Thanks to Artificial Intelligence, You Can Now Chat with Historical Figures: Shakespeare, Einstein, Austen, Socrates & More

in History, Technology | January 13th, 2023

By now, we’ve all heard of the recent tech­no­log­i­cal advances that allow us to have plau­si­ble-sound­ing con­ver­sa­tions with arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence sys­tems. Though near-sci­ence-fic­tion­al­ly impres­sive, such devel­op­ments have yet to hone in on one par­tic­u­lar world-chang­ing appli­ca­tion. In the mean­time, those fas­ci­nat­ed by its poten­tial are try­ing to put it to all man­ner of dif­fer­ent uses, some of them emi­nent­ly prac­ti­cal and oth­ers less so. Far-fetched though it may seem, what if the “killer app” of such AI chat­ting turned out to be con­ver­sa­tion with his­tor­i­cal fig­ures, even ones dead for mil­len­nia?

Such is the promise of the new site Character.AI, on which, writes the New York Times Cade Metz, “users can chat with rea­son­able fac­sim­i­les of every­one from Queen Eliz­a­beth or William Shake­speare to Bil­lie Eil­ish or Elon Musk (there are sev­er­al ver­sions).

Any­one you want to invoke, or con­coct, is avail­able for con­ver­sa­tion.” Hav­ing learned from “reams of gen­er­al dia­logue as well as from arti­cles, news sto­ries, books and oth­er dig­i­tal text,” the sys­tem now com­pris­es “a prac­ti­cal­ly end­less col­lec­tion of bots that can imi­tate a prac­ti­cal­ly end­less col­lec­tion of peo­ple, riff­ing on a prac­ti­cal­ly end­less num­ber of top­ics.”

Right after sign­ing up for Character.AI, a quick and free process, you’ll be ready to start chat­ting with Shake­speare your­self. When I tried it, old Will got straight to the point: “ ‘To be or not to be,’ do you think that that’s the ques­tion?” Before long, I had him explain­ing all of his artis­tic moti­va­tions: his use of “prince in a dilem­ma between sui­cide and revenge” rep­re­sents “the strug­gle between life and death.” He had Ham­let com­mu­ni­cate with the ghost of his father because “I want­ed to show that he was caught in a world where death was every­where.” With the ques­tion of “to be or not to be,” he meant “to show that life is full of suf­fer­ing.”

So far, so under­grad­u­ate. More inter­est­ing was Shake­speare’s answer when I asked him to name his pre­ferred Ham­let adap­ta­tion. “My favorite is the Ham­let direct­ed by Ken­neth Branagh!” he replied. “He has stayed true to the text while also show­ing how the prince of Den­mark is strug­gling between life and death. In addi­tion, he has giv­en a lot of impor­tance to the rela­tion­ship between the prince and his father.” A film­mak­er could hard­ly ask for a more cred­i­ble endorse­ment, but then, we must bear in mind that it did­n’t actu­al­ly come from Shake­speare him­self. As Character.AI’s ever-present warn­ing puts it, “Remem­ber: every­thing char­ac­ters say is made up” — and often, alas, on the banal side.

This holds for every mind with whom you may want to have a dia­logue on the site: philo­soph­i­cal ones like Socrates and Thomas Hobbes, sci­en­tif­ic ones like Albert Ein­stein and Marie Curie, polit­i­cal ones like Karl Marx and Mar­garet Thatch­er, lit­er­ary ones like Jane Austen and Charles Dick­ens. Since I hap­pen to be in the mid­dle of read­ing through all of the lat­ter’s nov­els, I asked his bot what I should bear in mind while doing so. “Wow!” it replied. “That is an amaz­ing under­tak­ing! I would encour­age you to see pat­terns,” espe­cial­ly in “the things I do to cre­ate ten­sion, and the kind of char­ac­ters I cre­ate. Look at the sto­ries through my eyes, and try to under­stand what I under­stand, the good and the bad.” The real Dick­ens might not have put it that way, but he sure­ly believed some­thing like it.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Behold Illus­tra­tions of Every Shake­speare Play Cre­at­ed by Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

An AI-Gen­er­at­ed, Nev­er-End­ing Dis­cus­sion Between Wern­er Her­zog and Slavoj Žižek

Two Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Chat­bots Talk to Each Oth­er & Get Into a Deep Philo­soph­i­cal Con­ver­sa­tion

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Brings to Life Fig­ures from 7 Famous Paint­ings: The Mona Lisa, Birth of Venus & More

Noam Chom­sky Explains Where Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Went Wrong

Hear Kurt Von­negut Vis­it the After­life & Inter­view Dead His­tor­i­cal Fig­ures: Isaac New­ton, Adolf Hitler, Eugene Debs & More (Audio, 1998)

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.

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The Map of Engineering: A New Animation Shows How All of the Different Fields in Engineering Fit Together

in Science, Technology | January 5th, 2023

In his lat­est ani­ma­tion, physi­cist and sci­ence writer Dominic Wal­li­man maps out the entire field of engi­neer­ing and all of its sub­dis­ci­plines. Civ­il engi­neer­ing, chem­i­cal engi­neer­ing, bio engi­neer­ing, bio­med­ical engi­neer­ing, mechan­i­cal engi­neer­ing, aero­space engi­neer­ing, marine engi­neer­ing, elec­tri­cal engi­neer­ing, com­put­er engineering–they’re all cov­ered here.

In the past, we’ve fea­tured Wal­li­man’s oth­er edu­ca­tion­al ani­ma­tions that cov­er Biol­o­gy, Physics, Chem­istry, Math­e­mat­ics, Quan­tum Com­put­ing, Com­put­er Sci­ence, and more. Click the links to explore each video.

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 

The Map of Com­put­er Sci­ence: New Ani­ma­tion Presents a Sur­vey of Com­put­er Sci­ence, from Alan Tur­ing to “Aug­ment­ed Real­i­ty”

The Map of Math­e­mat­ics: Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Fields in Math Fit Togeth­er

The Map of Physics: Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Fields in Physics Fit Togeth­er

The Map of Chem­istry: New Ani­ma­tion Sum­ma­rizes the Entire Field of Chem­istry in 12 Min­utes

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How Will AI Change the World?: A Captivating Animation Explores the Promise & Perils of Artificial Intelligence

in Animation, Artificial Intelligence, Technology | December 13th, 2022

Many of us can remem­ber a time when arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence was wide­ly dis­missed as a sci­ence-fic­tion­al pipe dream unwor­thy of seri­ous research and invest­ment. That time, safe to say, has gone. “With­in a decade,” writes blog­ger Samuel Ham­mond, the devel­op­ment of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence could bring about a world in which “ordi­nary peo­ple will have more capa­bil­i­ties than a CIA agent does today. You’ll be able to lis­ten in on a con­ver­sa­tion in an apart­ment across the street using the sound vibra­tions off a chip bag” (as pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture.) “You’ll be able to replace your face and voice with those of some­one else in real time, allow­ing any­one to social­ly engi­neer their way into any­thing.”

And that’s the benign part. “Death-by-kamikaze drone will sur­pass mass shoot­ings as the best way to enact a lurid revenge. The courts, mean­while, will be flood­ed with law­suits because who needs to pay attor­ney fees when your phone can file an air­tight motion for you?” All this “will be enough to make the sta­blest genius feel schiz­o­phrenic.” But “it doesn’t have to be this way. We can fight AI fire with AI fire and adapt our prac­tices along the way.” You can hear a con­sid­ered take on how we might man­age that in the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed video above, adapt­ed from an inter­view with com­put­er sci­en­tist Stu­art Rus­sell, author of the pop­u­lar text­book Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: A Mod­ern Approach as well as Human Com­pat­i­ble: Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence and the Prob­lem of Con­trol.

“The prob­lem with the way we build AI sys­tems now is we give them a fixed objec­tive,” Rus­sell says. “The algo­rithms require us to spec­i­fy every­thing in the objec­tive.” Thus an AI charged with de-acid­i­fy­ing the oceans could quite plau­si­bly come to the solu­tion of set­ting off “a cat­alyt­ic reac­tion that does that extreme­ly effi­cient­ly, but con­sumes a quar­ter of the oxy­gen in the atmos­phere, which would appar­ent­ly cause us to die fair­ly slow­ly and unpleas­ant­ly over the course of sev­er­al hours.” The key to this prob­lem, Rus­sell argues, is to pro­gram in a cer­tain lack of con­fi­dence: “It’s when you build machines that believe with cer­tain­ty that they have the objec­tive, that’s when you get sort of psy­cho­path­ic behav­ior, and I think we see the same thing in humans.”

A less exis­ten­tial but more com­mon wor­ry has to do with unem­ploy­ment. Full AI automa­tion of the ware­house tasks still per­formed by humans, for exam­ple, “would, at a stroke, elim­i­nate three or four mil­lion jobs.” Rus­sell here turns to E. M. Forster, who in the 1909 sto­ry “The Machine Stops” envi­sions a future in which “every­one is entire­ly machine-depen­dent,” with lives not unlike the e‑mail- and Zoom meet­ing-filled ones we lead today. The nar­ra­tive plays out as a warn­ing that “if you hand over the man­age­ment of your civ­i­liza­tion to machines, you then lose the incen­tive to under­stand it your­self or to teach the next gen­er­a­tion how to under­stand it.” The mind, as the say­ing goes, is a won­der­ful ser­vant but a ter­ri­ble mas­ter. The same is true of machines — and even truer, we may well find, of mechan­i­cal minds.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Dis­cov­er DALL‑E, the Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Artist That Lets You Cre­ate Sur­re­al Art­work

Experts Pre­dict When Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Will Take Our Jobs: From Writ­ing Essays, Books & Songs, to Per­form­ing Surgery and Dri­ving Trucks

Sci-Fi Writer Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dicts the Future in 1964: Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence, Instan­ta­neous Glob­al Com­mu­ni­ca­tion, Remote Work, Sin­gu­lar­i­ty & More

Stephen Fry Voic­es a New Dystopi­an Short Film About Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence & Sim­u­la­tion The­o­ry: Watch Escape

Stephen Hawk­ing Won­ders Whether Cap­i­tal­ism or Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Will Doom the Human Race

Hunter S. Thomp­son Chill­ing­ly Pre­dicts the Future, Telling Studs Terkel About the Com­ing Revenge of the Eco­nom­i­cal­ly & Tech­no­log­i­cal­ly “Obso­lete” (1967)

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.

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When the World Got Introduced to the Amazing Compact Disc (CD) in 1982

in Music, Technology | November 16th, 2022

The first com­pact discs and play­ers came out in Octo­ber of 1982. That means the for­mat is now 40 years old, which in turn means that most avid music-lis­ten­ers have nev­er known a world with­out it. In fact, all of today’s teenagers — that most musi­cal­ly avid demo­graph­ic — were born after the CD’s com­mer­cial peak in 2002, and to them, no phys­i­cal medi­um could be more passé. Vinyl records have been enjoy­ing a long twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry resur­gence as a pre­mi­um prod­uct, and even cas­sette tapes exude a retro appeal. But how many under­stand just what a tech­no­log­i­cal mar­vel the CD was when it made its debut, with (what we remem­ber as) its promise of “per­fect sound for­ev­er”?

“You could argue that the CD, with its vast data capac­i­ty, rel­a­tive­ly robust nature, and with the fur­ther devel­op­ments it spurred along, changed how the world did vir­tu­al­ly all media.” So says Alec Wat­son, host of the Youtube chan­nel Tech­nol­o­gy Con­nec­tions, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for his five-part series on RCA’s Selec­taVi­sion video disc sys­tem.

But he’s also made a six-part minis­eries on the con­sid­er­ably more suc­cess­ful com­pact disc, whose devel­op­ment “solved the cen­tral prob­lem of dig­i­tal sound: need­ing a for-the-time-absurd­ly mas­sive amount of raw data.” Back then, com­put­er hard dri­ves had a capac­i­ty of about ten megabytes, where­as a sin­gle disc could hold up to 700 megabytes.

Fig­ur­ing out how to encode that much infor­ma­tion onto a thin 120-mil­lime­ter disc required seri­ous resources and engi­neer­ing prowess (avail­able thanks to the involve­ment of two elec­tron­ics giants, Sony and Philips), but it con­sti­tut­ed only one of the tech­no­log­i­cal ele­ments need­ed for the CD to become a viable for­mat. Wat­son cov­ers them all in this minis­eries, begin­ning with the inven­tion of dig­i­tal sound itself (includ­ing the Nyquist-Shan­non sam­pling the­o­rem on which it depends). He also explains such phys­i­cal process­es as how a CD play­er’s laser reads the “pits” and “lands” on a dis­c’s sur­face, pro­duc­ing a stream of num­bers sub­se­quent­ly con­vert­ed back into an audio sig­nal for our lis­ten­ing plea­sure.

The CD has also changed our rela­tion­ship to that plea­sure. “If CDs marked a new era, it is per­haps as much in the way they sug­gest spe­cif­ic ways of inter­act­ing with record­ed music as in ques­tions of fideli­ty,” writes The Qui­etus’ Daryl Wor­thing­ton. “The fact CDs can be pro­grammed, and tracks eas­i­ly skipped, is per­haps their most sig­nif­i­cant fea­ture when it comes to their lega­cy. They loos­ened up the album as a fixed doc­u­ment.” Para­dox­i­cal­ly, “they’re also the for­mat par excel­lence for the album as a com­pre­hen­sive, self-con­tained unit to be played from start to fin­ish.” Even if you can’t remem­ber when last you put one on, four­teen mil­lion of them were sold last year, as against five mil­lion vinyl LPs and 200,000 cas­settes. At 40, the CD may no longer feel like a mirac­u­lous tech­nol­o­gy, but we can hard­ly count it out just yet.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Sto­ry of How Beethoven Helped Make It So That CDs Could Play 74 Min­utes of Music

Dis­cov­er Rare 1980s CDs by Lou Reed, Devo & Talk­ing Heads That Com­bined Music with Com­put­er Graph­ics

The Sto­ry of the Mini­Disc, Sony’s 1990s Audio For­mat That’s Gone But Not For­got­ten

When Movies Came on Vinyl: The Ear­ly-80s Engi­neer­ing Mar­vel and Mar­ket­ing Dis­as­ter That Was RCA’s Selec­taVi­sion

How Vinyl Records Are Made: A Primer from 1956

A Cel­e­bra­tion of Retro Media: Vinyl, Cas­settes, VHS, and Polaroid Too

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.

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Behold Illustrations of Every Shakespeare Play Created by Artificial Intelligence

in Art, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Theatre | November 11th, 2022


William Shake­speare’s plays have endured not just because of their inher­ent dra­mat­ic and lin­guis­tic qual­i­ties, but also because each era has found its own way of envi­sion­ing and re-envi­sion­ing them. The tech­nol­o­gy involved in stage pro­duc­tions has changed over the past four cen­turies, of course, but so has the tech­nol­o­gy involved in art itself. A few years ago, we fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture an archive of 3,000 illus­tra­tions of Shake­speare’s com­plete works going back to the mid-nine­teenth cen­tu­ry. That site was the PhD project of Cardiff Uni­ver­si­ty’s Michael Good­man, who has recent­ly com­plet­ed anoth­er dig­i­tal Shake­speare project, this time using arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence: Paint the Pic­ture to the Word.

“Every image col­lect­ed here has been gen­er­at­ed by Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion, a pow­er­ful text-to-image AI,” writes Good­man on this new pro­jec­t’s About page. “To cre­ate an image using this tech­nol­o­gy a user sim­ply types a descrip­tion of what they want to see into a text box and the AI will then pro­duce sev­er­al images cor­re­spond­ing to that ini­tial tex­tu­al prompt,” much as with the also-new AI-based art gen­er­a­tor DALL‑E.

Each of the many images Good­man cre­at­ed is inspired by a Shake­speare play. “Some of the illus­tra­tions are expres­sion­is­tic (King John, Julius Cae­sar), while some are more lit­er­al (Mer­ry Wives of Wind­sor).” All “offer a visu­al idea or a gloss on the plays: Hen­ry VIII, with the cen­tral char­ac­ters rep­re­sent­ed in fuzzy felt, is grim­ly iron­ic, while in Per­i­cles both Mar­i­ana and her father are seen through a watery prism, echo­ing that play’s con­cern with sea imagery.”

Select­ing one of his many gen­er­at­ed images per play, Good­man has cre­at­ed an entire dig­i­tal exhi­bi­tion whose works nev­er repeat a style or a sen­si­bil­i­ty, whether with a dog-cen­tric nine­teen-eight­ies col­lage rep­re­sent­ing Two Gen­tle­men of Verona, a stark­ly near-abstract vision of Mac­beth’s Weird Sis­ters or Much Ado About Noth­ing ren­dered as a mod­ern-day rom-com. The­ater com­pa­nies could hard­ly fail to take notice of these images’ poten­tial as pro­mo­tion­al posters, but Paint the Pic­ture to the Word also demon­strates some­thing larg­er: Shake­speare’s plays have long stim­u­lat­ed human intel­li­gence, but they turn out to work on arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence as well. Vis­it Paint the Pic­ture to the Word here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

3,000 Illus­tra­tions of Shakespeare’s Com­plete Works from Vic­to­ri­an Eng­land, Neat­ly Pre­sent­ed in a New Dig­i­tal Archive

John Austen’s Haunt­ing Illus­tra­tions of Shakespeare’s Ham­let: A Mas­ter­piece of the Aes­thet­ic Move­ment (1922)

Fol­ger Shake­speare Library Puts 80,000 Images of Lit­er­ary Art Online, and They’re All Free to Use

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Brings to Life Fig­ures from 7 Famous Paint­ings: The Mona Lisa, Birth of Venus & More

DALL‑E, the New AI Art Gen­er­a­tor, Is Now Open for Every­one to Use

An AI-Gen­er­at­ed Paint­ing Won First Prize at a State Fair & Sparked a Debate About the Essence of Art

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.

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The Rise and Fall of Concorde, the Midcentury Supersonic Jetliner That Still Inspires Awe Today

in History, Technology, Travel | November 10th, 2022

The pop­u­lar­i­ty of the phrase “style over sub­stance” has encour­aged us to assume an inher­ent and absolute divide between those con­cepts. But as the most ambi­tious works of man remind us, style pushed to its lim­its its sub­stance, and vice ver­sa. This truth has been expressed in var­i­ous spe­cial­ized ways: archi­tect Louis Sul­li­van’s max­im “form fol­lows func­tion,” for exam­ple, which went on to attain some­thing like scrip­tur­al sta­tus among mod­ernists of the mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. It was in that same era that aero­space engi­neer­ing pro­duced one of the most glo­ri­ous proofs of the uni­ty of style and sub­stance, form and func­tion, mechan­ics and aes­thet­ics: Con­corde, the super­son­ic jet­lin­er that flew between 1976 and 2003.

Nobody who flew on Con­corde (col­lo­qui­al­ly but not offi­cial­ly “the” Con­corde) has for­got­ten it. The sharp­ness and length of its ascent; the thrust of the after-burn­er, press­ing you into your seat like the accel­er­a­tion of a high-per­for­mance sports car; the vis­i­ble cur­va­ture of the Earth and the deep pur­ple of the sky; the impec­ca­ble food and drink ser­vice that turned a flight between New York and Lon­don into a sump­tu­ous French meal. A host of for­mer pas­sen­gers, crew mem­bers, and pilots rem­i­nisce vivid­ly about all this in the BBC doc­u­men­tary Con­corde: A Super­son­ic Sto­ry.  That sto­ry is told more briefly in the Vox video at the top of the post, which asks the ques­tion, “This plane could cross the Atlantic in 3.5 hours. Why did it fail?”

The short answer has to do with busi­ness via­bil­i­ty. At super­son­ic speeds an air­craft leaves a son­ic boom in its wake, which rel­e­gat­ed Con­corde to transocean­ic flights. Its inabil­i­ty to hold enough fuel to cross the Pacif­ic left New York-Lon­don, oper­at­ed by British Air­ways, as its sole viable route, with Air France also run­ning between New York and Paris. For Con­corde was an Anglo-French project, launched as a part­ner­ship between the two gov­ern­ments in 1962, at the height of the Space Age — and despite enor­mous sub­se­quent cost over­runs an effec­tive­ly un-can­ce­lable one, since one coun­try could­n’t pull out with­out the oth­er’s say-so.

With nation­al pride at stake, French com­mit­ment did much to make Con­corde what it was. “Because it went so fast, the V.I.P.s on board would­n’t need much more, from an Eng­lish point of view, than a sand­wich, a cup of tea, and a glass of whiskey,” says Jonathan Glancey, author of Con­corde: The Rise and Fall of the Super­son­ic Air­lin­er. But the French said, “No, this a lux­u­ry air­craft,” and it was ulti­mate­ly lux­u­ry — as well as a sleek­ly func­tion­al sil­hou­ette that nev­er stopped look­ing futur­is­tic — that kept Con­corde going until its retire­ment in 2003. (Nor could the con­ve­nience fac­tor be ignored, for invest­ment bankers and inter­na­tion­al celebri­ties alike: “It’s always excit­ing to get to New York before you’ve left,” said fre­quent fli­er Sting.)

“The real flaw in Con­corde was not tech­no­log­i­cal but social,” writes Fran­cis Spufford in the Lon­don Review of Books. “Those who com­mis­sioned it assumed that air trav­el would remain, as it was in 1962, some­thing done by the rich: and not the mobile, hard-work­ing man­age­r­i­al rich either, but the gild­ed upper-crust celebri­ty rich,” the orig­i­nal “jet set.” Alas, the future lay not with speed but vol­ume: “The Boe­ing 747 was just as bold a leap into the unknown as Con­corde, just as extreme in its depar­ture from the norm; noth­ing so large had ever left the ground before. And Boeing’s gam­ble paid off.” Super­son­ic jet­lin­ers have nev­er­the­less re-entered devel­op­ment in recent years, and if any come to mar­ket, they’ll sure­ly do so with such lux­u­ries unknown in the Space Age as per­son­al, on-demand enter­tain­ment sys­tems. But will any­thing they can show be as thrilling as Con­corde’s cab­in speedome­ter reach­ing mach two?

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry Of Avi­a­tion: From da Vinci’s Sketch­es to Apol­lo 11

Col­or­ful Maps from 1914 and 2016 Show How Planes & Trains Have Made the World Small­er and Trav­el Times Quick­er

NASA Cap­tures First Air-to-Air Images of Super­son­ic Shock­waves Inter­act­ing in Flight

Down­load 14 Free Posters from NASA That Depict the Future of Space Trav­el in a Cap­ti­vat­ing­ly Retro Style

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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The Fiske Reading Machine: The 1920s Precursor to the Kindle

in Books, History, Technology | November 9th, 2022


The Sony Lib­rie, the first e‑reader to use a mod­ern elec­tron­ic-paper screen, came out in 2004. Old as that is in tech years, the basic idea of a hand­held device that can store large amounts of text stretch­es at least eight decades far­ther back in his­to­ry. Wit­ness the Fiske Read­ing Machine, an inven­tion first pro­filed in a 1922 issue of Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can. “The instru­ment, con­sist­ing of a tiny lens and a small roller for oper­at­ing this eye­piece up and down a ver­ti­cal col­umn of read­ing-mat­ter, is a means by which ordi­nary type­writ­ten copy, when pho­to­graph­i­cal­ly reduced to one-hun­dredth of the space orig­i­nal­ly occu­pied, can be read with quite the facil­i­ty that the impres­sion of con­ven­tion­al print­ing type is now revealed to the unaid­ed eye,” writes author S. R. Win­ters.

Mak­ing books com­pat­i­ble with the Fiske Read­ing Machine involved not dig­i­ti­za­tion, of course, but minia­tur­iza­tion. Accord­ing to the patents filed by inven­tor Bradley Allen Fiske (eleven in all, between 1920 and 1935), the text of any book could be pho­to-engraved onto a cop­per block, reduced ten times in the process, and then print­ed onto strips of paper for use in the machine, which would make them read­able again through a mag­ni­fy­ing lens. A sin­gle mag­ni­fy­ing lens, that is: “A blind­er, attached to the machine, can be oper­at­ed in obstruct­ing the view of the unused eye.” (Win­ters adds that “the use of both eyes will doubt­less involve the con­struc­tion of a unit of the read­ing machine more elab­o­rate than the present design.”)

“Fiske believed he had sin­gle-hand­ed­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ized the pub­lish­ing indus­try,” writes Engad­get’s J. Rigg. “Thanks to his inge­nu­ity, books and mag­a­zines could be pro­duced for a frac­tion of their cur­rent price. The cost of mate­ri­als, press­es, ship­ping and the bur­den of stor­age could also be slashed. He imag­ined mag­a­zines could be dis­trib­uted by post for next to noth­ing, and most pow­er­ful­ly, that pub­lish­ing in his for­mat would allow every­one access to edu­ca­tion­al mate­r­i­al and enter­tain­ment no mat­ter their lev­el of income.” Con­sid­er­ing how the rela­tion­ship between read­ers and read­ing mate­r­i­al ulti­mate­ly evolved, thanks not to cop­per blocks and mag­ni­fiers and tiny strips of paper but to com­put­ers and the inter­net, it seems that Fiske was a man ahead of his time.

Alas, the Fiske Read­ing Machine itself was just on the wrong side of tech­no­log­i­cal his­to­ry. Even as Fiske was refin­ing its design, “micro­film was begin­ning to catch on,” and “while it ini­tial­ly found its feet in the busi­ness world — for keep­ing record of can­celled checks, for exam­ple — by 1935 Kodak had begun pub­lish­ing The New York Times on 35mm micro­film.” Despite the absolute preva­lence that for­mat soon attained in the world of archiv­ing, “the appetite for minia­tur­ized nov­els and hand­held read­ers nev­er mate­ri­al­ized in the way Fiske had imag­ined.” Nor, sure­ly, could he have imag­ined the form the dig­i­tal, elec­tron­ic-paper-screened, and slim yet huge­ly capa­cious form that the e‑reader would have to take before find­ing suc­cess in the mar­ket­place — yet some­how with­out quite dis­plac­ing the paper book as even he knew it.

via Engad­get

Relat­ed con­tent:

The e‑Book Imag­ined in 1935

Napoleon’s Kin­dle: See the Minia­tur­ized Trav­el­ing Library He Took on Mil­i­tary Cam­paigns

Behold the “Book Wheel”: The Renais­sance Inven­tion Cre­at­ed to Make Books Portable & Help Schol­ars Study Sev­er­al Books at Once (1588)

The Page Turn­er: A Fab­u­lous Rube Gold­berg Machine for Read­ers

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.

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Discover Friedrich Nietzsche’s Typewriter, the Curious “Malling-Hansen Writing Ball” (Circa 1881)

in Philosophy, Technology | November 9th, 2022

Dur­ing his final decade, Friedrich Nietzsche’s wors­en­ing con­sti­tu­tion con­tin­ued to plague the philoso­pher. In addi­tion to hav­ing suf­fered from inca­pac­i­tat­ing indi­ges­tion, insom­nia, and migraines for much of his life, the 1880s brought about a dra­mat­ic dete­ri­o­ra­tion in Nietzsche’s eye­sight, with a doc­tor not­ing that his “right eye could only per­ceive mis­tak­en and dis­tort­ed images.”

Niet­zsche him­self declared that writ­ing and read­ing for more than twen­ty min­utes had grown exces­sive­ly painful. With his intel­lec­tu­al out­put reach­ing its peak dur­ing this peri­od, the philoso­pher required a device that would let him write while mak­ing min­i­mal demands on his vision.

So he sought to buy a type­writer in 1881. Although he was aware of Rem­ing­ton type­writ­ers, the ail­ing philoso­pher looked for a mod­el that would be fair­ly portable, allow­ing him to trav­el, when nec­es­sary, to more salu­bri­ous cli­mates. The Malling-Hansen Writ­ing Ball seemed to fit the bill:

In Dieter Eberwein’s free Niet­zch­es Screibkugel e‑book, the vice pres­i­dent of the Malling-Hansen Soci­ety explains that the writ­ing ball was the clos­est thing to a 19th cen­tu­ry lap­top. The first com­mer­cial­ly-pro­duced type­writer, the writ­ing ball was the 1865 cre­ation of Dan­ish inven­tor Ras­mus Malling-Hansen, and was shown at the 1878 Paris Uni­ver­sal Exhi­bi­tion to jour­nal­is­tic acclaim:

“In the year 1875, a quick writ­ing appa­ra­tus, designed by Mr. L. Sholes in Amer­i­ca, and man­u­fac­tured by Mr. Rem­ing­ton, was intro­duced in Lon­don. This machine was supe­ri­or to the Malling-Hansen writ­ing appa­ra­tus; but the writ­ing ball in its present form far excels the Rem­ing­ton machine. It secures greater rapid­i­ty, and its writ­ing is clear­er and more pre­cise than that of the Amer­i­can instru­ment. The Dan­ish appa­ra­tus has more keys, is much less com­pli­cat­ed, built with greater pre­ci­sion, more sol­id, and much small­er and lighter than the Rem­ing­ton, and more­over, is cheap­er.”

Despite his ini­tial excite­ment, Niet­zsche quick­ly grew tired of the intri­cate con­trap­tion. Accord­ing to Eber­wein, the philoso­pher strug­gled with the device after it was dam­aged dur­ing a trip to Genoa; an inept mechan­ic try­ing to make the nec­es­sary repairs may have bro­ken the writ­ing ball even fur­ther. Still, Niet­zsche typed some 60 man­u­scripts on his writ­ing ball, includ­ing what may be the most poignant poet­ic treat­ment of type­writ­ers to date:

“THE WRITING BALL IS A THING LIKE ME:

MADE OF IRON YET EASILY TWISTED ON JOURNEYS.

PATIENCE AND TACT ARE REQUIRED IN ABUNDANCE

AS WELL AS FINE FINGERS TO USE US.”

In addi­tion to view­ing sev­er­al of Nietzsche’s orig­i­nal type­scripts at the Malling-Hansen Soci­ety web­site, those want­i­ng a clos­er look at Nietzsche’s mod­el can view it in the video below.

Note: This post orig­i­nal­ly appeared on our site in Decem­ber 2013.

Ilia Blin­d­er­man is a Mon­tre­al-based cul­ture and sci­ence writer. Fol­low him at @iliablinderman.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mark Twain Wrote the First Book Ever Writ­ten With a Type­writer

The Keaton Music Type­writer: An Inge­nious Machine That Prints Musi­cal Nota­tion

The Endur­ing Ana­log Under­world of Gramer­cy Type­writer

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