Grant­ed access to a time machine, few of us would pre­sum­ably opt first for the expe­ri­ence of skull surgery by the Incas. Yet our chances of sur­vival would be bet­ter than if we under­went the same pro­ce­dure 400 years lat­er, at least if it took place on a Civ­il War bat­tle­field. In both fif­teenth-cen­tu­ry Peru and the nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry Unit­ed States, sur­geons were per­form­ing a lot of trepa­na­tion, or removal of a por­tion of the skull. Since the Neolith­ic peri­od, indi­vid­u­als had been trepanned for a vari­ety of rea­sons, some of which now sound more med­ical­ly com­pelling than oth­ers, but the Incan civ­i­liza­tion took it to anoth­er lev­el of fre­quen­cy, and indeed sophis­ti­ca­tion.

Any­one with an inter­est in the his­to­ry of tech­nol­o­gy would do well to study the Incas, who were remark­able in both what they devel­oped and what they did­n’t. Though there was no Incan alpha­bet, there was khipu, (or quipu), pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, a sys­tem of record-keep­ing that used noth­ing but knot­ted cords.

The Incas may not have had wheeled vehi­cles or mechan­i­cal devices as we know them today, but they did have pre­ci­sion mason­ry, an exten­sive road sys­tem, advanced water man­age­ment for agri­cul­tur­al and oth­er uses, high-qual­i­ty tex­tiles, and plant-derived anti­sep­tic — some­thing more than a lit­tle use­ful if you also hap­pen to be cut­ting a lot of holes in peo­ple’s skulls.

Study­ing the his­to­ry of trepa­na­tion, neu­rol­o­gist David Kush­n­er, along with bioar­chae­ol­o­gists John Ver­a­no and Anne Titel­baum, exam­ined more than 600 Peru­vian skulls dat­ing from between 400 BC and the mid-six­teenth-cen­tu­ry, which marked the end of the Incans’ 133-year-long run. As Sci­ence’s Lizzie Wade reports, the old­est evi­dence shows an unen­vi­able 40% sur­vival rate, but the sur­gi­cal tech­nique evolved over time: by the Inca era, the num­ber ris­es to between 75% and 83%, as against 46% to 56% in Civ­il War mil­i­tary hos­pi­tals. Some Incan skulls even show signs of hav­ing under­gone up to sev­en suc­cess­ful trepa­na­tions — or non-fatal ones, at any rate. Though that ven­er­a­ble form of surgery may no longer be prac­ticed, mod­ern neu­ro­sur­geons today use tech­niques based on the same prin­ci­ples. Should we find our­selves in need of their ser­vices, we’ll no doubt pre­fer to keep our dis­tance from the time machine.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Dis­cov­er Khipu, the Ancient Incan Record & Writ­ing Sys­tem Made Entire­ly of Knots

Behold the Medieval Wound Man: The Poor Soul Who Illus­trat­ed the Injuries a Per­son Might Receive Through War, Acci­dent or Dis­ease

Jazz Musi­cian Plays Acoustic Gui­tar While Under­go­ing Brain Surgery, Help­ing Doc­tors Mon­i­tor Their Progress

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence & Drones Uncov­er 303 New Naz­ca Lines in Peru

How the “First Pho­to­jour­nal­ist,” Math­ew Brady, Shocked the Nation with Pho­tos from the Civ­il War

Down­load 100,000+ Images From The His­to­ry of Med­i­cine, All Free Cour­tesy of The Well­come Library

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

The Renais­sance did not, strict­ly speak­ing, occur in Chi­na. Yet it seems that the Mid­dle King­dom did have its Renais­sance men, so to speak, and in much ear­li­er times at that. We find one such illus­tri­ous fig­ure in the Han dynasty of the first and sec­ond cen­turies: a states­man named Zhang Heng (78–139 AD), who man­aged to dis­tin­guish him­self across a range of fields from math­e­mat­ics to astron­o­my to phi­los­o­phy to poet­ry. His accom­plish­ments in sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy include invent­ing the first hydraulic armil­lary sphere for observ­ing the heav­ens, improv­ing water clocks with a sec­ondary tank, cal­cu­lat­ing pi fur­ther than it had been in Chi­na to date, and mak­ing dis­cov­er­ies about the nature of the moon. He also, so records show, put togeth­er the first-ever seis­mo­scope, a device for detect­ing earth­quakes.

A visu­al expla­na­tion of Zhang’s design appears in the Sci­ence­World video above. His seis­mo­scope, its nar­ra­tor says, “was called hòufēng dìdòngyí, which means ‘instru­ment for mea­sur­ing sea­son­al winds and move­ments of the earth,’ ” and it could “deter­mine rough­ly the direc­tion in which an earth­quake occurred.”

Each of its eight drag­on heads (a com­bi­na­tion of num­ber and crea­ture that, in Chi­na, could hard­ly be more aus­pi­cious) holds a ball; when the ground shook, the drag­on point­ing toward the epi­cen­ter of the quake drops its ball into the mouth of one of the dec­o­ra­tive toads wait­ing below. At one time, as his­to­ry has record­ed, it “detect­ed an earth­quake 650 kilo­me­ters, or 400 miles away, that was­n’t felt at the loca­tion of the seis­mo­scope.”

Not bad, con­sid­er­ing that nei­ther Zhang nor any­one else had yet heard of tec­ton­ic plates. But as all engi­neers know, prac­ti­cal devices often work just fine even in the absence of com­plete­ly sound the­o­ry. Though no con­tem­po­rary exam­ples of hòufēng dìdòngyí sur­vive from Zhang’s time, “researchers believe that inside the seis­mo­scope were a pen­du­lum, a bronze ball under the pen­du­lum, eight chan­nels, and eight levers that acti­vat­ed the drag­ons’ mouths.” Mov­ing in response to a shock wave, the pen­du­lum would release the ball in the oppo­site direc­tion, which would roll down a chan­nel and release the mouth at the end of it. How­ev­er inno­v­a­tive it was for its time, this scheme could, of course, pro­vide no infor­ma­tion about exact­ly how far away the earth­quake hap­pened, to say noth­ing of pre­dic­tion. For­tu­nate­ly, cen­turies of Renais­sance men still lay ahead to fig­ure all that out.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the Ancient Greeks Invent­ed the First Com­put­er: An Intro­duc­tion to the Antikythera Mech­a­nism (Cir­ca 87 BC)

The Advanced Tech­nol­o­gy of Ancient Rome: Auto­mat­ic Doors, Water Clocks, Vend­ing Machines & More

Behold Col­or Pho­tographs Tak­en Dur­ing the After­math of San Francisco’s Dev­as­tat­ing 1906 Earth­quake

China’s 8,000 Ter­ra­cot­ta War­riors: An Ani­mat­ed & Inter­ac­tive Intro­duc­tion to a Great Archae­o­log­i­cal Dis­cov­ery

What Ancient Chi­nese Phi­los­o­phy Can Teach Us About Liv­ing the Good Life Today: Lessons from Harvard’s Pop­u­lar Pro­fes­sor, Michael Puett

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Buck­min­ster Fuller was, in many ways, a twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry man: an achieve­ment in itself, con­sid­er­ing he was born in the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry and died in the twen­ti­eth. In fact, it may actu­al­ly count as his defin­ing achieve­ment. For all the inven­tions pre­sent­ed as rev­o­lu­tion­ary that nev­er real­ly caught on — the Dymax­ion house and car, the geo­des­ic dome — as well as the count­less pages of eccen­tri­cal­ly the­o­ret­i­cal writ­ing and even more count­less hours of talk, it can be dif­fi­cult for us now, here in the actu­al twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, to pin down the civ­i­liza­tion­al impact he so earnest­ly longed to make. But to the extent that he embod­ied the faith, born of the com­bi­na­tion of indus­tri­al might and exis­ten­tial dread that col­ored the post­war Amer­i­can zeit­geist, that tech­nol­o­gy can ratio­nal­ly re-shape the world, we’re all his intel­lec­tu­al chil­dren.

In the video above, Joe Scott pro­vides an intro­duc­tion to Fuller and his world in about ten min­utes. After a much-ref­er­enced Dam­a­scene con­ver­sion, the once-dis­solute Fuller spent most of his life “try­ing to solve the world’s prob­lems,” Scott says, “specif­i­cal­ly in find­ing ways to save resources and pro­vide for every­body on the plan­et: to do more with less, as we would say.”

The title he gave him­self of “com­pre­hen­sive antic­i­pa­to­ry design sci­en­tist” neat­ly rep­re­sents both his glob­al­ly, even uni­ver­sal­ly scaled ambi­tions, as well as his com­pul­sive knack for self-pro­mo­tion. If the designs he came up with to achieve his utopi­an ends nev­er took root in soci­ety (even geo­des­ic domes end­ed up as some­thing like “the hula hoop of twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry archi­tec­ture,” James Gle­ick writes, in that they were “every­where, and then they were a bit sil­ly”), the prob­lem had in part to do with the ten­den­cy of his grand visions to out­pace the func­tion­al tech­nol­o­gy of his day.

In his sen­si­bil­i­ty, too, “Bucky” Fuller can come off as a famil­iar type in our own time, even to those who’ve nev­er heard of him. “There is no doubt what­ev­er in Fuller’s mind that the whole devel­op­ment of mod­ern sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy has result­ed from a will­ing­ness on the part of a very few men to sail into the wind of tra­di­tion, to trust in their own intel­lect, and to take advan­tage of their nat­ur­al mobil­i­ty,” wrote the New York­er’s Calvin Tomp­kins in a 1966 pro­file. No won­der he appealed to the Whole Earth Cat­a­log coun­ter­cul­ture of that decade, which even­tu­al­ly evolved into the cul­ture of what we now call Sil­i­con Val­ley, where no declared inten­tion to rein­vent the way humans live and work is too ridicu­lous­ly ambi­tious. Though few fig­ures could have seemed more like­ly to turn per­ma­nent­ly passé, Buck­min­ster Fuller con­tin­ues to inspire fas­ci­na­tion — and in a way, as a patron saint of tech­no-opti­mism, he lives on today.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Three-Minute Intro­duc­tion to Buck­min­ster Fuller, One of the 20th Century’s Most Pro­duc­tive Design Vision­ar­ies

Buck­min­ster Fuller Tells the World “Every­thing He Knows” in a 42-Hour Lec­ture Series (1975)

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

Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Dymax­ion Sleep Plan: He Slept Two Hours a Day for Two Years & Felt “Vig­or­ous” and “Alert”

The Life & Times of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Geo­des­ic Dome: A Doc­u­men­tary

A New Online Archive Lets You Read the Whole Earth Cat­a­log and Oth­er Whole Earth Pub­li­ca­tions, Tak­ing You from 1970 to 2002

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

For young chil­dren today, just as it was for gen­er­a­tions of their pre­de­ces­sors, noth­ing is quite so thrilling about their first vis­it to a Dis­ney theme park as catch­ing a glimpse of Mick­ey Mouse, Don­ald Duck, or anoth­er beloved char­ac­ter greet­ing them in real life. Cre­at­ing this mem­o­rable expe­ri­ence requires noth­ing more advanced than a well-trained employ­ee (or “cast mem­ber,” as the com­pa­ny puts it) in an over­sized cos­tume. Nev­er­the­less, effec­tive though it may be, it was­n’t part of Walt Dis­ney’s long-term vision. A true man of the Space Age, he looked ahead to the time — sure­ly not all too far in the future — when he could instead fill Dis­ney­land with reli­able, untir­ing, per­fect­ly life­like robots in the shape of ani­mals, human beings, or any­thing else besides.

In the event, Dis­ney only lived long enough to see his peo­ple cre­ate a mechan­i­cal ver­sion of Abra­ham Lin­coln, whose abil­i­ties were lim­it­ed to stand­ing up from his chair and deliv­er­ing a short speech. By the time that “audio-ani­ma­tron­ic” res­ur­rec­tion of the Unit­ed States’ six­teenth pres­i­dent was first pub­licly shown at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, its rumored devel­op­ment had already set off a num­ber of eth­i­cal and aes­thet­ic con­tro­ver­sies. Yet it worked so well — at least after its ear­ly, embar­rass­ing tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties were ironed out — that some atten­dees assumed that they were look­ing at an actor dressed up as Lin­coln, and even won­dered if the poor fel­low got tired doing the same rou­tine all day long.

This sto­ry is includ­ed in the video above from Defunct­land, a YouTube chan­nel that focus­es on amuse­ment-park-relat­ed fail­ures, espe­cial­ly those con­nect­ed with the Dis­ney empire. The Great Moments with Mr. Lin­coln show was a suc­cess, as was the all-robot­ic Hall of Pres­i­dents that opened at Dis­ney­land in 1971, a few years after Dis­ney’s death. But try as it might — and spend as much as it will — the com­pa­ny has yet to real­ize the vision that came to obsess its founder: in effect, that of cre­at­ing tech­no­log­i­cal life. Of course, Dis­ney was hard­ly the first to enter­tain such Promethean ambi­tions: mankind had already been try­ing to pull that trick off for quite some time, as evi­denced by the efforts, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, of minds like Leonar­do da Vin­ci and the medieval poly­math Al-Jazari.

To explain Dis­ney’s long, frus­trat­ed quest to cre­ate arti­fi­cial human beings — or mice, as the case may be — requires a good deal of his­tor­i­cal, eco­nom­ic, tech­no­log­i­cal, and even philo­soph­i­cal con­text. That’s just what Defunct­land cre­ator Kevin Per­jur­er does, and then some, in the doc­u­men­tary that com­pris­es the ear­li­er video from last year and its just-released sec­ond part above. Over its col­lec­tive run­time of six hours, he goes deep into a ques­tion of great inter­est to Dis­ney enthu­si­asts: what, exact­ly, has pre­vent­ed the most ambi­tious enter­tain­ment com­pa­ny in the world from per­fect­ing its automa­tons, even here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry? But then, as those of us of a cer­tain age who have fond mem­o­ries of the rel­a­tive­ly crude likes of the Haunt­ed Man­sion and Pirates of the Caribbean (to say noth­ing of  non-Dis­ney oper­a­tions like Chuck. E Cheese) under­stand, per­fec­tion isn’t always the way to a child’s heart.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Medieval Ara­bic Man­u­script Fea­tures the Designs for a “Per­pet­u­al Flute” and Oth­er Inge­nious Mechan­i­cal Devices

The Armored-Knight “Robot” Designed by Leonar­do da Vin­ci (cir­ca 1495)

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

The First-Ever Look at the Orig­i­nal Dis­ney­land Prospec­tus

Dis­ney­land 1957: A Lit­tle Stroll Down Mem­o­ry Lane

A Map of the Dis­ney Enter­tain­ment Empire Reveals the Deep Con­nec­tions Between Its Movies, Its Mer­chan­dise, Dis­ney­land & More (1967)

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.

To imag­ine our­selves into the time of Leonar­do da Vin­ci, we must first imag­ine a world with­out such things as heli­copters, para­chutes, tanks, div­ing suits, robots. Yet those all exist­ed for Leonar­do him­self — or rather, they exist­ed in his imag­i­na­tion. What he did­n’t build in real life, he doc­u­ment­ed in his note­books, leav­ing behind mate­r­i­al for appre­ci­a­tions of his genius that would con­tin­ue half a mil­len­ni­um lat­er. One such appre­ci­a­tion appears above in a new video from Lost in Time, which ren­ders his inven­tions using the kind of 3D ani­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy even the par­a­dig­mat­ic Renais­sance man couldn’t have begun to fore­see.

This helps us see Leonar­do’s work from the per­spec­tive of his con­tem­po­raries, and to feel how sur­prised they would’ve been to encounter a seat­ed knight who stands up, opens his visor, and reveals that there’s no one inside the armor. That sort of thing might even amuse us here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, but accus­tomed as we are to see­ing machines that move around under their own pow­er — and now, see­ing them take more cred­i­ble humanoid form every day — we would­n’t be inclined to cred­it it with any kind of life force.

In the four­teen-nineties, how­ev­er, man­pow­er was what peo­ple knew, so they instinc­tive­ly looked for the man. Leonar­do, too, con­ceived most of his inven­tions to employ human mus­cle, the study of whose inner work­ings enabled him to make the gears and pul­leys of his “robot­ic” knight move its limbs real­is­ti­cal­ly.

Accord­ing to the plans in one of Leonar­do’s note­books, his “aer­i­al screw,” involv­ing a linen sail wrapped around a wood­en mast, would need four men run­ning in cir­cles around a revolv­ing plat­form, which would the­o­ret­i­cal­ly cause the mast to rotate and the whole con­trap­tion to lift into the air. As designed, it would­n’t have been able to take off, but in 2019, Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land sci­en­tists mod­i­fied it to work suc­cess­ful­ly in minia­ture, as a kind of drone. As shown in the video, that’s not the only one of Leonar­do’s unre­al­ized inven­tions his intel­lec­tu­al descen­dants have tried out for them­selves. It seems that none have yet attempt­ed to con­struct his near­ly 80-foot-wide cross­bow, whose use on the bat­tle­field required the efforts of a dozen sol­diers, but then, that’s prob­a­bly all to the good.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Inven­tions Come to Life as Muse­um-Qual­i­ty, Work­able Mod­els: A Swing Bridge, Scythed Char­i­ot, Per­pet­u­al Motion Machine & More

Leonar­do da Vin­ci Draws Designs of Future War Machines: Tanks, Machine Guns & More

A Com­plete Dig­i­ti­za­tion of Leonar­do da Vinci’s Codex Atlanti­cus, the Largest Col­lec­tion of His Draw­ings & Writ­ings

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

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.