The e‑Book Imagined in 1935

in Books, History, Technology | January 29th, 2020

What is the future of the book? Will it retain more or less the same basic paper-between-cov­ers form as it has since the days of the Guten­berg Bible? Will it go entire­ly dig­i­tal, becom­ing read­able only with com­pat­i­ble elec­tron­ic devices? Or will we, in the com­fort of our arm­chairs, read them on glass-screened micro­film pro­jec­tors? That last is the bet made, and illus­trat­ed as above, by the April 1935 issue of Every­day Sci­ence and Mechan­ics mag­a­zine. “It has proved pos­si­ble to pho­to­graph books, and throw them on a screen for exam­i­na­tion,” says the arti­cle envi­sion­ing “a device for apply­ing this for home use and instruc­tion,” exhumed by Matt Novak at Smithsonian.com.

As The Atlantic’s Megan Gar­ber writes, “The whole thing, to our TV-and-tablet-jad­ed eyes, looks won­der­ful­ly quaint. (The pro­jec­tor! The knobs! The semi-redun­dant read­ing lamp! The smok­ing jack­et!)” But then, “what speaks to our cur­rent, hazy dreams of con­ver­gence more elo­quent­ly than the abil­i­ty to sit back, relax, and turn books into tele­vi­sion?”

And indeed, the orig­i­nal illus­tra­tion includes a cap­tion telling us how such a device will allow you to “read a ‘book’ (which is a roll of minia­ture film), music, etc., at your ease.” That may sound famil­iar to those of us who think noth­ing of flip­ping back and forth between books, web sites, movies, tele­vi­sion shows, and social media — all to our cus­tomized music-and-pod­cast sound­track of choice — on our com­put­ers, tablets, and phones today.

Every­day Sci­ence and Mechan­ics was­n’t look­ing into the dis­tant future. As Novak notes, micro­film had been patent­ed in 1895 and first prac­ti­cal­ly used in 1925; the New York Times began copy­ing its every edi­tion onto micro­film in 1935, the same year this arti­cle appeared. As imprac­ti­cal as it may look now, this home “e‑reader” could the­o­ret­i­cal­ly have been put into use not long there­after. As it hap­pened, the first e‑readers — the hand­held dig­i­tal ones of the kind we know today — would­n’t come on the mar­ket for anoth­er 70 years, and their wide­spread adop­tion has only occurred in the past decade. But for many, good old Guten­berg-style paper-between-cov­ers remains the way to read. It may be that the book has no one future form, but a vari­ety that will exist at once — a vari­ety that, absent a much stronger retro­fu­tur­ism revival, will prob­a­bly not include micro­film, ground-glass screens, and smok­ing jack­ets.

via Smithsonian.com

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read­ers Pre­dict in 1936 Which Nov­el­ists Would Still Be Wide­ly Read in the Year 2000

1930s Fash­ion Design­ers Pre­dict How Peo­ple Would Dress in the Year 2000

Did Stan­ley Kubrick Invent the iPad in 2001: A Space Odyssey?

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

Napoleon’s Kin­dle: See the Minia­tur­ized Trav­el­ing Library He Took on Mil­i­tary Cam­paigns

Behold the “Book Wheel”: The Renais­sance Inven­tion Cre­at­ed to Make Books Portable & Help Schol­ars Study (1588)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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 Face­book.

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Leonardo da Vinci’s Inventions Come to Life as Museum-Quality, Workable Models: A Swing Bridge, Scythed Chariot, Perpetual Motion Machine & More

in History, Physics, Technology | January 14th, 2020

Per­pet­u­al motion is impos­si­ble. Even if we don’t know much about physics, we all know that to be true — or at least we’ve heard it from cred­i­ble enough sources that we might as well believe it. More accu­rate­ly, we might say that nobody has yet fig­ured out how to make a machine that keeps on going and going and going by itself, with­out any exter­nal ener­gy source. But it has­n’t been for lack of try­ing, and the effort has been on the part of not just crack­pots but some of the most impres­sive minds in human his­to­ry. Take char­ter mem­ber of that group Leonar­do da Vin­ci, the Renais­sance design­er of bridges, musi­cal instru­ments, war machines, and much else beside, whose fas­ci­na­tion with the sub­ject also had him imag­in­ing the occa­sion­al per­pet­u­al motion machine.

Our unflag­ging fas­ci­na­tion with Leonar­do has fueled the efforts of 21st-cen­tu­ry enthu­si­asts to build his inven­tions for them­selves, even those inven­tions that pre­vi­ous­ly exist­ed only in his note­books. In the video above you can see a series of such Leonar­do-imag­ined devices made real in func­tion­al mod­el form.

Some of them, like the fly­wheel, odome­ter, ver­ti­cal ball-bear­ing, and dou­ble-deck­er bridge, have become so com­mon in oth­er forms that we no longer even stop to con­sid­er their inge­nious­ness. Oth­ers, like the invad­er-repelling cas­tle wall defense mech­a­nism and some­thing called a “scythed char­i­ot” — a nasty-look­ing yet char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly grace­ful piece of work — remind of us that, at least in most of the world, we live in less war­like times than Leonar­do did.

The video comes from Valeriy Ivanov, who on Youtube spe­cial­izes in build­ing and demon­strat­ing “work­ing mod­els of per­pet­u­al motion machines” as well as “Da Vin­ci inven­tions” and “mar­ble machines.” (Leonar­do’s odome­ter, fea­tured in the video, makes a par­tic­u­lar­ly impres­sive use of mar­bles.) “My mod­els of per­pet­u­al motion machines are of motor­ized ver­sions that were built to illus­trate how they were sup­posed to work in the minds of inven­tors,” writes Ivanov. We see not only the mechan­ics Leonar­do and oth­er hope­ful inven­tors must have imag­ined, but the mes­mer­iz­ing ele­gance of Leonar­do’s designs in par­tic­u­lar, such as the video’s over­bal­anced wheel. On a note­book page from 1494, Leonar­do told the seek­ers of per­pet­u­al motion to “go and take your place with the alchemists.” But now, with the aid of tech­nol­o­gy unimag­ined in Leonar­do’s time — even by Leonar­do him­self — we can see just how com­pelling that vision must have been.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

MIT Researchers 3D Print a Bridge Imag­ined by Leonar­do da Vin­ci in 1502— and Prove That It Actu­al­ly Works

How to Build Leonar­do da Vinci’s Inge­nious Self-Sup­port­ing Bridge: Renais­sance Inno­va­tions You Can Still Enjoy Today

Leonar­do da Vin­ci Draws Designs of Future War Machines: Tanks, Machine Guns & More

Watch Leonar­do da Vinci’s Musi­cal Inven­tion, the Vio­la Organ­ista, Being Played for the Very First Time

A Com­plete Dig­i­ti­za­tion of Leonar­do Da Vinci’s Codex Atlanti­cus, the Largest Exist­ing Col­lec­tion of His Draw­ings & Writ­ings

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Ele­gant Design for a Per­pet­u­al Motion Machine

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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 Face­book.

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Download Beautiful Free Posters Celebrating the Achievements of Living Female STEM Leaders

in Education, Gender, K-12, Physics, Podcasts, Science, Technology | December 27th, 2019

Remem­ber the posters that dec­o­rat­ed your child­hood or teenaged bed­room?

Of course you do.

Whether aspi­ra­tional or inspi­ra­tional, these images are amaz­ing­ly potent.

I’m a bit embar­rassed to admit what hung over my bed, espe­cial­ly in light of a cer­tain CGI adap­ta­tion…

No such wor­ries with a set of eight free down­load­able posters hon­or­ing eight female trail­blaz­ers in the fields of sci­ence, tech­nol­o­gy, engi­neer­ing, and math.

These should prove ever­green.


Com­mis­sioned by Nev­er­the­less, a pod­cast that cel­e­brates women whose advance­ments in STEM fields have shaped—and con­tin­ue to shape—education and learn­ing, each poster is accom­pa­nied with a brief bio­graph­i­cal sketch of the sub­ject.

Nev­er­the­less has tak­en care that the fea­tured achiev­ers are drawn from a wide cul­tur­al and racial pool.

No shame if you’re unfa­mil­iar with some of these extra­or­di­nary women. Their names may not pos­sess the same degree of house­hold recog­ni­tion as Marie Curie, but they will once they’re hang­ing over your daughter’s (or son’s) bed.

It’s worth not­ing that with the excep­tion of the under­sung moth­er of DNA Helix Ros­alind Franklin, these are liv­ing role mod­els. They are:

Astro­naut Dr. Mae Jemi­son

Robot­ics pio­neer Dr. Cyn­thia Breazeal

Math­e­mati­cian Gladys West

Tech inno­va­tor Juliana Rotich

Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal chemist Tu Youy­ou

Bio­phar­ma­cist and women rights advo­cate Maria da Pen­ha

Biotech­nol­o­gist Dr. Hay­at Sin­di

Kudos, too, to Nev­er­the­less for includ­ing biogra­phies of the eight female illus­tra­tors charged with bring­ing the STEM lumi­nar­ies to aes­thet­i­cal­ly cohe­sive graph­ic life: Lidia Toma­shevskaya,Thandi­we Tsha­bal­ala, Cami­la Rosa, Xu Hui, Kari­na Perez, Joana Neves, Gene­va B, and Juli­ette Bro­cal

Lis­ten to Nev­er­the­less’ episode on STEM Role Mod­els here.

Down­load Nev­er­the­less’ free posters in Eng­lish here. You can also down­load zipped fold­ers con­tain­ing all eight posters trans­lat­ed into Brazil­ian Por­tuguese, French, French Cana­di­an, Ger­man, Ital­ian, Span­ish, and Sim­pli­fied Chi­nese.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pop Art Posters Cel­e­brate Pio­neer­ing Women Sci­en­tists: Down­load Free Posters of Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace & More

Women Sci­en­tists Launch a Data­base Fea­tur­ing the Work of 9,000 Women Work­ing in the Sci­ences

“The Matil­da Effect”: How Pio­neer­ing Women Sci­en­tists Have Been Denied Recog­ni­tion and Writ­ten Out of Sci­ence His­to­ry

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Jan­u­ary 6 when her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domaincel­e­brates Cape-Cod­di­ties (1920) by Roger Liv­ingston Scaife. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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David Lynch Turns Twin Peaks into a Virtual Reality Game: Watch the Official Trailer

in Games, Technology, Television | December 11th, 2019

When David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks pre­miered on ABC in 1990, view­ers across Amer­i­ca were treat­ed to a tele­vi­su­al expe­ri­ence like none they’d ever had before. Four years ear­li­er, some­thing sim­i­lar had hap­pened to the unsus­pect­ing movie­go­ers who went to see Lynch’s break­out fea­ture Blue Vel­vet, an expe­ri­ence described as eye-open­ing by even David Fos­ter Wal­lace. A ded­i­cat­ed med­i­ta­tor with an inter­est in plung­ing into unex­plored realms of con­scious­ness, Lynch tends to bring his audi­ence right along with him in his work, whether that work be cin­e­ma, tele­vi­sion, visu­al art, music, or com­ic strips. Only nat­ur­al, then, that Lynch would take an inter­est in the artis­tic and expe­ri­en­tial pos­si­bil­i­ties of vir­tu­al real­i­ty.

Last year we fea­tured the first glimpse of a Twin Peaks vir­tu­al real­i­ty expe­ri­ence in devel­op­ment, revealed at Lynch’s Fes­ti­val of Dis­rup­tion in Los Ange­les. “The best news is that the com­pa­ny devel­op­ing the game, Col­lid­er Games, is giv­ing cre­ative con­trol to Lynch,” wrote Ted Mills, and now, with the release of Twin Peaks VR’s offi­cial trail­er, we can get a clear­er idea of what Lynch has planned for play­ers. As Lau­ra Snoad writes at It’s Nice That, Lynch has used the oppor­tu­ni­ty to revis­it “well-known envi­ron­ments fea­tured in the series, such as the icon­ic Red Room (the stripy-floored, vel­vet cur­tain-clad par­al­lel uni­verse where Agent Coop­er meets mur­dered teen Lau­ra Palmer), the Twin Peaks’ Sheriff’s Depart­ment and the pine-filled for­est around the fic­tion­al Wash­ing­ton town.”

This will come as good news indeed to those of us Twin Peaks enthu­si­asts who’ve made the pil­grim­age to Sno­qualmie, North Bend, and Fall City, the real-life Wash­ing­ton towns where Lynch and his col­lab­o­ra­tors shot the series. But Twin Peak VR will offer a greater vari­ety of chal­lenges than snap­ping pho­tos of the series’ loca­tions and chat­ting with bemused locals: Snoad writes that each envi­ron­ment is con­struct­ed like an escape room. “Solv­ing puz­zles to help Agent Coop­er and Gor­don Cole (the FBI agent played by Lynch him­self), play­ers will also meet some of the show’s weird and ter­ri­fy­ing char­ac­ters, from the back­wards-speak­ing inhab­i­tants of the Black Lodge to the ter­ri­fy­ing Bob him­self.”

Avail­able via Steam on Ocu­lus Rift, Vive, and Valve Index this month, with Ocu­lus Quest and PlaySta­tion VR ver­sions sched­uled, Twin Peaks VR should give a fair few vir­tu­al-real­i­ty hold­outs a com­pelling rea­son to put on the gog­gles — much as Twin Peaks the show caused the cinéastes of the 1990s to break down and watch evening TV. Enjoy­ing Lynch’s work, what­ev­er its medi­um, has always felt like plung­ing into a dream: not like watch­ing his dream, but expe­ri­enc­ing a dream he’s made for us. If vir­tu­al-real­i­ty tech­nol­o­gy has final­ly come any­where close to the vivid­ness of Lynch’s imag­i­na­tion, Twin Peaks VR will mark the next step in his artis­tic evo­lu­tion. But for now, to para­phrase no less a Lynch fan than Wal­lace, the one thing we can say with total con­fi­dence is that it will be… Lynchi­an.

via It’s Nice That

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch an Epic, 4‑Hour Video Essay on the Mak­ing & Mythol­o­gy of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks

Twin Peaks Actu­al­ly Explained: A Four-Hour Video Essay Demys­ti­fies It All

David Lynch Is Cre­at­ing a Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Expe­ri­ence for Twin Peaks

Twin Peaks Tarot Cards Now Avail­able as 78-Card Deck

Watch the Twin Peaks Visu­al Sound­track Released Only in Japan: A New Way to Expe­ri­ence David Lynch’s Clas­sic Show

David Lynch Directs a Mini-Sea­son of Twin Peaks in the Form of Japan­ese Cof­fee Com­mer­cials

Play the Twin Peaks Video Game: Retro Fun for David Lynch Fans

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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 Face­book.

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Nikola Tesla Accurately Predicted the Rise of the Internet & Smart Phone in 1926

in Science, Technology | November 19th, 2019

Cer­tain cult his­tor­i­cal fig­ures have served as pre­scient avatars for the tech­no-vision­ar­ies of the dig­i­tal age. Where the altru­is­tic utopi­an designs of Buck­min­ster Fuller pro­vid­ed an ide­al for the first wave of Sil­i­con Val­ley pio­neers (a group includ­ing com­put­er sci­en­tist and philoso­pher Jaron Lanier and Wired edi­tor Kevin Kel­ly), lat­er entre­pre­neurs have hewn clos­er to the prin­ci­ples of bril­liant sci­en­tist and inven­tor Niko­la Tes­la, who believed, as he told Lib­er­ty mag­a­zine in 1935, that “we suf­fer the derange­ment of our civ­i­liza­tion because we have not yet com­plete­ly adjust­ed our­selves to the machine age.”

Such an adjust­ment would come, Tes­la believed, only in “mas­ter­ing the machine”—and he seemed to have supreme con­fi­dence in human mastery—over food pro­duc­tion, cli­mate, and genet­ics. We would be freed from oner­ous labor by automa­tion and the cre­ation of “a think­ing machine” he said, over a decade before the inven­tion of the com­put­er. Tes­la did not antic­i­pate the ways such machines would come to mas­ter us, even though he can­ni­ly fore­saw the future of wire­less tech­nol­o­gy, com­put­ing, and tele­pho­ny, tech­nolo­gies that would rad­i­cal­ly reshape every aspect of human life.

In an ear­li­er, 1926, inter­view in Col­liers mag­a­zine, Tes­la pre­dict­ed, as the edi­tors wrote, com­mu­ni­cat­ing “instant­ly by sim­ple vest-pock­et equip­ment.” His actu­al words con­veyed a much grander, and more accu­rate, pic­ture of the future.

When wire­less is per­fect­ly applied the whole earth will be con­vert­ed into a huge brain, which in fact it is…. We shall be able to com­mu­ni­cate with one anoth­er instant­ly, irre­spec­tive of dis­tance. Not only this, but through tele­vi­sion and tele­pho­ny we shall see and hear one anoth­er as per­fect­ly as though were face to face, despite inter­ven­ing dis­tances of thou­sands of miles; and the instru­ments through which we shall be able to do this will be amaz­ing­ly sim­ple com­pared with our present tele­phone. A man will be able to car­ry one in his vest pock­et. 

The com­plex­i­ty of smart phones far out­strips that of the tele­phone, but in every oth­er respect, Tesla’s pic­ture maps onto the real­i­ty of almost 100 years lat­er. Oth­er aspects of Tesla’s future sce­nario for wire­less also seem to antic­i­pate cur­rent tech­nolo­gies, like 3D print­ing, though the kind he describes still remains in the realm of sci­ence fic­tion: “Wire­less will achieve the clos­er con­tact through trans­mis­sion of intel­li­gence, trans­port of our bod­ies and mate­ri­als and con­veyance of ener­gy.”

But Tesla’s vision had its lim­i­ta­tions, and they lay pre­cise­ly in his tech­no-opti­mism. He nev­er met a prob­lem that wouldn’t even­tu­al­ly have a tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tion (and like many oth­er tech­no-vision­ar­ies of the time, he hearti­ly endorsed state-spon­sored eugen­ics). “The major­i­ty of the ills from which human­i­ty suf­fers,” he said, “are due to the immense extent of the ter­res­tri­al globe and the inabil­i­ty of indi­vid­u­als and nations to come into close con­tact.”

Wire­less tech­nol­o­gy, thought Tes­la, would help erad­i­cate war, pover­ty, dis­ease, pol­lu­tion, and gen­er­al dis­con­tent, when were are “able to wit­ness and hear events—the inau­gu­ra­tion of a Pres­i­dent, the play­ing of a world series game, the hav­oc of an earth­quake or the ter­ror of a battle—just as though we were present.” When inter­na­tion­al bound­aries are “large­ly oblit­er­at­ed” by instant com­mu­ni­ca­tion, he believed, “a great step will be made toward the uni­fi­ca­tion and har­mo­nious exis­tence of the var­i­ous races inhab­it­ing the globe.”

Tes­la did not, and per­haps could not, fore­see the ways in which tech­nolo­gies that bring us clos­er togeth­er than ever also, and at the same time, pull us ever fur­ther apart. Read Tes­la’s full inter­view here, in which he also pre­dicts that women will become the “supe­ri­or sex,” not by virtue of “the shal­low phys­i­cal imi­ta­tion of men” but through “the awak­en­ing of the intel­lect.”

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Elec­tric Pho­to of Niko­la Tes­la, 1899

The Elec­tric Rise and Fall of Niko­la Tes­la: As Told by Tech­noil­lu­sion­ist Mar­co Tem­pest

The Secret His­to­ry of Sil­i­con Val­ley

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

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The Virtual Choir: Watch a Choir Conductor Digitally Unite 3500 Singers from Around the World

in Music, Technology | November 13th, 2019

For decades we’ve been hear­ing promis­es about how com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nol­o­gy will one day elim­i­nate dis­tance itself, mak­ing every­one around the globe feel as if they might as well be in the same room. Such a future would have its down­side as well as its upside, but even now, approach­ing the third decade of the 21st cen­tu­ry, it has­n’t quite arrived yet. Nev­er­the­less, we’ve already grown so used to the idea of real-time glob­al col­lab­o­ra­tion that it takes an extra­or­di­nar­i­ly ambi­tious project to let us step back and appre­ci­ate the tech­no­log­i­cal real­i­ty that makes it pos­si­ble. Take, for exam­ple, con­duc­tor Eric Whitacre’s Vir­tu­al Choir, whose per­for­mance of Whitacre’s own piece “Lux Arumque” appears above.

“Vir­tu­al,” here, is a bit of a mis­nomer, encour­ag­ing as it does Gib­son­ian visions of the 100-per­cent dig­i­tal voic­es of syn­thet­ic singers res­onat­ing pure­ly in cyber­space. And while Whitacre’s project would­n’t have been pos­si­ble with­out stream­ing dig­i­tal audio and video tech­nol­o­gy — as well as the infra­struc­ture of what we may as well still call cyber­space — it begins with the real voic­es of 100-per­cent ana­log humans.

185 such humans, to be pre­cise, based in twelve coun­tries, and all of them vis­i­ble on their sep­a­rate screens as Whitacre plays the role of con­duc­tor on his own. The much larg­er-scale per­for­mance of “Water Night,” a piece com­posed for the poet­ry of Octavio Paz, brings togeth­er 3,746 videos from 73 coun­tries, neces­si­tat­ing a cred­its sequence longer than the piece itself.

The Vir­tu­al Choir grew, as many such immense works do, from a small seed: “It all start­ed with this one young girl who sent me this video of her­self singing one of my choral pieces,” says Whitacre in this video on the prepa­ra­tion for the Vir­tu­al Choir’s “Sleep” video. “I was struck so hard by the beau­ty, the inti­ma­cy of it, the sweet­ness of it, and I thought, ‘Boy, it would be amaz­ing if we could get 100 peo­ple to do this and cut it all togeth­er.” The expe­ri­ence of assem­bling this vir­tu­al choir, or even hear­ing it, shows that “singing togeth­er and mak­ing music togeth­er is a fun­da­men­tal human expe­ri­ence,” and on a scale hard­ly imag­in­able a gen­er­a­tion or two ago. But on the most basic lev­el, even this new way of mak­ing music is mere­ly an expan­sion of the old­est way of mak­ing music: with one human voice, then anoth­er, and anoth­er.

via Swiss Miss

Relat­ed Con­tent:

30 Fans Joy­ous­ly Sing the Entire­ty of Bob Marley’s Leg­end Album in Uni­son

25 John Lennon Fans Sing His Album Work­ing Class Hero Word for Word, and Note for Note

Pat­ti Smith Sings “Peo­ple Have the Pow­er” with a Choir of 250 Fel­low Singers

Watch David Byrne Lead a Mas­sive Choir in Singing David Bowie’s “Heroes”

Watch Choirs Around the World Sim­u­late the Rain­storm in Toto’s “Africa” Using Only Their Hands

Bri­an Eno Lists the Ben­e­fits of Singing: A Long Life, Increased Intel­li­gence, and a Sound Civ­i­liza­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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 Face­book.

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MIT Researchers 3D Print a Bridge Imagined by Leonardo da Vinci in 1502— and Prove That It Actually Works

in History, MIT, Technology | October 15th, 2019

Pho­to by Gretchen Ertl, via MIT News

Unfor­tu­nate though it may be for the dream­ers of the world, we’re all judged not by what we imag­ine, but what we actu­al­ly do. This goes dou­ble for those specif­i­cal­ly tasked with cre­at­ing things in the phys­i­cal envi­ron­ment, from engi­neers and archi­tects to inven­tors and artists. Leonar­do da Vin­ci, the orig­i­nal “Renais­sance man,” was an engi­neer, archi­tect, inven­tor, artist, and more besides, and five cen­turies after his death we con­tin­ue to admire him for not just the works of art and tech­nol­o­gy he real­ized dur­ing his life­time, but also the ones that nev­er made it off his draw­ing board (or out of his note­books). And as we con­tin­ue to dis­cov­er, many of the lat­ter weren’t just flights of fan­cy, but gen­uine inno­va­tions ground­ed in real­i­ty.

Take the bridge Leonar­do pro­posed to Sul­tan Bayezid II, who in 1502 had “sent out the Renais­sance equiv­a­lent of a gov­ern­ment RFP (request for pro­pos­als), seek­ing a design for a bridge to con­nect Istan­bul with its neigh­bor city Gala­ta,” writes MIT News’ David L. Chan­dler. Writ­ing to the sul­tan, Leonar­do describes his design as “a mason­ry bridge as high as a build­ing, and even tall ships will be able to sail under it.”

At the time, such bridges required the sup­port of piers all along their spans, which pre­vent­ed large ships from pass­ing under­neath. But Leonar­do’s design would do the job with only “a sin­gle enor­mous arch.” About ten times longer than the typ­i­cal bridge of the ear­ly 16th cen­tu­ry, it took a page from the bridges of ancient Rome, designed as it was to “stand on its own under the force of grav­i­ty, with­out any fas­ten­ers or mor­tar to hold the stone togeth­er.”

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Alas, Leonar­do, who had bet­ter luck with Ital­ian patrons, did­n’t win this par­tic­u­lar com­mis­sion. His bridge design must at least have impressed the sul­tan with its sheer ambi­tion, but would it have held up? A team at MIT con­sist­ing of grad­u­ate Kar­ly Bast, pro­fes­sor John Ochsendorf, and under­grad­u­ate Michelle Xie recent­ly put it to the test, scru­ti­niz­ing the mate­r­i­al Leonar­do left behind, repli­cat­ing the geo­log­i­cal con­di­tions of the pro­posed site, and build­ing a 1:500 scale mod­el out of 126 3D-print­ed blocks. Not only could the mod­el bear weight using only the strength of its own geom­e­try, the design also came with oth­er fea­tures, such as sta­bi­liz­ing abut­ments (which Chan­dler com­pares to the legs of “a stand­ing sub­way rid­er widen­ing her stance to bal­ance in a sway­ing car”) to keep the bridge upright in that earth­quake-prone area of mod­ern-day Turkey.

That par­tic­u­lar loca­tion did­n’t get a bridge until 1845, when Valide Sul­tan ordered the con­struc­tion of the first, wood­en, Gala­ta Bridge. It stood for 18 years until its replace­ment by anoth­er wood­en bridge, part of an infra­struc­ture-build­ing push before Napoleon III’s vis­it to Istan­bul. The third Gala­ta Bridge, com­plet­ed in 1875 from a design by a British engi­neer­ing firm, float­ed on pon­toons. The fourth was a Ger­man-designed float­ing bridge in use from 1912 until a fire dam­aged it in 1992. Only the fifth and cur­rent Gala­ta Bridge, with its tram tracks above, its pedes­tri­an­ized deck full of shops and mar­ket spaces below, and it draw­bridge sec­tion in the mid­dle, was built by a Turk­ish com­pa­ny. In all its iter­a­tions, the Gala­ta Bridge has become one of Istan­bul’s cul­tur­al ref­er­ence points and major attrac­tions as well — not that hav­ing been designed by Leonar­do would have hurt its image any.

via MIT News/Pop­u­lar Mechan­ics

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Build Leonar­do da Vinci’s Inge­nious Self-Sup­port­ing Bridge: Renais­sance Inno­va­tions You Can Still Enjoy Today

Leonar­do da Vin­ci Draws Designs of Future War Machines: Tanks, Machine Guns & More

Watch Leonar­do da Vinci’s Musi­cal Inven­tion, the Vio­la Organ­ista, Being Played for the Very First Time

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry Of Avi­a­tion: From Leonar­do da Vinci’s Sketch­es to Apol­lo 11

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Huge Note­book Col­lec­tions, the Codex Forster, Now Dig­i­tized in High-Res­o­lu­tion: Explore Them Online

A Com­plete Dig­i­ti­za­tion of Leonar­do Da Vinci’s Codex Atlanti­cus, the Largest Exist­ing Col­lec­tion of His Draw­ings & Writ­ings

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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 Face­book.

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26-Year-Old Steve Jobs Debates the Utopian & Dystopian Promise of the Computer (1981)

in History, Technology | October 8th, 2019

The deep­er we get into the 21st cen­tu­ry, the few­er aspects of our lives remain dis­con­nect­ed from the dig­i­tal realm. The con­ve­nience of this arrange­ment is unde­ni­able, but the increas­ing dif­fi­cul­ty of get­ting through a day with­out hear­ing the lat­est ver­sion of the pub­lic argu­ment about pri­va­cy and data secu­ri­ty sug­gests an accom­pa­ny­ing dis­com­fort as well. Have our online lives stolen our pri­va­cy — or have we per­haps freely giv­en it away? Some us now even look long­ing­ly back­ward to a time before not just social media but the inter­net as we know it, a time in which, we imag­ine, nobody had to wor­ry about the large-scale har­vest­ing and sale of per­son­al infor­ma­tion.

As the 1981 Night­line clip above reveals, these con­cerns went main­stream well before most Amer­i­cans owned com­put­ers, much less went online with them. Even so, Ted Kop­pel could open the seg­ment claim­ing that “as a soci­ety, we’ve become used to com­put­er prob­lems of one kind or anoth­er, just as we’ve become used to com­put­ers. We’re so used to them, in fact, that few of us stop to think of the extent to which they now play a role in our every­day lives, a role that shows every sign of grow­ing even big­ger.”

There fol­lows footage of the con­texts in which com­put­ers involved them­selves in the lives of the aver­age per­son in the ear­ly 80s: mak­ing a phone call, get­ting mon­ey from the ATM, buy­ing gro­ceries at the super­mar­ket, book­ing an air­line tick­et. Nev­er­the­less, actu­al­ly own­ing a com­put­er your­self could still get you inter­viewed on the news with the chy­ron “Home-Com­put­er Own­er” beneath your name. After we hear from one such enthu­si­ast, the scene switch­es to the head­quar­ters of the five-year-old Apple Com­put­er, “the Big Apple in this land of high tech­nol­o­gy.”

A 26-year-old Steve Jobs appears to describe his com­pa­ny’s cre­ation as “a 21st-cen­tu­ry bicy­cle that ampli­fies a cer­tain intel­lec­tu­al abil­i­ty that man has,” one whose effects on soci­ety will “far out­strip even those that the petro­chem­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion has had.” But then comes the anti-com­put­er coun­ter­point: “Some peo­ple feel threat­ened by them,” says reporter Ken Kashi­wa­hara. “Some think they tend to dehu­man­ize, and oth­ers fear they may even­tu­al­ly take over their jobs.” Over satel­lite links, Kop­pel then brings on Jobs and inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist Daniel Burn­ham for a debate about the promise and per­il of the com­put­er.

“The gov­ern­ment has the capac­i­ty, by using com­put­ers, to get all kinds of infor­ma­tion on us that we’re real­ly not even aware that they have,” Kop­pel asks Jobs, under­scor­ing Burn­ham’s line of argu­ment. “Isn’t that dan­ger­ous?” For Jobs, “the best pro­tec­tion against some­thing like that is a very lit­er­ate pub­lic, and in this case com­put­er lit­er­ate.” Pre­dict­ing, cor­rect­ly, that every house­hold in the coun­try would even­tu­al­ly have its own com­put­er, he finds reas­sur­ance in the inevitably wide dis­tri­b­u­tion of com­put­ing pow­er and com­put­er lit­er­a­cy across the pub­lic, mean­ing “that cen­tral­ized intel­li­gence will have the least effect on our lives with­out us know­ing it.”

But Burn­ham nev­er­the­less warns of “a tremen­dous dan­ger that the pub­lic is not aware of enough at this moment.” He did­n’t describe that dan­ger in the forms of over­grown e‑commerce or social media giants — both of those con­cepts hav­ing yet to be real­ized in any form — or even ide­o­log­i­cal­ly opposed for­eign coun­tries, but the Unit­ed States’ own Army and Cen­sus Bureau. What hap­pens when they decide to use the data in their pos­ses­sion to “break the rules”? Com­put­ers are here to stay, it seems, but so are our incli­na­tions as human beings, and one won­ders how clean­ly the two can ever be rec­on­ciled. As apho­rist Aaron Haspel puts it, “We can have pri­va­cy or we can have con­ve­nience, and we choose con­ve­nience, every time.”

via Pale­o­fu­ture

Relat­ed Con­tent:

From the Annals of Opti­mism: The News­pa­per Indus­try in 1981 Imag­ines its Dig­i­tal Future

Steve Jobs on Life: “Stay Hun­gry, Stay Fool­ish”

A Young Steve Jobs Teach­es a Class at MIT (1992)

Steve Jobs Mus­es on What’s Wrong with Amer­i­can Edu­ca­tion, 1995

Steve Jobs Shares a Secret for Suc­cess: Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for Help

Steve Jobs Nar­rates the First “Think Dif­fer­ent” Ad (Nev­er Aired)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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 Face­book.

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