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

in History, Technology | March 9th, 2022

Anyone over 30 remembers a time when it was impossible to imagine home video without physical media. But anyone over 50 remembers a time when it was difficult to choose which kind of media to bet on. Just as the “computer zoo” of the early 1980s forced home-computing enthusiasts to choose between Apple, IBM, Commodore, Texas Instruments, and a host of other brands, each with its own technological specifications, the market for home-video hardware presented several different alternatives. You’ve heard of Sony’s Betamax, for example, which has been a punchline ever since it lost out to JVC’s VHS. But that was just the realm of video tape; have you ever watched a movie on a vinyl record?

Four decades ago, it was difficult for most consumers to imagine home video at all. “Get records that let you have John Travolta dancing on your floor, Gene Hackman driving though your living room, the Godfather staying at your house,” booms the narrator of the television commercial above.

How, you ask? By purchasing a SelectaVision player and compatible video discs, which allow you to “see the entertainment you really want, when you want, uninterrupted.” In our age of streaming-on-demand this sounds like a laughably pedestrian claim, but at the time it represented the culmination of seventeen years and $600 million of intensive research and development at the Radio Company of America, better known as RCA.

Radio, and even more so its successor television, made RCA an enormous (and enormously profitable) conglomerate in the first half of the twentieth century. By the 1960s, it commanded the resources to work seriously on such projects as a vinyl record that could contain not just music, but full motion pictures in color and stereo. This turned out to be even harder than it sounded: after numerous delays, RCA could only bring SelectaVision to market in the spring of 1981, four years after the internal target. By that time, after the company had been commissioning content for the better part of a decade (D. A. Pennebaker shot David Bowie’s final Ziggy Stardust concert in 1973 on commission from RCA, who’d intended to make a SelectaVision disc out of it), the format faced competition from not just VHS and Betamax but the cutting-edge LaserDisc as well.

Nevertheless, the SelectaVision’s ultra-densely encoded vinyl video discs — officially known as capacitance electronic discs, or CEDs — were, in their way, marvels of engineering. You can take a deep dive into exactly what makes the system so impressive, which involves not just a breakdown of its components but a complete retelling of the history of RCA, though the five-part Technology Connections miniseries at the top of the post. True completists can also watch RCA’s video tour of its SelectaVision production facilities, as well as its live dealer-introduction broadcast hosted by Tom Brokaw and featuring a Broadway-style musical number. SelectaVision was also rolled out in the United Kingdom in 1983, thus qualifying for a hands-on examination by British retro-tech Youtuber Techmoan.

SelectaVision lasted just three years. Its failure was perhaps overdetermined, and not just by the bad timing resulting from its troubled development. In the early 1980s, the idea of buying pre-recorded video media lacked the immediate appeal of “time-shifting” television, which had become possible only with video tape. Nor did RCA, whose marketing centered on the possibility of building a permanent home-video library in the manner of one’s music library, foresee the possibility of rental. And though CEDs were ultimately made functional, they remained cumbersome, able to hold just one hour of video per side and notoriously subject to jitters even on the first play. Yet as RCA’s ad campaigns emphasized, there really was a “magic” in being able to watch the movies you wanted at home, whenever you wanted to. In that sense, at least, we now live in a magical world indeed.

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

The Beauty of Degraded Art: Why We Like Scratchy Vinyl, Grainy Film, Wobbly VHS & Other Analog-Media Imperfection

The Museum of Failure: A New Swedish Museum Showcases Harley-Davidson Perfume, Colgate Beef Lasagne, Google Glass & Other Failed Products

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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How Insulated Glass Changed Architecture: An Introduction to the Technological Breakthrough That Changed How We Live and How Our Buildings Work

in Architecture, History, Technology | February 11th, 2022

When we think of a “midcentury modern” home, we think of glass walls. In part, this has to do with the post-World War II decades’ promotion of the southern California-style indoor-outdoor suburban lifestyle. But business and culture are downstream of technology, and, in this specific case, the technology known as insulated glass. Its development solved the problem of glass windows that had dogged architecture since at least the second century: they let in light, but even more so cold and heat. Only in the 1930s did a refrigeration engineer figure out how to make windows with not one but two panes of glass and an insulating layer of air between them. Its trade name: Thermopane.

First manufactured by the Libbey-Owens-Ford glass company, “Thermopane changed the possibilities for architects,” says Vox’s Phil Edwards in the video above, “How Insulated Glass Changed Architecture.” In it he speaks with architectural historian Thomas Leslie, who says that “by the 1960s, if you’re putting a big window into any residential or office building” in all but the most temperate climates, you were using insulated glass “almost by default.”

Competing glass manufacturers introduced a host of variations on and innovations in not just the technology but the marketing as well: “No home is truly modern without TWINDOW,” declared one brand’s magazine advertisement.

The associated imagery, says Leslie, was “always a sliding glass door looking out onto a very verdant landscape,” which promised “a way of connecting your inside world and your outside world” (as well as “being able to see all of your stuff”). But the new possibility of “walls of glass” made for an even more visible change in commercial architecture, being the sine qua non of the smoothly reflective skyscrapers that rise from every American downtown. Today, of course, we can see 80, 900, 100 floors of sheer glass stacked up in cities all over the world, shimmering declarations of membership among the developed nations. Those sliding glass doors, by the same token, once announced an American family’s arrival into the prosperous middle class — and now, more than half a century later, still look like the height of modernity.

How the Radical Buildings of the Bauhaus Revolutionized Architecture: A Short Introduction

The Surprising Reason Why Chinatowns Worldwide Share the Same Aesthetic, and How It All Started with the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake

Tony Hawk & Architectural Historian Iain Borden Tell the Story of How Skateboarding Found a New Use for Cities & Architecture

Why Europe Has So Few Skyscrapers

A Glass Floor in a Dublin Grocery Store Lets Shoppers Look Down & Explore Medieval Ruins

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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about the Bialetti Moka Express: A Deep Dive Into Italy’s Most Popular Coffee Maker

in Food & Drink, History, Technology | February 3rd, 2022

Which coffee maker is most deeply embedded in American culture? I would nominate the humble Mr. Coffee, a device referenced on Cheers as well as Seinfeld, in the work of Raymond Carver as well as that of the Bloodhound Gang (to say nothing of the 1970s mass-media phenomenon that was its commercials starring Joe DiMaggio). But I would also urge my fellow Americans to ask themselves when last they actually used one, or at least used one to satisfying results. Italy, by contrast, knows what it is to take a coffee maker to heart. As one study found, nine out of ten Italian households possesses, in one form or another, the same basic model: the Bialetti Moka Express.

As Ted Mills wrote here with confidence last month, “many an Open Culture reader has a Bialetti Moka Express in their kitchen. I know I do, but I must add that I knew little about its history and apparently even less about how to properly use one.” Enter coffee Youtuber and The World Atlas of Coffee author James Hoffmann, whose introductory video proved popular enough to launch a mini-series that takes a deep dive into the mechanics and variations on the nearly 90-year-old “moka pot.”

In the second episode, just above, Hoffman performs a series of experiments varying elements of the simple device — starting temperature, grind size, heat power — in order to determine how it makes the best cup of coffee.

In episode three, Hoffman (who clearly knows a thing or two about not just coffee, but how to name a Youtube video to algorithmic advantage) refines “the ultimate moka pot technique.” Much depends, of course, on factors like what sort of beans you buy, as well as subjective considerations like how you want your coffee to taste — your preferred “flavor profile,” as they now say. The longtime moka pot user will inevitably feel his/her way to his/her own idiosyncratic procedure and set of accessories, and will more than likely also accrue a formidable collection of moka pots themselves. Here Hoffman lines up ten of them, half of which are just different sizes of the classic Moka Express, its silhouette recognizable at any scale.

Less familiar models take center stage in the fourth episode, “The Moka Pot Variations.” In it Hoffman puts to the test the Bialetti’s double-cream espresso-making Brikka; their cappuccino-capable Mukka; the tiny, discontinued Cuor di Moka, with its correspondingly avid fan base; and finally something called the Kamira, which looks less like a coffee maker than a piece of recycled industrial art. Even apart from these, a variety of companies now make a variety of moka pots, every single one of which has no doubt at least a few serious coffee drinkers swearing by it. I myself have a weakness for Bialetti’s Moka Alpina; whether it makes a superior brew I couldn’t say, but the jauntiness of that Tyrolean feather is hardly debatable.

Life and Death of an Espresso Shot in Super Slow Motion

How to Make the World’s Smallest Cup of Coffee, from Just One Coffee Bean

The Birth of Espresso: How the Coffee Shots The Fuel Our Modern Life Were Invented

An Espresso Maker Made in Le Corbusier’s Brutalist Architectural Style: Raw Concrete on the Outside, High-End Parts on the Inside

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 and culture. His projects include 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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

In 1922, a Novelist Predicts What the World Will Look Like in 2022: Wireless Telephones, 8‑Hour Flights to Europe & More

in History, Technology | February 2nd, 2022

A century ago, the popular English novelist W.L. George sat down and put his mind to envisioning the world we live in today. That world has not, alas, turned out to be one in which his books are much read, but in his day a great many readers were moved by his social cause-driven fiction and reportage. One might compare him to Upton Sinclair, his contemporary on the other side of the Atlantic. In the Paris-born-and-raised George’s ancestral homeland, George Orwell described him as an author of what G.K. Chesterton called “good bad books,” singling out for praise his 1920 novel Caliban amid the “shoddy rubbish” of his wider oeuvre.

Still even authors of rubbish — and perhaps especially authors of rubbish — can sense the shape of things to come. For its edition of May 7, 1922, the New York Herald commissioned George to share that sense with their readers. In response he described a world in which “commercial flying will have become entirely commonplace,” reducing the separation of America and Europe to eight hours, and whose passenger steamers and railroads will have consequently fallen into obsolescence. “Wireless telegraphy and wireless telephones will have crushed the cable system,” resulting in generations who’ll never have seen “a wire outlined against the sky.”

That goes for the transmission of electricity as well, since George credits (a bit hastily, it seems) the possibility of wireless power systems of the kind researched by Nikola Tesla. In 2022, coal will take a distant backseat to the tides, the sun, and radium, and “it may also be that atomic energy will be harnessed.” As for the cinema, “the figures on the screen will not only move, but they will have their natural colors and speak with ordinary voices. Thus, the stage as we know it to-day may entirely disappear, which does not mean the doom of art, since the movie actress of 2022 will not only need to know how to smile but also how to talk.”

Other women, however, have proven just as capable as George had imagined: “All positions will be open to them and a great many women will have risen high. The year 2022 will probably see a large number of women in Congress, a great many on the judicial bench, many in civil service posts, and perhaps some in the President’s Cabinet.” Georges foresees the birth-control pill, but also the “pill lunch.” Unlike some reformers, he hesitates to declare the abolition of the family, but he does imagine the “majority of mankind” occupying modular homes in high-rise communal dwellings (“I have a vision of walls, furniture, and hangings made of more or less compressed papier-mâché”), all gathered in climate-controlled cities set under glass.

On the whole, in 2022, “the advancement of science will be amazing, but it will be nothing like so amazing as is the present day in relation to a hundred years ago.” Indeed, he suspects that a glimpse of our reality wouldn’t much surprise “the little girl who sells candies at Grand Central Station.” It could even be dull, what with complete settlement and development leaving “no more opportunity in America than there is in England to-day.” In 1922, George could write that “in fiction, America leads the world by sincerity, faith and fearlessness,” and believe that “in 2022 American literature will be a literature of culture. The battle will be over and the muzzle off. There will be no more things one can’t say, and things one can’t think.” Whatever the inspirations of his prophecy, they must not have told him about social media.

You can find a copy of George’s original article over at the Library of Congress.

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!

via Messy Nessy

Jules Verne Accurately Predicts What the 20th Century Will Look Like in His Lost Novel, Paris in the Twentieth Century (1863)

In 1900, Ladies’ Home Journal Publishes 28 Predictions for the Year 2000

Futurist from 1901 Describes the World of 2001: Opera by Telephone, Free College & Pneumatic Tubes Aplenty

In 1911, Thomas Edison Predicts What the World Will Look Like in 2011: Smart Phones, No Poverty, Libraries That Fit in One Book

In 1926, Nikola Tesla Predicts the World of 2026

9 Science-Fiction Authors Predict the Future: How Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, William Gibson, Philip K. Dick & More Imagined the World Ahead

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include 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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 72 ) |

Jon Hamm Narrates a Modernized Version of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Helping to Diagnose Our Social Media-Induced Narcissism

in Philosophy, Psychology, Technology, Television | January 10th, 2022

The Matrix gave a generation or two reason to reconsider, or indeed first to consider, Plato’s allegory of the cave. That era-defining blockbuster’s cavalcade of slick visual effects came delivered atop a plot about humanity’s having been enslaved — plugged into a colossal machine, as I recall, like an array of living batteries — while convinced by a direct-to-brain simulation that it wasn’t. Here in real life, about two and a half millennia earlier, one of Plato’s dialogues had conjured up a not-dissimilar scenario. You can see it retold in the video above, a clip drawn from a form as representative of the early 21st century as The Matrix’s was of the late 20th: Legion, a dramatic television series based on a comic book.

“Imagine a cave, where those inside never see the outside world,” says narrator Jon Hamm (himself an icon of our Golden Age of Television, thanks to his lead performance in Mad Men). “Instead, they see shadows of that world projected on the cave wall. The world they see in the shadows is not the real world, but it’s real to them. If you were to show them the world as it actually is, they would reject it as incomprehensible.” Then, Hamm suggests transposing this relationship to reality into life as we know it — or rather, as we two-dimensionally perceive it on the screens of our phones. But “unlike the allegory of the cave, where the people are real and the shadows are false, here other people are the shadows.”

This propagates “the delusion of the narcissist, who believes that they alone are real. Their feelings are the only feelings that matter, because other people are just shadows, and shadows don’t feel.” And “if everyone lived in caves, then no one would be real. Not even you.” With the rise of digital communication in general and social media in particular, a great many of us have ensconced ourselves, by degrees and for the most part unconsciously, inside caves of our own. Over the past decade or so, increasingly sobering glimpses of the outside world have motivated some of us to seek diagnoses of our collective condition from thinkers of the past, such as social theorist Christopher Lasch.

“The new narcissist is haunted not by guilt but by anxiety,” Lasch writes The Culture of Narcissism. “Liberated from the superstitions of the past, he doubts even the reality of his own existence” — wonders, in other words, whether he isn’t one of the shadows himself. Nevertheless, he remains “facile at managing the impressions he gives to others, ravenous for admiration but contemptuous of those he manipulates into providing it,” and dependent on “constant infusions of approval and admiration.” Social media has revealed traces of this personality, belonging to one who “sees the world as a mirror of himself and has no interest in external events except as they throw back a reflection of his own image,” in us all. It thus gives us pause to remember that Lasch was writing all this in the 1970s; but then, Plato was writing in the fifth century B.C.

Two Animations of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: One Narrated by Orson Welles, Another Made with Clay

Plato’s Cave Allegory Animated Monty Python-Style

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

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

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

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include 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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Explore the New 717-Gigapixel Scan of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, the Most Detailed Photo Ever Taken of a Work of Art

in Art, History, Technology | January 5th, 2022

Filmmaker and serious Rembrandt enthusiast Peter Greenaway once called The Night Watch the most famous painting in the Western world, behind the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But if the resources devoted to its scrutiny are anything to go by, the Dutch masterwork has been gaining on those other three in recent years. Can any work of Leonardo or Michelangelo, for example, boast of having been digitized at a resolution of 717 gigapixels, as the Rijksmuseum has just done with The Night Watch?

In fact, no other work of art in existence has ever been the subject of such a large and detailed photograph. Each of its 717,000,000,000 pixels, says the Rijksmuseum’s site, “is smaller than a human red blood cell.”

This necessitated the use of “a 00-megapixel Hasselblad H6D 400 MS-camera to make 8439 individual photos measuring 5.5cm x 4.1cm. Artificial intelligence was used to stitch these smaller photographs together to form the final large image, with a total file size of 5.6 terabytes.” You may remember artificial intelligence also having played a role in the reconstruction of the painting’s missing sections, previously featured here on Open Culture.

The result far surpasses the digital version of The Night Watch made available by the Rijksmuseum in 2020, itself high-resolution enough to allow viewers to zoom in to see the painting’s every individual brush stroke. (It even outdoes last year’s 10-billion-pixel scan of Girl with a Pearl Earring, the best-known work by Rembrandt’s fellow Dutch master Johannes Vermeer.) Now, writes Colossal’s Grace Ebert, you can see all the way down to “the cracked texture of the paint, brushstrokes, and slight pigment variations that wouldn’t be visible even if you were standing in front of the work itself.”

380 years after Rembrandt painted it, The Night Watch remains almost uniquely striking in its employment of contrasting shadow and light, all in service of a large-scale composition at once lifelike and somehow more vivid than reality. This digitization and the AI-assisted completion are both arts of “Operation Night Watch,” the thoroughgoing restoration project now underway at the Rijksmuseum, which will make all the elements of that composition more immediately visible than they’ve been in generations.

But the question of how, exactly, Rembrandt achieved such powerful effects can be answered only through rigorous examination of each and every detail, an activity open to all on the 717-gigapixel scan at the Rijksmuseum’s site.

via Colossal

Enter an Online Interactive Documentary on Rembrandt’s The Night Watch and Learn About the Painting’s Many Hidden Secrets

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

The Restoration of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch Begins: Watch the Painstaking Process On-Site and Online

Late Rembrandts Come to Life: Watch Animations of Paintings Now on Display at the Rijksmuseum

A 10 Billion Pixel Scan of Vermeer’s Masterpiece Girl with a Pearl Earring: Explore It Online

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include 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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

In 1953, a Telephone-Company Executive Predicts the Rise of Modern Smartphones and Video Calls

in History, Technology | January 3rd, 2022

We live in the age of the smartphone, which took more than a few of us by surprise. But in all human history, not a single piece of technology has actually come out of nowhere. Long before smartphones came on the market in the 2000s, those close to the telecommunications industry had a sense of what form its most widely used device would eventually take. “Here is my prophecy: In its final development, the telephone will be carried about by the individual, perhaps as we carry a watch today,” said Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company director Mark R. Sullivan in 1953. “It probably will require no dial or equivalent and I think the users will be able to see each other, if they want, as they talk. Who knows but it may actually translate from one language to another?”

Sullivan’s prescient-sounding words survive in the clipping of the Associated Press article seen at the top of the post. It’s worth remembering that the speech in question dates from a time when the rotary phone was the most advanced personal communication device in American households.

Just three years earlier, writes KQED’s Rae Alexandra, Sullivan “appeared in the San Francisco Examiner talking about the latest innovations in telephone technology. The advancement he was most proud of was a new device about the size of a small typewriter that automatically calculated how long people’s phone calls were.” However logical, pocket telephones with video-calling and translation capabilities would then have struck many as the stuff of science fiction.

Though born before the time of household electrification, Sullivan himself lived just long enough to see the debut of the first commercial cellphone “The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X was definitely not watch-sized and cost a whopping $3,995 in 1983 (about $11,000 today),” writes Alexandra, “but Sullivan might have seen this development as a step towards his long-ago vision — a sign that every one of his 1953 predictions would eventually come to fruition.” As printed in the Tacoma News Tribune, the AP article conveying those predictions to the public appeared under the headline “There’ll Be No Escape in Future from Telephones,” which sounds even more chilling today — in that very future — than it did nearly 70 years ago. But then, even the visions of actual science fiction are seldom wholly untroubled.

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

When We All Have Pocket Telephones (1923)

In 1911, Thomas Edison Predicts What the World Will Look Like in 2011: Smart Phones, No Poverty, Libraries That Fit in One Book

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

Filmmaker Wim Wenders Explains How Mobile Phones Have Killed Photography

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include 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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 29 ) |

The Amazing Engineering of James Webb Telescope

in Astronomy, Technology | December 30th, 2021

If you want to see the current height of technology, you could do worse than taking a look at the James Webb Space Telescope. Millions have been doing just that over the past few weeks, given that this past Christmas Day witnessed the launch of that ten-billion-dollar NASA project a decade in the making. As the successor to the now-venerable Hubble Space Telescope, the JWST is designed to go much farther into outer space and thus see much further back in time, potentially to the formation of the first galaxies. If all goes well, it will give us what the Real Engineering video above calls a glimpse of the “early universe from which we and everything we know was born.”

But one does not simply glance skyward to see back 13.5 billion years. No, “the combination of technologies required to make the James Webb telescope possible are unique to this time period in human history.” These include the heat shield that will unfold to protect its sensitive components from the heat of the sun, to the onboard cryocooler that maintains the mid-infrared detection instrument (which itself will enable the viewing of many more stars and galaxies than previous telescopes) at a cool seven degrees Kelvin, to the array of gold-coated beryllium mirrors that can pick up unprecedented amounts of light.

However complicated the JWST’s development and launch, “the truly nerve-wracking process begins on day seven,” says the Real Engineering video’s narrator. At that point, with the satellite finding its precisely determined position 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, the heat shield begins unfolding, and “there are over 300 single points of failure in this unfolding sequence: 300 chances for a ten billion-dollar, 25-year project to end.” With that process underway as of this writing, the teeth of the project’s engineers are no doubt firmly embedded in their nails.

As it plays out, also-nervous fans of space exploration (who’ve had much to get excited about in recent years) might consider distracting themselves with the above episode of Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s StarTalk. In it Tyson has in-depth discussions about the JWST’s conception, purpose, and potential with both NASA astronomer Natalie Batalha and filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn, whose documentary The Hunt for Planet B examines the JWST team’s “quest to find another Earth among the stars.” But let’s not get ahead of ourselves: even if the shield deploys without a hitch, there remains the not-untricky process of unfolding those mirrors. What we see through the telescope will no doubt change our ideas about humanity’s place in the universe — but if it functions as planned, we’ll have good reason to be pleased with human competence.

Related Content:

The Beauty of Space Photography

Free Interactive e‑Books from NASA Reveal History, Discoveries of the Hubble & Webb Telescopes

How Scientists Colorize Those Beautiful Space Photos Taken By the Hubble Space Telescope

Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ Re-Created by Astronomer with 100 Hubble Space Telescope Images

NASA Enlists Andy Warhol, Annie Leibovitz, Norman Rockwell & 350 Other Artists to Visually Document America’s Space Program

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include 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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

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

How Insulated Glass Changed Architecture: An Introduction to the Technological Breakthrough That Changed How We Live and How Our Buildings Work

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about the Bialetti Moka Express: A Deep Dive Into Italy’s Most Popular Coffee Maker

In 1922, a Novelist Predicts What the World Will Look Like in 2022: Wireless Telephones, 8‑Hour Flights to Europe & More

Jon Hamm Narrates a Modernized Version of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Helping to Diagnose Our Social Media-Induced Narcissism

Explore the New 717-Gigapixel Scan of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, the Most Detailed Photo Ever Taken of a Work of Art

In 1953, a Telephone-Company Executive Predicts the Rise of Modern Smartphones and Video Calls

The Amazing Engineering of James Webb Telescope

Essentials

Support Us

Free Courses

Free Movies

Free Language Lessons

Free eBooks

Free Audio Books

Free Textbooks

K-12 Resources

Free Art & Images

Free Music

Writing Tips

Archive

Personal Finance

Categories

Great Lectures

About Us

Great Recordings

Book Lists By

Syllabi

Favorite Movies

Archives

Search