com’s Sarah Pruitt tells it, agents “swooped in and took pos­ses­sion of all the prop­er­ty and doc­u­ments from his room at the New York­er Hotel” right after Tes­la’s death. And “while the FBI orig­i­nal­ly record­ed some 80 trunks among Tesla’s effects, only 60 arrived in Bel­grade,” home of the Niko­la Tes­la Muse­um, near­ly a decade lat­er. The idea of death rays has long sur­vived Tes­la him­self, tak­ing on forms from the Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion’s “Star Wars” nuclear defense pro­gram to the mil­i­tary laser weapons test­ed in recent years. Few such tech­nolo­gies seem capa­ble of end­ing all war, as Tes­la promised. But if one ever does, we could hon­or his mem­o­ry by refer­ring to it, in the man­ner he pre­ferred, as not a death ray but a death beam.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

In 1926, Niko­la Tes­la Pre­dicts the World of 2026

The Elec­tric Rise and Fall of Niko­la Tes­la: As Told by Tech­noil­lu­sion­ist Mar­co Tem­pest

Niko­la Tes­la Accu­rate­ly Pre­dict­ed the Rise of the Inter­net & Smart Phone in 1926

Mark Twain Plays With Elec­tric­i­ty in Niko­la Tesla’s Lab (Pho­to, 1894)

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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What Makes the Mona Lisa a Great Painting: A Deep Dive

in Art, History | November 5th, 2021

This past sum­mer we fea­tured a short video intro­duc­tion to the Mona Lisa here on Open Cul­ture. You’d think that if any paint­ing did­n’t need an intro­duc­tion, that would be the one. But the video’s cre­ator James Payne showed many of us just how much we still have to learn about Leonar­do’s most famous work of art — and indeed, per­haps the most famous work by any artist. On his Youtube chan­nel Great Art Explained, Payne offers clear and pow­er­ful analy­ses of paint­ings from van Gogh’s The Star­ry Night and Hop­per’s Nighthawks to Warhol’s Mar­i­lyn Dip­tych and Picas­so’s Guer­ni­ca. But there are some images to which a fif­teen-minute video essay can’t hope to do jus­tice.

In those cas­es, Payne has been known to fol­low up with a deluxe expand­ed edi­tion. Tak­ing on Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights, he fol­lowed up three indi­vid­ual fif­teen-minute videos — for a trip­tych, a neat union of form and sub­stance — with a full-length treat­ment of the whole work.

Payne’s full-length ver­sion of his Mona Lisa video more than dou­bles the length of the orig­i­nal. “This is the more com­pre­hen­sive ver­sion I always want­ed to do,” he notes, adding that it “uses some of the infor­ma­tion from the first film (but in high­er res­o­lu­tion with bet­ter sound and with clear­er graph­ics), as well as answer­ing the hun­dreds of ques­tions: Why does­n’t she have eye­brows? Is it a self-por­trait? Is she only famous because she was stolen? How do we know what he was think­ing?”

This time around, Payne has more to say about how Leonar­do cre­at­ed such a com­pelling por­trait on a tech­ni­cal lev­el, but also why he came to paint it in the first place. On top of that, the expand­ed for­mat gives him time to exam­ine the much more con­ven­tion­al por­traits Leonar­do’s con­tem­po­raries were paint­ing at the time, as well as what’s known as the Pra­do Mona Lisa. A depic­tion of the same sit­ter that may even have been paint­ed simul­ta­ne­ous­ly by one of Leonar­do’s stu­dents, it makes for an illu­mi­nat­ing object of com­par­i­son. Payne also gets into the 1911 theft and recov­ery that ulti­mate­ly did a great deal for the paint­ing’s rep­u­ta­tion, as well as its 1963 exhi­bi­tion in Amer­i­ca that, thanks to tele­vi­sion, turned it into a mass-media icon. By now we’ve all had more glimpses of the Mona Lisa more times than we can remem­ber, but it takes enthu­si­asm like Payne’s to remind us of all the ways we can tru­ly see it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Makes Leonardo’s Mona Lisa a Great Paint­ing?: An Expla­na­tion in 15 Min­utes

Why Leonar­do da Vinci’s Great­est Paint­ing is Not the Mona Lisa

How the Mona Lisa Went From Being Bare­ly Known, to Sud­den­ly the Most Famous Paint­ing in the World (1911)

Orig­i­nal Por­trait of the Mona Lisa Found Beneath the Paint Lay­ers of da Vinci’s Mas­ter­piece

Great Art Explained: Watch 15 Minute Intro­duc­tions to Great Works by Warhol, Rothko, Kahlo, Picas­so & More

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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