Late though it may be in the age of print, we still envi­sion ran­som or oth­er threat­en­ing notes in the same way we have for gen­er­a­tions, with their demands incon­gru­ous­ly spelled out with indi­vid­ual let­ters, each one a dif­fer­ent size and font, tak­en from the pages of news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines. This clas­sic cut-and-paste method of ran­som note con­struc­tion pre­sum­ably emerged as means of evad­ing minds like that of Trista Gins­berg, a doc­u­ment ana­lyst spe­cial­iz­ing in hand­writ­ing at the Secret Ser­vice. She appears in the Great Big Sto­ry above, which comes to focus on one facil­i­ty at the Ser­vice’s head­quar­ters in par­tic­u­lar: the Inter­na­tion­al Ink Library.

“The Secret Ser­vice has the largest ink library in the world,” says the video’s nar­ra­tor. Its more than 12,000 sam­ples of dif­fer­ent inks include “pens, bot­tled ink, and print­er car­tridges.” These come in handy when, say, “some­one writes a threat­en­ing let­ter to the pres­i­dent.”

A doc­u­ment ana­lyst like Iri­na Geiman sam­ples the let­ter’s ink, and then, by com­par­ing it to the inks in the library, “she can fig­ure out what kind of ink was used, and, hope­ful­ly, it can help solve the case.” Geiman also explains a less dra­mat­ic type of case that comes across her desk rather more often: at-home inkjet coun­ter­feit­ing of $20 bills.

Though that may not be the high­est exam­ple of the coun­ter­feit­er’s art, the art itself moti­vat­ed the cre­ation of the Secret Ser­vice in 1865 as a branch of the U.S. Trea­sury Depart­ment. “Fol­low­ing the Civ­il War,” says the Secret Ser­vice’s FAQ, “it was esti­mat­ed that one-third to one-half of the cur­ren­cy in cir­cu­la­tion was coun­ter­feit.” It was in 1901, after the McKin­ley assas­si­na­tion, that “the Secret Ser­vice was first tasked with its sec­ond mis­sion: the pro­tec­tion of the pres­i­dent.” Hence the cul­tur­al cur­ren­cy of the image of the would-be pres­i­dent assas­sin evad­ing gov­ern­men­tal pur­suit while labo­ri­ous­ly assem­bling his mis­sives one let­ter at a time — sure­ly rea­son enough for the Secret Ser­vice to have put togeth­er a top-secret Inter­na­tion­al Glue Library.

via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Ink is Made: The Process Revealed in a Mouth-Water­ing Video

Books Made with Dis­ap­pear­ing Ink Strate­gi­cal­ly Fade Away

Anato­my of a Fake: Forgery Experts Reveal 5 Ways To Spot a Fake Paint­ing by Jack­son Pol­lock (or Any Oth­er Artist)

Read the CIA’s Sim­ple Sab­o­tage Field Man­u­al: A Time­less Guide to Sub­vert­ing Any Orga­ni­za­tion with “Pur­pose­ful Stu­pid­i­ty” (1944)

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.

In the late twelfth and ear­ly thir­teenth cen­tu­ry there lived a mechan­i­cal­ly inclined poly­math named Badi’ al-Zaman Abu-‘l-‘Izz Ibn Isma’il Ibn al-Raz­zaz al-Jazari, whom we might pre­fer sim­ply to call Al-Jazari. A res­i­dent of Diyar-Bakir, in mod­ern-day Turkey, he was employed as a court engi­neer, and indeed, proved to be the finest engi­neer for which a Mesopotami­an ruler of that era could hope. He worked out a vari­ety of func­tion­al camshafts, crank­shafts, pumps, foun­tains, and clocks, not to men­tion his more ambi­tious designs, includ­ing a host of humanoid automa­ta meant to han­dle tasks like serv­ing bev­er­ages and even play­ing music.

Lying between the prac­ti­cal and the fan­ci­ful are such Al-Jazar­i­an inven­tions as the “per­pet­u­al flute,” a dia­gram of which you can see at the site of the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art. Involv­ing “two adja­cent tanks, each with a plug attached to a chain,” the set­up would work when “the pipe on an axle with a bowl fills with water from a chan­nel at the upper right and tips so that water flows into one tank. The air in the tank is thus forced through a pipe attached to a jar that plays a flute until the tank is filled. Then the pipe tilts to fill the oth­er tank with water, caus­ing the oth­er flute to play.” Like a pre-mod­ern Rube Gold­berg, Al-Jazari cre­at­ed mechan­i­cal con­cepts that are bet­ter seen than explained, and you’ll find many more of them illus­trat­ed at Flash­bak.

These works of schemat­ic art come not from Al-Jazari’s own hand, but from an Ara­bic man­u­script cre­at­ed some three to six cen­turies after his death. It appears to pay a kind of trib­ute to his pop­u­lar Book of Knowl­edge of Inge­nious Mechan­i­cal Devices, which itself drew upon a ninth-cen­tu­ry Book of Inge­nious Devices writ­ten by three Per­sian broth­ers known as the Banu Musa. All of these artis­tic and tech­ni­cal works, and their con­tin­ued avail­abil­i­ty in dif­fer­ent forms through the gen­er­a­tions, reflect the seri­ous work of intel­lec­tu­al cus­to­di­an­ship and devel­op­ment across the civ­i­liza­tions of the Mid­dle East after the fall of the Roman Empire — a project that great­ly ben­e­fit­ed from the occa­sion­al sui gener­is imag­i­na­tion like Al-Jazari’s.

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via Flash­bak

Relat­ed con­tent:

Behold Fan­tas­ti­cal Illus­tra­tions from the 13th Cen­tu­ry Ara­bic Man­u­script Mar­vels of Things Cre­at­ed and Mirac­u­lous Aspects of Things Exist­ing

Down­load 10,000+ Books in Ara­bic, All Com­plete­ly Free, Dig­i­tized and Put Online

A 13th-Cen­tu­ry Cook­book Fea­tur­ing 475 Recipes from Moor­ish Spain Gets Pub­lished in a New Trans­lat­ed Edi­tion

How Ara­bic Trans­la­tors Helped Pre­serve Greek Phi­los­o­phy … and the Clas­si­cal Tra­di­tion

500+ Beau­ti­ful Man­u­scripts from the Islam­ic World Now Dig­i­tized & Free to Down­load

The Only Sur­viv­ing Text Writ­ten in Ara­bic by an Amer­i­can Slave Has Been Dig­i­tized & Put Online: Read the Auto­bi­og­ra­phy of Enslaved Islam­ic Schol­ar, Omar Ibn Said (1831)

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.