How Car Chase Scenes Have Evolved Over 100 Years

For many a clas­sic action-movie enthu­si­ast, no car chase will ever top the one in Bul­litt. The nar­ra­tor of the Insid­er video above describes it as “the scene that set the stan­dard for all mod­ern car chas­es,” one made “icon­ic part­ly because of the char­ac­ters, but also because of their cars.” The pur­suer dri­ves a Dodge Charg­er, a mus­cle car that “explod­ed in pop­u­lar­i­ty dur­ing the late six­ties in the U.S.,” with a V‑8 engine and rear-wheel dri­ve that made it “basi­cal­ly built for infor­mal drag rac­ing.” The pur­sued, Steve McQueen’s detec­tive pro­tag­o­nist Frank Bul­litt, dri­ves an instant­ly rec­og­niz­able High­land Green Ford Mus­tang, “the first major pony car, a more com­pact, sporty take on the mus­cle car.”

Bul­litt could change the game, as they say, thanks not just to the cars but also the cam­eras avail­able at the time, not least the Arri­flex 35 II. “Small­er and more rugged” than the bulky rigs of ear­li­er gen­er­a­tions, it made it pos­si­ble to shoot on actu­al city streets rather than just stu­dio sets and rear-pro­jec­tion setups. (To get a sense of the dif­fer­ence in feel that result­ed, sim­ply com­pare the Bul­litt chase to the one in Dr. No, the first James Bond pic­ture, from six years before.)

This threw down the gaunt­let before all action film­mak­ers, who over the sub­se­quent decades would take advan­tage of every tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment that could pos­si­bly height­en the thrills of their own car chas­es.

The video also includes vehic­u­lar action movies from The French Con­nec­tion and Van­ish­ing Point to Ronin and Dri­ve. But the most impor­tant devel­op­ment in recent decades actu­al­ly owes to the horse-rac­ing movie Seabis­cuit, whose pro­duc­tion neces­si­tat­ed a rig, now known as “the bis­cuit,” that “makes it look like an actor is doing the dri­ving, while a stunt per­son actu­al­ly steers from the dri­ver’s pod.” Gone are the days when a star like Steve McQueen, a gen­uine rac­er of both motor­cy­cles and cars, could han­dle some of the stunt dri­ving him­self; gone, too, is the era of the mus­cle car not pro­grammed to shut down auto­mat­i­cal­ly when it goes into a drift. But for view­ers in con­stant need of ever more spec­tac­u­lar, tech­ni­cal­ly com­plex, and expen­sive car chas­es, it seems the Fast and the Furi­ous series will always come through.

Relat­ed con­tent:

William Fried­kin, RIP: Why the 80s Action Movie To Live and Die in L.A. Is His “Sub­ver­sive Mas­ter­piece”

The Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Title Sequences and Trail­ers Cre­at­ed by Pablo Fer­ro: Dr. Strangelove, A Clock­work Orange, Stop Mak­ing Sense, Bul­litt & Oth­er Films

The Dark Knight: Anato­my of a Flawed Action Scene

Take a Dri­ve Through 1940s, 50s & 60s Los Ange­les with Vin­tage Through-the-Car-Win­dow Films

Some of Buster Keaton’s Great, Death-Defy­ing Stunts Cap­tured in Ani­mat­ed Gifs

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 Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Built to Last: How Ancient Roman Bridges Can Still Withstand the Weight of Modern Cars & Trucks

A for­eign trav­el­er road-trip­ping across Europe might well feel a wave of trep­i­da­tion before dri­ving a ful­ly loaded mod­ern auto­mo­bile over a more than 2,000-year-old bridge. But it might also be bal­anced out by the under­stand­ing that such a struc­ture has, by def­i­n­i­tion, stood the test of time — and, for those with a grasp of the his­to­ry of engi­neer­ing, that its ancient design­ers would have ensured its capac­i­ty to bear a load far heav­ier than any that would have crossed it in real­i­ty. With no sci­en­tif­ic means of mod­el­ing stress­es, as clas­si­cal-his­to­ry Youtu­ber Gar­rett Ryan explains in the new Told in Stone video above, they just had to build it tough.

Key to that tough­ness were arch­es, “made of heavy blocks laid over a false­work frame until the key­stone was slot­ted into place.” From the late first cen­tu­ry, stonework was sup­ple­ment­ed or replaced by brick and Roman con­crete, a sub­stance much-fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture.

We’ve also cov­ered the Roman bridges you can still cross today: Spain’s Puente de Alcán­tara (from the Ara­bic al-qanţarah, mean­ing “arch”), for exam­ple, which, though crossed by a quar­ter-mil­lion vehi­cles every year, “shows no signs of fail­ing”; or France’s Pont des Marchands, which “has sup­port­ed a neigh­bor­hood of mul­ti-sto­ry shops and hous­es since the Mid­dle Ages.”

But the arch­es of the near­ly 1,000 whol­ly or par­tial­ly sur­viv­ing Roman bridges haven’t done all the work by geom­e­try alone. “The load-bear­ing capac­i­ty of a bridge depend­ed both on the solid­i­ty of its abut­ments and the strength — ‘shear­ing point’ — of its vous­soirs,” or the stones of its arch­es between the key­stone at the top and the springers at the bot­tom. “Since Roman builders carved vous­soirs from the strongest read­i­ly avail­able stone, their bridges tend­ed to be impres­sive­ly sol­id.” You would­n’t want to run a freight train across the Puente de Alcán­tara, but 40-ton trucks are no prob­lem — to say noth­ing of a car filled with lug­gage, a few kids, and even a dog or two.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Roman Roads and Bridges You Can Still Trav­el Today

The Mys­tery Final­ly Solved: Why Has Roman Con­crete Been So Durable?

The Beau­ty & Inge­nu­ity of the Pan­theon, Ancient Rome’s Best-Pre­served Mon­u­ment: An Intro­duc­tion

Why Hasn’t the Pantheon’s Dome Col­lapsed?: How the Romans Engi­neered the Dome to Last 19 Cen­turies and Count­ing

The Roads of Ancient Rome Visu­al­ized in the Style of Mod­ern Sub­way Maps

Roman Archi­tec­ture: A Free Online Course from Yale

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 Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Thomas Edison’s Recordings of Leo Tolstoy: Hear the Voice of the Great Russian Novelist

Born 196 years ago, Russ­ian nov­el­ist Leo Tolstoy’s life (1828–1910) spanned a peri­od of immense social, polit­i­cal, and tech­no­log­i­cal change, par­al­leled in his own life by his rad­i­cal shift from hedo­nis­tic noble­man to the­olo­gian, anar­chist, and veg­e­tar­i­an paci­fist. Though he did not live to see the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion, the nov­el­ist did see Tsar Alexan­der II’s sweep­ing reforms, includ­ing the 1861 Eman­ci­pa­tion order that changed the social char­ac­ter of the coun­try. Near the end of his life, Tol­stoy saw the com­ing of new record­ing tech­nol­o­gy that would rev­o­lu­tion­ize the direc­tion of his own life’s work—telling sto­ries.

In his lat­er years Tol­stoy appeared in the new medi­um of film, which cap­tured his 80th birth­day in 1908, and his funer­al pro­ces­sion two years lat­er. He was the sub­ject of the first col­or pho­to­graph tak­en in Rus­sia (top) also in 1908. And that same year, Tol­stoy made sev­er­al audio record­ings of his voice, on a phono­graph sent to him per­son­al­ly by Thomas Edi­son. You can hear one of those record­ings, “The Pow­er of Child­hood,” made on April 19th, 1908, just above.

You’ll note, of course, that the great author reads in his native lan­guage. Most of the record­ings he made, which he intend­ed for the edi­fi­ca­tion of his coun­try­men, are in Russ­ian. Below, how­ev­er, you can hear him read from his last book, Wise Thoughts For Every Day in Eng­lish, Ger­man, French and Russ­ian. The book col­lects Tolstoy’s favorite pas­sages from thinkers as diverse as Lao-Tzu and Ralph Wal­do Emer­son. As Mike Springer wrote in a pre­vi­ous post on this record­ing, “Tol­stoy reject­ed his great works of fic­tion” as an old man, “believ­ing that it was more impor­tant to give moral and spir­i­tu­al guid­ance to the com­mon peo­ple.” To that end, he made a series of short record­ings, which you can hear at this site, on such sub­jects as art, law, moral­i­ty, pover­ty, non­vi­o­lence, and cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment.

The sto­ry of how Tol­stoy came to make these record­ings is a fas­ci­nat­ing one. Inter­est­ed in the new tech­nol­o­gy, Tol­stoy made his first record­ing in 1895, when, writes The Moscow Times, “an Edi­son rep­re­sen­ta­tive came to Yas­naya Polyana, Tol­stoy’s estate, to record the author’s voice. Those record­ings were tak­en over the bor­der to Berlin, where they lay in an archive until they were brought back to the Sovi­et Union after World War II.” When Stephen Bon­sal, edi­tor of the New York Times learned of Tolstoy’s inter­est in record­ing tech­nol­o­gy in 1907, he promised to send the nov­el­ist an Edi­son phono­graph of his own. Edi­son him­self, hear­ing of this, refused to accept any pay­ment, and per­son­al­ly sent his own machine to Tolstoy’s estate with the engraved mes­sage “A Gift to Count Leo Tol­stoy from Thomas Alva Edi­son.”

Edi­son asked Tol­stoy for many mul­ti-lin­gual record­ings, request­ing “short mes­sages” in Eng­lish and French, “con­vey­ing to the peo­ple of the world some thoughts that would tend to their moral and social advance­ment.” Tol­stoy dili­gent­ly made sev­er­al record­ings, some of which were then shipped to Edi­son in 1908. On Feb­ru­ary 21 of that year, the New York Times pub­lished an arti­cle on the exchange titled “Tolstoy’s Gift to Edi­son. Will Send Record of His Voice—Edison Gave Him a Phono­graph.” The world eager­ly await­ed the world-famous author’s mes­sage to its “civ­i­lized peo­ples.” It seems how­ev­er, that the mes­sage nev­er arrived. Accord­ing to Sput­nik News, the fate of that leg­endary record­ing “has yet to be found out.” Nev­er­the­less, thanks to Edi­son, we have sev­er­al oth­er record­ings of Tolstoy’s very well-pre­served voice, the record of a life lived to the end with fierce con­vic­tion and curios­i­ty.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Leo Tol­stoy Became a Veg­e­tar­i­an and Jump­start­ed the Veg­e­tar­i­an & Human­i­tar­i­an Move­ments in the 19th Cen­tu­ry

The Only Col­or Pic­ture of Tol­stoy, Tak­en by Pho­tog­ra­phy Pio­neer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky (1908)

Leo Tol­stoy Reads From His Last Major Work in 4 Lan­guages, 1909

Vin­tage Footage of Leo Tol­stoy: Video Cap­tures the Great Nov­el­ist Dur­ing His Final Days

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

The Greatest Shot in Television: Science Historian James Burke Had One Chance to Nail This Scene … and Nailed It

The 80-sec­ond clip above cap­tures a rock­et launch, some­thing of which we’ve all seen footage at one time or anoth­er. What makes its view­ers call it “the great­est shot in tele­vi­sion” still today, 45 years after it first aired, may take more than one view­ing to notice. In it, sci­ence his­to­ri­an James Burke speaks about how “cer­tain gas­es ignite, and that the ther­mos flask per­mits you to store vast quan­ti­ties of those gas­es safe­ly, in their frozen liq­uid form, until you want to ignite them.” Use a suf­fi­cient­ly large flask filled with hydro­gen and oxy­gen, design it to mix the gas­es and set light to them, and “you get that” — that is, you get the rock­et that launch­es behind Burke just as soon as he points to it.

One can only admire Burke’s com­po­sure in dis­cussing such tech­ni­cal mat­ters in a shot that had to be per­fect­ly timed on the first and only take. What you would­n’t know unless you saw it in con­text is that it also comes as the final, cul­mi­nat­ing moment of a 50-minute explana­to­ry jour­ney that begins with cred­it cards, then makes its way through the inven­tion of every­thing from a knight’s armor to canned food to air con­di­tion­ing to the Sat­urn V rock­et, which put man on the moon.

For­mal­ly speak­ing, this was a typ­i­cal episode of Con­nec­tions, Burke’s 1978 tele­vi­sion series that traces the most impor­tant and sur­pris­ing moves in the evo­lu­tion of sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy through­out human his­to­ry.

Though not as wide­ly remem­bered as Carl Sagan’s slight­ly lat­er Cos­mos, Con­nec­tions bears repeat view­ing here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, not least for the intel­lec­tu­al and visu­al brava­do typ­i­fied by this “great­est shot in tele­vi­sion,” now viewed near­ly 18 mil­lion times on Youtube. Watch it enough times your­self, and you’ll notice that it also pulls off some minor sleight of hand by hav­ing Burke walk from a non-time-sen­si­tive shot into anoth­er with the already-framed rock­et ready for liftoff. But that hard­ly lessens the feel­ing of achieve­ment when the launch comes off. “Des­ti­na­tion: the moon, or Moscow,” says Burke, “the plan­ets, or Peking” — a clos­ing line that sound­ed con­sid­er­ably more dat­ed a few years ago than it does today.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Endeavour’s Launch Viewed from Boost­er Cam­eras

The 100 Most Mem­o­rable Shots in Cin­e­ma Over the Past 100 Years

The Most Beau­ti­ful Shots in Cin­e­ma His­to­ry: Scenes from 100+ Films

125 Great Sci­ence Videos: From Astron­o­my to Physics & Psy­chol­o­gy

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 Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Artificial Intelligence & Drones Uncover 303 New Nazca Lines in Peru

If you vis­it one tourist site in Peru, it will almost cer­tain­ly be the ruined Incan city of Machu Pic­chu. If you vis­it anoth­er, it’ll prob­a­bly be the Naz­ca Desert, home to many large-scale geo­glyphs made by pre-Inca peo­ples between 500 BC and 500 AD. Many of these “Naz­ca lines” are lit­er­al­ly that, run­ning across the desert floor in an abstract fash­ion, but oth­ers are fig­u­ra­tive, depict­ing human beings, flo­ra, fau­na, and var­i­ous less eas­i­ly cat­e­go­riz­able chimeras. The preser­v­a­tive effects of the cli­mate kept many of these designs iden­ti­fi­able by the time mod­erns dis­cov­ered them in 1927, and thanks to arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence tech­nol­o­gy, researchers are find­ing new ones still today.

“A team from the Japan­ese Uni­ver­si­ty of Yamagata’s Naz­ca Insti­tute, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with IBM Research, dis­cov­ered 303 pre­vi­ous­ly unknown geo­glyphs of humans and ani­mals, all small­er in size than the vast geo­met­ric pat­terns that date from AD 200–700 and stretch across more than 400 sq km of the Naz­ca plateau,” writes the Guardian’s Dan Col­lyns.

“The use of AI com­bined with low-fly­ing drones rev­o­lu­tion­ized the speed and rate at which the geo­glyphs were dis­cov­ered, accord­ing to a research paper pub­lished this week in the Pro­ceed­ings of the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences,” and many more Naz­ca lines could remain to be iden­ti­fied with these meth­ods.

The new­ly iden­ti­fied geo­glyphs “include birds, plants, spi­ders, human­like fig­ures with head­dress­es, decap­i­tat­ed heads and an orca wield­ing a knife,” writes CNN’s Katie Hunt. She also cites hypothe­ses about why the orig­i­nal cre­ators of these fig­ures did the painstak­ing work of dis­plac­ing stone after stone to cre­ate images most­ly invis­i­ble to the human eye: it’s pos­si­ble that “they formed a sacred space that was per­haps a place of pil­grim­age. Oth­er the­o­ries pro­pose they played a part in cal­en­dars, astron­o­my, irri­ga­tion or for move­ment, such as run­ning or danc­ing, or com­mu­ni­ca­tion.” Some of them, sure­ly, were meant only for the eyes of the gods, and so it may stand to rea­son that only our mod­ern gods of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence have been able to reveal them.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed con­tent:

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Machu Pic­chu, One of the New 7 Won­ders of the World

The Solar Sys­tem Drawn Amaz­ing­ly to Scale Across 7 Miles of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert

Peru­vian Singer & Rap­per, Rena­ta Flo­res, Helps Pre­serve Quechua with Viral Hits on YouTube

Alger­ian Cave Paint­ings Sug­gest Humans Did Mag­ic Mush­rooms 9,000 Years Ago

A Mys­te­ri­ous Mono­lith Appears in the Utah Desert, Chan­nel­ing Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

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 Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse: Rick Beato Explains

Ear­li­er this month, a North Car­oli­na man was charged with gen­er­at­ing songs using an arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence sys­tem and con­fig­ur­ing bots to stream them auto­mat­i­cal­ly, thus rack­ing up some $10 mil­lion in ille­gal roy­al­ties. Though that amount no doubt star­tles many of us, in this age when legit­i­mate musi­cians pub­licly lament the pit­tance they earn through stream­ing plat­forms, such a case prob­a­bly comes as no sur­prise to Rick Beato. This past June, the promi­nent music YouTu­ber put out a video deal­ing with just that inter­sec­tion of cul­ture and tech­nol­o­gy, with the high­ly click­able title “The Real Rea­son Why Music Is Get­ting Worse.”

Con­sid­er the ques­tion of how we evoke one par­tic­u­lar cul­tur­al era rather than anoth­er. We can use its fash­ions, its slang, or its inte­ri­or dec­o­ra­tion, to name just a few pos­si­bil­i­ties, but noth­ing works as pow­er­ful­ly or imme­di­ate­ly as its music. Most of us grew up in a world where the sound of pop­u­lar songs changed dra­mat­i­cal­ly every decade or so. This hap­pened for many rea­sons, prac­ti­cal­ly all of them down­stream of devel­op­ments in tech­nol­o­gy. Blues­men elec­tri­fy­ing their gui­tars; Frank Sina­tra singing into micro­phones sen­si­tive enough to pick up his nuances; the Bea­t­les cre­at­ing com­plex, often strange minia­ture sound worlds in the stu­dio; rap­pers telling their sto­ries over looped frag­ments of dis­co records: all of it was made pos­si­ble by feats of engi­neer­ing.

Yet, in Beat­o’s view, tech­no­log­i­cal progress has late­ly back­fired on music, and both musi­cians and lis­ten­ers are feel­ing it. The con­ver­gence of com­put­ers and music pro­duc­tion is now com­plete, mak­ing any sound the­o­ret­i­cal­ly pos­si­ble at vir­tu­al­ly no cost. But “the cre­ative depen­dence on tech­nol­o­gy lim­its the abil­i­ty of peo­ple to inno­vate,” and “the over­re­liance on sim­i­lar tools” brings about “a lack of diver­si­ty” and a per­sis­tence of for­mu­la­ic trend-fol­low­ing. The ease of cre­ation has caused “an over­sat­u­ra­tion of music, mak­ing it hard­er to find real­ly excep­tion­al things.” This is tak­en to an extreme by the only-just-begin­ning avalanche of AI-gen­er­at­ed songs (and the storm of law­suits it has drawn).

Of course, if I’d known back when I was grow­ing up in the nine­teen-nineties that all the music I want­ed to lis­ten to would be made instant­ly avail­able at lit­tle or no cost, I’d have regard­ed it as the immi­nent arrival of heav­en on earth. Pre­sum­ably, the prospect would also have excit­ed the ado­les­cent Beato, bag­ging gro­ceries to save up the mon­ey to buy Led Zep­pelin and Pat Methe­ny albums in the sev­en­ties. Today, by con­trast, “music is not as val­ued by young peo­ple. There is no sweat equi­ty put into obtain­ing it, hav­ing it be part of your col­lec­tion, hav­ing it be a part of your iden­ti­ty, of who you are.”

Music, in short, has become both too easy to pro­duce and too easy to con­sume. It would be easy for any­one under 30 to dis­miss Beat­o’s argu­ment as that of a mid­dle-aged man reflex­ive­ly insist­ing that things were bet­ter in his day, when we knew the val­ue of an album. But even the youngest gen­er­a­tion of music-lovers must, at times, feel a cer­tain dis­sat­is­fac­tion amid this end­less abun­dance. To them — and to all of us — Beato says this: “Vote with your atten­tion” by try­ing to lis­ten to music delib­er­ate­ly, with­out dis­trac­tion. Per­son­al­ly, I rec­om­mend lis­ten­ing to not just full albums but com­plete discogra­phies, which at the very least cul­ti­vates a cer­tain dis­cern­ment. And to cross the musi­cal land­scape ahead of us, we’ll need all the dis­cern­ment we can get.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Sur­pris­ing­ly Long His­to­ry of Auto-Tune, the Vocal-Pro­cess­ing Tech­nol­o­gy Music Crit­ics Love to Hate

Nick Cave Answers the Hot­ly Debat­ed Ques­tion: Will Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Ever Be Able to Write a Great Song?

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 Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

How a 16th-Century Explorer’s Sailing Ship Worked: An Animated Video Takes You on a Comprehensive Tour

These days, it feels as if you can’t go very long at all before scrolling past anoth­er announce­ment about some new tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment (real­ized or sched­uled) relat­ed to space explo­ration. Some react to this by won­der­ing what could pos­si­bly be out there in the uni­verse to jus­ti­fy such enor­mous­ly cap­i­tal- and research-inten­sive projects. Cen­turies ago, sim­i­lar sen­ti­ments were no doubt voiced about the more adven­tur­ous kinds of sea­far­ing. In the new Ani­ma­graffs video above, you can see all that went into the con­struc­tion and equip­ment of a six­teenth-cen­tu­ry explor­er’s sail­ing ship in great detail, from the keel to the fish davit.

The par­tic­u­lar ship you see bro­ken down into its con­stituent parts in this video nev­er actu­al­ly exist­ed. But it may look famil­iar, espe­cial­ly if you’ve seen the recon­struc­tion in Lon­don of Gold­en Hind, the galleon in which Fran­cis Drake cir­cum­nav­i­gat­ed the world in the fif­teen-sev­en­ties. The video’s cre­ator Jacob O’Neal drew a good deal of inspi­ra­tion from that par­tic­u­lar ship, but also incor­po­rat­ed oth­er char­ac­ter­is­tics bor­rowed from the Mary Rose, the Mayflower, Swe­den’s Vas­sa, and var­i­ous Span­ish galleons of what we now regard as “the ear­ly age of sail, when ships began to cross the globe instead of mere­ly fol­low­ing coast­lines or cross­ing inter­nal bod­ies of water.”

How­ev­er advanced a mod­el it would’ve been in its day, this ship could only make a long transocean­ic jour­ney so com­fort­able for its crew of 80 or so, most of whom would’ve been sleep­ing on mats, sub­sist­ing pri­mar­i­ly on bread and beer (rationed at one gal­lon per man per day), and using rudi­men­ta­ry out­door toi­lets. Pre­sum­ably, few would have signed up for such a tri­al if not for the promise of bring­ing rich­es back from dis­tant lands — sup­ple­ment­ed, in the par­tic­u­lar case of the Gold­en Hind, by “unof­fi­cial­ly sanc­tioned pira­cy of Span­ish galleons.” We have here, in oth­er words, a vari­ety of pirate ship, the vehi­cle for swash­buck­ling adven­tures fan­ta­sized about by gen­er­a­tions upon gen­er­a­tions of young­sters.

I myself nev­er dreamed of pira­cy, but I do remem­ber the rap­tur­ous gid­di­ness with which my first-grade class react­ed to learn­ing about the sail­ing ship’s “poop deck.” O’Neal does­n’t neglect that com­po­nent, but nor does he dwell on it, hav­ing many more impor­tant parts to explain and con­tex­tu­al­ize in 40 min­utes. To get an idea of how dra­mat­i­cal­ly ships evolved as the age of sail pro­gressed, have a look at his hit video on the eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry HMS Vic­to­ry just above. Though the age of space explo­ration seems to have yet to begin in earnest, some of us are no doubt already psych­ing our­selves up to climb into the mod­ern equiv­a­lent of the Gold­en Hind for the 34-month trip to Mars.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

See the Well-Pre­served Wreck­age of Ernest Shackleton’s Ship Endurance Found in Antarc­ti­ca

Watch the Sink­ing of the Lusi­ta­nia Ani­mat­ed in Real Time (1915)

16th-Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese His­to­ri­ans Describe the Odd­ness of Meet­ing the First Euro­peans They Ever Saw

How an Ancient Roman Ship­wreck Could Explain the Uni­verse

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 Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

 

A Digital Archive Features Hundreds of Audio Cassette Tape Designs, from the 1960s to the 1990s

Audio cas­sette tapes first appeared on the mar­ket in the ear­ly nine­teen-six­ties, but it would take about a decade before they came to dom­i­nate it. And when they did, they’d changed the lives of many a music-lover by hav­ing made it pos­si­ble not just to lis­ten to their albums of choice on the go, but also to col­lect and trade their own cus­tom-assem­bled lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ences. By the eight­ies, blank tapes had become a house­hold neces­si­ty on the order of bat­ter­ies or toi­let paper for such con­sumers — and just as with those fre­quent­ly replen­ished prod­ucts, every­one seemed to have their favorite brand.


Some pre­ferred tapes from Philips, which devel­oped the for­mat of the Com­pact Cas­sette in the first place. Oth­ers had their pick from Fuji, BASF, Sony, Radio Shack, Scotch (which also made tape of the sticky vari­ety), and a host of oth­er brands besides.

Even some mem­bers of post-cas­sette gen­er­a­tions rec­og­nize the old tagline “Is it live or is it Mem­o­rex?” or Max­el­l’s “Blown Away Guy” in his scarf and LC2. If you’re old enough to have done tap­ing of your own, you don’t need a logo to rec­og­nize your brand; you’ll know it as soon as you spot the design of the cas­sette itself in the online archive at tapedeck.org.


“I built tapedeck.org to show­case the amaz­ing beau­ty and (some­times) weird­ness found in the designs of the com­mon audio tape cas­sette,” writes the site’s cre­ator Oliv­er Gel­brich. “There’s an amaz­ing range of designs, start­ing from the ear­ly 60’s func­tion­al cas­sette designs, mov­ing through the col­or­ful play­ful­ness of the 70’s audio tapes to amaz­ing shape vari­a­tions dur­ing the 80s and 90s.” You can browse the ever-expand­ing col­lec­tion by brand, run­ning time, col­or, and even tape coat­ing: chrome, fer­ro, fer­rochrome, and met­al, by whose dif­fer­ences audio­philes set great store.


Some­what improb­a­bly, in this age where even home CD-burn­ing has been dis­placed by near-instan­ta­neous stream­ing and down­load­ing of dig­i­tal music, the cas­sette tape has made some­thing of a come­back. The near-mytho­log­i­cal allure of the mix­tape has only grown in recent years, dur­ing which artists both minor and major have put out cas­sette releas­es — and in some cas­es, cas­sette-only releas­es. This seems to be hap­pen­ing around the world: a few weeks ago, while strolling an art-school neigh­bor­hood in Seoul, where I live, I passed a cof­fee shop that offered its young cus­tomers rentals of both tapes and Walk­man-style play­ers on which to lis­ten to them. As anoth­er gen­er­a­tion-tran­scend­ing slo­gan has it, every­thing old is new again.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed con­tent:

Home Tap­ing Is Killing Music: When the Music Indus­try Waged War on the Cas­sette Tape Dur­ing the 1980s, and Punk Bands Fought Back

Lis­ten to Audio Arts: The 1970s Tape Cas­sette Arts Mag­a­zine Fea­tur­ing Andy Warhol, Mar­cel Duchamp & Many Oth­ers

The Beau­ty of Degrad­ed Art: Why We Like Scratchy Vinyl, Grainy Film, Wob­bly VHS & Oth­er Ana­log-Media Imper­fec­tion

Atten­tion K‑Mart Shop­pers: Hear 90 Hours of Back­ground Music & Ads from the Retail Giant’s 1980s and 90s Hey­day

A Free Dig­i­tal Archive of Graph­ic Design: A Curat­ed Col­lec­tion of Design Trea­sures from the Inter­net Archive

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 Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.