Gustav Klimt’s Masterpieces Destroyed During World War II Get Recreated with Artificial Intelligence

in Art, Technology | October 11th, 2021

A cen­tu­ry after the death of Gus­tav Klimt, his art con­tin­ues to enrap­ture its view­ers. Maybe it has enrap­tured you, but no mat­ter how deep you’ve gone into Klimt’s oeu­vre, there are three paint­ings you’ve only ever seen in black and white. That’s not because he paint­ed them in that way; rich and bril­liant col­ors orig­i­nal­ly fig­ured into all his work, the most notable usage being the real gold lay­ered onto his best-known paint­ing, 1908’s The Kiss. In the year before The Kiss, he com­plet­ed an even more ambi­tious work: a series of paint­ings com­mis­sioned for the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vien­na’s Great Hall, meant to rep­re­sent the fields after which they were titled: Phi­los­o­phy, Med­i­cine, and Jurispru­dence.

Klimt’s “Fac­ul­ty Paint­ings,” as they’re now known, struck crit­ics at the time as pieces of “per­vert­ed excess.” Such charges must have been noth­ing new to Klimt, for whom unabashed eroti­cism and sub­jec­tive views of real­i­ty — nei­ther par­tic­u­lar­ly in fash­ion in the insti­tu­tions of ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry Vien­na — con­sti­tut­ed basic artis­tic prin­ci­ples.

Ulti­mate­ly, Klimt him­self bought Phi­los­o­phy, Med­i­cine, and Jurispru­dence back, and by the end of the Sec­ond World War all three had found their way into the hands of the Nazis. With defeat loom­ing, they chose to burn down rather than sur­ren­der the Aus­tri­an cas­tle in which they’d been stor­ing the Fac­ul­ty Paint­ings and oth­er works of art.

With the Fac­ul­ty Paint­ings sur­viv­ing only in black-and-white pho­tographs and scanty descrip­tions, gen­er­a­tions of Klimt enthu­si­asts have had to imag­ine how they real­ly looked. Now, Google Arts & Cul­ture and Vien­na’s Belvedere Muse­um have joined forces to fig­ure out to a greater degree of cer­tain­ty than ever, using arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence to deter­mine what col­ors Klimt would have applied to Phi­los­o­phy, Med­i­cine, and Jurispru­dence based on in-depth analy­ses of the rest of his work. You can get an overview of the process from the short video at the top of the post, and you can read about it in more detail at Google Arts & Cul­ture.

“Klimt’s three Fac­ul­ty Paint­ings were among the largest art­works Klimt ever cre­at­ed and in the field of Sym­bol­ist paint­ing they rep­re­sent Klimt’s mas­ter­pieces,” says Belvedere cura­tor Dr. Franz Smo­la in a Google Arts & Cul­ture blog post. “The col­ors were essen­tial for the over­whelm­ing effect of these paint­ings, and they caused quite a stir among Klimt’s con­tem­po­raries. There­fore the recon­struc­tion of the col­ors is syn­ony­mous with rec­og­niz­ing the true val­ue and sig­nif­i­cance of these out­stand­ing art­works.” The project comes as just one part of Klimt vs. Klimt: The Man of Con­tra­dic­tions, an online ret­ro­spec­tive fea­tur­ing more than 120 of the artist’s works avail­able to view in aug­ment­ed real­i­ty, as well as an ultra-high-res­o­lu­tion scan of The Kiss. Klimt’s paint­ings may no longer shock us, but they still have much to show us.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Long-Lost Pieces of Rembrandt’s Night Watch Get Recon­struct­ed with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

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

AI & X‑Rays Recov­er Lost Art­works Under­neath Paint­ings by Picas­so & Modigliani

Gus­tav Klimt’s Haunt­ing Paint­ings Get Re-Cre­at­ed in Pho­tographs, Fea­tur­ing Live Mod­els, Ornate Props & Real Gold

Gus­tav Klimt’s Icon­ic Paint­ing The Kiss: An Intro­duc­tion to Aus­tri­an Painter’s Gold­en, Erot­ic Mas­ter­piece (1908)

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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A Brilliant Demonstration of Magnets & the Promise of Levitating Trains (1975)

in Science, Technology | October 7th, 2021

For a brief time in the 1980s, it seemed like trains pow­ered by maglev — mag­net­ic lev­i­ta­tion — might just solve trans­porta­tion prob­lems every­where, maybe even replac­ing air trav­el, there­by elim­i­nat­ing one of the most vex­ing sources of car­bon emis­sions. Maglev trains don’t use fuel; they don’t require very much pow­er by com­par­i­son with oth­er sources of high speed trav­el; they don’t pro­duce emis­sions; they’re qui­et, require less main­te­nance than oth­er trains, and can trav­el at speeds of 300 mph and more. In fact, the fastest maglev train to date, unveiled this past sum­mer in Qing­dao, Chi­na, can reach speeds of up to 373 miles per hour (600 kph).

So, why isn’t the plan­et criss-crossed by maglev trains? asks Dave Hall at The Guardian, cit­ing the fact that the first maglev train was launched in the UK in 1984, after which Ger­many, Japan, and Chi­na fol­lowed suit. It seems to come down, as such things do, to “polit­i­cal will.” With­out sig­nif­i­cant com­mit­ment from gov­ern­ments to reshape the trans­porta­tion infra­struc­ture of their coun­tries, maglev trains remain a dream, the mono­rails of the future that nev­er mate­ri­al­ize. Even in Chi­na, where gov­ern­ment man­date can insti­tute mass changes at will, the devel­op­ment of maglev trains has not meant their deploy­ment. The new train could, the­o­ret­i­cal­ly, fer­ry trav­el­ers between Shang­hai to Bei­jing in 2.5 hours… if it had the track.

Per­haps some­day the world will catch up with maglev trains, an idea over a cen­tu­ry old. (The first patents for maglev tech­nol­o­gy were filed by a French-born Amer­i­can engi­neer named Emile Bachelet in the 1910s.) Until then, the rest of us can edu­cate our­selves on the tech­nol­o­gy of trains that use mag­net­ic lev­i­ta­tion with the 1975 video les­son above from British engi­neer and pro­fes­sor Eric Laith­waite (Impe­r­i­al Col­lege Lon­don), who “decon­structs the fas­ci­nat­ing physics at work behind his plans for a maglev trains, which he first mod­elled in the 1940s and per­fect­ed in the 1970s,” notes Aeon. “Well-regard­ed in his time as both a lec­tur­er and an engi­neer, Laith­waite presents a series of demon­stra­tions that build, step by step, until he final­ly unveils a small maglev train mod­el.”

Laithwaite’s small-scale demon­stra­tion would even­tu­al­ly cul­mi­nate in the first com­mer­cial maglev train almost a decade lat­er at Birm­ing­ham Air­port. Here, he begins where sci­ence begins, with an admis­sion of igno­rance. “Per­ma­nent mag­nets are dif­fi­cult things to under­stand,” he says. “In fact, if we’re absolute­ly hon­est with our­selves, we don’t under­stand them.” The good pro­fes­sor then briskly moves on to demon­strate what he does know — enough to build a lev­i­tat­ing train. Learn much more about the his­to­ry and tech­nol­o­gy of maglev trains at How Stuff Works, and keep your eyes on the North­east Maglev project, a devel­op­ing Super­con­duct­ing Maglev train that promis­es trav­el between New York and Wash­ing­ton, DC in one hour flat.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Fly­ing Train: A 1902 Film Cap­tures a Futur­is­tic Ride on a Sus­pend­ed Rail­way in Ger­many

In 1900, a Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Had to Cre­ate an Enor­mous 1,400-Pound Cam­era to Take a Pic­ture of an Entire Train

Free Online Physics Cours­es 

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

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Facebook Whistleblower Offers an Unprecedented Look at How the Company “Chooses Profits Over Safety”

in Technology | October 5th, 2021

On Sun­day night, Frances Hau­gen, a for­mer Face­book data sci­en­tist, appeared on 60 Min­utes and revealed that she left the com­pa­ny with a trove of pri­vate Face­book research–research which shows, she con­tends, that the com­pa­ny know­ing­ly ampli­fies hate, mis­in­for­ma­tion and polit­i­cal unrest, all to keep peo­ple engaged and out­raged, and thus their adver­tis­ing mon­ey machine rolling. And that’s just the tip of the ice­berg.

Ini­tial­ly, she gave the com­pa­ny’s leaked doc­u­ments to the Wall Street Jour­nal, and they became the basis of the pod­cast series The Face­book Files. Accord­ing to the Jour­nal, “Time and again, the doc­u­ments show, Facebook’s researchers have iden­ti­fied the platform’s ill effects. Time and again, despite con­gres­sion­al hear­ings, its own pledges and numer­ous media exposés, the com­pa­ny didn’t fix them. The doc­u­ments offer per­haps the clear­est pic­ture thus far of how broad­ly Facebook’s prob­lems are known inside the com­pa­ny, up to the chief exec­u­tive him­self.”

Watch the 60 Min­utes inter­view above. Then stream the Face­book Files on WSJ’s site, Spo­ti­fy and/or Apple. The episodes all appear below:

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

Episode 4

Episode 5

Episode 6

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Sacha Baron Cohen Links the Decline of Democ­ra­cy to the Rise of Social Media, “the Great­est Pro­pa­gan­da Machine in His­to­ry”

The Prob­lem with Face­book: “It’s Keep­ing Things From You”

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

New Ani­ma­tion Explains Sher­ry Turkle’s The­o­ries on Why Social Media Makes Us Lone­ly

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

 

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See Every Nuclear Explosion in History: 2153 Blasts from 1945–2015

in History, Physics, Technology | September 30th, 2021

There have been more than 2,000 nuclear explo­sions in all of his­to­ry — which, in the case of the tech­nol­o­gy required to det­o­nate a nuclear explo­sion, goes back only 76 years. It all began, accord­ing to the ani­mat­ed video above, on July 16, 1945, with the nuclear device code-named Trin­i­ty. The fruit of the labors of the Man­hat­tan Project, its explo­sion famous­ly brought to the mind of the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist Robert J. Oppen­hemier a pas­sage from the Bha­gavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, destroy­er of worlds.” But how­ev­er rev­e­la­to­ry a spec­ta­cle Trin­i­ty pro­vid­ed, it turned out mere­ly to be the over­ture of the nuclear age.

Cre­at­ed by Ehsan Rezaie of Orbital Mechan­ics, the video offers a sim­ple-look­ing but decep­tive­ly infor­ma­tion-rich pre­sen­ta­tion of every nuclear explo­sion that has so far occurred. It belongs to a per­haps unlike­ly but nev­er­the­less deci­sive­ly estab­lished genre, the ani­mat­ed nuclear-explo­sion time-lapse, of which we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured exam­ples from Busi­ness Insid­er’s Alex Kuzoian and artist Isao Hasi­mo­to here on Open Cul­ture.

The size of each cir­cle that erupts on the world map indi­cates the rel­a­tive pow­er of the explo­sion in its loca­tion (all infor­ma­tion also pro­vid­ed in the scrolling text on the low­er left); those det­o­nat­ed under­ground appear in yel­low, those det­o­nat­ed under­wa­ter in blue, and those det­o­nat­ed in the atmos­phere in red.

Trin­i­ty cre­at­ed an atmos­pher­ic explo­sion above New Mex­i­co’s Jor­na­da del Muer­to desert. (Oth­er­wise Oppen­heimer would­n’t have been able to wit­ness it change the world.) So did Lit­tle Boy and Fat Man, the bombs dropped on Japan in World War II. Those remain the only det­o­na­tions of nuclear weapons in com­bat, and thus the nuclear explo­sions every­one knows, but they, too, rep­re­sent only the begin­ning. As the Cold War sets in, some­thing of a test­ing vol­ley emerges between the Unit­ed States and the Sovi­et Union, cul­mi­nat­ing in the colos­sal red dot of 1961’s Tsar Bom­ba, still the most pow­er­ful nuclear weapon ever test­ed. With the USSR long gone today, the explo­sions have only slowed. But in recent years, as the data on which this video is based indi­cates, nuclear test­ing has turned into a one-play­er game — and that play­er is North Korea.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Every Nuclear Bomb Explo­sion in His­to­ry, Ani­mat­ed

53 Years of Nuclear Test­ing in 14 Min­utes: A Time Lapse Film by Japan­ese Artist Isao Hashimo­to

200 Haunt­ing Videos of U.S. Nuclear Tests Now Declas­si­fied and Put Online

Watch Chill­ing Footage of the Hiroshi­ma & Nagasa­ki Bomb­ings in Restored Col­or

U.S. Det­o­nates Nuclear Weapons in Space; Peo­ple Watch Spec­ta­cle Sip­ping Drinks on Rooftops (1962)

J. Robert Oppen­heimer Explains How He Recit­ed a Line from Bha­gavad Gita–“Now I Am Become Death, the Destroy­er of Worlds” — Upon Wit­ness­ing the First Nuclear Explo­sion

Haunt­ing Unedit­ed Footage of the Bomb­ing of Nagasa­ki (1945)

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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Beethoven’s Unfinished Tenth Symphony Gets Completed by Artificial Intelligence: Hear How It Sounds

in Music, Technology | September 27th, 2021

Few sym­phonies are as well-known as Beethoven’s Ninth, an asser­tion sup­port­ed by the fact that it’s no doubt play­ing in your head even as you read this. Few sym­phonies are less well-known — at least by Beethoven’s stan­dards — than his Tenth, pri­mar­i­ly because he nev­er actu­al­ly got the thing fin­ished. He did make a start on it, how­ev­er, and at his death in 1827 left behind notes and drafts com­posed along­side the Ninth, which had also been com­mis­sioned by the Roy­al Phil­har­mon­ic Soci­ety. Such is Beethoven’s stature that his enthu­si­asts have been spec­u­lat­ing ever since on what his incom­plete sym­pho­ny would sound like if com­plet­ed, employ­ing any tech­niques to do so that their time put at hand.

“In 1988, musi­col­o­gist Bar­ry Coop­er ven­tured to com­plete the first and sec­ond move­ments,” writes Rut­gers Uni­ver­si­ty Art & AI Lab direc­tor Ahmed Elgam­mal at The Con­ver­sa­tion. “He wove togeth­er 250 bars of music from the sketch­es to cre­ate what was, in his view, a pro­duc­tion of the first move­ment that was faith­ful to Beethoven’s vision. Yet the sparse­ness of Beethoven’s sketch­es made it impos­si­ble for sym­pho­ny experts to go beyond that first move­ment.”

When Beethoven’s mile­stone 250th year approached, how­ev­er, the age of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence was well under­way. To Matthias Röder, the direc­tor of Salzburg’s Kara­jan Insti­tute, unit­ing this tow­er­ing com­pos­er and this promis­ing tech­nol­o­gy had become an irre­sistible propo­si­tion.

Elgam­mal and Röder were just two of the team that came togeth­er to take on the for­mi­da­ble task of engi­neer­ing a form of machine learn­ing capa­ble of help­ing to com­plete Beethoven’s Tenth. The oth­ers includ­ed com­pos­er Wal­ter Wer­zowa (“famous for writ­ing Intel’s sig­na­ture bong jin­gle”), com­pu­ta­tion­al music expert Mark Gotham, and musi­col­o­gist-pianist Robert Levin, who “had pre­vi­ous­ly fin­ished a num­ber of incom­plete 18th-cen­tu­ry works by Mozart and Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach.” Deutsche Telekom pro­vid­ed fund­ing for the project, and also pro­duced the short doc­u­men­tary video on its result above. How­ev­er con­cep­tu­al­ly intrigu­ing, this A.I.-driven musi­cal endeav­or could final­ly be put to the test in only one way: hear­ing it per­formed by a 100-per­cent human orches­tra. As Wer­zowa puts it, look­ing sky­ward, “We hope when he hears it now that he smiles.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stream the Com­plete Works of Bach & Beethoven: 250 Free Hours of Music

Watch Ani­mat­ed Scores of Beethoven’s 16 String Quar­tets: An Ear­ly Cel­e­bra­tion of the 250th Anniver­sary of His Birth

Did Beethoven Use a Bro­ken Metronome When Com­pos­ing His String Quar­tets? Sci­en­tists & Musi­cians Try to Solve the Cen­turies-Old Mys­tery

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

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Writes a Piece in the Style of Bach: Can You Tell the Dif­fer­ence Between JS Bach and AI Bach?

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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How Technology Is Reshaping Democracy & Our Lives: A Stanford Course with Sal Khan, Thomas Friedman, Kara Swisher, Sasha Baron Cohen, Reid Hoffman & More

in Stanford, Technology | September 19th, 2021

This fall, Stan­ford Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies presents 150+ cours­es in the Lib­er­al Arts & Sci­ences, Cre­ative Writ­ing, and Pro­fes­sion­al Devel­op­ment, includ­ing the new and time­ly course “Which Side of His­to­ry? How Tech­nol­o­gy Is Reshap­ing Democ­ra­cy and Our Lives.” Led by James Stey­er (CEO, Com­mon Sense Media), the course includes an exten­sive line-up of guest speak­ers and thought lead­ers. Hear from Hillary Clin­ton, Kara Swish­er, Sal Khan, Sasha Baron Cohen, Lau­rie San­tos, Reid Hoff­man, Ellen Pao, Thomas Fried­man, Jonathan Zit­train, Cory Book­er, Nicholas Kristof and more. Togeth­er they will explore key ques­tions: How do we pro­tect the pri­va­cy of con­sumers and stop data abus­es? How will we ensure the men­tal health and well-being of our soci­ety as we emerge from the pan­dem­ic? How can we hold tech plat­forms account­able for safe­guard­ing basic demo­c­ra­t­ic norms?

This live online course is open to any adult who wants to enroll. Although the Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies cours­es aren’t free, they’re time­ly and bound to engage. Which Side of His­to­ry? How Tech­nol­o­gy Is Reshap­ing Democ­ra­cy and Our Lives starts Sep­tem­ber 27. Many oth­er online cours­es start the week of Sep­tem­ber 20. Explore the entire Stan­ford Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies cat­a­logue here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

A Free Stan­ford Course on How to Teach Online: Watch the Lec­tures Online

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

in Food & Drink, History, Technology | September 14th, 2021

The inter­net as we know it today began with a cof­fee pot. Despite the ring of exag­ger­a­tion, that claim isn’t actu­al­ly so far-fetched. When most of us go online, we expect some­thing new: often not just some­thing new to read, but some­thing new to watch. This, as those of us past a cer­tain age will recall, was not the case with the ear­ly World Wide Web, con­sist­ing as it most­ly did of sta­t­ic pages of text, updat­ed irreg­u­lar­ly if at all. Younger read­ers will have to imag­ine even that being a cut­ting-edge thrill, but we did­n’t real­ly feel like we were liv­ing in the future until the fall of 1993, when XCof­fee first went live.

This ground­break­ing tech­no­log­i­cal project “start­ed back in the dark days of 1991,” writes co-cre­ator Quentin Stafford-Fras­er, “when the World Wide Web was lit­tle more than a glint in CERN’s eye.” At the time, Stafford-Fras­er was employed as one of fif­teen researchers in the “Tro­jan Room” of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge Com­put­er Lab. “Being poor, impov­er­ished aca­d­e­mics, we only had one cof­fee fil­ter machine between us, which lived in the cor­ri­dor just out­side the Tro­jan Room. How­ev­er, being high­ly ded­i­cat­ed and hard-work­ing aca­d­e­mics, we got through a lot of cof­fee, and when a fresh pot was brewed, it often did­n’t last long.”

It occurred to Stafford-Fras­er to train an unused video cam­era from the Tro­jan Room on the cof­fee pot (and thus the amount of cof­fee avail­able with­in), then con­nect it to a com­put­er, specif­i­cal­ly an Acorn Archimedes. His col­league Paul Jardet­zky “wrote a ‘serv­er’ pro­gram, which ran on that machine and cap­tured images of the pot every few sec­onds at var­i­ous res­o­lu­tions, and I wrote a ‘client’ pro­gram which every­body could run, which con­nect­ed to the serv­er and dis­played an icon-sized image of the pot in the cor­ner of the screen. The image was only updat­ed about three times a minute, but that was fine because the pot filled rather slow­ly, and it was only greyscale, which was also fine, because so was the cof­fee.”

XCof­fee, the result­ing pro­gram, was meant only to pro­vide this much-need­ed infor­ma­tion to Com­put­er Lab mem­bers else­where in the build­ing. But after the release of image-dis­play­ing web browsers in 1993, it found a much wider audi­ence as the world’s first stream­ing web­cam. Stafford-Fraser’s suc­ces­sors “res­ur­rect­ed the sys­tem, treat­ed it to a new frame grab­ber, and made the images avail­able on the World Wide Web. Since then, hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple have looked at the cof­fee pot, mak­ing it undoubt­ed­ly the most famous in the world.” Stafford-Fras­er wrote these words in 1995; in the years there­after XCof­fee went on to receive mil­lions of views before its even­tu­al shut­down in 2001.

In the Cen­tre for Com­put­ing His­to­ry video above, Stafford-Fras­er shows the very Olivet­ti cam­era he orig­i­nal­ly used to mon­i­tor the cof­fee lev­el. (He’d pre­vi­ous­ly worked at the Olivet­ti Research Lab­o­ra­to­ry, whose par­ent com­pa­ny also owned Acorn Com­put­ers.) “We could see things at a dis­tance before,” he says. “We could view tele­vi­sion pro­grams, we could look through tele­scopes.” But only after the Tro­jan Room’s cof­fee pot hit the inter­net could we “see what’s hap­pen­ing now, some­where else in the world,” on demand. Thir­ty years after XCof­fee’s devel­op­ment, we’re mes­mer­ized by live-stream­ing stars and sur­round­ed by “smart” home appli­ances, hop­ing for noth­ing so much as way to con­cen­trate on our imme­di­ate sur­round­ings again — to wake up, if you like, and smell the cof­fee.

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

See Web Cams of Sur­re­al­ly Emp­ty City Streets in Venice, New York, Lon­don & Beyond

Sci-Fi “Por­tal” Con­nects Cit­i­zens of Lublin & Vil­nius, Allow­ing Passers­by Sep­a­rat­ed by 376 Miles to Inter­act in Real Time

George Orwell Pre­dict­ed Cam­eras Would Watch Us in Our Homes; He Nev­er Imag­ined We’d Glad­ly Buy and Install Them Our­selves

The Cof­fee Pot That Fueled Hon­oré de Balzac’s Cof­fee Addic­tion

The Hertel­la Cof­fee Machine Mount­ed on a Volk­swa­gen Dash­board (1959): The Most Euro­pean Car Acces­so­ry Ever Made

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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Sci-Fi Pioneer Hugo Gernsback Predicts Telemedicine in 1925

in Health, Sci Fi, Technology | September 13th, 2021

If you’ve ever won­dered why one of sci­ence fiction’s great­est hon­ors is called the “Hugo,” meet Hugo Gerns­back, one of the genre’s most impor­tant fig­ures, a man whose work has been var­i­ous­ly described as “dread­ful,” “tawdry,” “incom­pe­tent,” “grace­less,” and “a sort of ani­mat­ed cat­a­logue of gad­gets.” But Gerns­back isn’t remem­bered as a writer, but as an edi­tor, pub­lish­er (of Amaz­ing Sto­ries mag­a­zine), and pio­neer of sci­ence fact, for it was Gerns­back who first intro­duced the earth-shak­ing tech­nol­o­gy of radio to the mass­es in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry.

“In 1905 (just a year after emi­grat­ing to the U.S. from Ger­many at the age of 20),” writes Matt Novak at Smith­son­ian, “Gerns­back designed the first home radio set and the first mail-order radio busi­ness in the world.” He would lat­er pub­lish the first radio mag­a­zine, then, in 1913, a mag­a­zine that came to be called Sci­ence and Inven­tion, a place where Gerns­back could print cat­a­logues of gad­gets with­out the both­er of hav­ing to please lit­er­ary crit­ics. In these pages he shone, pre­dict­ing futur­is­tic tech­nolo­gies extrap­o­lat­ed from the cut­ting edge. He was under­stand­ably enthu­si­as­tic about the future of radio. Like all self-appoint­ed futur­ists, his pre­dic­tions were a mix of the ridicu­lous and the prophet­ic.

Case in point: Gerns­back the­o­rized in a 1925  Sci­ence and Inven­tion arti­cle that com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nolo­gies like radio would rev­o­lu­tion­ize med­i­cine, in exact­ly the ways that they have in the 21st cen­tu­ry, though not quite through the device Gerns­back invent­ed: the “teledactyl,” which is not a robot­ic dinosaur but a telemed­i­cine plat­form that would allow doc­tors to exam­ine, diag­nose, and treat patients from a dis­tance with robot­ic arms, a hap­tic feed­back sys­tem, and “by means of a tele­vi­sion screen.” Nev­er mind that tele­vi­sion did­n’t exist in 1925. Sound­ing not a lit­tle like his con­tem­po­rary Buck­min­ster Fuller, Gerns­back insist­ed that his device “can be built today with means avail­able right now.”

It would require sig­nif­i­cant upgrades to radio tech­nol­o­gy before it could sup­port the wire­less inter­net that lets us meet with doc­tors on com­put­er screens. Per­haps Gerns­back was­n’t entire­ly wrong — tech­nol­o­gy may have allowed for some ver­sion of this in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, if med­i­cine had been inspired to move in a more sci-fi direc­tion. But the focus of the med­ical com­mu­ni­ty — after the dev­as­ta­tion of the 1918 flu epi­dem­ic — had under­stand­ably turned toward dis­ease cure and pre­ven­tion, not dis­tance diag­no­sis.

Gerns­back looked fifty years ahead, to a time, he wrote, when “the busy doc­tor… will not be able to vis­it his patients as he does now. It takes too much time, and he can only, at best, see a lim­it­ed num­ber today.” Home vis­its did not last anoth­er fifty years, but remote med­i­cine did­n’t take their place until almost 100 years after Gerns­back wrote. Indeed, the web­cams that now give doc­tors access to patients in the pan­dem­ic only came about in 1991 for the pur­pose of mak­ing sure the break room in the com­put­er sci­ence depart­ment at Cam­bridge had cof­fee.

Gerns­back even antic­i­pat­ed advances in space med­i­cine, which has spent the last sev­er­al years build­ing the tech­nol­o­gy he pre­dict­ed in order to per­form surg­eries on sick and injured astro­nauts stuck months or years away from Earth. He would have par­tic­u­lar­ly appre­ci­at­ed this usage, though he isn’t giv­en cred­it for the idea. Gerns­back also deserves cred­it for pok­ing fun at him­self, as he seemed to real­ize how hard it was for most peo­ple to take him seri­ous­ly.

To non-vision­ar­ies, the tech­nolo­gies of the future would all seem equal­ly ridicu­lous today, as in the pages of Gerns­back­’s satir­i­cal 1947 pub­li­ca­tion, Pop­u­lar Neck­an­ics Gagazine. Here, we find such objects as the Lam­pli­fi­er, “the lamp that has EVERYTHING.” Gerns­back­’s love of gad­gets blurred the bound­aries between sci­ence fic­tion and fact, always with the strong sug­ges­tion that — no mat­ter how use­ful or how ludi­crous — if a machine could be imag­ined, it could be built and put to work.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Iso­la­tor: A 1925 Hel­met Designed to Elim­i­nate Dis­trac­tions & Increase Pro­duc­tiv­i­ty (Cre­at­ed by Sci­Fi Pio­neer Hugo Gerns­back)

A 1947 French Film Accu­rate­ly Pre­dict­ed Our 21st-Cen­tu­ry Addic­tion to Smart­phones

Enter a Huge Archive of Amaz­ing Sto­ries, the World’s First Sci­ence Fic­tion Mag­a­zine, Launched in 1926

Sci-Fi Author J.G. Bal­lard Pre­dicts the Rise of Social Media (1977)

Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dicts in 2001 What the World Will Look By Decem­ber 31, 2100

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

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