Revisit Morphine, the 90s Power Trio Who Played the Two-String Bass, Saxophone & Drums

in Music | April 27th, 2022

No 90s band flew as low under that radar as Cam­bridge, Mass­a­chu­setts three-piece Mor­phine. Too odd for nos­tal­gia radio, not com­mer­cial enough to pop up on a big-time mod­ern sound­track, Mor­phine either means noth­ing to you or, if you were in the right place at the right time, every­thing.

YouTube chan­nel Rock n’ Roll True Sto­ries would like more peo­ple to dis­cov­er Mor­phine and their intro­duc­tion video does an ade­quate job of stitch­ing togeth­er inter­view quotes, band pics, and some daffy stock pho­tog­ra­phy. The only thing miss­ing: actu­al exam­ples of their music. We’ll get to that in just a bit.

Mor­phine were some­where between a rock band and a jazz trio. Led by Mark Sand­man, the group con­sist­ed of drum­mers Jerome Deupree or Bil­ly Con­way, and sax­o­phon­ist Dana Col­ley, with Sandman’s two-string bass front and cen­ter. “In a pop uni­verse where every singer, gui­tarist, and key­boardist instinc­tive­ly goes to a high­er note to attract atten­tion,” wrote the Wash­ing­ton Post at the time, “Mor­phine stays hun­kered down low.”

Live, Sand­man most­ly kept to his bass, but on their five albums, he also includ­ed home­made instru­ments like the “tri­tar,” con­sist­ing of two gui­tar strings and a bass string. He also added piano and key­boards to the mix. Col­ley some­times played two sax­es at once, or he switched out his main bari­tone for sopra­no, tenor, or bass sax­o­phones.

After their first indie release Good in 1992, Rykodisc signed the band. But Mor­phine remained as res­olute­ly anti-com­mer­cial as they could, turn­ing down offers to license their songs for com­mer­cials. (Ryko, how­ev­er, could license their music for TV and movies with­out the band’s approval.) “You Look Like Rain” was a col­lege radio “hit”; “Bue­na” was the sin­gle release. There’s a bit of Tom Waits or Nick Cave in his voice; a bit of be-bop by way of Twin Peaks in the music. It’s a for­mu­la they tweaked, altered, and per­fect­ed. Their crit­i­cal apex came with the album Cure for Pain in 1993, but each suc­ces­sive album sold more units. The label Dream­works took over from Ryko, but Sand­man felt they were push­ing the band to be some­thing they were not, a “new Beck” or a sound beyond the trio of instru­ments. But they didn’t fal­ter and remained true to them­selves.

Instead, the band end­ed when Sand­man suf­fered a heart attack on stage in 1999, pos­si­bly due to stress and the oppres­sive heat of the venue itself. Their fifth and final album The Night was released posthu­mous­ly. The sur­viv­ing mem­bers have formed a few Mor­phine-adja­cent bands since, as well as start­ing a schol­ar­ship in Sandman’s name.

Ryko recent­ly re-released their ear­ly discog­ra­phy on vinyl with bonus tracks, so a new gen­er­a­tion is poised to dis­cov­er Mor­phine, look around and won­der, who else knows about this band? That’s how it starts.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Mas­sive 800-Track Playlist of 90s Indie & Alter­na­tive Music, in Chrono­log­i­cal Order

The Evo­lu­tion of the Rock Gui­tar Solo: 28 Solos, Span­ning 50 Years, Played in 6 Fun Min­utes

Stream a Mas­sive Col­lec­tion of Indie, Noise Indus­tri­al Mix­tapes from the 80s and 90s

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

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A Whirlwind Architectural Tour of the New York Public Library–“Hidden Details” and All

in Architecture, History | April 27th, 2022

The New York Pub­lic Library opened in 1911, an age of mag­nif­i­cence in Amer­i­can city-build­ing. Eigh­teen years before that, writes archi­tect-his­to­ri­an Witold Rybczyn­s­ki, “Chicago’s Columbian Expo­si­tion pro­vid­ed a real and well-pub­li­cized demon­stra­tion of how the unruly Amer­i­can down­town could be tamed though a part­ner­ship of clas­si­cal archi­tec­ture, urban land­scap­ing, and hero­ic pub­lic art.” Mod­eled after Europe’s urban civ­i­liza­tion, the “White City” built on the ground of the Columbian Expo­si­tion inspired a gen­er­a­tion of Amer­i­can archi­tects and plan­ners includ­ing John Nolen, Fred­er­ick Law Olm­st­ed, Jr., and John Car­rère, co-design­er of the New York Pub­lic Library.

Car­rère appears in the Archi­tec­tur­al Digest tour video of the NYPL build­ing above — or at least his bust does, promi­nent­ly placed as it is on the land­ing of one of the grand stair­cas­es lead­ing up from the main entrance. The stair­cas­es are mar­ble, as is much of else; when the NYPL opened after nine years of con­struc­tion, so the tour’s nar­ra­tion informs us, it did so as the largest mar­ble-clad struc­ture in the coun­try.

On the sound­track we have not just one guide, but three: NYPL vis­i­tor vol­un­teer pro­gram man­ag­er Kei­th Glut­ting, design his­to­ri­an Judith Gura, and archi­tec­tur­al his­to­ri­an Paul Ranoga­jec. Togeth­er they tell the sto­ry of this ven­er­a­ble Amer­i­can build­ing, and also point out the “hid­den details” that a vis­i­tor might not oth­er­wise notice.

Take the ter­race on which the whole build­ing stands, a fea­ture of the Euro­pean vil­la and palace tra­di­tion. Or the murals depict­ing the his­to­ry of the writ­ten word from Moses’ stone tablets on down. Or the pneu­mat­ic tubes, arti­facts of the ana­log infor­ma­tion-tech­nol­o­gy sys­tem in use before the NYPL com­put­er­ized in the nine­teen-sev­en­ties. Or the ren­der­ing of the world in the library’s for­mi­da­ble map room that mis­tak­en­ly depicts Cal­i­for­nia as an island (not that every New York­er would dis­agree). The video also includes oth­er, even less­er-seen won­ders both old and new, from a 1455 Guten­berg Bible — the first in the New World — to the auto­mat­ed trol­ley sys­tem that brings books out of the stacks. But it is the build­ing itself that inspires won­der, its extrav­a­gant solid­i­ty and detail that hark back to a time of con­sen­sus, how­ev­er brief, that noth­ing was too good for ordi­nary peo­ple.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The New York Pub­lic Library Announces the Top 10 Checked-Out Books of All Time

Watch 52,000 Books Get­ting Reshelved at The New York Pub­lic Library in a Short, Time­lapse Film

The New York Pub­lic Library Pro­vides Free Online Access to Banned Books: Catch­er in the Rye, Stamped & More

The New York Pub­lic Library Unveils a Cut­ting-Edge Train That Deliv­ers Books

The “Weird Objects” in the New York Pub­lic Library’s Col­lec­tions: Vir­ginia Woolf’s Cane, Charles Dick­ens’ Let­ter Open­er, Walt Whitman’s Hair & More

The New York Pub­lic Library Cre­ates a List of 125 Books That They Love

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Why Do Oreos Never Come Apart Evenly?: MIT Researchers Build an “Oreometer” to Find the Answer

in Food & Drink, Science | April 27th, 2022

Despite hav­ing been around for well over a cen­tu­ry, the Oreo cook­ie has man­aged to retain cer­tain mys­ter­ies. Why, for exam­ple, does it nev­er come apart even­ly? Though dif­fer­ent Oreo-eaters pre­fer dif­fer­ent meth­ods of Oreo-eat­ing, an espe­cial­ly pop­u­lar approach to the world’s most pop­u­lar cook­ie involves twist­ing it open before con­sump­tion. That action pro­duces two sep­a­rate choco­late wafers, but as even kinder­garten­ers know from long and frus­trat­ing expe­ri­ence, the crème fill­ing sticks only to one side. It seems that no man­u­al tech­nique, no mat­ter how advanced, can split the con­tents of an Oreo close to even­ly, and only recent­ly have a team of researchers at the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy sought an expla­na­tion.

This endeav­or neces­si­tat­ed an inves­ti­ga­tion of the Ore­o’s rhe­ol­o­gy — the study of the flow of mat­ter, espe­cial­ly liq­uids but also “soft solids” like crème fill­ing. Like all sci­en­tif­ic research, it involved inten­sive exper­i­men­ta­tion, and even the inven­tion of a new mea­sure­ment device: in this case, a sim­ple 3D-print­able “Ore­ome­ter” (seen in ani­mat­ed action above) that uses pen­nies and rub­ber bands.

With it the researchers applied “applied vary­ing degrees of torque and angu­lar rota­tion, not­ing the val­ues that suc­cess­ful­ly twist­ed each cook­ie apart,” writes MIT News’ Jen­nifer Chu. “In all, the team went through about 20 box­es of Ore­os, includ­ing reg­u­lar, Dou­ble Stuf, and Mega Stuf lev­els of fill­ing, and reg­u­lar, dark choco­late, and ‘gold­en’ wafer fla­vors. Sur­pris­ing­ly, they found that no mat­ter the amount of cream fill­ing or fla­vor, the cream almost always sep­a­rat­ed onto one wafer.”

Crys­tal Owens, a mechan­i­cal engi­neer­ing PhD can­di­date work­ing on this project, puts this down in large part to how Ore­os are made. “Videos of the man­u­fac­tur­ing process show that they put the first wafer down, then dis­pense a ball of cream onto that wafer before putting the sec­ond wafer on top. Appar­ent­ly that lit­tle time delay may make the cream stick bet­ter to the first wafer.” But oth­er phys­i­cal fac­tors also bear on the phe­nom­e­non as well, as doc­u­ment­ed in the paper Owens and her col­lab­o­ra­tors pub­lished ear­li­er this year in the jour­nal Physics of Flu­id. “We intro­duce Ore­ol­o­gy (/ɔriːˈɒlədʒi/), from the Nabis­co Oreo for “cook­ie” and the Greek rheo logia for ‘flow study,’ as the study of the flow and frac­ture of sand­wich cook­ies,” they write in its abstract. For a sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly inclined young­ster, one could hard­ly imag­ine a more com­pelling field.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Sci­ence & Cook­ing: Harvard’s Free Course on Mak­ing Cakes, Pael­la & Oth­er Deli­cious Food

Nor­man Rockwell’s Type­writ­ten Recipe for His Favorite Oat­meal Cook­ies

Dessert Recipes of Icon­ic Thinkers: Emi­ly Dickinson’s Coconut Cake, George Orwell’s Christ­mas Pud­ding, Alice B. Tok­las’ Hashish Fudge & More

Mak­ing Choco­late the Tra­di­tion­al Way, From Bean to Bar: A Short French Film

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

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Frank Lloyd Wright: America’s Greatest Architect? –A Free Streaming Documentary

in Architecture, Film | April 27th, 2022

From Time­line comes a free stream­ing doc­u­men­tary called Frank Lloyd Wright: Amer­i­ca’s Great­est Archi­tect?: 

Frank Lloyd Wright is Amer­i­ca’s great­est ever archi­tect. But few peo­ple know about the Welsh roots that shaped his life and world-famous build­ings. Now, lead­ing Welsh archi­tect Jonathan Adams sets off across Amer­i­ca to explore Frank Lloyd Wright’s mas­ter­pieces for him­self. Along the way, he uncov­ers the tem­pes­tu­ous life sto­ry of the man behind them, and the secrets of his rad­i­cal Welsh back­ground . In a career span­ning sev­en decades, Frank Lloyd Wright built over 500 build­ings, and changed the face of mod­ern archi­tec­ture.

Frank Lloyd Wright: Amer­i­ca’s Great­est Archi­tect? will be added to our list of Free Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent

How Frank Lloyd Wright’s Son Invent­ed Lin­coln Logs, “America’s Nation­al Toy” (1916)

12 Famous Frank Lloyd Wright Hous­es Offer Vir­tu­al Tours: Hol­ly­hock House, Tal­iesin West, Falling­wa­ter & More

Frank Lloyd Wright Cre­ates a List of the 10 Traits Every Aspir­ing Artist Needs

Frank Lloyd Wright Reflects on Cre­ativ­i­ty, Nature and Reli­gion in Rare 1957 Audio

The Mod­ernist Gas Sta­tions of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe

The Frank Lloyd Wright Lego Set

A is for Archi­tec­ture: 1960 Doc­u­men­tary on Why We Build, from the Ancient Greeks to Mod­ern Times

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Stunningly Elaborate Ottoman Calligraphy Drawn on Dried Leaves

in Art, History | April 26th, 2022


The study of Islam­ic cal­lig­ra­phy is “almost inex­haustible,” begins Ger­man-born Har­vard pro­fes­sor Annemarie Schim­mel’s Cal­lig­ra­phy and Islam­ic Cul­ture, “giv­en the var­i­ous types of Ara­bic script and the exten­sion of Islam­ic cul­ture” through­out the Ara­bi­an Penin­su­la, Per­sia, Africa, and the Ottoman Empire. The first cal­li­graph­ic script, called Ḥijāzī, alleged­ly orig­i­nat­ed in the Hijaz region, birth­place of the Prophet Muham­mad him­self. Anoth­er ver­sion called Kūfī, “one of the ear­li­est extant Islam­ic scripts,” devel­oped and flour­ished in the “Abbasid Bagh­dad,” Anchi Hoh writes for the Library of Con­gress, “a major cen­ter of cul­ture and learn­ing dur­ing the clas­si­cal Islam­ic age.”

Despite the long and ven­er­a­ble his­to­ry of cal­lig­ra­phy around the Islam­ic world, there is good rea­son for the say­ing that the Qur’an was “revealed in Mec­ca, recit­ed in Egypt, and writ­ten in Istan­bul.” The Ottomans refined Ara­bic cal­lig­ra­phy to its high­est degree, bring­ing the art into a “gold­en age… unknown since the Abbasid era,” Hoh writes.

“Ottoman cal­lig­ra­phers adopt­ed [mas­ter Abbasid cal­lig­ra­ph­er] Ibn Muqlah’s six styles and ele­vat­ed them to new peaks of beau­ty and ele­gance.” One of the peaks of this refine­ment can be seen here in these del­i­cate­ly pre­served dead leaves cov­ered with gold­en Ara­bic script.

This par­tic­u­lar appli­ca­tion of the art is, need­less to say, “dif­fi­cult and del­i­cate work,” say the notes on one such leaf in Sin­ga­pore’s Asian Civil­i­sa­tion Muse­um:

The leaf has to be dried, and the tis­sue has to be removed slow­ly so as to leave the skele­tal mem­brane. The sten­cil of the com­po­si­tion is placed behind the leaf and the gold ink with gum Ara­bic is applied over it. This art of pro­duc­ing cal­lig­ra­phy of a dried leaf, is one that was prac­tised most wide­ly in Ottoman Turkey dur­ing the 19th cen­tu­ry. Dur­ing this peri­od, Ottoman cal­lig­ra­phers were inter­est­ed in pro­duc­ing com­po­si­tions which took the shape of fruits, ani­mals and even inan­i­mate objects like ships and hous­es.

The exam­ples here come from a Twit­ter thread by Bayt Al Fann, an artist col­lec­tive “explor­ing art & cul­ture inspired by Islam­ic tra­di­tion.” There you can find many more elab­o­rate exam­ples and trans­la­tions and descrip­tions of the cal­li­graph­ic script — gen­er­al­ly vers­es from the Qur’an, Hadith prayers, and poet­ry. Learn much more about Islam­ic cal­lig­ra­phy in Schim­mel’s book; in her Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art bul­letin “Islam­ic Cal­lig­ra­phy” with Bar­bara Riv­ol­ta (free here); and in Hoh’s three-part Library of Con­gress series here. And find out how Turk­ish cal­lig­ra­phers like Nick Mer­denyan and Sal­i­ha Aktaş have rein­vent­ed the art in the 21st cen­tu­ry.…

via MetaFil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Learn Cal­lig­ra­phy from Lloyd Reynolds, the Teacher of Steve Jobs’ Own Famous­ly Inspir­ing Cal­lig­ra­phy Teacher

The Mod­el Book of Cal­lig­ra­phy (1561–1596): A Stun­ning­ly Detailed Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­script Cre­at­ed over Three Decades

Free: Down­load Thou­sands of Ottoman-Era Pho­tographs That Have Been Dig­i­tized and Put Online

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

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Why Does This Lady Have a Fly on Her Head?: A Curious Look at a 15th-Century Portrait

in Art, History | April 26th, 2022

In the Nation­al Gallery there hangs a por­trait of an unknown woman, paint­ed by an unknown artist around 1470 some­where in south­west­ern Ger­many. This may sound like an art­work of lit­tle note, but it does boast one high­ly con­spic­u­ous mark of dis­tinc­tion: a house­fly. It’s not that the por­traitist was in such thrall to real­ism that he includ­ed an insect that hap­pened to drop into the sit­ting; at first glance, the fly looks as if it belongs to our real­i­ty, and has alight­ed on the can­vas itself.  Why would a painter, pre­sum­ably com­mis­sioned at the con­sid­er­able expense of the sit­ter’s fam­i­ly, include such a seem­ing­ly bizarre detail? Nation­al Gallery cura­tor Francesca Whitlum-Coop­er offers answers in the video below.

“It’s a joke,” says Whitlum-Coop­er. “And it’s a joke that works on dif­fer­ent lev­els, because on the one hand, the fly has been tricked into think­ing this is a real head­dress,” fooled by the painter’s mas­tery of that most dif­fi­cult col­or for light and shad­ow, white.

“But obvi­ous­ly there’s a dou­ble joke, because we, look­ing at it, think, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s a fly on that paint­ing!’ ” It is our very instinct to shoo the bug away that tells us “we’ve been duped, because actu­al­ly, every­thing here is two-dimen­sion­al. This is just paint. And the skill of the artist is that they’ve been able to take that paint, and brush, and a bit of wood, and con­jure it into some­thing that feels so life­like, we do believe — even just for a sec­ond — that’s a fly sit­ting on that pic­ture.”

Five cen­turies lat­er the joke still works, though it could well be more than a joke. One the­o­ry put forth here and there in the com­ments holds that the fly func­tions as a reminder of imper­ma­nence, of decay, of mor­tal­i­ty. If so, it sug­gests that the sub­ject of this por­trait may already have been dead by the time of its paint­ing, a notion sup­port­ed by the sym­bol­ic weight of the for­get-me-nots in her hand. (One com­menter even argues that the artist is none oth­er than the famed Albrecht Dür­er, and that the woman depict­ed is his late moth­er.) Though it may not rank among the great works of art, this mys­te­ri­ous image nev­er­the­less shares with them the qual­i­ty of mul­ti­va­lence. The fly could be a gag, and it could be a memen­to mori — but why not both?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

19th-Cen­tu­ry Skele­ton Alarm Clock Remind­ed Peo­ple Dai­ly of the Short­ness of Life: An Intro­duc­tion to the Memen­to Mori

A Restored Ver­meer Paint­ing Reveals a Por­trait of a Cupid Hid­den for Over 350 Years

What Made Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus a Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Paint­ing

The Genius of Albrecht Dür­er Revealed in Four Self-Por­traits

What Makes the Mona Lisa a Great Paint­ing: A Deep Dive

Down­load 35,000 Works of Art from the Nation­al Gallery, Includ­ing Mas­ter­pieces by Van Gogh, Gau­guin, Rem­brandt & More

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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How Thomas Edison & Henry Ford Envisioned a Low-Priced Electric Vehicle in 1914, Almost Changing the Direction of Automobile History

in History, Technology | April 25th, 2022

Few inven­tions have come to define twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry mobil­i­ty as much as the elec­tric car. As report­ed at EVBox by Joseph D. Simp­son and Wes­ley van Bar­lin­gen, the num­ber of elec­tric vehi­cles on the road has explod­ed from “neg­li­gi­ble” in 2010 to “as many as 10 mil­lion” by the end of 2021. Elec­tric vehi­cle man­u­fac­tur­er Tes­la “is the most valu­able auto­mo­tive com­pa­ny on the plan­et,” worth “an esti­mat­ed $1 tril­lion.” That com­pa­ny takes its name from inven­tor and alter­nat­ing-cur­rent pio­neer Niko­la Tes­la, but it was under the influ­ence of Tes­la’s rival Thomas Edi­son that the elec­tric car went through much of its ear­ly evo­lu­tion.

“At about the time Ford Motor Co. was found­ed in 1903, Edi­son had made inroads with bat­tery tech­nol­o­gy and start­ed offer­ing nick­el-iron bat­ter­ies for sev­er­al uses, includ­ing auto­mo­biles,” writes Wired’s Dan Strohl. At the turn of the 20th cen­tu­ry, the vehi­cles on Amer­i­can roads ran on three dif­fer­ent kinds of pow­er: 40 per­cent used steam, almost as many used elec­tric­i­ty, and round 20 per­cent used gaso­line.

Nev­er hes­i­tant to pro­mote his own tech­nolo­gies, Edi­son declared that “elec­tric­i­ty is the thing,” with its lack of “whirring and grind­ing gears with their numer­ous levers to con­fuse,” of “that almost ter­ri­fy­ing uncer­tain throb and whirr of the pow­er­ful com­bus­tion engine,” of a “water-cir­cu­lat­ing sys­tem to get out of order,” of “dan­ger­ous and evil-smelling gaso­line.”

As BBC Future Plan­et’s Alli­son Hirschlag tells it, “Edi­son claimed the nick­el-iron bat­tery was incred­i­bly resilient, and could be charged twice as fast as lead-acid bat­ter­ies.” He even had a deal in place with Ford Motors to pro­duce this pur­port­ed­ly more effi­cient elec­tric vehi­cle.” Alas, “by the time Edi­son had a more refined pro­to­type” — one that could be dri­ven from Scot­land to Lon­don — “elec­tric vehi­cles were on the way out in favor of fos­sil-fuel-pow­ered vehi­cles that could go longer dis­tances before need­ing to refu­el or recharge.” It did­n’t help, as Simp­son and van Bar­lin­gen add, that “after the dis­cov­ery of oil in Texas, gaso­line became cheap and read­i­ly avail­able for many, while elec­tric­i­ty only remained avail­able in cities.” As a result, elec­tric vehi­cles had “almost com­plete­ly dis­ap­peared from the mar­ket” by the mid-nine­teen-thir­ties.

By the mid-twen­ty-thir­ties, how­ev­er, elec­tric vehi­cles will quite pos­si­bly dom­i­nate the mar­ket, and 200 years after their inven­tion at that. “It is said that the first elec­tric vehi­cle was dis­played at an indus­try con­fer­ence in 1835 by a British inven­tor by the name of Robert Ander­son,” write Simp­son and van Bar­lin­gen. The twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry cen­tu­ry saw its devel­op­ment set back by the slow devel­op­ment of bat­tery tech­nol­o­gy, com­bined with the sud­den devel­op­ment of gaso­line-relat­ed tech­nolo­gies and infra­struc­ture. But eco­nom­ic, envi­ron­men­tal, and polit­i­cal fac­tors have con­verged to make it seem as if elec­tric­i­ty is, indeed, the thing after all, and cars pow­ered by it are posi­tioned to come roar­ing — or at least hum­ming — back.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Fly­ing Car Took to the Skies Back in 1949: See the Tay­lor Aero­car in Action

New­ly Unearthed Footage Shows Albert Ein­stein Dri­ving a Fly­ing Car (1931)

The Time­less Beau­ty of the Cit­roën DS, the Car Mythol­o­gized by Roland Barthes (1957)

A Har­row­ing Test Dri­ve of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s 1933 Dymax­ion Car: Art That Is Scary to Ride

The World’s Fastest Solar Car

Behold the First Elec­tric Gui­tar: The 1931 “Fry­ing Pan”

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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The History of Birth Control: From Alligator Dung to The Pill

in Gender, Health, History, Politics, Religion | April 25th, 2022

The his­to­ry of birth con­trol is almost as old as the his­to­ry of the wheel.

Pes­saries dat­ing to Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt pro­vide the launch­ing pad for doc­u­men­tar­i­an Lind­say Hol­i­day’s overview of birth con­trol through­out the ages and around the world.

Holiday’s His­to­ry Tea Time series fre­quent­ly delves into women’s his­to­ry, and her pledge to donate a por­tion of the above video’s ad rev­enue to Pathfind­er Inter­na­tional serves as reminder that there are parts of the world where women still lack access to afford­able, effec­tive, and safe means of con­tra­cep­tion.

One goal of the World Health Organization’s End­ing Pre­ventable Mater­nal Mor­tal­i­ty ini­tia­tive is for 65% of women to be able to make informed and empow­ered deci­sions regard­ing sex­u­al rela­tions, con­tra­cep­tive use, and their repro­duc­tive health by 2025.

As Hol­i­day points out, expense, social stig­ma, and reli­gious edicts have impact­ed ease of access to birth con­trol for cen­turies.

The fur­ther back you go, you can be cer­tain that some meth­ods advo­cat­ed by mid­wives and med­i­cine women have been lost to his­to­ry, owing to unrecord­ed oral tra­di­tion and the sen­si­tive nature of the infor­ma­tion.

Hol­i­day still man­ages to truf­fle up a fas­ci­nat­ing array of prac­tices and prod­ucts that were thought — often erro­neous­ly — to ward off unwant­ed preg­nan­cy.

Some that worked and con­tin­ue to work to vary­ing degrees, include bar­ri­er meth­ods, con­doms, and more recent­ly the IUD and The Pill.

Def­i­nite­ly NOT rec­om­mend­ed: with­draw­al, hold­ing your breath dur­ing inter­course, a post-coital sneez­ing reg­i­men, douch­ing with Lysol or Coca-Cola, tox­ic cock­tails of lead, mer­cury or cop­per salt, any­thing involv­ing alli­ga­tor dung, and slug­ging back water that’s been used to wash a corpse.

As for sil­phi­um, an herb that like­ly did have some sort of sper­mi­ci­dal prop­er­ties, we’ll nev­er know for sure. By 1 CE, demand out­stripped sup­ply of this rem­e­dy, even­tu­al­ly wip­ing it off the face of the earth despite increas­ing­ly astro­nom­i­cal prices. Fun fact: sil­phi­um was also used to treat sore throat, snakebite, scor­pi­on stings, mange, gout, quin­sy, epilep­sy, and anal warts

The his­to­ry of birth con­trol can be con­sid­ered a semi-secret part of the his­to­ry of pros­ti­tu­tion, fem­i­nism, the mil­i­tary, obscen­i­ty laws, sex edu­ca­tion and atti­tudes toward pub­lic health.

From Mar­garet Sanger and the 60,000 women exe­cut­ed as witch­es in the 16th and 17th cen­turies, to econ­o­mist Thomas Malthus’ 1798 Essay on the Prin­ci­ple of Pop­u­la­tion and leg­endary adven­tur­er Gia­co­mo Casano­va’s satin rib­bon-trimmed jim­my hat, this episode of His­to­ry Tea Time with Lind­say Hol­i­day touch­es on it all.

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

The Birth Con­trol Hand­book: The Under­ground Stu­dent Pub­li­ca­tion That Let Women Take Con­trol of Their Bod­ies (1968)

I’m Just a Pill: A School­house Rock Clas­sic Gets Reimag­ined to Defend Repro­duc­tive Rights in 2017

The Sto­ry Of Men­stru­a­tion: Watch Walt Disney’s Sex Ed Film from 1946

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