Amer­i­cans of a cer­tain age may well remem­ber grow­ing up with an Apple II in the class­room, and the per­pet­u­al temp­ta­tion it held out to play The Ore­gon Trail, Num­ber Munch­ers, or per­haps Lode Run­ner. More than a few recess gamers went on to com­put­er-ori­ent­ed careers, but only the most curi­ous sought an answer to the ques­tion implied in the machine’s name: was there an Apple I? Half a cen­tu­ry after the foun­da­tion of Apple, Inc., then known as Apple Com­put­er, the prod­uct that launched what’s now one of the world’s most valu­able com­pa­nies remains very much an obscu­ri­ty. Unless you fre­quent com­put­er muse­ums, you’re unlike­ly ever to have laid eyes on an Apple I, let alone used one. Even if one of the exist­ing mod­els were to come on the mar­ket, you’d need about half a mil­lion dol­lars to buy it.

It’s actu­al­ly eas­i­er to buy the parts that went into an Apple I and build it your­self — which, as demon­strat­ed by the 8‑Bit Guy in the video above, still isn’t easy at all. Yet it does con­vey some­thing of what Apple’s very first cus­tomers would have expe­ri­enced in 1976, when do-it-your­self was the order of the day in com­put­ing.

When I bought the Mac­Book on which I’m writ­ing this post, I sim­ply opened it up and, nat­u­ral­ly, found it ready to use. That would scarce­ly have been imag­in­able to com­put­er enthu­si­asts of the mid-sev­en­ties, accus­tomed as they were to sol­der­ing indi­vid­u­al­ly pur­chased chips onto elec­tron­ics boards by hand. The Apple I marked a great leap for­ward in con­ve­nience by com­ing already assem­bled, albeit with­out a mon­i­tor, a key­board, or even a case; the pur­chase price of USD $666.66 (clos­er to $4,000 today) just got you the board. But what a board.

Though we remem­ber Steve Jobs as the mas­ter­mind, the Apple I is a tour de force of the engi­neer­ing genius of his busi­ness part­ner Steve Woz­ni­ak. When the Steves debuted it at the Home­brew Com­put­er Club in July of 1976, the rel­a­tive­ly small num­ber of chips and advanced func­tions (BASIC pro­gram­ming! Cas­sette-tape data stor­age! Actu­al video out­put, if only of tele­type-like scrolling text!) cre­at­ed a con­sid­er­able demand then and there. We often hear of Jobs and Woz­ni­ak start­ing Apple in a garage, and it was in that garage (as well as the house­’s liv­ing room) that the first Apple I boards were put togeth­er. Ulti­mate­ly, 200 were sold before the Apple II arrived the fol­low­ing year. Apple’s first com­put­er may look intim­i­dat­ing to most of today’s Mac users. But con­sid­er the com­pa­ny’s rep­u­ta­tion for min­i­mal­ism, acces­si­bil­i­ty, and a knack for cap­tur­ing the con­sumer’s imag­i­na­tion: all qual­i­ties present on that board 50 years ago.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Rid­ley Scott on the Mak­ing of Apple’s Icon­ic “1984” Com­mer­cial, Aired on Super Bowl Sun­day in 1984

Before The Simp­sons, Matt Groen­ing Illus­trat­ed a “Student’s Guide” for Apple Com­put­ers (1989)

Hunter S. Thompson’s Edgy 1990s Com­mer­cial for Apple’s Mac­in­tosh Com­put­er: A Med­i­ta­tion on Pow­er

Dis­cov­ered: The User Man­u­al for the Old­est Sur­viv­ing Com­put­er in the World

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.

If mono­rails have a bad name, The Simp­sons may be to blame. In an episode acclaimed for its hilar­i­ous­ness since it first aired 33 years ago, a huck­ster shows up in Spring­field and con­vinces the town to build just such a tran­sit sys­tem, which turns out to be not just sus­pi­cious­ly unnec­es­sary (at least in young Lisa’s judg­ment) but also dan­ger­ous­ly shod­dy. I watched it while grow­ing up in the sub­urbs of Seat­tle, a city that endured bit­ter­ly pro­tract­ed con­tention over whether or not to build out its own rudi­men­ta­ry mono­rail sys­tem — a World’s Fair arti­fact, like the Space Nee­dle — but final­ly opt­ed not to. Con­cerns were per­pet­u­al­ly raised, right­ly or wrong­ly, about the noise and dark­ness that could result from extend­ing the wide ele­vat­ed track on which it ran.

But what if there were anoth­er way to build a mono­rail? Indeed, what if it could run on the ground, like a tra­di­tion­al two-railed train? Such was the idea in the head of the inde­fati­ga­ble Irish-Aus­tralian engi­neer Louis Bren­nan, who’s remem­bered today for invent­ing a wire-guid­ed tor­pe­do back in 1877.

If things had gone dif­fer­ent­ly, maybe he’d be bet­ter remem­bered for invent­ing the gyro mono­rail, the sub­ject of the Pri­mal Space video above. In Bren­nan’s design, which he actu­al­ly got built and work­ing, the car bal­ances on a sin­gle rail with the aid of a pair of spin­ning pow­ered gyro­scopes that pre­vent it from falling over (and, in the case of pow­er loss, could keep spin­ning for half an hour to allow a safe evac­u­a­tion), allow­ing it to run faster and cor­ner more tight­ly than the trains the world knew.

Bren­nan’s gyro mono­rail made its pub­lic debut at the Japan-British Exhi­bi­tion in Lon­don in 1910, giv­ing 50 pas­sen­gers at a time the oppor­tu­ni­ty to ride around in a cir­cle at 20 miles per hour. Though the inter­est it drew inspired a minor boom of gyro-sta­bi­lized chil­dren’s toys, it nev­er actu­al­ly trans­lat­ed into a real tran­sit sys­tem. Around the same time, a group in Ger­many also unveiled their own ver­sion, and in the decades there­after, addi­tion­al abortive efforts were made in Rus­sia. The engi­neer­ing involved was impres­sive, as the video explains, but also a bit too com­pli­cat­ed and expen­sive for its time. The devel­op­ment of a new Ger­man app-ordered autonomous gyro mono­rail sys­tem was announced just a few years ago. Giv­en the pos­si­bil­i­ty of its enter­ing pro­duc­tion as soon as 2032, we could soon be hear­ing cho­rus­es of “Mono­rail, mono­rail, mono­rail” — or rather, “Mono­cab, Mono­cab, Mono­cab” — once again.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Trips on the World’s Old­est Elec­tric Sus­pen­sion Rail­way in 1902 & 2015 Show How a City Changes Over a Cen­tu­ry

Paris Had a Mov­ing Side­walk in 1900, and a Thomas Edi­son Film Cap­tured It in Action

A Sub­way Ride Through New York City: Watch Vin­tage Footage from 1905

Why Pub­lic Tran­sit Sucks in the Unit­ed States: Four Videos Tell the Sto­ry

A Har­row­ing Test Dri­ve of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s 1933 Dymax­ion Car: Art That Is Scary to Ride

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.

When it comes to tourist pil­grim­age sites in the Unit­ed States, the Hoover Dam may not quite rank up there with the Stat­ue of Lib­er­ty, the Lin­coln Memo­r­i­al, Mount Rush­more, the Grand Canyon, or Dis­ney­land. But that’s not due to a lack of impor­tance, nor even a lack of impres­sive­ness. Prop­er appre­ci­a­tion of its man-made majesty, how­ev­er, requires an under­stand­ing of not just the vital func­tion it serves, but the enor­mous task of its con­struc­tion. The guides at the Hoover Dam have been trained to explain just that to its many vis­i­tors, of course, but all of us could ben­e­fit from going in pre­pared with a lit­tle knowl­edge. Watch the hour-long video on the dam’s design and con­struc­tion from Ani­ma­graffs above, and you may be pre­pared with enough knowl­edge to tell the guides a thing or two.

Ani­ma­graffs is the YoT­tube chan­nel of Jacob O’Neal, which we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for its acclaimed expla­na­tions on a six­teenth-cen­tu­ry explor­er’s sail­ing ship and the Gold­en Gate Bridge, anoth­er icon­ic con­struc­tion project of the Great Depres­sion. Like those, his Hoover Dam video uses detailed 3D mod­els based on seri­ous research, not least into the pro­jec­t’s orig­i­nal design doc­u­ments.

This allows O’Neal to show each ele­ment of the dam and its com­plex sys­tem of sup­port­ing infra­struc­ture in detail and from every angle, as well as in a kind of x‑ray vision. We’ve all seen pho­tographs of the Hoover Dam, and maybe even bought some from its gift shop, but even the most sub­lime aer­i­al view does­n’t reveal as much about its ambi­tion as a look into its inner work­ings.

And the ambi­tion of the Hoover Dam is one aspect guar­an­teed to impress any view­ers. It required thou­sands of work­ers about five years to re-shape the Neva­da and Ari­zona land­scape at a grand enough scale to make pos­si­ble human con­trol of the mighty — and, more to the point, might­i­ly unpre­dictable — Col­orado Riv­er. With its large tur­bines, the engi­neer­ing and instal­la­tion of which O’Neal explains in full, it man­aged to gen­er­ate enough elec­tric­i­ty to repay its con­struc­tion cost of more than $811 mil­lion in today’s dol­lars by 1987, just over 50 years after it opened. And in an achieve­ment almost impos­si­ble to believe today, it opened more than two years ahead of sched­ule. We hear a good deal today about the con­cept of “state capac­i­ty,” and how the U.S. could regain it. At the Hoover Dam, we behold state capac­i­ty quite lit­er­al­ly made con­crete.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Incred­i­ble Sto­ry of the Hoover Dam

The Genius Urban Design of Ams­ter­dam: Canals, Dams & Lean­ing Hous­es

How Medieval Islam­ic Engi­neer­ing Brought Water to the Alham­bra

The Genius Engi­neer­ing of Roman Aque­ducts

The Bril­liant Engi­neer­ing That Made Venice: How a City Was Built on Water

Dis­cov­er Ansel Adams’ 226 Pho­tos of U.S. Nation­al Parks (and Anoth­er Side of the Leg­endary Pho­tog­ra­ph­er)

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.