The 1855 Map That Revolutionized Disease Prevention & Data Visualization: Discover John Snow’s Broad Street Pump Map

in Data, Design, Health, History, Science | July 15th, 2019

No, he didn’t help defeat an implaca­ble zom­bie army intent on wip­ing out all life. But Eng­lish obste­tri­cian John Snow seems as impor­tant as the sim­i­lar­ly-named Game of Thrones hero for his role in per­suad­ing mod­ern med­i­cine of the germ the­o­ry of dis­ease. Dur­ing the 1854 out­break of cholera in Lon­don, Snow con­vinced author­i­ties and crit­ics that the dis­ease spread from a con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed water pump on Broad Street, lead­ing to the now-leg­endary info­graph­ic map above show­ing the inci­dences of cholera clus­tered around the pump.

Snow’s per­sis­tence result­ed in the removal of the han­dle from the Broad Street pump and has been cred­it­ed with end­ing an epi­dem­ic that claimed 500 lives. The Broad Street pump map has become “an endur­ing fea­ture of the folk­lore of pub­lic health and epi­demi­ol­o­gy,” write the authors of an arti­cle pub­lished in The Lancet. They also point out that, con­trary to pop­u­lar retellings, the “map did not give rise to the insight” that the pump and its germ-cov­ered han­dle caused the out­break. “Rather it tend­ed to con­firm the­o­ries already held by the var­i­ous inves­ti­ga­tors.”

Snow him­self pub­lished a pam­phlet in 1849 called “On the Mode of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion of Cholera” in which he argued that “cholera is com­mu­ni­cat­ed by the evac­u­a­tions from the ali­men­ta­ry canal.” As he remind­ed read­ers of The Edin­burgh Med­ical Jour­nal in an 1856 let­ter, in that same year, “Dr William Budd pub­lished a pam­phlet ‘On Malig­nant Cholera’ in which he expressed views sim­i­lar to my own.” Germ the­o­ry had a long, dis­tin­guished his­to­ry already, and Snow and his con­tem­po­raries made sound, evi­dence-based argu­ments for it.

But their posi­tion “large­ly went ignored by the med­ical estab­lish­ment,” notes Randy Alfred at Wired, “and was opposed by a local water com­pa­ny near one Lon­don out­break.” The accept­ed, main­stream sci­en­tif­ic opin­ion held that all dis­ease was spread through “mias­ma,” or bad air. Pol­lu­tion, it was thought, must be the cause. After the pump handle’s removal, Snow pub­lished an 1855 mono­graph on water­borne dis­eases. This was the first pub­lic appear­ance of the leg­endary map—after the removal of the han­dle.

Help­ing to inform Snow’s map, anoth­er inves­ti­ga­tor, parish priest Hen­ry White­head had “con­clud­ed that it was the wash­ing of soiled dia­pers into drains which flowed to the com­mu­nal cesspool that con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed the pump and start­ed the out­break,” writes Atlas Obscu­ra. White­head, a for­mer crit­ic of germ the­o­ry, lat­er point­ed out that the removal of the pump han­dle didn’t actu­al­ly stop the epi­dem­ic, which, he said, “had already run its course” by that point.

Nonethe­less, Snow and oth­er pro­po­nents of the the­o­ry were vin­di­cat­ed, White­head had to admit, and Snow’s inter­ven­tion “had prob­a­bly every­thing to do with pre­vent­ing a new out­break.” The sim­ple, yet sophis­ti­cat­ed data visu­al­iza­tion would lead to rad­i­cal new ways of con­cep­tu­al­iz­ing dis­ease out­breaks, help­ing to stop or pre­vent who knows how many epi­demics before they killed hun­dreds or thou­sands. Snow’s map also deserves cred­it for giv­ing “data jour­nal­ists a mod­el of how to work today.”

It was hard­ly the first or only data visu­al­iza­tion of cholera out­breaks of the time. “As ear­ly as the 1830s,” Visu­al Cap­i­tal­ist points out, “geo­g­ra­phers began using spa­cial analy­sis to study cholera epi­demi­ol­o­gy.” But Snow’s was by far the most influ­en­tial, and effec­tive, of them all. In his TED talk above, jour­nal­ist Steven John­son (author of The Ghost Map:The Sto­ry of Lon­don’s Most Ter­ri­fy­ing Epi­dem­ic and How It Changed Sci­ence, Cities, and the Mod­ern World) tells the sto­ry of how the out­break, and Snow’s the­o­ry and map, “helped cre­ate the world that we live in today, and par­tic­u­lar­ly the kind of city that we live in today.”

Read a Q&A with John­son here; head over to The Guardian’s Data Blog to see Snow’s visu­al­iza­tion recre­at­ed over a mod­ern, satel­lite-view map of Lon­don and the Soho neigh­bor­hood of the famous Broad Street pump; and learn more about Snow and dead­ly cholera out­breaks in the crowd­ed Euro­pean cities of the ear­ly 19th cen­tu­ry at the John Snow Archive and Research Com­pan­ion online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Flo­rence Nightin­gale Saved Lives by Cre­at­ing Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Visu­al­iza­tions of Sta­tis­tics (1855)

Napoleon’s Dis­as­trous Inva­sion of Rus­sia Detailed in an 1869 Data Visu­al­iza­tion: It’s Been Called “the Best Sta­tis­ti­cal Graph­ic Ever Drawn”

The Art of Data Visu­al­iza­tion: How to Tell Com­plex Sto­ries Through Smart Design

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

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Why Should We Read Pioneering Sci-Fi Writer Octavia Butler? An Animated Video Makes the Case

in Sci Fi | July 15th, 2019

Two of the most star­tling­ly orig­i­nal sci­ence fic­tion writ­ers of the past cen­tu­ry, Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. But­ler, emerged in the 60s and 70s and cre­at­ed dystopi­an visions that res­onate with us today with more depth and imme­di­a­cy than the major­i­ty of their con­tem­po­raries. Both writ­ers also hap­pened to be African Amer­i­can. But why should this detail mat­ter? Why indeed, asked But­ler, in an equal­ly rel­e­vant ques­tion, “is sci­ence fic­tion so white?” She went on to explore the ques­tion in a 1980 essay pub­lished in Trans­mis­sion, not with a his­to­ry of the genre, but with rebut­tals to the rea­sons for exclud­ing peo­ple like her.

“A more insid­i­ous prob­lem than out­right racism is sim­ply habit, cus­tom,” But­ler writes. Peo­ple get com­fort­able with things as they are—an atti­tude anti­thet­i­cal to the spir­it of sci-fi. “Sci­ence fic­tion, more than any oth­er genre deals with change—change in sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy, and social change. But sci­ence fic­tion itself changes slow­ly, often under protest.”

But­ler died too young, in 2006 at age 58; but she lived to see resis­tance to change in sci­ence fic­tion per­sist into the 21st cen­tu­ry. Yet in her most com­pelling, and slight­ly ter­ri­fy­ing, pro­jec­tion into the future—her mid-90s Para­ble series of nov­els—change is the only thing that any­one can rely on.

All that you touch, you Change. All that you Change Changes you.

N.K. Jemi­son quotes these lines from Para­ble of the Sow­er in her intro­duc­tion to the book’s reis­sue this year. Pub­lished in 1993, Para­ble’s futur­ism didn’t have the same fris­son as that of, say, William Gib­son at the time. “Rov­ing, uncon­test­ed gangs of pedophiles and drug-addict­ed pyro­ma­ni­acs? Slav­ery 2.0? A pow­er­ful coali­tion of white-suprema­cist, homo­pho­bic, Chris­t­ian zealots tak­ing over the coun­try?” writes Jemi­son. “Nah, I thought, and hoped But­ler would get back to aliens soon.” Set in the con­text of a U.S. post-mas­sive cli­mate col­lapse (pos­si­bly), hyper-finan­cial­iza­tion, and cor­po­rate rule.… the nov­el now seems all too pre­scient to its cur­rent-day read­ers.

But even Butler’s alien sto­ries are sto­ries about humans in rad­i­cal tran­si­tion, and col­lec­tive social actions with both dev­as­tat­ing and trans­for­ma­tive out­comes. In Dawn, the first nov­el in her Xeno­gen­e­sis tril­o­gy (now called “Lilith’s Brood”), human woman Lilith Iyapo “awak­ens after 250 years of sta­sis,” fol­low­ing an apoc­a­lyp­tic nuclear war on Earth, “to find her­self sur­round­ed by aliens called the Oankali,” as the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed les­son above by Ayana Jamieson and Moya Bai­ley tells it. These beings want to trade DNA with the remain­ing humans, there­by cre­at­ing a hybrid species. The alter­na­tive is ster­il­iza­tion.

The chill­ing sce­nario in Dawn and its suc­ces­sors has its moments of Love­craft­ian dread, but it goes in an even stranger direc­tion, bring­ing an added dimen­sion to the mean­ing of the word “dehu­man­iza­tion.” What would it mean to slow­ly trans­form into anoth­er species? Such pro­found­ly uni­ver­sal ques­tions about the mean­ing of human iden­ti­ty reached “read­ers who had been exclud­ed from the genre,” notes Emanuel­la Grin­berg at CNN. But­ler peo­ples her books with humans of every col­or and eth­nic­i­ty, and aliens only she might have imag­ined. But most of her pro­tag­o­nists are black and brown women. Many of the read­ers But­ler influ­enced, like Jemi­son, are women of col­or who became genre-chang­ing sci-fi writ­ers them­selves.

Butler’s work “helped define the lit­er­ary cor­ner­stone of Afro­fu­tur­ism,” notes Grin­berg. Her writ­ing was strate­gic, a way to con­front dehu­man­iz­ing polit­i­cal and social polit­i­cal real­i­ties. Para­ble of the Sow­er, the TED les­son explains, was part­ly a response to Butler’s home state of California’s Propo­si­tion 187, which denied undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grants basic health­care, edu­ca­tion, and basic ser­vices. In the fol­low-up, Para­ble of the Tal­ents (1998), an author­i­tar­i­an pres­i­den­tial can­di­date cam­paigns on the slo­gan “Make Amer­i­can Great Again.” Her best-sell­ing nov­el, Kin­dred, pub­lished in 1979, tells the sto­ry of a con­tem­po­rary woman repeat­ed­ly pulled back in time to the Mary­land plan­ta­tion of her enslaved ances­tor.

Why should we read Octavia But­ler? You’ll have to read her to answer that ques­tion your­self. But I’d ven­ture to say—along with the intro to her life and work above—because she had a bet­ter read on how the time she lived in would turn into the time we live in now than near­ly any­one writ­ing at the time; because she told strange, won­der­ful, out­landish, com­pelling sto­ries that stretched the imag­i­na­tion with­out los­ing sight of the human core; because, like Ursu­la K. Le Guin, she chal­lenged the world as it is with pro­found visions of what it might be; and because she not only excelled as a sto­ry­teller but specif­i­cal­ly as a com­mit­ted sci­ence fic­tion sto­ry­teller, one who deeply touched, and thus deeply changed, the form.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Octavia Butler’s 1998 Dystopi­an Nov­el Fea­tures a Fascis­tic Pres­i­den­tial Can­di­date Who Promis­es to “Make Amer­i­ca Great Again”

The Dai­ly Rit­u­als of 143 Famous Female Cre­ators: Octavia But­ler, Edith Whar­ton, Coco Chanel & More

Cel­e­brate the Life & Writ­ing of Ursu­la K. Le Guin (R.I.P.) with Clas­sic Radio Drama­ti­za­tions of Her Sto­ries

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

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George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, Praised as the Greatest Comic Strip of All Time, Gets Digitized as Early Installments Enter the Public Domain

in Comics/Cartoons | July 15th, 2019

“As a car­toon­ist, I read Krazy Kat with awe and won­der,” writes Calvin and Hobbes cre­ator Bill Wat­ter­son in his intro­duc­tion to The Kom­plete Kolor Krazy Kat. The cre­ator of quite pos­si­bly the most beloved com­ic strip of the past thir­ty years calls Krazy Kat “such a pure and com­plete­ly real­ized per­son­al vision that the strip’s inner mech­a­nism is ulti­mate­ly as unknow­able as George Her­ri­man,” the artist who wrote and drew it for its entire three-decade run from 1913 to 1944. “I mar­vel at how this fan­ci­ful world could be so force­ful­ly imag­ined and brought to paper with such imme­di­a­cy. THIS is how good a com­ic strip can be.”

High praise, espe­cial­ly from the hyper­bole-resis­tant Wat­ter­son, a sharp-eyed crit­ic of his art form and per­ceiv­er of its unre­al­ized poten­tial. “Quirky, indi­vid­ual, and uncom­pro­mised, Krazy Kat is one of the very few com­ic strips that takes full advan­tage of its medi­um. There are some things a com­ic strip can do that no oth­er medi­um, not even ani­ma­tion, can touch, and Krazy Kat is a vir­tu­al essay on com­ic strip essence.”

The “self-con­scious­ly baroque nar­ra­tions and mono­logues” show that “words can be fun­ny in them­selves”; “the sky turns from black to white to zigza­gs and plaids sim­ply because, in a com­ic strip, it CAN”; its sur­re­al Ari­zona desert set­ting “is a char­ac­ter in the sto­ry, and the strip is ‘about’ that land­scape as much as it is about the ani­mals who pop­u­late it,” Ignatz Mouse, Off­is­sa Pupp, and the tit­u­lar Krazy Kat.

Ignatz Mouse “demon­strates his con­tempt for Krazy by throw­ing bricks at her” (though their gen­ders, so mod­ern observers note, were nev­er quite sta­ble), “Krazy rein­ter­prets the bricks as signs of love,” and Off­is­sa Pupp, the desert’s lone law­man, is “oblig­ed by duty (and regard for Krazy) to thwart and pun­ish Ignatz’s ‘sin,’ there­by inter­fer­ing with a process that’s sat­is­fy­ing to every­one for all the wrong rea­sons.”

Now read­ers every­where can feel that sat­is­fac­tion for them­selves at the web site of Krazy Kat fan Joel Franu­sic, who has launched a project to find and dig­i­tize (using Machine Learn­ing) all of Her­ri­man’s strips that have so far fall­en into the pub­lic domain. Franu­sic writes of hav­ing got into Krazy Kat in the first place because of the pres­ence of Calvin and Hobbes in his child­hood: “I remem­bered how Bill Wat­ter­son ref­er­enced Krazy Kat as a big rea­son why he insist­ed on get­ting a larg­er full col­or for­mat for his Sun­day com­ic strips.”

I myself first picked up a Krazy Kat col­lec­tion as a Calvin and Hobbes-lov­ing ele­men­tary school­er, and soon found myself cap­ti­vat­ed by the sheer den­si­ty of strange­ness in its pages. But read enough of Her­ri­man’s mas­ter­work, and that strange­ness takes on a strong mean­ing that nev­er­the­less dif­fers from read­er to read­er. “Krazy Kat has been described as a para­ble of love, a metaphor for democ­ra­cy, a ‘sur­re­al­is­tic’ poem, unfold­ing over years and years,” writes Chris Ware, anoth­er of the most respect­ed com­ic-strip artists alive. “It is all of these, but so much more: it is a por­trait of Amer­i­ca, a self-por­trait of Her­ri­man, and, I believe, the first attempt to paint the full range  of human con­scious­ness in the lan­guage of the com­ic strip.” And now, 75 years after its con­clu­sion, much more of human­i­ty can enjoy Krazy Kat than ever. Explore dig­i­tized scans at Franu­sic’s web site. Or pick up a copy of the new edi­tion of The Com­plete Krazy Kat in Col­or, a col­or fac­sim­i­le of the com­plete pages of Krazy Kat 1935–44.

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Umber­to Eco Explains the Poet­ic Pow­er of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts

24,000 Vin­tage Car­toons from the Library of Con­gress Illus­trate the His­to­ry of This Mod­ern Art Form (1780–1977)

Down­load 15,000+ Free Gold­en Age Comics from the Dig­i­tal Com­ic Muse­um

Down­load Over 22,000 Gold­en & Sil­ver Age Com­ic Books from the Com­ic Book Plus Archive

Clas­sic Children’s Books Now Dig­i­tized and Put Online: Revis­it Vin­tage Works from the 19th & 20th Cen­turies

A Dig­i­tal Archive of Heavy Met­al, the Influ­en­tial “Adult Fan­ta­sy Mag­a­zine” That Fea­tured the Art of Moe­bius, H.R. Giger & More

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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An Illustrated Version of The Mueller Report: Read Online an Edition Created by the Author of Black Hawk Down and an Illustrator from Archer

in Comics/Cartoons, Current Affairs | July 14th, 2019

The 448 page Mueller Report does­n’t make for breezy beach read­ing. That’s for sure. But, “buried with­in the Mueller report, there is a nar­ra­tive that reads in parts like a thriller.” Work­ing with that the­o­ry, Insider.com “hired Mark Bow­den, a jour­nal­ist and author known for his bril­liant works of nar­ra­tive non­fic­tion like Black Hawk Down, Killing Pablo, and Hue 1968.” And they gave him an assign­ment: “Use the inter­views and facts laid out in the Mueller Report (plus those from reli­able, fact-checked sources and pub­lished first­hand accounts)” and cre­ate an account that’s “so grip­ping it will hold your atten­tion (and maybe your con­gres­sion­al rep­re­sen­ta­tive’s).” They also hired “Chad Hurd, an illus­tra­tor from the art depart­ment of Archer,” and “asked him to draw out scenes from the report to bring them to life.” Find the result­ing illus­trat­ed edi­tion of The Mueller Report right here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Mueller Report Released as a Free Well-For­mat­ted eBook (by The Dig­i­tal Pub­lic Library of Amer­i­ca)

Watch a Star-Stud­ded Cast Read The Mueller Report: John Lith­gow, Kevin Kline, Sigour­ney Weaver, Annette Ben­ing & More

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A Beautiful 1870 Visualization of the Hallucinations That Come Before a Migraine

in History, Science | July 12th, 2019

Headaches num­ber among human­i­ty’s most com­mon ail­ments. The headache-relat­ed dis­or­ders known as migraines may be rar­er, afflict­ing rough­ly fif­teen per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion, but they’re also much more severe. Besides a headache that can last as long as three days, migraines can also come with var­i­ous oth­er symp­toms includ­ing nau­sea as well as sen­si­tiv­i­ty to light, sound, and smells. They even cause some suf­fer­ers to hal­lu­ci­nate: the visu­al ele­ments of these pre-migraine “auras” might take the shape of dis­tor­tions, vibra­tions, zig-zag lines, bright lights, blobs, or blind spots. Some­times they also come in col­or, and bril­liant col­or at that.

Those col­ors jump right out of this 1870 draw­ing by Eng­lish physi­cian Hubert Airy, with which he sought to cap­ture his own visu­al expe­ri­ence of a migraine. He “first became aware of his afflic­tion in the fall of 1854,” writes Nation­al Geo­graph­ic’s Greg Miller, “when he noticed a small blind spot inter­fer­ing with his abil­i­ty to read. ‘At first it looked just like the spot which you see after hav­ing looked at the sun or some bright object,’ he lat­er wrote. But the blind spot was grow­ing, its edges tak­ing on a zigzag shape that remind­ed Airy of the bas­tions of a for­ti­fied medieval town.” As Airy describes it, “All the inte­ri­or of the for­ti­fi­ca­tion, so to speak, was boil­ing and rolling about in a most won­der­ful man­ner as if it was some thick liq­uid all alive.”

To a migra­neur, that descrip­tion may sound famil­iar, and the draw­ing that accom­pa­nied it in the Philo­soph­i­cal Trans­ac­tions of the Roy­al Soci­ety in 1870 may look even more so. Called “arguably the most beau­ti­ful sci­en­tif­ic records of migraine aura ever made” by G.D. Schott in Brain, Airy’s draw­ings “record the progress and expan­sion of his own visu­al dis­tur­bances” over their half-hour-long onset. Apart from their stark beau­ty, writes Miller, the set of draw­ings “antic­i­pates dis­cov­er­ies in neu­ro­science that were still decades in the future,” such as the assump­tion that the hal­lu­ci­na­tions orig­i­nate in the brain rather than the eyes and that cer­tain parts of the field of vision cor­re­spond to cer­tain parts of the visu­al cor­tex.

“There’s still much we don’t know about migraines and migraine auras,” Miller writes. “One hypoth­e­sis is that a sort of elec­tri­cal wave sweeps across the visu­al cor­tex, caus­ing hal­lu­ci­na­tions that spread across the cor­re­spond­ing parts of the visu­al field” — an idea with which Airy’s ear­ly ren­der­ings also accord. And what about the source of all those col­ors? Elec­tri­cal waves pass­ing through parts of the brain “that con­tain neu­rons that respond to spe­cif­ic col­ors” may be respon­si­ble, but near­ly 150 years after the pub­li­ca­tion of Airy’s draw­ings, “no one real­ly knows.” Migraine research of the kind pio­neered by Airy him­self may have dis­pelled some of the mys­tery sur­round­ing the afflic­tion, but a great deal nev­er­the­less remains. Airy’s draw­ings, still among the most vivid rep­re­sen­ta­tions of the visu­al aspect of migraines ever cre­at­ed, will no doubt inspire gen­er­a­tions of future neu­ro­sci­en­tists to find out more.

via Greg Miller at Nation­al Geo­graph­ic and don’t miss his book: All Over the Map: A Car­to­graph­ic Odyssey.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Oliv­er Sacks Explains the Biol­o­gy of Hal­lu­ci­na­tions: “We See with the Eyes, But with the Brain as Well”

When Jean-Paul Sartre Had a Bad Mesca­line Trip and Then Hal­lu­ci­nat­ed That He Was Being Fol­lowed by Crabs

Hunter S. Thompson’s Per­son­al Hang­over Cure (and the Real Sci­ence of Hang­overs)

Free Guid­ed Imagery Record­ings Help Kids Cope with Pain, Stress & Anx­i­ety

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Hear the First Recording of the Human Voice (1860)

in Music | July 12th, 2019

When inven­tor Édouard-Léon Scott de Mar­t­inville sang a nurs­ery rhyme into his phonoau­to­gram in 1860, he had no plans on ever play­ing this record­ing back. A pre­cur­sor to the wax cylin­der, the phonoau­to­gram took inputs for the study of sound waves, but could not be turned into an out­put device. How amaz­ing then, that 150 or so years lat­er, we can hear the voice of Scott in what is now con­sid­ered the first ever record­ing of human sound.

What you will hear in the above video are the var­i­ous stages of recon­struct­ing and reverse engi­neer­ing the voice that sung on that April day in 1860, until, like wip­ing away decades of dirt and soot, the orig­i­nal art is revealed.

Scott had looked to the inven­tion of pho­tog­ra­phy and won­dered if some­thing sim­i­lar could be done with sound waves, focused as he was on improv­ing stenog­ra­phy. And so the phonoau­to­gram took in sound vibra­tions through a diaphragm, which moved a sty­lus against a rotat­ing cylin­der cov­ered in lamp­black. What was left was a wig­gly line in a con­cen­tric cir­cle.

But how to play them back? That was the prob­lem. Scott’s inven­tion nev­er turned a prof­it and he went back to book­selling. The inven­tion and some of the paper cylin­ders went into muse­ums.

In 2008, Amer­i­can audio his­to­ri­ans dis­cov­ered the scrib­bles and turned to the Lawrence Berke­ley Nation­al Lab­o­ra­to­ry and a soft­ware called IRENE. The soft­ware was designed to extract sounds from wax cylin­ders with­out touch­ing the del­i­cate sur­faces, and the first pass revealed what they thought at first was a young woman or child singing “Au Clair de la lune,” the French nurs­ery rhyme (not the Debussy piano work).

How­ev­er, a fur­ther exam­i­na­tion of Scott’s notes revealed that the record­ing was at a much slow­er speed, and it was a man–most prob­a­bly Scott–singing the lul­la­by.

The video shows the stages that brought Scott back to life: Denois­ing a lot of extra­ne­ous sound; stretch­ing the record­ing back to nat­ur­al time; “tun­ing and quantizing”–correcting for imper­fec­tions in the human-turned cylin­der; clean­ing up har­mon­ics; and final­ly adding fur­ther har­mon­ics, reverb and a stereo effect.

The result is less an unrec­og­niz­able ghost sig­nal and more a touch­ing sound of human­i­ty, desir­ing some­how to have their voice live on.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

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

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

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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The New David Bowie Barbie Doll Released to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of “Space Oddity”

in Music, Random | July 12th, 2019

This week Open Cul­ture com­mem­o­rat­ed the 50th anniver­sary of the release of David Bowie’s “Space Odd­i­ty” by explor­ing the song’s rela­tion­ship to the Apol­lo 11 moon land­ing and Stan­ley Kubrick­’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Mat­tel, they han­dled things a lit­tle dif­fer­ent­ly, releas­ing a new David Bowie Bar­bie Doll. Here’s their spiel:

  • In the defin­i­tive cel­e­bra­tion of two pop cul­ture icons, Bar­bie hon­ors the ulti­mate pop chameleon, Eng­lish singer, song­writer and actor, David Bowie.
  • This col­lectible Bar­bie doll wears the metal­lic Zig­gy Star­dust ‘space suit’ with red and blue stripes, flared shoul­ders and Bowie’s sig­na­ture cher­ry-red plat­form boots.
  • Spe­cial details include bold make­up — fea­tur­ing the famed astral sphere fore­head icon — and a hair­style inspired by Bowie’s fiery-red locks.
  • Spe­cial­ly designed pack­ag­ing makes Bar­bie David Bowie the ulti­mate collector’s item for Bowie and Bar­bie fans alike.
  • Hon­or David Bowie’s extra­or­di­nary tal­ent and unde­ni­able influ­ence with Bar­bie David Bowie doll.

You can pur­chase it online.

Relat­ed Con­tent

David Bowie’s “Space Odd­i­ty” and the Apol­lo 11 Moon Land­ing Turn 50 This Month: Cel­e­brate Two Giant Leaps That Took Place 9 Days Apart

David Bowie’s Top 100 Books

Hear Demo Record­ings of David Bowie’s “Zig­gy Star­dust,” “Space Odd­i­ty” & “Changes”

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The Oldest Book Printed with Movable Type is Not The Gutenberg Bible: Jikji, a Collection of Korean Buddhist Teachings, Predated It By 78 Years and It’s Now Digitized Online

in Books, History | July 11th, 2019

The his­to­ry of the print­ed word is full of bib­li­o­graph­ic twists and turns, major his­tor­i­cal moments, and the sig­nif­i­cant print­ing of books now so obscure no one has read them since their pub­li­ca­tion. Most of us have only the sketchi­est notion of how mass-pro­duced print­ed books came into being—a few scat­tered dates and names. But every school­child can tell you the first book ever print­ed, and every­one knows the first words of that book: “In the begin­ning….”

The first Guten­berg Bible, print­ed in 1454 by Johannes Guten­berg, intro­duced the world to mov­able type, his­to­ry tells us. It is “uni­ver­sal­ly acknowl­edged as the most impor­tant of all print­ed books,” writes Mar­garet Leslie Davis, author of the recent­ly pub­lished The Lost Guten­berg: The Astound­ing Sto­ry of One Book’s Five-Hun­dred-Year Odyssey. In 1900, Mark Twain expressed the sen­ti­ment in a let­ter “com­ment­ing on the open­ing of the Guten­berg Muse­um,” writes M. Sophia New­man at Lithub. “What the world is to-day,” he declared, “good and bad, it owes to Guten­berg. Every­thing can be traced to this source.”

There is kind of an over­sim­pli­fied truth in the state­ment. The print­ed word (and the print­ed Bible, at that) did, in large part, deter­mine the course of Euro­pean his­to­ry, which, through empire, deter­mined the course of glob­al events after the “Guten­berg rev­o­lu­tion.” But there is anoth­er sto­ry of print entire­ly inde­pen­dent of book his­to­ry in Europe, one that also deter­mined world his­to­ry with the preser­va­tion of Bud­dhist, Chi­nese dynas­tic, and Islam­ic texts. And one that begins “before Johannes Guten­berg was even born,” New­man points out.

The old­est extant text ever print­ed with mov­able type pre­dates Guten­berg him­self (born in 1400) by 23 years, and pre­dates the print­ing of his Bible by 78 years. It is the Jikji, print­ed in Korea, a col­lec­tion of Bud­dhist teach­ings by Seon mas­ter Bae­gun and print­ed in mov­able type by his stu­dents Seok-chan and Dai­jam in 1377. (Seon is a Kore­an form of Chan or Zen Bud­dhism.) Only the sec­ond vol­ume of the print­ing has sur­vived, and you can see sev­er­al images from it here.

Impres­sive as this may be, the Jikji does not have the hon­or of being the first book print­ed with mov­able type, only the old­est sur­viv­ing exam­ple. The tech­nol­o­gy could go back two cen­turies ear­li­er. Mar­garet Davis nods to this his­to­ry, New­man con­cedes, writ­ing that “mov­able type was an 11th cen­tu­ry Chi­nese inven­tion, refined in Korea in 1230, before meet­ing con­di­tions in Europe that would allow it to flour­ish.” This is more than most pop­u­lar accounts of the print­ed word say on the mat­ter, but it’s still an inac­cu­rate and high­ly cur­so­ry sum­ma­ry of the evi­dence.

New­man her­self says quite a lot more. In essays at Lithub and Tri­cy­cle, she describes how print­ing tech­niques devel­oped in Asia and were tak­en up in Korea in the 1200s by the Goryeo dynasty, who com­mis­sioned a print­er named Choe Yun-ui to recon­struct a wood­block print of the mas­sive col­lec­tion of ancient Bud­dhists texts called the Tip­i­ta­ka after the Mon­gols burned the only Kore­an copy. By cast­ing “indi­vid­ual char­ac­ters in met­al” and arrang­ing them in a frame—the same process Guten­berg used—he was able to com­plete the project by 1250, 200 years before Gutenberg’s press.

This text, how­ev­er, did not sur­vive, nor did the count­less num­ber of oth­ers print­ed when the tech­nol­o­gy spread across the Mon­gol empire on the Silk Road and took root with the Mus­lim Uyghurs. It is pos­si­ble, though “no clear his­tor­i­cal evi­dence” yet sup­ports the con­tention, that mov­able type spread to Europe from Asia along trade routes. “If there was any con­nec­tion,” wrote Joseph Need­ham in Sci­ence and Civ­i­liza­tion in Chi­na, “in the spread of print­ing between Asia and the West, the Uyghurs, who used both block print­ing and mov­able type, had good oppor­tu­ni­ties to play an impor­tant role in this intro­duc­tion.”

With­out sur­viv­ing doc­u­men­ta­tion, this ear­ly his­to­ry of print­ing in Asia relies on sec­ondary sources. But “the entire his­to­ry of the print­ing press” in Europe” is like­wise “rid­dled with gaps,” New­man writes. What we do know is that Jikji, a col­lec­tion of Kore­an Zen Bud­dhist teach­ings, is the world’s old­est extant book print­ed with mov­able type. The myth of Johannes Guten­berg as “a lone genius who trans­formed human cul­ture,” as Davis writes, “endures because the sweep of what fol­lowed is so vast that it feels almost myth­ic and needs an ori­gin sto­ry to match.” But this is one inven­tive indi­vid­ual in the his­to­ry of print­ing, not the orig­i­nal, god­like source of mov­able type.

Guten­berg makes sense as a con­ve­nient start­ing point for the growth and world­wide spread of cap­i­tal­ism and Euro­pean Chris­tian­i­ty. His inno­va­tion worked much faster than ear­li­er sys­tems, and oth­ers that devel­oped around the same time, in which frames were pressed by hand against the paper. Flows of new cap­i­tal enabled the rapid spread of his machine across Europe. The achieve­ment of the Guten­berg Bible is not dimin­ished by a fuller his­to­ry. But “what gets left out” of the usu­al sto­ry, as New­man tells us in great detail, “is star­tling­ly rich.”

“Only very recent­ly, most­ly in the last decade” has the long his­to­ry of print­ing in Asia been “acknowl­edged at all” in pop­u­lar cul­ture, though schol­ars in both the East and West have long known it. Korea has regard­ed Jikji “and oth­er ancient vol­umes as nation­al points of pride that rank among the most impor­tant of books.” Yet UNESCO only cer­ti­fied Jikji as the “old­est mov­able met­al type print­ing evi­dence” in 2001. The recog­ni­tion may be late in com­ing, but it mat­ters a great deal, nonethe­less. Learn much more about the his­to­ry, con­tent, and prove­nance of Jikji at this site cre­at­ed by “cyber diplo­mats” in Korea after UNESCO bestowed World Her­itage sta­tus on the book. And see a ful­ly dig­i­tized copy of the book here.

via Lithub

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The World’s Old­est Mul­ti­col­or Book, a 1633 Chi­nese Cal­lig­ra­phy & Paint­ing Man­u­al, Now Dig­i­tized and Put Online

1,000+ His­toric Japan­ese Illus­trat­ed Books Dig­i­tized & Put Online by the Smith­son­ian: From the Edo & Meji Eras (1600–1912)

See How The Guten­berg Press Worked: Demon­stra­tion Shows the Old­est Func­tion­ing Guten­berg Press in Action

Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Presents the 550-Year-Old Guten­berg Bible in Spec­tac­u­lar, High-Res Detail

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

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