It would be awful­ly clichéd to call Seoul, where I live, a place of con­trasts between old and new. And yet that tex­ture real­ly does man­i­fest every­where in Kore­an life, most pal­pa­bly on the streets of the cap­i­tal. In my favorite neigh­bor­hoods, one pass­es through a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent eras walk­ing down a sin­gle alley. “Third-wave” cof­fee shops and “newtro” bars coex­ist with fam­i­ly restau­rants unchanged for decades and even small indus­tri­al work­shops. Those work­shops pro­duce cloth­ing, plumb­ing fix­tures, print­ed mat­ter, elec­tron­ics, and much else besides, in many cas­es late into the night. For all its rep­u­ta­tion as a high-tech “Asian Tiger,” this remains, clear­ly and present­ly, a coun­try that makes things.

You can see just how Korea makes things on the Youtube chan­nel All Process of World, which has drawn tens of mil­lions of views with its videos of fac­to­ries: fac­to­ries mak­ing forks, bricks, sliced tuna, sheep­skin jack­ets, bowl­ing balls, humanoid robots. The scale of these Kore­an indus­tri­al oper­a­tions ranges from the mas­sive to the arti­sanal; some prod­ucts are unique to twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry life, and oth­ers have been in use for cen­turies.

On the tra­di­tion­al side, All Process of World has pro­vid­ed close-up views of the mak­ing of ceram­ic teapots, wood­en win­dow frames (as you would see in a clas­si­cal Kore­an hanok), hand­held per­cus­sive mok­tak to aid Bud­dhist monks in their chants, and even jeogori, the dis­tinc­tive jack­ets worn with han­bok dress­es.

Judg­ing by the com­ments, All Process of World’s many view­ers hail from around the globe. This should­n’t come as a sur­prise, giv­en Kore­a’s new­found world­wide pop­u­lar­i­ty. But that so-called “Kore­an wave” owes less to the appeal of Kore­a’s tra­di­tion­al cul­ture than its mod­ern one, less to its rus­tic yet ele­gant pot­tery and bril­liant­ly col­or­ful for­mal­wear than to BTS and “Gang­nam Style,” Par­a­site and Squid Game — whose “robot girl” appears on a rug made in one All Process of World video. Anoth­er shows us the pro­duc­tion of an equal­ly mod­ern item, the face masks seen every­where in Korea dur­ing the past two years. Just a few weeks ago, the gov­ern­ment gave us the okay to take those masks off out­doors. While hop­ing for the arrival of ful­ly post-COVID era, we’d do well to keep in mind how the past always seems to find its way into the present.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch a Kore­an Mas­ter Crafts­man Make a Kim­chi Pot by Hand, All Accord­ing to Ancient Tra­di­tion

The Art of the Japan­ese Teapot: Watch a Mas­ter Crafts­man at Work, from the Begin­ning Until the Star­tling End

How a Kore­an Pot­ter Found a “Beau­ti­ful Life” Through His Art: A Short, Life-Affirm­ing Doc­u­men­tary

How Japan­ese Things Are Made in 309 Videos: Bam­boo Tea Whisks, Hina Dolls, Steel Balls & More

Mod­ern Artists Show How the Ancient Greeks & Romans Made Coins, Vas­es & Arti­sanal Glass

Three Pink Floyd Songs Played on the Tra­di­tion­al Kore­an Gayageum: “Com­fort­ably Numb,” “Anoth­er Brick in the Wall” & “Great Gig in the Sky”

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.

Few inven­tions have come to define twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry mobil­i­ty as much as the elec­tric car. As report­ed at EVBox by Joseph D. Simp­son and Wes­ley van Bar­lin­gen, the num­ber of elec­tric vehi­cles on the road has explod­ed from “neg­li­gi­ble” in 2010 to “as many as 10 mil­lion” by the end of 2021. Elec­tric vehi­cle man­u­fac­tur­er Tes­la “is the most valu­able auto­mo­tive com­pa­ny on the plan­et,” worth “an esti­mat­ed $1 tril­lion.” That com­pa­ny takes its name from inven­tor and alter­nat­ing-cur­rent pio­neer Niko­la Tes­la, but it was under the influ­ence of Tes­la’s rival Thomas Edi­son that the elec­tric car went through much of its ear­ly evo­lu­tion.

“At about the time Ford Motor Co. was found­ed in 1903, Edi­son had made inroads with bat­tery tech­nol­o­gy and start­ed offer­ing nick­el-iron bat­ter­ies for sev­er­al uses, includ­ing auto­mo­biles,” writes Wired’s Dan Strohl. At the turn of the 20th cen­tu­ry, the vehi­cles on Amer­i­can roads ran on three dif­fer­ent kinds of pow­er: 40 per­cent used steam, almost as many used elec­tric­i­ty, and round 20 per­cent used gaso­line.

Nev­er hes­i­tant to pro­mote his own tech­nolo­gies, Edi­son declared that “elec­tric­i­ty is the thing,” with its lack of “whirring and grind­ing gears with their numer­ous levers to con­fuse,” of “that almost ter­ri­fy­ing uncer­tain throb and whirr of the pow­er­ful com­bus­tion engine,” of a “water-cir­cu­lat­ing sys­tem to get out of order,” of “dan­ger­ous and evil-smelling gaso­line.”

As BBC Future Plan­et’s Alli­son Hirschlag tells it, “Edi­son claimed the nick­el-iron bat­tery was incred­i­bly resilient, and could be charged twice as fast as lead-acid bat­ter­ies.” He even had a deal in place with Ford Motors to pro­duce this pur­port­ed­ly more effi­cient elec­tric vehi­cle.” Alas, “by the time Edi­son had a more refined pro­to­type” — one that could be dri­ven from Scot­land to Lon­don — “elec­tric vehi­cles were on the way out in favor of fos­sil-fuel-pow­ered vehi­cles that could go longer dis­tances before need­ing to refu­el or recharge.” It did­n’t help, as Simp­son and van Bar­lin­gen add, that “after the dis­cov­ery of oil in Texas, gaso­line became cheap and read­i­ly avail­able for many, while elec­tric­i­ty only remained avail­able in cities.” As a result, elec­tric vehi­cles had “almost com­plete­ly dis­ap­peared from the mar­ket” by the mid-nine­teen-thir­ties.

By the mid-twen­ty-thir­ties, how­ev­er, elec­tric vehi­cles will quite pos­si­bly dom­i­nate the mar­ket, and 200 years after their inven­tion at that. “It is said that the first elec­tric vehi­cle was dis­played at an indus­try con­fer­ence in 1835 by a British inven­tor by the name of Robert Ander­son,” write Simp­son and van Bar­lin­gen. The twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry cen­tu­ry saw its devel­op­ment set back by the slow devel­op­ment of bat­tery tech­nol­o­gy, com­bined with the sud­den devel­op­ment of gaso­line-relat­ed tech­nolo­gies and infra­struc­ture. But eco­nom­ic, envi­ron­men­tal, and polit­i­cal fac­tors have con­verged to make it seem as if elec­tric­i­ty is, indeed, the thing after all, and cars pow­ered by it are posi­tioned to come roar­ing — or at least hum­ming — back.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Fly­ing Car Took to the Skies Back in 1949: See the Tay­lor Aero­car in Action

New­ly Unearthed Footage Shows Albert Ein­stein Dri­ving a Fly­ing Car (1931)

The Time­less Beau­ty of the Cit­roën DS, the Car Mythol­o­gized by Roland Barthes (1957)

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

The World’s Fastest Solar Car

Behold the First Elec­tric Gui­tar: The 1931 “Fry­ing Pan”

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.

At its peak, ancient Rome enjoyed a vari­ety of com­forts that, once lost, would take cen­turies to recov­er. This process, of course, con­sti­tutes much of the sto­ry of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion. Though some knowl­edge did­n’t sur­vive in any use­ful form, some of it remained last­ing­ly embod­ied. The mighty ruins of Roman aque­ducts, for exam­ple, con­tin­ued to stand all across the for­mer Empire. Togeth­er they once con­sti­tut­ed a vast water-deliv­ery sys­tem, one of whose con­struc­tion and oper­a­tion it took human­i­ty quite some time to regain a func­tion­al under­stand­ing. Today, you can learn about both in the video from ancient-his­to­ry Youtu­ber Gar­rett Ryan just above.

“Greek engi­neers began build­ing aque­ducts as ear­ly as the sixth cen­tu­ry BC,” says Ryan. “A stone-line chan­nel car­ried spring water to archa­ic Athens, and Samos was served by an aque­duct that plunged through a tun­nel more than one kilo­me­ter long.”

These sys­tems devel­oped through­out the Hel­lenis­tic era, and their Roman suc­ces­sors made use of “arch­es and hydraulic con­crete, but above all it was the sheer num­ber and scale that set them apart.” Most Roman cities had “net­works of wells and cis­terns” to sup­ply drink­ing water; aque­ducts, in large part, came as “lux­u­ries, designed to sup­ply baths, ornate foun­tains, and the hous­es of the élite.” Man’s taste for lux­u­ry has inspired no few of his great works.

The task of build­ing Rome’s aque­ducts was, in essence, the task of build­ing “an arti­fi­cial riv­er flow­ing down­hill from source to city” — over great dis­tances using no pow­er but grav­i­ty, and thus on a descend­ing slope of about five to ten feet per mile. This pre­ci­sion engi­neer­ing was made pos­si­ble by the use of tools like the diop­tra and choro­bates, as well as an enor­mous amount of man­pow­er. Roman aque­ducts ran most­ly under­ground, but more impres­sive­ly in the ele­vat­ed chan­nels that have become land­marks today. “The most spec­tac­u­lar exam­ple is undoubt­ed­ly the Pont du Gard, locat­ed just out­side Nîmes,” says Ryan, and TV trav­el­er Rick Steves vis­its it in the clip above. What once served as infra­struc­ture for the well-watered man­sions of the wealthy and con­nect­ed now makes for a fine pic­nick­ing spot.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Roman Archi­tec­ture: A Free Online Course from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

A Vir­tu­al Tour of Ancient Rome, Cir­ca 320 CE: Explore Stun­ning Recre­ations of The Forum, Colos­se­um and Oth­er Mon­u­ments

A Huge Scale Mod­el Show­ing Ancient Rome at Its Archi­tec­tur­al Peak (Built Between 1933 and 1937)

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

How Did the Romans Make Con­crete That Lasts Longer Than Mod­ern Con­crete? The Mys­tery Final­ly Solved

Every­thing You Want­ed to Know About the L.A. Aque­duct That Made Roman Polanski’s Chi­na­town Famous: A New UCLA Archive

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.