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

in Art, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Data, Technology | June 17th, 2022

DALL‑E, an arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence sys­tem that gen­er­ates viable-look­ing art in a vari­ety of styles in response to user sup­plied text prompts, has been gar­ner­ing a lot of inter­est since it debuted this spring.

It has yet to be released to the gen­er­al pub­lic, but while we’re wait­ing, you could have a go at DALL‑E Mini, an open source AI mod­el that gen­er­ates a grid of images inspired by any phrase you care to type into its search box.

Co-cre­ator Boris Day­ma explains how DALL‑E Mini learns by view­ing mil­lions of cap­tioned online images:

Some of the con­cepts are learnt (sic) from mem­o­ry as it may have seen sim­i­lar images. How­ev­er, it can also learn how to cre­ate unique images that don’t exist such as “the Eif­fel tow­er is land­ing on the moon” by com­bin­ing mul­ti­ple con­cepts togeth­er.

Sev­er­al mod­els are com­bined togeth­er to achieve these results:

• an image encoder that turns raw images into a sequence of num­bers with its asso­ci­at­ed decoder

• a mod­el that turns a text prompt into an encod­ed image

• a mod­el that judges the qual­i­ty of the images gen­er­at­ed for bet­ter fil­ter­ing 

My first attempt to gen­er­ate some art using DALL‑E mini failed to yield the hoped for weird­ness.  I blame the bland­ness of my search term — “toma­to soup.”

Per­haps I’d have bet­ter luck “Andy Warhol eat­ing a bowl of toma­to soup as a child in Pitts­burgh.”

Ah, there we go!

I was curi­ous to know how DALL‑E Mini would riff on its name­sake artist’s han­dle (an hon­or Dali shares with the tit­u­lar AI hero of Pixar’s 2018 ani­mat­ed fea­ture, WALL‑E.)

Hmm… seems like we’re back­slid­ing a bit.

Let me try “Andy Warhol eat­ing a bowl of toma­to soup as a child in Pitts­burgh with Sal­vador Dali.”

Ye gods! That’s the stuff of night­mares, but it also strikes me as pret­ty legit mod­ern art. Love the spar­ing use of red. Well done, DALL‑E mini.

At this point, van­i­ty got the bet­ter of me and I did the AI art-gen­er­at­ing equiv­a­lent of googling my own name, adding “in a tutu” because who among us hasn’t dreamed of being a bal­le­ri­na at some point?

Let that be a les­son to you, Pan­do­ra…

Hope­ful­ly we’re all plan­ning to use this play­ful open AI tool for good, not evil.

Hyperallergic’s Sarah Rose Sharp raised some valid con­cerns in rela­tion to the orig­i­nal, more sophis­ti­cat­ed DALL‑E:

It’s all fun and games when you’re gen­er­at­ing “robot play­ing chess” in the style of Matisse, but drop­ping machine-gen­er­at­ed imagery on a pub­lic that seems less capa­ble than ever of dis­tin­guish­ing fact from fic­tion feels like a dan­ger­ous trend.

Addi­tion­al­ly, DALL‑E’s neur­al net­work can yield sex­ist and racist images, a recur­ring issue with AI tech­nol­o­gy. For instance, a reporter at Vice found that prompts includ­ing search terms like “CEO” exclu­sive­ly gen­er­at­ed images of White men in busi­ness attire. The com­pa­ny acknowl­edges that DALL‑E “inher­its var­i­ous bias­es from its train­ing data, and its out­puts some­times rein­force soci­etal stereo­types.”

Co-cre­ator Day­ma does not duck the trou­bling impli­ca­tions and bias­es his baby could unleash:

While the capa­bil­i­ties of image gen­er­a­tion mod­els are impres­sive, they may also rein­force or exac­er­bate soci­etal bias­es. While the extent and nature of the bias­es of the DALL·E mini mod­el have yet to be ful­ly doc­u­ment­ed, giv­en the fact that the mod­el was trained on unfil­tered data from the Inter­net, it may gen­er­ate images that con­tain stereo­types against minor­i­ty groups. Work to ana­lyze the nature and extent of these lim­i­ta­tions is ongo­ing, and will be doc­u­ment­ed in more detail in the DALL·E mini mod­el card.

The New York­er car­toon­ists Ellis Rosen and Jason Adam Katzen­stein con­jure anoth­er way in which DALL‑E mini could break with the social con­tract:

And a Twit­ter user who goes by St. Rev. Dr. Rev blows minds and opens mul­ti­ple cans of worms, using pan­els from car­toon­ist Joshua Bark­man’s beloved web­com­ic, False Knees:

Pro­ceed with cau­tion, and play around with DALL‑E mini here.

Get on the wait­list for orig­i­nal fla­vor DALL‑E access here.

 

Relat­ed Con­tent

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

Google App Uses Machine Learn­ing to Dis­cov­er Your Pet’s Look Alike in 10,000 Clas­sic Works of Art

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence for Every­one: An Intro­duc­to­ry Course from Andrew Ng, the Co-Founder of Cours­era

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Watch the First Movie Ever Streamed on the Net: Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees (1991)

in Film, Technology | June 9th, 2022

When the World Wide Web made its pub­lic debut in the ear­ly nine­teen-nineties, it fas­ci­nat­ed many and struck some as rev­o­lu­tion­ary, but the idea of watch­ing a film online would still have sound­ed like sheer fan­ta­sy. Yet on May 23rd, 1993, report­ed the New York Times’ John Markoff, “a small audi­ence scat­tered among a few dozen com­put­er lab­o­ra­to­ries gath­ered” to “watch the first movie to be trans­mit­ted on the Inter­net — the glob­al com­put­er net­work that con­nects mil­lions of sci­en­tists and aca­d­e­m­ic researchers and hith­er­to has been a medi­um for swap­ping research notes and an occa­sion­al still image.”

That expla­na­tion speaks vol­umes about how life online was per­ceived by the aver­age New York Times read­er three decades ago. But it was hard­ly the aver­age New York Times read­er who tuned into the inter­net’s very first film screen­ing, whose fea­ture pre­sen­ta­tion was Wax or the Dis­cov­ery of Tele­vi­sion Among the Bees. Com­plet­ed in 1991 by artist David Blair, this hybrid fic­tion and essay-film offered to its view­ers what Times crit­ic Stephen Hold­en called “a mul­ti-gen­er­a­tional fam­i­ly saga as it might be imag­ined by a cyber­punk nov­el­ist. It flash­es all the way back to the sto­ry of Cain and Abel and the Tow­er of Babel and for­ward to the nar­ra­tor’s own death, birth and rebirth in an act of vio­lence.”

Jacob Mak­er, the nar­ra­tor, was once a hum­ble mis­sile-guid­ance sys­tem engi­neer. But increas­ing dis­en­chant­ment with his line of work pushed him into the api­ar­i­an arts, in homage to his famous bee­keep­er grand­son Jacob Hive Mak­er. That the lat­ter is played by William S. Bur­roughs sug­gests that Wax has the mak­ings of a “cult clas­sic,” as does the film’s con­struc­tion, in large part out of found footage, jux­ta­posed and manip­u­lat­ed into a dig­i­tal psy­che­delia. Its nar­ra­tive — amus­ing, ref­er­ence-rich, and bewil­der­ing­ly com­plex for an 85-minute run­time — has Jacob men­tal­ly over­tak­en by his own bees, who implant a tele­vi­sion into his brain and repro­gram him as an assas­sin.

With Wax, writes Screen Slate’s Sean Ben­jamin, “Blair laid an extrap­o­la­tion of La Jetée atop a bedrock of Thomas Pyn­chon and came out with some­thing clos­est to ear­ly Peter Green­away — yet ulti­mate­ly sin­gu­lar.” And on an inter­net that could only broad­cast it “at the dream-like rate of two frames a sec­ond” in black-and-white, it must have made for a sin­gu­lar view­ing expe­ri­ence indeed. Back then, as Markoff wrote, “dig­i­tal broad­cast­ing was not yet ready for prime time.”

Today, in our age of stream­ing, dig­i­tal broad­cast­ing has dis­placed prime time, and it feels only prop­er that we can watch Wax on Youtube, where Blair has uploaded it as part of a larg­er, ongo­ing, and not-eas­i­ly-grasped ongo­ing dig­i­tal film project. “There is a sense in which we have all had tele­vi­sions implant­ed in our heads,” Hold­en reflect­ed in 1992. “Who real­ly knows what those end­less reruns are doing to us?” Even now, the inter­net has only just begun to trans­form not just how we watch movies, but how we com­mu­ni­cate, con­duct our dai­ly lives, and even think. We can all see some­thing of our­selves in Jacob Mak­er — and on today’s inter­net, we can see it much more clear­ly.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Very First Web­cam Was Invent­ed to Keep an Eye on a Cof­fee Pot at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty

Cyber­punk: 1990 Doc­u­men­tary Fea­tur­ing William Gib­son & Tim­o­thy Leary Intro­duces the Cyber­punk Cul­ture

Dar­win: A 1993 Film by Peter Green­away

Mes­mer­iz­ing Time­lapse Film Cap­tures the Won­der of Bees Being Born

The First Music Stream­ing Ser­vice Was Invent­ed in 1881: Dis­cov­er the Théâtro­phone

4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

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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Remembering Dave Smith (RIP), the Father of MIDI & the Creator of the 80s’ Most Beloved Synthesizer, the Prophet‑5

in Computer Science, Music, Technology | June 8th, 2022

Some founders rest on their lau­rels, build indus­tries around them­selves like a cocoon, and nev­er escape or out­grow the big achieve­ment that made their name. Some, like Dave Smith — the so-called “father of MIDI,” and one of the most inno­v­a­tive syn­the­siz­er pio­neers of the last sev­er­al decades – don’t stop cre­at­ing for long enough to col­lect dust. You may nev­er have heard of Smith, but you’ve heard his tech­nol­o­gy. Before pio­neer­ing MIDI (Musi­cal Instru­ment Dig­i­tal Inter­face), the dig­i­tal stan­dard that allows hun­dreds of elec­tron­ic instru­ments to play nice­ly with each oth­er across com­put­er and soft­ware mak­ers, Smith found­ed Sequen­tial Cir­cuits and built one of the most revered syn­the­siz­ers ever made, the Prophet‑5, invent­ed in 1977 and essen­tial to the sound of the 1980s and beyond.

Smith’s key­boards made appear­ances on stage, video, and albums through­out the decade. Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes used the Prophet‑5 on the band’s first album and “vir­tu­al­ly every record I have made since then,” he said in a state­ment. “With­out Dav­e’s vision and inge­nu­ity,” Rhodes went on, “the sound of the 1980s would have been very dif­fer­ent, he tru­ly changed the son­ic sound­scape of a gen­er­a­tion.”

Sequen­tial synths appeared on albums by bands as dis­parate as The Cure and Daryl Hall & John Oates, who demon­strate the dream-like, ethe­re­al capa­bil­i­ties of the Prophet‑5 — the first ful­ly pro­gram­ma­ble poly­phon­ic ana­log synth — in “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do).” The Prophet‑5 also drove the sound of Radio­head­’s Kid A, and indie dance dar­lings Hot Chip wrote they would be “noth­ing with­out what [Smith] cre­at­ed.” Few vin­tage synths are as desir­able as the Prophet‑5.

The orig­i­nal Prophet is “not immune to the dark side of vin­tage synths,” writes Vin­tage Synth Explor­er, includ­ing prob­lems such as unsta­ble tun­ing and a lack of MIDI. Smith fixed that issue him­self with new iter­a­tions of the Prophet and oth­er synths fea­tur­ing his most famous post-Prophet‑5 tech­nol­o­gy. “Like so many bril­liant and cre­ative peo­ple,” the MIDI Asso­ci­a­tion writes, Smith “always focused on the future.” He was “not actu­al­ly a big fan of being called the ‘Father of MIDI.’ ” Many peo­ple con­tributed to the devel­op­ment of the tech­nol­o­gy, espe­cial­ly Roland founder Iku­taro Kake­hashi, who won a tech­ni­cal Gram­my with Smith in 2013 for the pro­to­col that made its debut as a new stan­dard in 1983.

Smith pre­ferred mak­ing hard­ware instru­ments and “almost begrudg­ing­ly accept­ed inter­views about his con­tri­bu­tions to MIDI.…. He was also not a big fan of orga­ni­za­tions, com­mit­tees and meet­ings.” He was a synth lover’s synth mak­er, a design­er and engi­neer with a “deep under­stand­ing of what musi­cians want­ed,” says Rhodes. Col­lab­o­ra­tions with Yama­ha and Korg pro­duced more soft­ware inno­va­tions in the 90s, but in the 2000s, Smith returned to Sequen­tial Cir­cuits and debuted the Prophet X, Prophet‑6, and OB‑6 with Tom Ober­heim. The two design­ers col­lab­o­rat­ed in 2021 on the Ober­heim OB-X8 and Smith intro­duced it just weeks before his death.

He had trav­eled a long way from invent­ing the Prophet‑5 in 1977 and pre­sent­ing a paper in 1981 to the Audio Engi­neer­ing Soci­ety on what he then called a Uni­ver­sal Syn­the­siz­er Inter­face. Smith him­self nev­er seemed to stop and look back, but lovers of his famous instru­ments are hap­py we still can, and that elec­tron­ic instru­ments and com­put­ers can talk to each oth­er eas­i­ly thanks to MIDI. Few of those instru­ments sound as good as the orig­i­nal, how­ev­er. See a demon­stra­tion of the Prophet-5’s range of sounds in the video just above and hear more tracks that show off the synth in the list here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sto­ry of the Syn­thAxe, the Aston­ish­ing 1980s Gui­tar Syn­the­siz­er: Only 100 Were Ever Made

Wendy Car­los Demon­strates the Moog Syn­the­siz­er on the BBC (1970)

Thomas Dol­by Explains How a Syn­the­siz­er Works on a Jim Hen­son Kids Show (1989)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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How Korean Things Are Made: Watch Mesmerizing Videos Showing the Making of Traditional Clothes, Teapots, Buddhist Instruments & More

in History, Technology | May 25th, 2022

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.

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Footage of Flappers from 1929 Restored & Colorized with AI

in Fashion, Film, History, Technology, Video - Politics/Society | May 4th, 2022

The flap­per is the Roar­ing 20s’ endur­ing emblem — a lib­er­at­ed, young woman with bobbed hair, rolled down stock­ings, and a pub­lic thirst for cock­tails.

(My grand­moth­er longed to be one, and suc­ceed­ed, as best one could in Cairo, Illi­nois, only to mar­ry an old­er man at the age of 17, and give birth to my father a few months before the stock mar­ket crashed, bring­ing the friv­o­li­ty of the decade to an abrupt halt.)

Our abid­ing affec­tion for the flap­per is stoked on F. Scott Fitzger­ald’s Jazz Age novel­la, The Great Gats­by, and its many stage and screen adap­ta­tions, with their depic­tions of wild par­ties fea­tur­ing guests like Miss Baedeck­er (“When she’s had five or six cock­tails she always starts scream­ing like that”) and Lucille (“I nev­er care what I do, so I always have a good time.”)


The vin­tage fash­ion blog Glam­our Daze’s new­ly col­orized footage of a 1929  fash­ion show in Buf­fa­lo, New York, at the top of this post, presents a vast­ly more sedate image than Fitzger­ald, or Ethel Hays, whose sin­gle-pan­el dai­ly car­toon Flap­per Fan­ny was wild­ly pop­u­lar with both young women and men of the time.

 

 

The scene it presents seems more whole­some than one might have found in New York City, with what Fitzger­ald dubbed its “wild promise of all the mys­tery and the beau­ty in the world”. The mod­els seem more eager ama­teurs than run­way pro­fes­sion­als, though lined up jaun­ti­ly on a wall, all exhib­it “nice stems.”

My young grand­moth­er would have gone ga ga for the cloche hats, tea dress­es, bathing suits, loung­ing paja­mas, golf and ten­nis ensem­bles, and evening gowns, though the Deep Exem­plar-based Video Col­oriza­tion process seems to have stained some mod­els’ skin and teeth by mis­take.

The orig­i­nal black and white footage is part of the Uni­ver­si­ty of South Carolina’s Fox Movi­etone News col­lec­tion, whose oth­er fash­ion-relat­ed clips from 1929 include pre­sen­ta­tions fea­tur­ing Wash­ing­ton debu­tantes and col­lege coeds.

Added sound brings the peri­od to life with nary a men­tion of the Charleston or gin, though if you want a feel for 20s fash­ion, check out the col­lec­tion’s non-silent Movi­etone clip devot­ed to the lat­est in 1929 swimwear — this is a mod­ernistic beach ensem­ble of ray­on jer­sey with diag­o­nal stripes and a sun back cut…

It’s the cat’s paja­mas. As is this playlist of hits from 1929.


Explore Glam­our Daze’s guide to 1920s fash­ion his­to­ry here.

Watch the orig­i­nal black and white footage of the Buf­fa­lo, New York fash­ion show here.

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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How People Imagined in 1948 What Cars Would Look Like in the Future

in Technology | May 3rd, 2022

With a few excep­tions, car design of the last two decades has been stuck in a rut, with a same­ness on the outside—-aerodynamic, sleek, rounded—-hiding the advance­ments under the hood and in the con­trol pan­el. That’s why it’s always a hoot to check out mock designs from the past, espe­cial­ly when they are being used to fore­cast the future.

This short 1948 film from Pop­u­lar Mechan­ics shows three pos­si­ble cars of the future, all of which for var­i­ous rea­sons, nev­er real­ly caught on. But films like this offer a tan­ta­liz­ing thought-—what if they had? It’s a tiny glimpse of an alter­na­tive real­i­ty, and we all seem to be lov­ing that mul­ti­verse vibe these days.

The first is the Davis Divan, which is per­fect for par­al­lel park­ing with its sin­gle front tire and tight maneu­ver­abil­i­ty. It cer­tain­ly looks cool but I will dis­agree with the nar­ra­tor: no amount of space-age oomph is going to make chang­ing a tire an “exhil­a­rat­ing expe­ri­ence.” The Divan was built by the Davis Motor­car Com­pa­ny of Van Nuys, CA, designed by used-car sales­man Gary Davis, and includ­ed ideas tak­en from the aero­nau­ti­cal indus­try. This film appear­ance was part of a major pub­lic­i­ty push from 1947–1949, but in the end only 13 Divans were pro­duced, and a dozen sur­vive. Not so the com­pa­ny, which was sued into liq­ui­da­tion after it failed to deliv­er prod­uct.

The sec­ond has an even stranger his­to­ry. If this is a “car from the future”, then the film­mak­ers neglect­ed to note it’s actu­al­ly from 1935. The Hoppe & Streur Stream­lin­er pro­to­type was designed and built by Allyn Streur and Allen Hoppe as part of Con­sol­i­dat­ed Air­craft San Diego, and based on a Chrysler 66 chas­sis. It seat­ed five peo­ple. If it looks like flim­sy met­al on top of a skele­tal frame, then you’ve guessed cor­rect­ly.

You can see how South­ern California’s aero­space indus­try has start­ed to influ­ence every­thing after the war, which accounts for the air­plane obses­sion with these autos, espe­cial­ly what comes next. The final selec­tion is Gor­don Buehrig’s TACSO pro­to­type from 1948. Sev­er­al of the con­trols in the dri­ver’s seat imi­tate those found in the cock­pit of a plane, and the four wheels are cov­ered in fiber­glass direc­tion­al fend­ers. Not not­ed in the film: the car had “a trans­par­ent roof that could be removed to let the wind in,” a fea­ture way ahead of its time. But it would have been too expen­sive to mass pro­duce (Auto­Blog fig­ures one of these would have cost the equiv­a­lent of $80,000 back in the day) so the one in the video is the only one in exis­tence.

As peo­ple are still try­ing (and fail­ing) to suc­cess­ful­ly par­al­lel park, safe to say none of these pre­dic­tions came true. Part­ly, that’s sad. On the oth­er hand, next time you hear some doom-n-gloom pre­dic­tion of our cur­rent moment, think on this video and how thank­ful­ly wrong they were.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Niko­la Tesla’s Pre­dic­tions for the 21st Cen­tu­ry: The Rise of Smart Phones & Wire­less, The Demise of Cof­fee & More (1926/35)

How Pre­vi­ous Decades Pre­dict­ed the Future: The 21st Cen­tu­ry as Imag­ined in the 1900s, 1950s, 1980s, and Oth­er Eras

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

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

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How Thomas Edison & Henry Ford Envisioned a Low-Priced Electric Vehicle in 1914, Almost Changing the Direction of Automobile History

in History, Technology | April 25th, 2022

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.

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100-Year-Old Music Recordings Can Now Be Heard for the First Time, Thanks to New Digital Technology

in History, Music, Technology | April 21st, 2022

If you were lis­ten­ing to record­ed music around the turn of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, you lis­tened to it on cylin­ders. Not that any­one alive today was lis­ten­ing to record­ed music back then, and much of it has since been lost. Invent­ed by Alexan­der Gra­ham Bell (bet­ter known for his work on an even more pop­u­lar device known as the tele­phone), the record­ing cylin­der marked a con­sid­er­able improve­ment on Thomas Edis­on’s ear­li­er tin­foil phono­graph. Nev­er hes­i­tant to cap­i­tal­ize on an inno­va­tion — no mat­ter who did the inno­vat­ing — Edi­son then began mar­ket­ing cylin­ders of his own, soon turn­ing his own name into the for­mat’s most pop­u­lar and rec­og­niz­able brand.

“Edi­son set up coin-oper­at­ed phono­graph machines that would play pre-record­ed wax cylin­ders in train sta­tions, hotel lob­bies, and oth­er pub­lic places through­out the Unit­ed States,” writes Atlas Obscu­ra’s Sarah Durn. They also became the medi­um choice for hob­by­ists. “One of the most famous is Lionel Maple­son,” says Jen­nifer Vanasco in an NPR sto­ry from ear­li­er this month.

“He record­ed his fam­i­ly,” but “he was also the librar­i­an for the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Opera. And in the ear­ly 1900s, he record­ed dozens of rehearsals and per­for­mances. Lis­ten­ing to his work is the only way you can hear pre-World War I opera singers with a full orches­tra”: Ger­man sopra­no Frie­da Hempel, singing “Evvi­va la Fran­cia!” above.

The “Maple­son Cylin­ders” con­sti­tute just part of the New York Pub­lic Library’s col­lec­tion of about 2,700 record­ings in that for­mat. “Only a small por­tion of those cylin­ders, around 175, have ever been dig­i­tized,” writes Durn. “The vast major­i­ty of the cylin­ders have nev­er even been played in the gen­er­a­tions since the library acquired them.” Most have become too frag­ile to with­stand the nee­dles of tra­di­tion­al play­ers. Enter End­point Audio Labs’ $50,000 Cylin­der and Dictabelt Machine, which uses a com­bi­na­tion of nee­dle and laser to read and dig­i­tize even already-dam­aged cylin­ders with­out harm. Only sev­en of End­point’s machines exist in the world, one of them a recent acqui­si­tion of the NYPL’s, which will now be able to play many of its cylin­ders for the first time in more than a cen­tu­ry.

Some of these cylin­ders are unla­beled, their con­tents unknown. Cura­tor Jes­si­ca Wood, as Velas­co says, is hop­ing to “hear a birth­day par­ty or some­thing that tells us more about the social his­to­ry at the time, even some­one shout­ing their name and explain­ing they’re test­ing the machine, which is a pret­ty com­mon thing to hear on these record­ings.” She knows that the NYPL’s col­lec­tion has “about eight cylin­ders from Por­tu­gal, which may be some of the old­est record­ings ever made in the coun­try,” as well as “five Argen­tin­ian cylin­ders that have pre­served the sound of cen­tu­ry-old tan­go music.” In the event, from the first cylin­der she puts on for NPR’s micro­phone issue famil­iar words: “Hel­lo, my baby. Hel­lo, my hon­ey. Hel­lo, my rag­time gal.” This lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence per­haps felt like some­thing less than time trav­el. But then, were you real­ly to go back to 1899, what song would you be more like­ly to hear?

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed con­tent:

Down­load 10,000 of the First Record­ings of Music Ever Made, Cour­tesy of the UCSB Cylin­der Audio Archive

Opti­cal Scan­ning Tech­nol­o­gy Lets Researchers Recov­er Lost Indige­nous Lan­guages from Old Wax Cylin­der Record­ings

Hear Singers from the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Opera Record Their Voic­es on Tra­di­tion­al Wax Cylin­ders

A Beer Bot­tle Gets Turned Into a 19th Cen­tu­ry Edi­son Cylin­der and Plays Fine Music

400,000+ Sound Record­ings Made Before 1923 Have Entered the Pub­lic Domain

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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