How Kraftwerk’s 22-Minute Song “Autobahn” Became an Early Masterpiece in Electronic Music (1975)

in History, Music, Technology | March 30th, 2026

It takes about five hours to dri­ve from Düs­sel­dorf to Ham­burg on the Auto­bahn. Dur­ing that stretch, you can lis­ten to Kraftwerk’s album Auto­bahn sev­en times — or if you pre­fer, you can loop its epony­mous open­ing song thir­teen times. For it was “Auto­bahn,” more so than Auto­bahn, that changed the sound of music around the world in ways we still hear today. “Ger­many was sud­den­ly on the musi­cal map,” writes the Guardian’s Tim Jonze. “David Bowie – who used to ride the auto­bahn while lis­ten­ing to the record – moved to Berlin and went on to make the elec­tron­i­cal­ly influ­enced Low, “Heroes” and Lodger. Bri­an Eno relo­cat­ed to the rur­al vil­lage of Forst to record with the influ­en­tial avant-garde band Har­mo­nia.” Soon would come the elec­tron­ic pop of Ultra­vox, DAF and the Eury­th­mics, fol­lowed by Don­na Sum­mer and Gior­gio Moroder’s flood­gate-open­ing “I Feel Love”.

Not a bad pop-cul­tur­al coup for, as Jonze puts it, “a 22-minute 43-sec­ond song about the Ger­man road net­work.” At the time of its release in ear­ly 1975, Kraftwerk had put out three full albums, but what would become their sig­na­ture Teu­ton­ic-elec­tron­ic sound had­n’t quite tak­en shape. But it was already clear that their work took its inspi­ra­tion from twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry moder­ni­ty, a sub­ject of which no sin­gle work of man in their home­land could have been more evoca­tive than the Auto­bahn.

With its ori­gins in the Weimar Repub­lic and its long stretch­es with­out a speed lim­it, the Ger­man free­way net­work is inter­na­tion­al­ly regard­ed as a con­crete sym­bol of total per­son­al free­dom, and total per­son­al respon­si­bil­i­ty, with­in a high­ly rule-respect­ing cul­ture. To the young mem­bers of Kraftwerk, who often drove the Düs­sel­dorf-Ham­burg sec­tion, it held out the promise of free­dom.

So did the then-new Min­i­moog syn­the­siz­er, which cost as much as a Volk­swa­gen at the time, but offered the chance to make music like noth­ing the pub­lic had ever heard before. “Auto­bahn” cap­tured the imag­i­na­tions of lis­ten­ers every­where with not just its elec­tron­ic effects, but also the incon­gruity of their com­bi­na­tion with instru­ments like the flute (a holdover from Kraftwerk’s ear­li­er com­po­si­tions) and vehic­u­lar sounds evoca­tive of a gen­uine road trip — all assem­bled at what would then have seemed a hyp­not­i­cal­ly expan­sive length for a pop song. Lit­tle did even the hippest lis­ten­ers of the mid-sev­en­ties, such as the Amer­i­cans tuned into ear­ly free-form FM sta­tions where no cor­po­rate pro­gram­ming rules applied, know that they were hear­ing what Jones calls “the point where elec­tron­ic pop music tru­ly began.” All car trips run out of road even­tu­al­ly, but human­i­ty’s jour­ney into the pos­si­bil­i­ties of high-tech music shows no signs of approach­ing its end.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Psy­che­del­ic Ani­mat­ed Video for Kraftwerk’s “Auto­bahn” (1979)

Kraftwerk Plays a Live 40-Minute Ver­sion of their Sig­na­ture Song “Auto­bahn:” A Sound­track for a Long Road Trip (1974)

How Kraftwerk Made the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Kraftwerk’s First Con­cert: The Begin­ning of the End­less­ly Influ­en­tial Band (1970)

How the Moog Syn­the­siz­er Changed the Sound of Music

Hear the Evo­lu­tion of Elec­tron­ic Music: A Son­ic Jour­ney from 1929 to 2019

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.

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Meet the “Telharmonium,” the First Synthesizer (and Predecessor to Muzak), Invented in 1897

in Music, Technology | March 26th, 2026

Before the New Year, we brought you footage of Russ­ian poly­math­ic inven­tor Léon Theremin demon­strat­ing the strange instru­ment that bears his sur­name, and we not­ed that the Theremin was the first elec­tron­ic instru­ment. This is not strict­ly true, though it is the first elec­tron­ic instru­ment to be mass pro­duced and wide­ly used in orig­i­nal com­po­si­tion and per­for­mance. But like bio­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion, the his­to­ry of musi­cal instru­ment devel­op­ment is lit­tered with dead ends, anom­alies, and for­got­ten ances­tors (such as the octo­bass). One such obscure odd­i­ty, the Tel­har­mo­ni­um, appeared almost 20 years before the Theremin, and it was patent­ed by its Amer­i­can inven­tor, Thad­deus Cahill, even ear­li­er, in 1897. (See some of the many dia­grams from the orig­i­nal patent below.)

Telharmonium 1

Cahill, a lawyer who had pre­vi­ous­ly invent­ed devices for pianos and type­writ­ers, cre­at­ed the Telharmonium—also called the Dynamaphone—to broad­cast music over the tele­phone, mak­ing it a pre­cur­sor not to the Theremin but to the lat­er scourge of tele­phone hold music. “In a large way,” writes Jay Willis­ton at Synthmuseum.com, “Cahill invent­ed what we know of today as ‘Muzak.’”

He built the first pro­to­type Tel­har­mo­ni­um, the Mark I, in 1901. It weighed sev­en tons. The final incar­na­tion of the instru­ment, the Mark III, took 50 peo­ple to build at the cost of $200,000 and was “60 feet long, weighed almost 200 tons and incor­po­rat­ed over 2000 elec­tric switch­es…. Music was usu­al­ly played by two peo­ple (4 hands) and con­sist­ed of most­ly clas­si­cal works by Bach, Chopin, Greig, Rossi­ni and oth­ers.” The work­ings of the gar­gan­tu­an machine resem­ble the boil­er room of an indus­tri­al facil­i­ty. (See sev­er­al pho­tographs here.)

Telharmonium 2

Need­less to say, this was a high­ly imprac­ti­cal instru­ment. Nev­er­the­less, Cahill not only found will­ing investors for the enor­mous con­trap­tion, but he also staged suc­cess­ful demon­stra­tions in Bal­ti­more, then—after dis­as­sem­bling and mov­ing the thing by train—in New York. By 1905, his New Eng­land Elec­tric Music Com­pa­ny “made a deal with the New York Tele­phone Com­pa­ny to lay spe­cial lines so that he could trans­mit the sig­nals from the Tel­har­mo­ni­um through­out the city.” Cahill used the term “syn­the­siz­ing” in his patent, which some say makes the Tel­har­mo­ni­um the first syn­the­siz­er, though its oper­a­tion was as much mechan­i­cal as elec­tron­ic, using a com­pli­cat­ed series of gears and cylin­ders to repli­cate the musi­cal range of a piano. (See the oper­a­tion explained in the video at the top.) “Raised bumps on cylin­ders helped cre­ate musi­cal con­tour notes,” writes Pop­u­lar Mechan­ics, “not unlike a music box, with the size of the cylin­der deter­min­ing the pitch.”

Telharmonium 3

The huge, very loud Tel­har­mo­ni­um Mark III end­ed up in the base­ment of the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Opera House for a time as Cahill worked on his scheme for pump­ing music through the tele­phone lines. But this plan did not come off smooth­ly. “The prob­lem was,” Pop­u­lar Mechan­ics points out,” all cables leak off radio waves. Send­ing a gigan­tic, ampli­fied sig­nal on turn-of-the-20th-cen­tu­ry phone lines was bound to cause trou­ble.” The Tel­har­mo­ni­um cre­at­ed inter­fer­ence on oth­er phone lines and even inter­rupt­ed Naval radio trans­mis­sions. “Rumor has it,” the Dou­glas Ander­son School of the Arts writes, “that a New York busi­ness­man, infu­ri­at­ed by the con­stant net­work inter­fer­ence, broke into the build­ing where the Tel­har­mo­ni­um was housed and destroyed it, throw­ing pieces of the machin­ery into the Hud­son riv­er below.”

The sto­ry seems unlike­ly, but it serves as a sym­bol for the instru­men­t’s col­lapse. Cahill’s com­pa­ny fold­ed in 1908, though the final Tel­har­mo­ni­um sup­pos­ed­ly remained oper­a­tional until 1916. No record­ings of the instru­ment have sur­vived, and Thad­deus Cahill’s broth­er Arthur even­tu­al­ly sold the last pro­to­type off for scrap in 1950 after fail­ing to find a buy­er. The entire ratio­nale for the instru­ment had been sup­plant­ed by radio broad­cast­ing. The Tel­har­mo­ni­um may have failed to catch on, but it still had a sig­nif­i­cant impact. Its unique design inspired anoth­er impor­tant elec­tron­ic instru­ment, the Ham­mond organ. And its very exis­tence gave musi­cal futur­ists a vision. The Dou­glas Ander­son School writes:

Despite its final demise, the Tel­har­mo­ni­um trig­gered the birth of elec­tron­ic music—The Ital­ian Com­pos­er and intel­lec­tu­al Fer­ruc­cio Busoni inspired by the machine at the height of its pop­u­lar­i­ty was moved to write his “Sketch of a New Aes­thet­ic of Music” (1907) which in turn became the clar­i­on call and inspi­ra­tion for the new gen­er­a­tion of elec­tron­ic com­posers such as Edgard Varèse and Lui­gi Rus­so­lo.

The instru­ment also made quite an impres­sion on anoth­er Amer­i­can inven­tor, Mark Twain, who enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly demon­strat­ed it through the tele­phone dur­ing a New Year’s gath­er­ing at his home, after giv­ing a speech about his own not incon­sid­er­able sta­tus as an inno­va­tor and ear­ly adopter of new tech­nolo­gies. “Unfor­tu­nate­ly for Thad­deus Cahill,” writes William Weir at The Hart­ford Courant, “Twain’s sup­port was­n’t enough to make a suc­cess of the Tel­har­mo­ni­um.” Learn more about the instru­men­t’s his­to­ry from this book.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sovi­et Inven­tor Léon Theremin Shows Off the Theremin, the Ear­ly Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment That Could Be Played With­out Being Touched (1954)

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music, 1800–2015: Free Web Project Cat­a­logues the Theremin, Fairlight & Oth­er Instru­ments That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Music

The Fas­ci­nat­ing Sto­ry of How the Elec­tric Music Pio­neer Delia Der­byshire Cre­at­ed the Orig­i­nal Doc­tor Who Theme (1963)

Hear Sev­en Hours of Women Mak­ing Elec­tron­ic Music (1938–2014)

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. 

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How the Hoover Dam Works: A 3D Animated Introduction

in History, Technology | March 25th, 2026

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.

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Lynda Barry on How the Smartphone Is Endangering Three Ingredients of Creativity: Loneliness, Uncertainty & Boredom

in Art, Creativity, Productivity, Technology | March 24th, 2026

The phone gives us a lot but it takes away three key ele­ments of dis­cov­ery: lone­li­ness, uncer­tain­ty and bore­dom. Those have always been where cre­ative ideas come from. — Lyn­da Bar­ry

In the spring of 2016, the great car­toon­ist and edu­ca­tor, Lyn­da Bar­ry, did the unthink­able, pri­or to giv­ing a lec­ture and writ­ing class at NASA’s God­dard Space Flight Cen­ter.

She demand­ed that all par­tic­i­pat­ing staff mem­bers sur­ren­der their phones and oth­er such per­son­al devices.

Her vic­tims were as jan­gled by this prospect as your aver­age iPhone-addict­ed teen, but sur­ren­dered, agree­ing to write by hand, anoth­er anti­quat­ed notion Bar­ry sub­scribes to:

The delete but­ton makes it so that any­thing you’re unsure of you can get rid of, so noth­ing new has a chance. Writ­ing by hand is a rev­e­la­tion for peo­ple. Maybe that’s why they asked me to NASA – I still know how to use my hands… there is a dif­fer­ent way of think­ing that goes along with them.

Barry—who told the Onion’s AV Club that she craft­ed her book What It Is with an eye toward bored read­ers stuck in a Jiffy Lube oil-change wait­ing room—is also a big pro­po­nent of doo­dling, which she views as a cre­ative neu­ro­log­i­cal response to bore­dom:

Bor­ing meet­ing, you have a pen, the usu­al clowns are yakking. Most peo­ple will draw some­thing, even peo­ple who can’t draw. I say “If you’re bored, what do you draw?” And every­body has some­thing they draw. Like “Oh yeah, my lit­tle guy, I draw him.” Or “I draw eye­balls, or palm trees.” … So I asked them “Why do you think you do that? Why do you think you doo­dle dur­ing those meet­ings?” I believe that it’s because it makes hav­ing to endure that par­tic­u­lar sit­u­a­tion more bear­able, by chang­ing our expe­ri­ence of time. It’s so slight. I always say it’s the dif­fer­ence between, if you’re not doo­dling, the min­utes feel like a cheese grater on your face. But if you are doo­dling, it’s more like Bril­lo.  It’s not much bet­ter, but there is a dif­fer­ence. You could han­dle Bril­lo a lit­tle longer than the cheese grater.

Meet­ings and class­rooms are among the few remain­ing venues in which screen-addict­ed moths are expect­ed to force them­selves away from the phone’s invit­ing flame. Oth­er settings—like the Jiffy Lube wait­ing room—require more ini­tia­tive on the user’s part.

Once, we were keen­er stu­dents of minor changes to famil­iar envi­ron­ments, the books strangers were read­ing in the sub­way, and those strangers them­selves. Our sub­se­quent obser­va­tions were known to spark con­ver­sa­tion and some­times ideas that led to cre­ative projects.

Now, many of us let those oppor­tu­ni­ties slide by, as we fill up on such fleet­ing con­fec­tions as fun­ny videos and all-you-can-eat serv­ings of social media.

It’s also tempt­ing to use our phones as defac­to shields any time social anx­i­ety looms. This dodge may pro­vide short term com­fort, espe­cial­ly to younger peo­ple, but remem­ber, Bar­ry and many of her car­toon­ist peers, includ­ing Daniel Clowes, Simon Hansel­mann, and Ariel Schrag, toughed it out by mak­ing art. That’s what got them through the lone­li­ness, uncer­tain­ty, and bore­dom of their mid­dle and high school years.

The book you hold in your hands would not exist had high school been a pleas­ant expe­ri­ence for me… It was on those qui­et week­end nights when even my par­ents were out hav­ing fun that I began mak­ing seri­ous attempts to make sto­ries in comics form.

- Adri­an Tomine, intro­duc­tion to 32 Sto­ries

Bar­ry is far from alone in encour­ag­ing adults to peel them­selves away from their phone depen­den­cy for their cre­ative good.

Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Eric Pickersgill’s Removed imag­ines a series of every­day sit­u­a­tions in which phones and oth­er per­son­al devices have been ren­dered invis­i­ble. (It’s worth not­ing that he removed the offend­ing arti­cles from the mod­els’ hands, rather that Pho­to­shop­ping them out lat­er.)

Com­put­er Sci­ence Pro­fes­sor Calvin Newport’s book, Deep Work, posits that all that shal­low phone time is cre­at­ing stress, anx­i­ety, and lost cre­ative oppor­tu­ni­ties, while also doing a num­ber on our per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al lives.

Author Manoush Zomorodi’s TED Talk on how bore­dom can lead to bril­liant ideas, below, details a week­long exper­i­ment in bat­tling smart­phone habits, with lots of sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence to back up her find­ings.

But what if you wipe the slate of dig­i­tal dis­trac­tions only to find that your brain’s just… emp­ty? A once occu­pied room, now devoid of any­thing but dim­ly recalled memes, and gen­er­al­ized dread over the state of the world?

The afore­men­tioned AV Club inter­view with Bar­ry offers both encour­age­ment and some use­ful sug­ges­tions that will get the tem­porar­i­ly par­a­lyzed mov­ing again:

I don’t know what the strip’s going to be about when I start. I nev­er know. I often­times have—I call it the word-bag. Just a bag of words. I’ll just reach in there, and I’ll pull out a word, and it’ll say “ping-pong.” I’ll just have that in my head, and I’ll start draw­ing the pic­tures as if I can… I hear a sen­tence, I just hear it. As soon as I hear even the begin­ning of the first sen­tence, then I just… I write real­ly slow. So I’ll be writ­ing that, and I’ll know what’s going to go at the top of the pan­el. Then, when it gets to the end, usu­al­ly I’ll know what the next one is. By three sen­tences or four in that first pan­el, I stop, and then I say “Now it’s time for the draw­ing.” Then I’ll draw. But then I’ll hear the next one over on anoth­er page! Or when I’m draw­ing Marlys and Arna, I might hear her say some­thing, but then I’ll hear Marlys say some­thing back. So once that first sen­tence is there, I have all kinds of choic­es as to where I put my brush. But if noth­ing is hap­pen­ing, then I just go over to what I call my decoy page. It’s like decoy ducks. I go over there and just start mess­ing around.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Infor­ma­tion Over­load Robs Us of Our Cre­ativ­i­ty: What the Sci­en­tif­ic Research Shows

The Case for Delet­ing Your Social Media Accounts & Doing Valu­able “Deep Work” Instead, Accord­ing to Prof. Cal New­port

Lyn­da Barry’s Illus­trat­ed Syl­labus & Home­work Assign­ments from Her New UW-Madi­son Course, “Mak­ing Comics”

Lyn­da Bar­ry, Car­toon­ist Turned Pro­fes­sor, Gives Her Old Fash­ioned Take on the Future of Edu­ca­tion

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and the­ater mak­er in NYC.

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The Fascinating Engineering of the Titanic: How the Great Ocean Liner Was Built

in History, Technology | March 16th, 2026

When many of us first learned of the RMS Titan­ic, it was pre­sent­ed first as one of his­to­ry’s great­est ironies: the “unsink­able” ocean lin­er that went down on its maid­en voy­age. Of course, there’s a great deal more to the sto­ry, as any­one who becomes obsessed with the ill-fat­ed ship (James Cameron being just one notable exam­ple) under­stands full well. Even apart from the many human expe­ri­ences sur­round­ing it, some of them told by the wreck­’s sur­vivors and pre­served on film, the mechan­i­cal aspects of the Titan­ic hold out con­sid­er­able fas­ci­na­tion for any­one with an engi­neer’s cast of mind. Put aside, for the moment, the mat­ter of the sink­ing, and con­sid­er just what went into mak­ing it one of the most glo­ri­ous cre­ations of man launched into the ocean to date — or rather, one of the three most glo­ri­ous.

The Titan­ic was one of a trio of sim­i­lar White Star Line ships com­plet­ed in the ear­ly nine­teen-tens. In the video above, Bill Ham­mack, known on YouTube as Engi­neer­guy, tells the sto­ry of not just the Titan­ic, but also the Olympic and the HMHS Bri­tan­nic. An engi­neer­ing pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois, he found in the cam­pus library issues of the jour­nal The Engi­neer pub­lished between 1909 and 1911 that con­tain detailed pho­tographs of the con­struc­tion of both the Titan­ic and Olympic, sis­ter ships that were built side-by-side.

One ele­ment high­light­ed that we may not much con­sid­er today is the sheer scale of the things: each was held togeth­er by three mil­lion riv­ets, could con­tain 1.5 mil­lion gal­lons of bal­last water, weighed 52,000 tons when ful­ly fit­ted, required 23 tons of lubri­cant to slide from the dock into the water, and burned 650 tons of coal per day on a transat­lantic cross­ing.

Alas, size alone was­n’t enough to pre­vent dis­as­ter. “Less than a year after the launch of these two giant ships, one suf­fered a col­li­sion that ripped a gap­ing hole in its side,” says Ham­mack. “That ship was of course, the Olympic.” Its sud­den encounter with a pass­ing war­ship neces­si­tat­ed patch­ing with wood before it could return home for a full repair, but there­after it remained in ser­vice for near­ly a quar­ter-cen­tu­ry. Its less lucky sib­ling end­ed up at the bot­tom of the ocean after run­ning into trou­ble of its own: a mine and a tor­pe­do spelled the end for the Bri­tan­nic in 1916. As for the Titan­ic, we all know about its fate­ful encounter with the ice­berg, and maybe we’ve even heard dis­cus­sions of how its design­ers could have mit­i­gat­ed the impact: more or taller bulk­heads, a dou­ble hull rather than just a dou­ble bot­tom, greater lifeboat capac­i­ty. As for whether and how those solu­tions would have worked, per­haps Ham­mack could still shoot a fol­low-up explain­ing it all to us.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The First Full 3D Scan of the Titan­ic, Made of More Than 700,000 Images Cap­tur­ing the Wreck’s Every Detail

See the First 8K Footage of the Titan­ic, the High­est-Qual­i­ty Video of the Ship­wreck Yet

The Titan­ic: Rare Footage of the Ship Before Dis­as­ter Strikes (1911–1912)

Titan­ic Sur­vivor Inter­views: What It Was Like to Flee the Sink­ing Lux­u­ry Lin­er

The Sink­ing of the Bri­tan­nic: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Titan­ic’s For­got­ten Sis­ter Ship

How a 16th-Cen­tu­ry Explorer’s Sail­ing Ship Worked: An Ani­mat­ed Video Takes You on a Com­pre­hen­sive Tour

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.

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The Met Releases High-Definition 3D Scans of 140 Famous Art Objects: Sarcophagi, Van Gogh Paintings, Marble Sculptures & More

in Art, Museums, Technology | March 11th, 2026

We can go through most of our lives hold­ing out hope of one day see­ing in real­i­ty such works as van Gogh’s Sun­flow­ers, Mon­et’s Haystacks, a clay tablet con­tain­ing actu­al cuneiform writ­ing with our own eyes, or the ancient Egypt­ian Tem­ple of Den­dur. We can actu­al­ly come face to face — or rather, face to sur­face — with all of them, tem­ple includ­ed, at New York’s Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art, which con­tains all those and more arti­facts of human civ­i­liza­tion than any of us could hope to exam­ine close­ly in a life­time. But even if we did, we might only feel tempt­ed to look at them more close­ly still, even to touch them. That may be an improb­a­ble hope, but we can at least get clos­er than ever now thanks to the Met’s new archive of high-def­i­n­i­tion 3D scans.

“View­ers can zoom in, rotate, and exam­ine each mod­el, bring­ing unprece­dent­ed access to sig­nif­i­cant works of art,” says the Met’s offi­cial announce­ment. “The 3D mod­els can also be explored in view­ers’ own spaces through aug­ment­ed real­i­ty (AR) on most smart­phone and VR head­sets, as a resource for research, explo­ration, and curios­i­ty.”

High­lights include “a mar­ble sar­coph­a­gus with lions felling ante­lope (3rd cen­tu­ry); a stat­ue of Horus as a fal­con pro­tect­ing King Nectanebo II (360–343 BCE); Kano Sansetsu’s Old Plum (1646); and a house mod­el by Nayarit artist(s) (200 BCE–300 CE).” Or per­haps you’d pre­fer an inti­mate view of an eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry tile depic­tion of Mec­ca, a nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry mar­ble sculp­ture of Perseus with the head of Medusa, or a suit of armor belong­ing to King Hen­ry II of France?

Brows­ing this archive of more than 100 dig­i­tized his­tor­i­cal objects, you’ll also notice pieces from Japan like sev­en­teenth-cen­tu­ry screens by the artists Kano Sanset­su and Suzu­ki Kiit­su. These must have been pri­or­i­ties for the Met’s insti­tu­tion­al part­ner in this project, the Japan­ese tele­vi­sion net­work NHK. It all came about “as part of the pub­lic broadcaster’s ini­tia­tive to pro­duce ultra-high def­i­n­i­tion 3D com­put­er graph­ics of nation­al trea­sures and oth­er impor­tant art­works,” with “fur­ther edu­ca­tion­al pro­gram­ming and poten­tial con­tent using these cut­ting-edge, best-in-class mod­els” in the off­ing. For now, though, the archive offers us more than enough to behold from any pos­si­ble angle. To do so, just click the “View in 3D” but­ton below the image on the page of your arti­fact or art­work of choice. It may not be the same as hold­ing the object in your hands, but it’s as close as you’re going to get — unless, of course, you find your­self inspired to pur­sue the dream of becom­ing a cura­tor at the Met.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed con­tent:

Take a New Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Tour of the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art

See Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Ear­ring in 3D in a New 108-Gigapix­el Scan

3D Scans of 7,500 Famous Sculp­tures, Stat­ues & Art­works: Down­load & 3D Print Rodin’s Thinker, Michelangelo’s David & More

Explore Metic­u­lous 3D Mod­els of Endan­gered His­tor­i­cal Sites in Google’s “Open Her­itage” Project

Open­Ver­te­brate Presents a Mas­sive Data­base of 13,000 3D Scans of Ver­te­brate Spec­i­mens

The Earth Archive Will 3D-Scan the Entire World & Cre­ate an “Open-Source” Record of Our Plan­et

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.

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The Ingenious Engineering of Silk: How the 2,000-Year-Old Pattern Loom Powered the Silk Road and the Wealth of Ancient China

in History, Technology | February 25th, 2026

The Silk Road’s long peri­od of high activ­i­ty spanned the sec­ond cen­tu­ry BC and the fif­teenth cen­tu­ry AD, but its name was­n’t coined until more than 400 years after that. Schol­ars have argued it prac­ti­cal­ly ever since, giv­en that the ref­er­ent was­n’t just one road but a vast and ever-chang­ing net­work of them, and that silk was hard­ly the only com­mod­i­ty car­ried by its traders. Yet the name per­sists, and not only due to Mar­co Polo-type roman­ti­cism. Silk may not have been the high­est-vol­ume item on its epony­mous road — more busi­ness was sure­ly done in every­day tex­tiles, to say noth­ing of spices, grains, or dyes — but it was per­haps the most vis­i­ble, and sure­ly the most glam­orous. From the per­spec­tive of Chi­nese civ­i­liza­tion, it can also look like the most impor­tant.

In the new Pri­mal Space video above, you can hear the sto­ry of “the machine that made Chi­na rich”: the pat­tern loom, that is, a mod­el of which was unearthed in 2017 dur­ing sub­way con­struc­tion in the city of Cheng­du. At some­where between 2,100 and 2,200 years old, they rep­re­sent the ear­li­est known evi­dence of pat­tern loom tech­nol­o­gy, of which Chi­na made high­ly pro­duc­tive use dur­ing the time of its three-mil­len­ni­um monop­oly on silk.

As far away as the Roman Empire, those who had the means could­n’t get enough of the stuff, espe­cial­ly when it came in designs nev­er before seen in human his­to­ry. Hence the high pri­or­i­ty Chi­na placed on keep­ing knowl­edge of its har­vest­ing and weav­ing pro­pri­etary — at least until a cou­ple of Roman monks man­aged to smug­gle silk­worm lar­vae back to Europe in the mid­dle of the sixth cen­tu­ry.

Yet even hav­ing lost its sta­tus as the only land capa­ble of pro­duc­ing silk, Chi­na retained a great advan­tage in the form of its sheer man­u­fac­tur­ing capac­i­ty. (This sto­ry rings some­what famil­iar about a mil­len­ni­um and a half lat­er, when none of us can dis­pute which coun­try holds the title of “the world’s fac­to­ry.”) Its silk indus­try could achieve that scale thanks to the rel­a­tive ease of use of the pat­tern loom, which required no spe­cial skills to oper­ate. The most com­plex aspect would have been “pro­gram­ming” the pat­terns to be formed by the strands, which, though an entire­ly ana­log process, has its basic sim­i­lar­i­ties with the dig­i­tal com­put­er pro­gram­ming we know today. Chi­na’s trade net­works have great­ly mul­ti­plied since the days of Mar­co Polo, and the tech­nol­o­gy it uses has devel­oped to a pre­vi­ous­ly unimag­in­able degree. Yet some­how, the “Elec­tric Vehi­cle Road” does­n’t have quite the same ring, does it?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dis­cov­er the World’s First Earth­quake Detec­tor, Invent­ed in Chi­na 2,000 Years Ago

How the Ornate Tapes­tries from the Age of Louis XIV Were Made (and Are Still Made Today)

China’s 8,000 Ter­ra­cot­ta War­riors: An Ani­mat­ed & Inter­ac­tive Intro­duc­tion to a Great Archae­o­log­i­cal Dis­cov­ery

Watch a Trans­fix­ing Demon­stra­tion of Kumi­hi­mo, the Ancient Japan­ese Art­form of Mak­ing Braids & Cords

The Improb­a­ble Inven­tion of Chi­nese Type­writ­ers & Com­put­er Key­boards: Three Videos Tell the Tech­no-Cul­tur­al Sto­ry

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.

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An Animated Introduction to the Antikythera Mechanism: The World’s First Analog Computer from Ancient Greece

in History, Technology | February 17th, 2026

From TED-Ed comes an ani­mat­ed intro­duc­tion to the Antikythera Mech­a­nism, an ancient Greek device that dates back to the 2nd cen­tu­ry BCE. TED writes: “In 1900, Greek divers stum­bled upon a 2,000-year-old ship­wreck whose con­tents would shake our under­stand­ing of the ancient world. Among the remains were frag­ments of man­gled wood and cor­rod­ed met­al, which archae­ol­o­gists soon real­ized were parts of the old­est geared device ever dis­cov­ered — and humankind’s first com­put­er. So, how did it work?” Above, sci­ence jour­nal­ist Max G. Levy explains the inner work­ings of the Antikythera Mech­a­nism and how the Greeks put the device to use.

For those who want to take a deep­er dive into this ancient ana­log com­put­er (there’s a lot more to learn), we invite you to explore the titles in the Relat­eds sec­tion below. They’ll take you deep­er into this mar­vel of ancient engi­neer­ing.

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 

How the World’s Old­est Com­put­er Worked: Recon­struct­ing the 2,200-Year-Old Antikythera Mech­a­nism

Researchers Devel­op a Dig­i­tal Mod­el of the 2,200-Year-Old Antikythera Mech­a­nism, “the World’s First Com­put­er”

A Ful­ly Func­tion­al Repli­ca of the Antikythera Mech­a­nism, the First Ana­log Com­put­er from Ancient Greece, Re-Cre­at­ed in LEGO

How the Ancient Greeks Invent­ed the First Com­put­er: An Intro­duc­tion to the Antikythera Mech­a­nism (Cir­ca 87 BC)

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