The Armored-Knight “Robot” Designed by Leonardo da Vinci (circa 1495)

in History, Technology | February 28th, 2024

Image by Erik Möller, via Wikimedia Commons

Those of us who were playing video games in the nineteen-nineties may remember a fun little platformer, not technically unimpressive for its time, called Clockwork Knight. The concept of a clockwork knight turns out to have had some historical validity, or at least it could potentially have been justified by the then-current state of Leonardo da Vinci studies. Back in the fifties, writes Royal Montgomery at Unchained Robotics, “a team of scholars at the University of California were poring over a number of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, specifically the Codices Atlanticus and Madrid.” There they found plans for what turned out to be “a life-size mechanical knight inside a fifteenth-century German suit of armor.”

More than one generation of enthusiasts and robotics specialists have since set about re-creating Leonardo’s “automaton.” Before 2007, writes Montgomery, “most reconstructed plans included a mechanical device in the belly of the knight. It was later determined that this device had nothing to do with the knight at all — it was actually part of a clock!”

Even if it didn’t run on literal clockwork, Leonardo’s knight would’ve made quite a spectacle. It “appears to have been assembled and displayed for the first time at a ceremony held by the Prince of Milan, Ludovico Sforza in 1495,” and in this sole appearance “could sit and stand, lift its own visor, and move its arms. It was stiff, sure, but you try moving gracefully in 15th century armor.”

However much it amused its aristocratic audience, Leonardo’s surreptitiously pulley-and-cable-operated “robot” would also have offered working, integrated proof of the kind of mechanical systems to which he’d long put his formidable engineering mind. And today, as pointed out at the site of the Robotic Online Short Film Festival, “we are fascinated and terrified in equal parts by humanoid robots for military purposes like Atlas, created by the company Boston Dynamics for DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States). They are all heirs, with twenty-first century technology, to the robotic soldier designed by Leonardo.” The question of whether he also did any pioneering work on robot animals who could dance remains a matter of inquiry for future Leonardo scholars.

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

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

Discover the World’s Oldest University, Which Opened in 427 CE, Housed 9 Million Manuscripts, and Then Educated Students for 800 Years

in Education, History, Religion | February 22nd, 2024

In the Buddhist Asia of a dozen centuries ago, the equivalent of going off to study at an Ivy League school was going off to study at Nalanda. It was founded in the year 427 in what’s now the Indian state of Bihar, making it “the world’s first residential university,” as Sugato Mukherjee writes at BBC travel. As it developed, Nalanda became a “home to nine million books that attracted 10,000 students from across Eastern and Central Asia. They gathered here to learn medicine, logic, mathematics and – above all – Buddhist principles from some of the era’s most revered scholars.”

Alas, despite being much older than the famously venerable universities of Bologna, Oxford, or Cambridge, Nalanda can’t claim to have been in continuous operation since the fifth century. Destroyed by marauders during Turko-Afghan general Bakhtiyar Khilji’s conquest of northern and eastern India in the 1190s, its vast campus lay in obscure ruins until Scottish surveyor Francis Buchanan-Hamilton and British Army engineer Sir Alexander Cunningham rediscovered and identified it, respectively, in the nineteenth century.

In its nearly eight centuries of initial activity, writes Mukherjee, Nalanda attracted proto-international students from all over Asia, and “regularly sent some of its best scholars and professors to places like China, Korea, Japan, Indonesia and Sri Lanka to propagate Buddhist teachings and philosophy.” Its notable faculty members included Aryabhata, “the father of Indian mathematics,” who may have been its head in the sixth century, and Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who returned to his homeland in 645 with “a wagonload of 657 Buddhist scriptures from Nalanda.” Later “he would translate a portion of these volumes into Chinese to create his life’s treatise.”

Image by Sumitsurai, via Wikimedia Commons

Of the nine million handwritten Buddhist manuscripts in Nalanda’s library at the time of its destruction, “only a handful” survived. Some of them eventually made their way to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a fitting enough tribute to the world-spanning outlook of the institution. Not far from its original location, now a UNESCO World Heritage site, Nalanda is making a comeback as an international place of learning for the twenty-first century. You can get a sense of how that project is shaping up from the BBC Reel video above. “I think we are already a university of the future,” says its Vice Chancellor Sunaina Singh, and indeed, a promising vision of the future needs nothing quite so much as a sufficiently deep past.

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 9 ) |

Isaac Asimov Predicts the Future in 1982: Computers Will Be “at the Center of Everything;” Robots Will Take Human Jobs

in History, Technology, Television | February 21st, 2024

Four decades ago, our civilization seemed to stand on the brink of a great transformation. The Cold War had stoked around 35 years of every-intensifying developments, including but not limited to the Space Race. The personal computer had been on the market just long enough for most Americans to, if not actually own one, then at least to wonder if they might soon find themselves in need of one. On New Year’s Eve of 1982, The MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour offered its viewers a glimpse of the shape of things to come by inviting a trio of forward-looking guests, Wasn’t the Future Wonderful author Tim Onosko; Omni magazine editor Dick Teresi; and, most distinguished of all, Isaac Asimov.

As the “author of more than 250 books, light and heavy, fiction and non-fiction, some of the most notable being about the future,” Asimov had long been a go-to interviewee for media outlets in need of long-range predictions about technology, society, and the dynamic relationship between the two. (Here on Open Culture, we’ve previously featured his speculations from 1983, 1980, 1978, 1967, and 1964.) Robert MacNeil opens with a natural subject for any science-fiction writer: mankind’s forays into outer space, and whether Asimov sees “anything left out there.” Asimov’s response: “Oh, everything.”

In the early eighties, the man who wrote the Foundation series saw humanity as “still in the Christopher Columbus stage as far as space is concerned,” foreseeing not just space stations but “solar power stations,” “laboratories and factories that can do things in space that are difficult or impossible to do on Earth,” and even “space settlements in which thousands of people can be housed more or less permanently.” In the fullness of time, the goal would be to “build a larger and more elaborate civilization and one which does not depend upon the resources of one world.”

As for “the computer age,” asks Jim Lehrer; “have we crested on that one as well”? Asimov knew full well that the computer would be “at the center of everything.” Just as had happened with television over the previous generation, “computers are going to be necessary in the house to do a great many things, some in the way of entertainment, some in the way of making life a little easier, and everyone will want it.” There were many, even then, who could feel real excitement at the prospect of such a future. But what of robots, which, as even Asimov knew, would come to “replace human beings?”

“It’s not that they kill them, but they kill their jobs,” he explains, and those who lose the old jobs may not be equipped to take on any of the new ones. “We are going to have to accept an important role — society as a whole — in making sure that the transition period from the pre-robotic technology to the post-robotic technology is as painless as possible. We have to make sure that people aren’t treated as though they’re used up dishrags, that they have to be allowed to live and retain their self-respect.” Today, the technology of the moment is artificial intelligence, which the news media haven’t hesitated to pay near-obsessive attention to. (I’m traveling in Japan at the moment, and saw just such a broadcast on my hotel TV this morning.) Would that they still had an Asimov to discuss it with a level-headed, far-sighted perspective.

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 10 ) |

Scenes from Life in Paris During the 1920s, Colorized and Restored: Cafés, Notre Dame, Street Life & More

in Film, History | February 20th, 2024

Few cities have been as romanticized as Paris, and few eras in Paris have been as romanticized as the nineteen-twenties. This owes much to the famous expatriate artistic and literary figures residing there in that decade: Ernest Hemingway, Salvador Dalí, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, and Man Ray, to name just a few of the figures revived in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. It’s still difficult, a century later, not to feel at least some curiosity about the real Paris in the twenties, footage of which you can see colorized and enhanced to play at a smooth 60 frames per second in the video above.

In some respects, Paris hasn’t changed much over the past hundred or so years. Notre-Dame, the bridges across the Seine, and the colonne Vendôme will be immediately recognizable to anyone who’s been there.

And though the attire of Parisians may be unrecognizable, their habits certainly aren’t: then as now, they clearly spent considerable amounts of time on les terrasses of their cafés of choice. (And in some cases, they’re just the same cafés, as in the case of Le Dôme and Le Café de la Paix.) And though a few of them still read newspapers there in the twenty-twenties, many more did in the nineteen twenties, the invention of the smartphone lying about eighty years in the future.

For some of us, the absence of screens alone may feel like reason enough to time-travel back, as Owen Wilson’s disaffected Hollywood screenwriter does in Midnight in Paris. If we consider the state of plumbing, heating and dentistry in the France after World War I, we may have second thoughts, and surely our foreknowledge of World War II would also put a damper on the experience. But romance is romance, and if we could successfully manage to integrate ourselves into the urban life captured by these film clips, we might just get used to it, and even want to stick around for a few more decades after Hemingway, Picasso, the Fitzgeralds, et al leave the scene. After all, les Trente Glorieuses were still to come.

via MyModernMet

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

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

A Web Site That Lets You Find Your Home Address on Pangea

in History, Maps | February 19th, 2024

A cool tool. Software engineer Ian Webster has created a website that lets you see how the land masses on planet Earth have changed over the course of 750 million years. And it has the added bonus of letting you plot modern addresses on these ancient land formations. Ergo, you can see where your home was located on the Big Blue Marble some 20, 100, 500, or 750 million years ago. Webster’s project (access it here) is open source. Have fun.

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

A 3D Animation Shows the Evolution of New York City (1524 — 2023)

in Architecture, History | February 14th, 2024

Nearly two and a half centuries after its founding, the United States of America is still both celebrated and derided as a young country. Examined on the whole, the US may or may not seem less mature than other lands in any obvious way, but the difference manifests much more clearly on the level of cities. For even among those founded before the independence of the country itself, no American city has yet attained 500 official years of age. But in the case of New York City, we can trace its formation through half a millennium of history, as rendered in the 3D animated video from InfoGeek above.

The long version of New York’s story begins in 1524, the year Giovanni da Verrazzano commanded the French ship La Dauphine into what we now know as New York Harbor. While he and his crew did not, of course, get the dramatic forest-of-skyscrapers view for which that approach would later be celebrated, they would, perhaps, have seen an actual forest, as well as other elements of a natural landscape that would have appeared sublimely untouched. A century later, the Dutch there founded the trading outpost of New Amsterdam, which commenced the written history of New York — as well as the aggressive development that would eventually come to characterize the city and its culture.

New Amsterdam became New York in 1664, one of the many historical events that scroll past in the window at the video’s lower-left corner. At that point in time, the population had grown to about 3,600, a figure counted at the bottom of the frame. Yet even as we see streets roll out, buildings rise, and trees sprout rapidly around us over the next 150 or so years of our stroll, and even after New York becomes America’s largest city in 1790, we must bear in mind that its century hasn’t even begun. It’s something of an irony that the hugely destructive Great Fire of 1835 precedes a developmental push that makes the city, even to our twenty-first-century eyes, look almost modern.

Later in the nineteenth century, we witness the appearance of Central Park and the introduction of motorcars; by the turn of the twentieth, New York’s population approaches three and a half million. Walking down Wall Street (and into the Great Depression), we pass just-materializing landmarks that remain iconic today, like the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building and — after a somewhat dramatic fast-forward in time — Frank Lloyd Wright’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Minoru Yamasaki’s ill-fated World Trade Center. We’re now well into the New York of living memory, and even when the animation has passed the creative decrepitude of the seventies and eighties and arrives at the city as it was last year (population: 7,888,120), we sense that its evolution has only just begun.

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

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

Black History in Two Minutes: Watch 93 Videos Written & Narrated by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

in History | February 13th, 2024

We’re nearly halfway through February, which the United States of America also knows as Black History Month. Perhaps there are relevant subjects on which you’ve been meaning to catch up, but you haven’t quite got around to it yet. If so, never fear: in the next couple of weeks, you’ll have plenty of time to binge-watch the Youtube series Black History in Two Minutes. Written and narrated by historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., it has so far covered everything from Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth to the Civil War and emancipation to the civil rights movement and school integration.

Those of us who went to school in the US — and especially those of us who did so after the institution of Black History Month, in 1970 — will remember those subjects having been discussed in the classroom. But even within the brief confines of two minutes (sometimes sprawling out to three minutes and change), Gates introduces facts most of us will never have heard.

For instance, the very first underground railroad in the eighteenth century ran not from the south of the country to the north, but the other way around, Spanish Florida having then been “a sanctuary for slaves who fled south from English rule” — though the freedom it offered did require conversion to Catholicism.

Also among the nearly 100 videos Black History in Two Minutes has so far produced are a wealth of bite-sized treatments of movements and figures important to not just black culture but the whole of American culture. These include Billie Holiday and Maya Angelou, the 1893 World’s Fair, the births of jazz and hip hop, and Negro league baseball. The show also encompasses episodes of history well within living memory, such as the Los Angeles riots and the election of Barack Obama — as well as the earlier, pioneering presidential run of Jesse Jackson. And in light of Jackson’s campaign T‑shirts’ having made a fashion comeback in Korea, where I live, it now seems to say that the culture that has arisen out of black history isn’t just vital to the culture of America, but of the world.

You can watch the complete playlist of videos at the top, or visit the Black History in Two Minutes website here.

via Kottke

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

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

Watch Dziga Vertov’s Soviet Toys: The First Soviet Animated Movie Ever (1924)

in Animation, History | February 7th, 2024

Dziga Vertov is best known for his dazzling city symphony A Man with a Movie Camera, which was ranked by Sight and Sound magazine as the 8th best movie ever made. Yet what you might not know is that Vertov also made the Soviet Union’s first ever animated movie, Soviet Toys.

Consisting largely of simple line drawings, the film might lack the verve and visual sophistication that marked A Man with a Movie Camera, but Vertov still displays his knack for making striking, pungent images. Yet those who don’t have an intimate knowledge of Soviet policy of the 1920s might find the movie — which is laden with Marxist allegories — really odd.

Soviet Toys came out in 1924, during Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP), which gave some market incentives to small farmers. Not surprisingly, the farmers started producing a lot more food than before, and soon a whole new class of middleman traders formed — the reviled “NEPmen.”

The movie opens with a NEPman — a bloated caricature of a Capitalist (who coincidentally looks vaguely like Nikita Khrushchev) — devouring a massive heap of food. He’s so stuffed that he spends much of the rest of the movie sprawled out on the floor, much in the same way one might imagine Jamie Dimon after Thanksgiving dinner. Then he belches riches at a woman who is can-canning on his distended belly. I said this film is odd.

Later, as a couple of squabbling Russian Orthodox priests look on, a worker tries to extract money from the NEPman by cutting his gut with a huge pair of scissors. When that fails, the worker and a passing peasant fuse bodies to create a two-headed being that stomps on the Capitalist’s belly, which pops open like a piñata filled with cash. Then members of the Red Army pile together and form a sort of human pyramid before turning into a giant tree. They hang the Capitalist along with the priests. The end.

Some of the references in this movie are clear: The worker’s use of scissors points to the “Scissors Crisis” – an attempt by the Central Government to correct the price imbalance between agriculture and industrial goods. And the physical melding of the peasantry and the proletariat is a representation of the never quite realized dream of the Bolsheviks. Other images are as obscure as they are weird — the leering close ups of the Capitalist, the NEPman’s girlfriend who disappears into his stomach, the revolutionary filmmaker who has the eyes of a camera lens and the mouth of a camera shutter. They feel like something out of a Marxist fever dream.

Soviet Toys can be found in the Animation section of our collection of Free Movies Online.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

Watch the Surrealist Glass Harmonica, the Only Animated Film Ever Banned by Soviet Censors (1968)

A Soviet Animation of Stephen King’s Short Story “Battleground” (1986)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Armored-Knight “Robot” Designed by Leonardo da Vinci (circa 1495)

Discover the World’s Oldest University, Which Opened in 427 CE, Housed 9 Million Manuscripts, and Then Educated Students for 800 Years

Isaac Asimov Predicts the Future in 1982: Computers Will Be “at the Center of Everything;” Robots Will Take Human Jobs

Scenes from Life in Paris During the 1920s, Colorized and Restored: Cafés, Notre Dame, Street Life & More

A Web Site That Lets You Find Your Home Address on Pangea

A 3D Animation Shows the Evolution of New York City (1524 — 2023)

Black History in Two Minutes: Watch 93 Videos Written & Narrated by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Watch Dziga Vertov’s Soviet Toys: The First Soviet Animated Movie Ever (1924)

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