Nikola Tesla Accurately Predicted the Rise of Wireless Technology & the Smartphone in 1926

in Science, Technology | November 3rd, 2025

Cer­tain cult his­tor­i­cal fig­ures have served as pre­scient avatars for the tech­no-vision­ar­ies of the dig­i­tal age. Where the altru­is­tic utopi­an designs of Buck­min­ster Fuller pro­vid­ed an ide­al for the first wave of Sil­i­con Val­ley pio­neers (a group includ­ing com­put­er sci­en­tist and philoso­pher Jaron Lanier and Wired edi­tor Kevin Kel­ly), lat­er entre­pre­neurs have hewn clos­er to the prin­ci­ples of bril­liant sci­en­tist and inven­tor Niko­la Tes­la, who believed, as he told Lib­er­ty mag­a­zine in 1935, that “we suf­fer the derange­ment of our civ­i­liza­tion because we have not yet com­plete­ly adjust­ed our­selves to the machine age.”

Such an adjust­ment would come, Tes­la believed, only in “mas­ter­ing the machine”—and he seemed to have supreme con­fi­dence in human mastery—over food pro­duc­tion, cli­mate, and genet­ics. We would be freed from oner­ous labor by automa­tion and the cre­ation of “a think­ing machine,” he said, over a decade before the inven­tion of the com­put­er. Tes­la did not antic­i­pate the ways such machines would come to mas­ter us, even though he can­ni­ly fore­saw the future of wire­less tech­nol­o­gy, com­put­ing, and tele­pho­ny, tech­nolo­gies that would rad­i­cal­ly reshape every aspect of human life.

In an ear­li­er, 1926, inter­view in Col­lier’s mag­a­zine, Tes­la pre­dict­ed, as the edi­tors wrote, com­mu­ni­cat­ing “instant­ly by sim­ple vest-pock­et equip­ment.” His actu­al words con­veyed a much grander, and more accu­rate, pic­ture of the future.

When wire­less is per­fect­ly applied the whole earth will be con­vert­ed into a huge brain, which in fact it is…. We shall be able to com­mu­ni­cate with one anoth­er instant­ly, irre­spec­tive of dis­tance. Not only this, but through tele­vi­sion and tele­pho­ny we shall see and hear one anoth­er as per­fect­ly as though we were face to face, despite inter­ven­ing dis­tances of thou­sands of miles; and the instru­ments through which we shall be able to do this will be amaz­ing­ly sim­ple com­pared with our present tele­phone. A man will be able to car­ry one in his vest pock­et. 

The com­plex­i­ty of smart­phones far out­strips that of the tele­phone, but in every oth­er respect, Tesla’s pic­ture maps onto the real­i­ty of almost 100 years lat­er. Oth­er aspects of Tesla’s future sce­nario for wire­less also seem to antic­i­pate cur­rent tech­nolo­gies, like 3D print­ing, though the kind he describes still remains in the realm of sci­ence fic­tion: “Wire­less will achieve the clos­er con­tact through trans­mis­sion of intel­li­gence, trans­port of our bod­ies and mate­ri­als and con­veyance of ener­gy.”

But Tesla’s vision had its lim­i­ta­tions, and they lay pre­cise­ly in his tech­no-opti­mism. He nev­er met a prob­lem that wouldn’t even­tu­al­ly have a tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tion (and like many oth­er tech­no-vision­ar­ies of the time, he hearti­ly endorsed state-spon­sored eugen­ics). “The major­i­ty of the ills from which human­i­ty suf­fers,” he said, “are due to the immense extent of the ter­res­tri­al globe and the inabil­i­ty of indi­vid­u­als and nations to come into close con­tact.”

Wire­less tech­nol­o­gy, thought Tes­la, would help erad­i­cate war, pover­ty, dis­ease, pol­lu­tion, and gen­er­al dis­con­tent, when we are “able to wit­ness and hear events—the inau­gu­ra­tion of a Pres­i­dent, the play­ing of a world series game, the hav­oc of an earth­quake or the ter­ror of a battle—just as though we were present.” When inter­na­tion­al bound­aries are “large­ly oblit­er­at­ed” by instant com­mu­ni­ca­tion, he believed, “a great step will be made toward the uni­fi­ca­tion and har­mo­nious exis­tence of the var­i­ous races inhab­it­ing the globe.”

Tes­la did not, and per­haps could not, fore­see the ways in which tech­nolo­gies that bring us clos­er togeth­er than ever also, and at the same time, pull us ever fur­ther apart. Read Tes­la’s full inter­view here, in which he also pre­dicts that women will become the “supe­ri­or sex,” not by virtue of “the shal­low phys­i­cal imi­ta­tion of men” but through “the awak­en­ing of the intel­lect.”

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2019.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sci-Fi Author J.G. Bal­lard Pre­dicts the Rise of Social Media (1977)

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like in 2014

In 1922, a Nov­el­ist Pre­dicts What the World Will Look Like in 2022: Wire­less Tele­phones, 8‑Hour Flights to Europe & More

A 1947 French Film Accu­rate­ly Pre­dict­ed Our 21st-Cen­tu­ry Addic­tion to Smart­phones

Jules Verne Accu­rate­ly Pre­dicts What the 20th Cen­tu­ry Will Look Like in His Lost Nov­el, Paris in the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry (1863)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

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Einstein’s Divorce Letters and the Cruel List of Marital Demands He Imposed on His First Wife

in History, Letters, Science | October 7th, 2025

Albert Ein­stein is the rare fig­ure who’s uni­ver­sal­ly known, but almost entire­ly for his pro­fes­sion­al achieve­ments. Few of us who can explain the the­o­ry of rel­a­tiv­i­ty can also say much about the per­son­al life of the man who came up with it, though that does­n’t owe to a lack of doc­u­men­ta­tion. Thanks to sci­ence YouTu­ber Toby Hendy, we have, for exam­ple, some of the love let­ters he wrote to the women who con­sti­tut­ed a ver­i­ta­ble parade through his life. Also, in anoth­er video for her chan­nel Tibees, Hendy reads the let­ters he wrote in the process of divorc­ing his first wife, the Ser­bian physi­cist and math­e­mati­cian Mil­e­va Mar­ić.

Ein­stein mar­ried Mar­ić in Jan­u­ary 1903, says Hendy, “after they had been togeth­er for around five years. The rela­tion­ship was in its prime, and so was the aca­d­e­m­ic pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. It was in 1905 that Ein­stein would pub­lish his four major papers that would change the face of physics. By 1912, how­ev­er, Ein­stein had start­ed hav­ing an affair with his cousin,” Elsa Lowen­thal.

By 1914, Ein­stein wrote to Mar­ić a let­ter “detail­ing some con­di­tions of them con­tin­u­ing to live togeth­er,” if not quite as man and wife. The con­di­tions read as fol­lows:

CONDITIONS

A. You will make sure:

1. that my clothes and laun­dry are kept in good order;
2. that I will receive my three meals reg­u­lar­ly in my room;
3. that my bed­room and study are kept neat, and espe­cial­ly that my desk is left for my use only.

B. You will renounce all per­son­al rela­tions with me inso­far as they are not com­plete­ly nec­es­sary for social rea­sons. Specif­i­cal­ly, You will forego:

1. my sit­ting at home with you;
2. my going out or trav­el­ling with you.

C. You will obey the fol­low­ing points in your rela­tions with me:

1. you will not expect any inti­ma­cy from me, nor will you reproach me in any way;
2. you will stop talk­ing to me if I request it;
3. you will leave my bed­room or study imme­di­ate­ly with­out protest if I request it.

D. You will under­take not to belit­tle me in front of our chil­dren, either through words or behav­ior.

Though they agreed to put this strin­gent plan into effect, less than two weeks lat­er, he wrote to Elsa, “Yes­ter­day my wife left for good with the chil­dren” — and “you, dear lit­tle Elsie, will now become my wife and become con­vinced that it is not at all so hard to live by my side.”

Ein­stein did mar­ry Lowen­thal in 1919, and the union, though hard­ly char­ac­ter­ized by ide­al faith­ful­ness, did last until her death in 1935. There would be plen­ty of oth­er women, but none who played quite the same role in his life as Mar­ić, not only the moth­er of his chil­dren, but also — accord­ing to some his­to­ri­ans — a col­lab­o­ra­tor on some of his accom­plish­ments in physics. Accord­ing to Lost Women of Sci­ence, “there is lit­tle tan­gi­ble evi­dence to sup­port the claims that Mar­ić was a co-author of Einstein’s first major work. That said, there are plen­ty of per­son­al tes­ti­monies from those who knew Mar­ić and Ein­stein that her involve­ment was like­ly.” One con­di­tion of their divorce set­tle­ment, at any rate, held that Mar­ić receive his Nobel Prize mon­ey, were he to win it, which he went on to do a cou­ple of years lat­er. This makes clear that, what­ev­er the impor­tance of her own sci­en­tif­ic work, she must’ve had a good head on her shoul­ders.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Read­ings of Albert Einstein’s Love Let­ters (and Chilly Divorce Let­ters) to His First Wife Mil­e­va

Albert Ein­stein Impos­es on His First Wife a Cru­el List of Mar­i­tal Demands

Albert Ein­stein & Sig­mund Freud Exchange Let­ters and Debate How to Make the World Free from War (1932)

Read the Uplift­ing Let­ter That Albert Ein­stein Sent to Marie Curie Dur­ing a Time of Per­son­al Cri­sis (1911)

“Do Sci­en­tists Pray?”: A Young Girl Asks Albert Ein­stein in 1936. Ein­stein Then Responds

Albert Einstein’s Grades: A Fas­ci­nat­ing Look at His Report Cards

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

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Remembering Jane Goodall (RIP): Watch Jane, the Acclaimed National Geographic Documentary

in Film, Life, Science | October 1st, 2025

Jane Goodall, the revered con­ser­va­tion­ist, passed away today at age 91. In her hon­or, we’re fea­tur­ing above a Nation­al Geo­graph­ic doc­u­men­tary called Jane. Direct­ed by Brett Mor­gen, the film draws “from over 100 hours of nev­er-before-seen footage that has been tucked away in the Nation­al Geo­graph­ic archives for over 50 years.” The doc­u­men­tary offers an inti­mate por­trait of Goodall and her chim­panzee research that “chal­lenged the male-dom­i­nat­ed sci­en­tif­ic con­sen­sus of her time and rev­o­lu­tion­ized our under­stand­ing of the nat­ur­al world.” It’s set to an orches­tral score by com­pos­er Philip Glass.

You can find Jane added to our col­lec­tion of Free Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our larg­er col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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 

Ani­mat­ed: The Inspi­ra­tional Sto­ry of Jane Goodall, and Why She Believes in Big­foot

Google Street View Lets You Walk in Jane Goodall’s Foot­steps and Vis­it the Chim­panzees of Tan­za­nia

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Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit: Tools for Thinking Critically & Knowing Pseudoscience When You See It

in Books, Science | September 29th, 2025

Though he died too young, Carl Sagan left behind an impres­sive­ly large body of work, includ­ing more than 600 sci­en­tif­ic papers and more than 20 books. Of those books, none is more wide­ly known to the pub­lic — or, still, more wide­ly read by the pub­lic — than Cos­mos, accom­pa­nied as it was by Cos­mos: A Per­son­al Voy­age, a com­pan­ion tele­vi­sion series on PBS. Sagan’s oth­er pop­u­lar books, like Shad­ows of For­got­ten Ances­tors or Con­tact (the basis of the 1997 Hol­ly­wood movie) are also well worth read­ing, but we per­haps ignore at our great­est per­il The Demon-Haunt­ed World: Sci­ence as a Can­dle in the Dark. Pub­lished in 1995, the year before Sagan’s death, it stands as his tes­ta­ment to the impor­tance of crit­i­cal, sci­en­tif­ic think­ing for all of us.

The Demon-Haunt­ed World is the sub­ject of the Genet­i­cal­ly Mod­i­fied Skep­tic video above, whose host Drew McCoy describes it as his favorite book. He pays spe­cial atten­tion to its chap­ter in which Sagan lays out what he calls his “baloney detec­tion kit.” This assem­bled metaphor­i­cal box of tools for diag­nos­ing fraud­u­lent argu­ments and con­struct­ing rea­soned ones involves these nine prin­ci­ples:

  • Wher­ev­er pos­si­ble there must be inde­pen­dent con­fir­ma­tion of the “facts.”
  • Encour­age sub­stan­tive debate on the evi­dence by knowl­edge­able pro­po­nents of all points of view.
  • Argu­ments from author­i­ty car­ry lit­tle weight — “author­i­ties” have made mis­takes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Per­haps a bet­ter way to say it is that in sci­ence there are no author­i­ties; at most, there are experts.
  • Spin more than one hypoth­e­sis. If there’s some­thing to be explained, think of all the dif­fer­ent ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly dis­prove each of the alter­na­tives.
  • Try not to get over­ly attached to a hypoth­e­sis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way sta­tion in the pur­suit of knowl­edge. Ask your­self why you like the idea. Com­pare it fair­ly with the alter­na­tives.
  • See if you can find rea­sons for reject­ing it. If you don’t, oth­ers will.
  • If what­ev­er it is you’re explain­ing has some mea­sure, some numer­i­cal quan­ti­ty attached to it, you’ll be much bet­ter able to dis­crim­i­nate among com­pet­ing hypothe­ses. What is vague and qual­i­ta­tive is open to many expla­na­tions.
  • If there’s a chain of argu­ment, every link in the chain must work (includ­ing the premise) — not just most of them.
  • Occam’s Razor. This con­ve­nient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypothe­ses that explain the data equal­ly well to choose the sim­pler. Always ask whether the hypoth­e­sis can be, at least in prin­ci­ple, fal­si­fied…. You must be able to check asser­tions out. Invet­er­ate skep­tics must be giv­en the chance to fol­low your rea­son­ing, to dupli­cate your exper­i­ments and see if they get the same result.

As McCoy points out, these tech­niques of mind have to do with can­cel­ing out the man­i­fold bias­es present in our think­ing, those nat­ur­al human ten­den­cies that incline us to accept ideas that may or may not coin­cide with real­i­ty as it is. If we take no trou­ble to cor­rect for these bias­es, Sagan came to believe, we’ll become easy marks for all the trick­sters and char­la­tans who hap­pen to come our way. And that’s just on the micro lev­el: on the macro lev­el, vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty to delu­sion can bring down entire civ­i­liza­tions.

“Like all tools, the baloney detec­tion kit can be mis­used, applied out of con­text, or even employed as a rote alter­na­tive to think­ing,” Sagan cau­tions. “But applied judi­cious­ly, it can make all the dif­fer­ence in the world — not least in eval­u­at­ing our own argu­ments before we present them to oth­ers.” McCoy urges us to heed these words, adding that “this kit is not some per­fect solu­tion to the world’s prob­lems, but as it’s been uti­lized over the last few cen­turies” — for its basic pre­cepts long pre­date Sagan’s par­tic­u­lar artic­u­la­tion — “it has enabled us to cre­ate tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tions and use­ful explana­to­ry mod­els of our world more quick­ly and effec­tive­ly than ever before.” The walls of baloney may always be clos­ing in on human­i­ty, but if you fol­low Sagan’s advice, you can at least give your­self some breath­ing room.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Carl Sagan on the Impor­tance of Choos­ing Wise­ly What You Read (Even If You Read a Book a Week)

Carl Sagan’s Syl­labus & Final Exam for His Course on Crit­i­cal Think­ing (Cor­nell, 1986)

Carl Sagan Pre­dicts the Decline of Amer­i­ca: Unable to Know “What’s True,” We Will Slide, “With­out Notic­ing, Back into Super­sti­tion & Dark­ness” (1995)

Richard Feyn­man Cre­ates a Sim­ple Method for Telling Sci­ence From Pseu­do­science (1966)

How to Spot Bull­shit: A Man­u­al by Prince­ton Philoso­pher Har­ry Frank­furt (RIP)

Crit­i­cal Think­ing: A Free Course

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

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Ernst Haeckel’s Sublime Drawings of Flora & Fauna: The Beautiful Scientific Drawings That Influenced Europe’s Art Nouveau Movement (1889)

in Art, Biology, Science | September 24th, 2025

If you fol­low the ongo­ing beef many pop­u­lar sci­en­tists have with phi­los­o­phy, you’d be for­giv­en for think­ing the two dis­ci­plines have noth­ing to say to each oth­er. That’s a sad­ly false impres­sion, though they have become almost entire­ly sep­a­rate pro­fes­sion­al insti­tu­tions. But dur­ing the first, say, 200 years of mod­ern sci­ence, sci­en­tists were “nat­ur­al philosophers”—often as well versed in log­ic, meta­physics, or the­ol­o­gy as they were in math­e­mat­ics and tax­onomies. And most of them were artists too of one kind or anoth­er. Sci­en­tists had to learn to draw in order to illus­trate their find­ings before mass-pro­duced pho­tog­ra­phy and com­put­er imag­ing could do it for them. Many sci­en­tists have been fine artists indeed, rival­ing the greats, and they’ve made very fine musi­cians as well.

And then there’s Ernst Hein­rich Haeck­el, a Ger­man biol­o­gist and nat­u­ral­ist, philoso­pher and physi­cian, and pro­po­nent of Dar­win­ism who described and named thou­sands of species, mapped them on a genealog­i­cal tree, and “coined sev­er­al sci­en­tif­ic terms com­mon­ly known today,” This is Colos­sal writes, “such as ecol­o­gy, phy­lum, and stem cell.” That’s an impres­sive resume, isn’t it? Oh, and check out his art—his bril­liant­ly col­ored, ele­gant­ly ren­dered, high­ly styl­ized depic­tions of “far flung flo­ra and fau­na,” of microbes and nat­ur­al pat­terns, in designs that inspired the Art Nou­veau move­ment. “Each organ­ism Haeck­el drew has an almost abstract form,” notes Kather­ine Schwab at Fast Co. Design, “as if it’s a whim­si­cal fan­ta­sy he dreamed up rather than a real crea­ture he exam­ined under a micro­scope. His draw­ings of sponges reveal their intense­ly geo­met­ric structure—they look archi­tec­tur­al, like feats of engi­neer­ing.”

Haeck­el pub­lished 100 fab­u­lous prints begin­ning in 1889 in a series of ten books called Kun­st­for­men der Natur (“Art Forms in Nature”), col­lect­ed in two vol­umes in 1904. The aston­ish­ing work was “not just a book of illus­tra­tions but also the sum­ma­tion of his view of the world,” one which embraced the new sci­ence of Dar­win­ian evo­lu­tion whole­heart­ed­ly, writes schol­ar Olaf Brei­d­bach in his 2006 Visions of Nature.

Haeckel’s method was a holis­tic one, in which art, sci­ence, and phi­los­o­phy were com­ple­men­tary approach­es to the same sub­ject. He “sought to secure the atten­tion of those with an inter­est in the beau­ties of nature,” writes pro­fes­sor of zool­o­gy Rain­er Will­mann in a book from Taschen called The Art and Sci­ence of Ernst Haeck­el­, “and to empha­size, through this rare instance of the inter­play of sci­ence and aes­thet­ics, the prox­im­i­ty of these two realms.”

The gor­geous Taschen book includes 450 of Haeckel’s draw­ings, water­col­ors, and sketch­es, spread across 704 pages, and it’s expen­sive. But you can see all 100 of Haeckel’s orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished prints in zoomable high-res­o­lu­tion scans here. Or pur­chase a one-vol­ume reprint of the orig­i­nal Art Forms in Nature, with its 100 glo­ri­ous prints, through this Dover pub­li­ca­tion, which describes Haeckel’s art as “hav­ing caused the accep­tance of Dar­win­ism in Europe…. Today, although no one is great­ly inter­est­ed in Haeck­el the biol­o­gist-philoso­pher, his work is increas­ing­ly prized for some­thing he him­self would prob­a­bly have con­sid­ered sec­ondary.” It’s a shame his sci­en­tif­ic lega­cy lies neglect­ed, if that’s so, but it sure­ly lives on through his art, which may be just as need­ed now to illus­trate the won­ders of evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gy and the nat­ur­al world as it was in Haeckel’s time.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Relat­ed Con­tent

Down­load 435 High Res­o­lu­tion Images from John J. Audubon’s The Birds of Amer­i­ca

Explore a New Archive of 2,200 His­tor­i­cal Wildlife Illus­tra­tions (1916–1965): Cour­tesy of The Wildlife Con­ser­va­tion Soci­ety

Two Mil­lion Won­drous Nature Illus­tra­tions Put Online by The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library

Cats in Japan­ese Wood­block Prints: How Japan’s Favorite Ani­mals Came to Star in Its Pop­u­lar Art

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

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How a 19th Century Scientist Created Incredibly Realistic 3D Models of the Moon (1874)

in History, Science | September 17th, 2025

At the moment, there’s no bet­ter way to see any­thing in space than through the lens of the James Webb Space Tele­scope. Pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, that ten-bil­lion-dol­lar suc­ces­sor to the Hub­ble Space Tele­scope can see unprece­dent­ed­ly far out into space, which, in effect, means it can see unprece­dent­ed­ly far back in time: some 13.5 bil­lion years, in fact, to the state of the ear­ly uni­verse. We post­ed the first pho­tos tak­en by the James Webb Space Tele­scope in 2022, which showed us dis­tant galax­ies and neb­u­lae at a lev­el of detail in which they’d nev­er been seen before.

Such images would scarce­ly have been imag­in­able to James Nas­myth, though he might have fore­seen that they would one day be a real­i­ty. A man of many inter­ests, he seems to have pur­sued them all dur­ing the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry through which he lived in its near-entire­ty.

His inven­tion of the steam ham­mer, which turned out to be a great boon to the ship­build­ing indus­try, did its part to make pos­si­ble his ear­ly retire­ment. At that point, he was freed to pur­sue such pas­sions as astron­o­my and pho­tog­ra­phy, and in 1874, he pub­lished with co-author James Car­pen­ter a book that occu­pied the inter­sec­tion of those fields.

The Moon: Con­sid­ered as a Plan­et, a World, and a Satel­lite con­tains what still look like strik­ing­ly detailed pho­tos of the sur­face of that famil­iar but then-still-mys­te­ri­ous heav­en­ly body: quite a coup at the time, con­sid­er­ing that the tech­nol­o­gy for tak­ing pic­tures through a tele­scope had yet to be invent­ed. Nas­myth did use a tele­scope — one he made him­self — but only as a ref­er­ence in order to sketch “the moon’s scarred, cratered and moun­tain­ous sur­face,” writes Ned Pen­nant-Rea at the Pub­lic Domain Review. “He then built plas­ter mod­els based on the draw­ings, and pho­tographed these against black back­grounds in the full glare of the sun.”

In the book’s text, Nas­myth and Car­pen­ter showed a cer­tain sci­en­tif­ic pre­science with their obser­va­tions on such phe­nom­e­na as the “stu­pen­dous reser­voir of pow­er that the tidal waters con­sti­tute.” You can read the first edi­tion at the Inter­net Archive, and you can see more of its pho­tographs at the Pub­lic Domain Review. Com­pare them to pic­tures of the actu­al moon, and you’ll notice that he got a good deal right about the look of its sur­face, espe­cial­ly giv­en the tools he had to work with at the time. There’s even a sense in which Nas­myth’s pho­tos look more real than the 100 per­cent faith­ful images we have now, that they vivid­ly rep­re­sent some­thing of the moon’s essence. As mil­lions of dis­ap­point­ed view­ers of CGI-sat­u­rat­ed mod­ern sci-fi movies under­stand, some­times only mod­els feel right.

via Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed con­tent:

The First Sur­viv­ing Pho­to­graph of the Moon (1840)

The Very First Pic­ture of the Far Side of the Moon, Tak­en 60 Years Ago

The Full Rota­tion of the Moon: A Beau­ti­ful, High Res­o­lu­tion Time Lapse Film

The Evo­lu­tion of the Moon: 4.5 Bil­lions Years in 2.6 Min­utes

The Ulti­mate Full Moon Shot

A Trip to the Moon (1902): The First Great Sci-Fi Film

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

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One-in-70-Trillion: An Evolutionary Biologist Explains the Mind-Bending Probability of Our Existence

in Biology, Science | August 8th, 2025

At a 1998 con­fer­ence on tech­nol­o­gy and life, The Hitch­hik­er’s Guide to the Galaxy author Dou­glas Adams once pro­posed the notion of a sen­tient pud­dle. Imag­ine it “wak­ing up one morn­ing and think­ing, ‘This is an inter­est­ing world I find myself in — an inter­est­ing hole I find myself in — fits me rather neat­ly, does­n’t it? In fact, it fits me stag­ger­ing­ly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ ” No mat­ter how much intel­li­gence it may some­how have attained, this pud­dle does­n’t real­ize that its shape was dic­tat­ed by its envi­ron­ment, not the oth­er way around. Nor does it seem to real­ize on just how many fac­tors its very exis­tence is con­tin­gent; to its mind, this is a pud­dle’s world, and the rest of us are just liv­ing in it.

Of course, the rest of us are in just the same sit­u­a­tion. In the 70-minute Big Think video above, evo­lu­tion­ary devel­op­men­tal biol­o­gist Sean B. Car­roll puts our pres­ence on Earth in per­spec­tive, begin­ning with the var­i­ous fac­tors that hap­pened to con­verge to make com­plex life pos­si­ble on this plan­et at all. “A huge num­ber of things had to go right for our species to exist, and for each of us indi­vid­u­al­ly to exist,” he says, and that’s true on “the cos­mo­log­i­cal scale, the geo­log­i­cal scale, and the bio­log­i­cal scale.”

One impor­tant event is the aster­oid impact that “reset” life on Earth 66 mil­lion years ago, which trig­gered a grad­ual cool­ing of the plan­et, and anoth­er was the tec­ton­ic move­ment that pushed togeth­er what we now know as Asia and the Indi­an sub­con­ti­nent. A result of these and oth­er unlike­ly occur­rences was the “bios­phere” in which we and all oth­er extant species live today.

What about you and me in par­tic­u­lar? Nei­ther of us, as Car­roll tells it here and in his book A Series of For­tu­nate Events: Chance and the Mak­ing of the Plan­et, Life, and You, should feel that our place was guar­an­teed. In human repro­duc­tion, when two par­ents get togeth­er and “that one lucky sperm makes it and com­bines with that one egg at that moment, that’s about a one-in-70-tril­lion event, genet­i­cal­ly speak­ing.” This can be dif­fi­cult to inter­nal­ize, since our own exis­tence is all we’ve ever known, in the man­ner of Adams’ sen­tient pud­dle. Even “as the sun ris­es in the sky and the air heats up and as, grad­u­al­ly, the pud­dle gets small­er and small­er,” it con­tin­ues “fran­ti­cal­ly hang­ing on to the notion that every­thing’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it.” There’s a les­son for human­i­ty in that sto­ry, and one that has­n’t become any less urgent in the past 27 years.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dis­cov­er “Jour­ney of the Uni­verse,” a Mul­ti­me­dia Project That Explores Humanity’s Place in the Epic His­to­ry of the Cos­mos

The His­to­ry of the Earth (All 4.5 Bil­lion Years) in 1 Hour: A Mil­lion Years Cov­ered Every Sec­ond

Big His­to­ry: David Chris­t­ian Cov­ers 13.7 Bil­lion Years of His­to­ry in 18 Min­utes

An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth by Com­man­der Chris Had­field: The Viral Book Trail­er

Who’s Out There?: Orson Welles Nar­rates a Doc­u­men­tary Ask­ing Whether There’s Extrater­res­tri­al Life in the Uni­verse (1975)

Carl Sagan Presents a Mini-Course on Earth, Mars & What’s Beyond Our Solar Sys­tem: For Kids and Adults (1977)

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

 

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The Real Science Experiments That Inspired Frankenstein

in History, Literature, Science | July 21st, 2025

With the Hal­loween sea­son mere months away, the time has come to start think­ing about what fright­en­ing reads to line up for our­selves this year. Some of us may reach for Mary Shel­ley’s Franken­stein; or, The Mod­ern Prometheus, a sto­ry we all think we know. But a look into its con­text reveals that what’s now regard­ed as a time­less clas­sic was, in its day, quite a top­i­cal nov­el. Intro­duc­ing the 1931 James Whale film adap­ta­tion, the reg­u­lar hor­ror-movie play­er Edward Van Sloan describes Franken­stein as deal­ing with “the two great mys­ter­ies of cre­ation: life and death” — which, when Shel­ley’s nov­el was pub­lished more than a cen­tu­ry ear­li­er, were yet more mys­te­ri­ous still.

“Wor­ried by the poten­tial inabil­i­ty to dis­tin­guish between the states of life and death, two doc­tors, William Hawes and Thomas Cogan, set up the Roy­al Humane Soci­ety in Lon­don in 1774,” writes Sharon Rus­ton at The Pub­lic Domain Review. At the time, it was actu­al­ly called the Soci­ety for the Recov­ery of Per­sons Appar­ent­ly Drowned, a name that would’ve dou­bled neat­ly as a mis­sion state­ment. Falling into the rivers and canals of Lon­don was, it seems, a com­mon occur­rence in those days, and few mem­bers of the pub­lic pos­sessed the swim­ming skills to save them­selves. Thus the Soci­ety’s mem­bers took it upon them­selves to devise meth­ods of reviv­ing those “per­sons appar­ent­ly drowned,” whether their plunges were acci­den­tal­ly or delib­er­ate­ly tak­en.

One such attempt­ed sui­cide, writes Rus­ton, “seems to have been Mary Shelley’s moth­er, the fem­i­nist, Mary Woll­stonecraft,” who lat­er com­plained about how, after leap­ing into the Thames, she was “inhu­man­ly brought back to life and mis­ery.” That inci­dent could well have done its part to inspire Franken­stein, though notions of reviv­ing the dead were very much in the air at the time, not least due to the atten­tion being paid to the prac­tice of “Gal­vanism,” which involved stim­u­lat­ing the mus­cles of dead ani­mals and human bod­ies to move­ment using the then-nov­el phe­nom­e­non of elec­tric­i­ty. In the Eng­land of that his­tor­i­cal moment, it was­n’t entire­ly far-fetched to believe that the dead real­ly could be brought back to life.

You can learn more about the sci­en­tif­ic devel­op­ments, social changes, and human anx­i­eties (includ­ing about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of being buried alive) that formed Franken­stein’s cul­tur­al back­ground from the Vox His­to­ry Club video above. In a way, it seems inevitable that some­one in the ear­ly nine­teenth cen­tu­ry would write about a sci­en­tist avant la let­tre who dares to cre­ate life from death. It just hap­pened to be the teenage Shel­ley, to whom the idea came while engaged in a com­pe­ti­tion with Lord Byron, the writer-physi­cian John Poli­dori, and her soon-to-be hus­band Per­cy Bysshe Shel­ley to see who could write the scari­est sto­ry. Two cen­turies lat­er, the sto­ry of Franken­stein may no longer scare us, but as told by Shel­ley, it still has a way of sound­ing strange­ly plau­si­ble.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Read­ing Mary Shelley’s Franken­stein on Its 200th Anniver­sary: An Ani­mat­ed Primer to the Great Mon­ster Sto­ry & Tech­nol­o­gy Cau­tion­ary Tale

Read a Huge Anno­tat­ed Online Edi­tion of Franken­stein: A Mod­ern Way to Cel­e­brate the 200th Anniver­sary of Mary Shelley’s Clas­sic Nov­el

Mary Shelley’s Hand­writ­ten Man­u­script of Franken­stein: This Is “Ground Zero of Sci­ence Fic­tion,” Says William Gib­son

The Very First Film Adap­ta­tion of Mary Shelley’s Franken­stein, a Thomas Edi­son Pro­duc­tion (1910)

The First Muse­um Ded­i­cat­ed to Mary Shel­ley & Her Lit­er­ary Cre­ation Franken­stein Opens in Bath, Eng­land

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

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