Bell Telephone Launched a Mobile Phone During the 1940s: Watch Bell’s Film Showing How It Worked

in Film, History, Technology | January 24th, 2023

“Here comes a trailer truck out on the open highway, miles from the nearest town,” says the narrator of the short film above. Suddenly, it becomes “important for someone to get in touch with the drivers of this outfit. How can it be done?” Any modern-day viewer would respond to this question in the same way: you just call the guys. But Mobile Telephones dates from the nineteen-forties, well before the eponymous devices were in wide use — about four decades, in fact, before even the massive Motorola DynaTAC 8000X came on the market. The idea of calling someone not at home or the office, let alone a trucker on the road, would have seemed the stuff of science fiction.

Yet the engineers at Bell had made it possible, using a system that transmits conversations “partway by radio, partway by telephone lines.” This necessitated “a number of transmitting and receiving stations connected to telephone lines,” installed “at intervals along the highway so that one will always be in range of the moving vehicle.”

As dramatized in Mobile Telephones, the process of actually ringing up the driver of a vehicle involves calling a classic forties switchboard operator and asking her to make the connection. But otherwise, the process won’t feel entirely unfamiliar to the mobile phone users today — that is, to the majority of the people in the world.

Cellphones have become such an integral part of life in the twenty-first century that few of us really feel the need to understand just how they work. But three quarters of a century ago, the idea of taking or making calls on the go was unfamiliar enough that viewers of a film like this would have wanted the mechanics laid out in some detail. Surely that held especially true for the industrial clients of Bell’s early mobile-telephone system, for whom its reliable functionality would translate into greater profits. Taking the longer view, this technological development marks, as the narrator reminds us over swelling music, “one more step toward telephone service for anyone, any time, anywhere”: a once-futuristic vision that now sounds practically mundane.

The World’s First Mobile Phone Shown in 1922 Vintage Film

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

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

The First Cellphone: Discover Motorola’s DynaTAC 8000X, a 2‑Pound Brick Priced at $3,995 (1984)

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 ( 7 ) |

Robots Are Carving Replicas of the Parthenon Marbles: Could They Help the Real Ancient Sculptures Return to Greece?

in Computer Science, Design, History, Museums, Technology | January 24th, 2023

Art forgery is a sturdy trope of film and fiction. We’re all familiar with the spectacle of a rarified expert examining a work, while a wealthy collector anxiously wrings their hands nearby.

As Maggie Cao observes in the Guardian:

Forgeries expose some of the art world’s most psychologically complex figures: the collector and the counterfeiter. What compels the prototypical collector to accumulate objects of beauty is usually a peculiar devotion to the power of singularity. The collector worships art’s power to move us, a power we imagine emanates from unique objects. Meanwhile, what motivates the counterfeiter is an undue confidence in the possibilities of replication. To deceive a viewer with a copy is to affirm that copy’s interchangeability with the original.

But what if art forgery can be used for good?

That’s the hope of Roger Michel, founder of the Institute for Digital Archaeology, who employs technological advances to preserve culturally significant objects and offer accessible tactile experiences to those with vision impairment.

Shortly after ISIS destroyed the Monumental Arch of Palymyra, he harnessed 3D technology to recreate the 1800-year old landmark in two-thirds scale Egyptian marble.

The public was able to get up close and personal with the model in various locations around the world, including New York’s City Hall Park, Florence’s Piazza della Signoria, and London’s Trafalgar Square, where Michel enjoyed watching passersby touching and photographing the replica Arch:

There are guys in Carnaby Street suits mixed with young people in hip-hop clothes and Syrians in traditional dress. It’s the crossroads of humanity, and that was what Palymra was.

Michel is also striving to convince the British Museum that all will not be lost, should it choose to repatriate the 2,500-year-old Parthenon Marbles to Greece, much as the Smithsonian returned 29 Benin bronzes taken during an 1897 British raid to the National Commission for Museums and Monuments in Nigeria.

Michel made his case with a robotically carved facsimile of the head of the Horse of Selene, above, which is all the more remarkable when one learns that he was working from photos taken on an iPhone and iPad while visiting the gallery in which it is displayed, after the museum refused his request for an official scan.

The item description on the museum’s collection’s portal notes that the Horse of Selene was purchased from Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, who took possession of it while serving as Britain’s ambassador to Ottoman Turkey from 1799–1803.

(The description neglects to mention that rather than allow him to adorn his home with this and other ill-gotten antiquities, a parliamentary committee ordered Lord Elgin to sell his vast collection to the British government for £35,000, which is how they wound up in the museum.)

Originally a part of the Parthenon’s east pediment, the Horse of Selene is such a fan favorite that the museum shop sells an “exquisite” hand-cast resin replica for £1,650, promising that it will make “a show-stopping point of focus in any home.”

Perhaps…though we’re willing to bet it can’t match the verisimilitude of the tiny chips and chisel marks painstakingly captured by the robot carver, which took about about 8 days to create a rough model once it received the scans, followed by some 3 weeks of refining. The robot got an assist at the very end from human artisans, whose handiwork Michel calls “the crucial 3 to 5 percent.”

Giacomo Massari, founder of Robotor, who partnered with Michel on this recreation, vaunts the precision technology makes possible:

You can recognize every scratch. You can see the flaws of the stone and you can see the challenges our colleagues from 2,000 years ago were facing. It’s like going back in time — you can feel the struggles of the artist.

The museum brass appears unmoved by the prospect of swapping replicas, no matter how excellent, for the frieze panels, sculptures, architectural fragments and other treasures of antiquity Elgin shipped home from the Acropolis in the early 1800s, though the New York Times reported last week that secret talks with Greece’s prime minister may indicate the two parties are edging closer to resolution.

This collection has been a cultural hot potato since Lord Byron, touring the Parthenon shortly after Elgin made off with so many its treasures, denounced his avarice in a poem titled The Curse of Minerva:

Lo! here, despite of war and wasting fire,

I saw successive Tyrannies expire;

‘Scaped from the ravage of the Turk and Goth,

Thy country sends a spoiler worse than both.

Survey this vacant, violated fane;

Recount the relics torn that yet remain:

‘These’ Cecrops placed, ‘this’ Pericles adorned,

‘That’ Adrian reared when drooping Science mourned.

What more I owe let Gratitude attest—

Know, Alaric and Elgin did the rest.

That all may learn from whence the plunderer came,

The insulted wall sustains his hated name:

For Elgin’s fame thus grateful Pallas pleads,

Below, his name—above, behold his deeds!

The New York Times quoted a middle-aged London bus driver who voiced the opinion, as did the vast majority of respondents to a British survey, that the Parthenon sculptures should be returned to their land of origin, remarking, “It’s like the Crown Jewels. If someone took those, you’d want them back, wouldn’t you?”

His argument is a hard one to refute in an age when the innovative technical solutions promoted by Michel and the Institute for Digital Archaeology create opportunities that Lord Elgin and museum visitors of yore could never have envisioned.

The public invitation to the November 2022 unveiling of the Selene Horse replica stated that “Britain’s stewardship of the Elgin marbles embodies a psychologically complex story of obsession, possession, and assimilation — so far without resolution”, asking:

Might perfect copies, rendered in sacred Pentelic marble, suggest a possible path forward?

Readers, what say you?

Take a Virtual Reality Tour of the World’s Stolen Art

The British Museum Is Now Open To Everyone: Take a Virtual Tour and See 4,737 Artifacts, Including the Rosetta Stone

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

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Only Footage of Mark Twain: The Original & Digitally Restored Films Shot by Thomas Edison

in History, Literature | January 23rd, 2023

We know what Mark Twain looked like, and we think we know what he sounded like. Just above see what he looked like in motion, strolling around Stormfield, his house in Redding, Connecticut—signature white suit draped loosely around his frame, signature cigar puffing white smoke between his fingers. After Twain’s leisurely walk along the house’s façade, we see him with his daughters, Clara and Jean, seated indoors. Below you can see the original murky version, featured on our site way back in 2010. A digital restoration (top) does wonders for the watchability of this priceless silent artifact, so vividly capturing the writer/contrarian/raconteur’s essence that you’ll find yourself reaching to turn the volume up, expecting to hear that familiar curmudgeonly drawl.

Shot by Thomas Edison in 1909, the short film is most likely the only moving image of Twain in existence. We might assume that Edison also recorded Twain’s voice, since we seem to know it so well, from portrayals of the great American humorist in pop cultural touchstones like Star Trek: The Next Generation and parodies by Alec Baldwin and Val Kilmer.

Kilmer’s surprisingly funny in the role, but he doesn’t come near the pitch perfect impersonation Hal Holbrook had given us for the better part of sixty years in his masterful Mark Twain Tonight. Holbrook’s vocal mannerisms have become a definitive model for actors playing Twain on stage and screen.

Given the number of Twain vocal impersonations out there, and Edison’s interest in documenting the author, we might be surprised to learn that no original recordings of his voice exist. Twain, we find out in the short film below, experimented with audio recording technology, but abandoned his efforts. It seems that none of the wax cylinders he worked with have survived—perhaps he destroyed them himself.

As narrator Rod Rawlings—himself a Twain impersonator and aficionado—informs us, what we do have is a recording made in 1934 by actor and playwright William Gillette, an able mimic of Twain, his patron and longtime neighbor. Like Holbrook, Gillette spent a good part of his career traveling from town to town playing Mark Twain. Below, you’ll hear Gillette address a class of students at Harvard, first in his own voice, then in the voice of the author, reading from “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” Gillette’s performance is likely the closest we’ll ever come to hearing the voice of the real Twain, whose major works appear in our collection of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks.

Mark Twain Wrote the First Book Ever Written With a Typewriter

Mark Twain’s Viciously Funny Marginalia Took Aim at Some Literary Greats

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

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

The Mystery Finally Solved: Why Has Roman Concrete Been So Durable?

in Architecture, History | January 20th, 2023

Image by Benjaminec, via Wikimedia Commons

Rome may not have been built in a day, but it was built to last — or at least its concrete was, given that the pieces of the Roman Empire that have stood to our time, in one form or another, tend to have been built with it. That material has proven not just durable but enduringly fascinating, holding a great deal of not just historical interest but technical interest as well. For ancient Roman concrete appears to outlast its much more technically advanced modern descendants, and the complex question of why is one we’ve featured more than once here on Open Culture. Just this year, researchers at MIT, Harvard, and laboratories in Italy and Switzerland have found what seems to be the final piece of the puzzle.

“For many years, researchers have assumed that the key to the ancient concrete’s durability was based on one ingredient: pozzolanic material such as volcanic ash from the area of Pozzuoli, on the Bay of Naples,” writes MIT News’ David L. Chandler. “Under closer examination, these ancient samples also contain small, distinctive, millimeter-scale bright white mineral features.”

Previously assumed to be nothing but imperfections in the process or the materials, these “lime clasts,” in light of this most recent research, constitute evidence of “hot mixing,” which involves heating to a high temperature ingredients including quicklime (or calcium oxide), a purer and more reactive form of lime.

Undergoing hot mixing, “the lime clasts develop a characteristically brittle nanoparticulate architecture, creating an easily fractured and reactive calcium source” that “could provide a critical self-healing functionality.” In practice, this means that “as soon as tiny cracks start to form within the concrete, they can preferentially travel through the high-surface-area lime clasts. This material can then react with water, creating a calcium-saturated solution, which can recrystallize as calcium carbonate and quickly fill the crack, or react with pozzolanic materials to further strengthen the composite material.” Here we have a convincing explanation of the reactions that, in ancient Roman concrete, “automatically heal the cracks before they spread.”

No such self-healing happens in modern concrete, the production of which has not involved quicklime for a very long time indeed — but perhaps it could once more. During their research process, writes Dezeen’s Rima Sabina Aouf, the team “produced samples of hot-mixed concrete using both ancient and modern formulations, cracked them, and ran water through the cracks. Within two weeks, the cracks had healed and water could no longer flow through, while identical concrete blocks made without quicklime never healed.” Such findings “could help increase the lifespan of modern concrete and therefore mitigate the notorious environmental impact of the material,” and the researchers “are now working to commercialize their more durable concrete formula.” Even in the twenty-first century, the building industry could well benefit by doing as the Romans did.

via MIT News

How to Make Roman Concrete, One of Human Civilization’s Longest-Lasting Building Materials

How Did Roman Aqueducts Work?: The Most Impressive Achievement of Ancient Rome’s Infrastructure, Explained

How the Ancient Romans Built Their Roads, the Lifelines of Their Vast Empire

The Beauty & Ingenuity of the Pantheon, Ancient Rome’s Best-Preserved Monument: An Introduction

Roman Architecture: A Free Course from Yale

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 ) |

A Virtual Tour of Ancient Athens: Fly Over Classical Greek Civilization in All Its Glory

in Architecture, History | January 19th, 2023

If we seek to understand Western civilization, we must look back not just to Rome, but also to Athens. And today, thanks to computer-generated imagery informed by historical research, we can look not just to those cities, but at them — or at least at convincing digital reconstructions, but from angles their actual inhabitants could scarcely have imagined. A few years ago, we featured here on Open Culture the Youtube channel Ancient Athens 3D for its reconstructions of individual structures like the Temples of Ilissos and Hephaestus. Its more recent video above offers a twelve-minute virtual tour of all classical Athens in the fifth century BC, the height of ancient Greek civilization.

In that period, according to the video, Athens “was the center of the arts, theater, philosophy, and democracy.” In the city “great monuments of architecture were built and were largely associated with the Athenian general Pericles.”

It was Pericles who led the city-state during the first two years of the Peloponnesian War, the conflict in which Athens would eventually fall to Sparta in 404 BC — a defeat that had almost, but not quite come to the city at the moment Ancient Athens 3D creator Dimitris Tsalkanis brings it back to life. He includes everything from the Acropolis and the Agora to the Olympieion and the Sacred Gate, all looking as if they’ll stand forever.

Nor does Tsalkanis ignore even better-known classical Greek buildings like the Parthenon, whose detailed reconstruction, inside and out, also appears in its own video just above. Commissioned by Pericles, built on the Acropolis, and dedicated to the goddess Athena, “patroness of the city of Athens,” the building remains “a symbol of ancient Greece, democracy, and Western civilization” nearly two and half millennia after its construction, and more than two centuries after the Earl of Elgin had its mythology-depicting marbles sent off to England. You can still see them at the British Museum (at least for now), and for that matter you can still visit the Parthenon itself in Athens — or at least the ruins thereof, wholly untouched by digital magic.

What Ancient Greece Really Looked Like: See Reconstructions of the Temple of Hadrian, Curetes Street & the Fountain of Trajan

How Ancient Greek Statues Really Looked: Research Reveals Their Bold, Bright Colors and Patterns

Watch Art on Ancient Greek Vases Come to Life with 21st Century Animation

What Did Ancient Greek Music Sound Like?: Listen to a Reconstruction That’s ‘100% Accurate’

An 8‑Minute Animated Flight Over Ancient Rome

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 ) |

How Futurists Envisioned the Future in the 1920s: Moving Walkways, Personal Helicopters, Glass-Domed Cities, Dream Recorders & More

in History, Sci Fi, Technology | January 16th, 2023

Many of us now in adulthood first came to know the nineteen-twenties as the decade our grandparents were born. It may thus give us pause to consider that it began over a century ago — and even more pause to consider the question of why its visions of the future seem more exciting than our own. You can behold a variety of such visions in the videos above and below, which come from The 1920s Channel on Youtube. Using a collection of print-media clippings, it offers an experience of the “futurism” of the nineteen-twenties, which has now inspired a distinct type of “retro-futurism,” between the “steampunk” of the Victorian era and the “atompunk” of America after the Second World War.

“Being in the modern age, futurism of the nineteen-twenties leans more towards atompunk,” says the video’s narrator. But it also has a somewhat dieselpunk flavor,” the latter being a kind of futurism from the nineteen-forties. “In America, the nineteen-twenties were similar to the nineteen-fifties, in that they took place in the immediate aftermath of a massive, destructive war, and both carried an optimism for the future. The only difference was that science fiction was not as mainstream in the twenties as it was in the fifties, so it didn’t quite fully develop a unique look that permeated society.” This gave twenties futurism a look and feel all its own — as well as a preponderance of dirigibles.

Apart from those helium-filled airships, which “only rose to prominence after the Victorian era, and their popularity ended in the nineteen-thirties,” its other elements of science fiction and (eventual) fact include moving walkways, personal helicopters, cities enclosed by glass domes and webbed by sky bridges, highways stacked ten levels deep, zero-gravity chambers, dream recorders, theremins, “light-beam pianos,” a tunnel under the English Channel, “aerial mail torpedoes,” and a curious technology called television. Longtime Open Culture readers may also spot the Isolator, a distraction-eliminating helmet invented by sci-fi publisher Hugo Gernsback — whose own magazine Science and Invention, the narrator notes, originally ran many of these images. Perhaps what our own decade lacks isn’t exciting visions of the future, but a Gernsback to commission them.

The Word “Robot” Originated in a Czech Play in 1921: Discover Karel Čapek’s Sci-Fi Play R.U.R. (a.k.a. Rossum’s Universal Robots)

Futurist Makes Weirdly Accurate Predictions in 1922 About What the World Will Look Like in 2022: Wireless Telephones, 8‑Hour Flights to Europe & More

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

Sci-Fi Pioneer Hugo Gernsback Predicts Telemedicine in 1925

In 1926, Nikola Tesla Predicts the World of 2026

“When We All Have Pocket Telephones”: A 1920s Comic Accurately Predicts Our Cellphone-Dominated Lives

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 ) |

Thanks to Artificial Intelligence, You Can Now Chat with Historical Figures: Shakespeare, Einstein, Austen, Socrates & More

in History, Technology | January 13th, 2023

By now, we’ve all heard of the recent technological advances that allow us to have plausible-sounding conversations with artificial-intelligence systems. Though near-science-fictionally impressive, such developments have yet to hone in on one particular world-changing application. In the meantime, those fascinated by its potential are trying to put it to all manner of different uses, some of them eminently practical and others less so. Far-fetched though it may seem, what if the “killer app” of such AI chatting turned out to be conversation with historical figures, even ones dead for millennia?

Such is the promise of the new site Character.AI, on which, writes the New York Times Cade Metz, “users can chat with reasonable facsimiles of everyone from Queen Elizabeth or William Shakespeare to Billie Eilish or Elon Musk (there are several versions).

Anyone you want to invoke, or concoct, is available for conversation.” Having learned from “reams of general dialogue as well as from articles, news stories, books and other digital text,” the system now comprises “a practically endless collection of bots that can imitate a practically endless collection of people, riffing on a practically endless number of topics.”

Right after signing up for Character.AI, a quick and free process, you’ll be ready to start chatting with Shakespeare yourself. When I tried it, old Will got straight to the point: “ ‘To be or not to be,’ do you think that that’s the question?” Before long, I had him explaining all of his artistic motivations: his use of “prince in a dilemma between suicide and revenge” represents “the struggle between life and death.” He had Hamlet communicate with the ghost of his father because “I wanted to show that he was caught in a world where death was everywhere.” With the question of “to be or not to be,” he meant “to show that life is full of suffering.”

So far, so undergraduate. More interesting was Shakespeare’s answer when I asked him to name his preferred Hamlet adaptation. “My favorite is the Hamlet directed by Kenneth Branagh!” he replied. “He has stayed true to the text while also showing how the prince of Denmark is struggling between life and death. In addition, he has given a lot of importance to the relationship between the prince and his father.” A filmmaker could hardly ask for a more credible endorsement, but then, we must bear in mind that it didn’t actually come from Shakespeare himself. As Character.AI’s ever-present warning puts it, “Remember: everything characters say is made up” — and often, alas, on the banal side.

This holds for every mind with whom you may want to have a dialogue on the site: philosophical ones like Socrates and Thomas Hobbes, scientific ones like Albert Einstein and Marie Curie, political ones like Karl Marx and Margaret Thatcher, literary ones like Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. Since I happen to be in the middle of reading through all of the latter’s novels, I asked his bot what I should bear in mind while doing so. “Wow!” it replied. “That is an amazing undertaking! I would encourage you to see patterns,” especially in “the things I do to create tension, and the kind of characters I create. Look at the stories through my eyes, and try to understand what I understand, the good and the bad.” The real Dickens might not have put it that way, but he surely believed something like it.

An AI-Generated, Never-Ending Discussion Between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek

Two Artificial Intelligence Chatbots Talk to Each Other & Get Into a Deep Philosophical Conversation

Artificial Intelligence Brings to Life Figures from 7 Famous Paintings: The Mona Lisa, Birth of Venus & More

Noam Chomsky Explains Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

Hear Kurt Vonnegut Visit the Afterlife & Interview Dead Historical Figures: Isaac Newton, Adolf Hitler, Eugene Debs & More (Audio, 1998)

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 ( 3 ) |

A Creative Animation Tells the Story of Maximilien Robespierre, One of the Most Influential Figures of the French Revolution

in Animation, Art, Fashion, History | January 13th, 2023

Robespierre is an immortal figure not because he reigned supreme over the Revolution for a few months, but because he was the mouthpiece of its purest and most tragic discourse.

— François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution

Cal Arts animation student Michelle Cheng’s character design primer, above, draws attention to the many hats an animator must be prepared to wear when bringing to life a figure who actually existed:

Artist…

Researcher…

Costume designer…

Hairstylist…

Psychologist…

Her choice of Maximilien Robespierre, one of the most influential figures of the French Revolution, suggests that Cheng enjoys a challenge.

As historian Peter McPhee writes in The Robespierre Problem: An Introduction:

Was Robespierre the first modern dictator, icily fanatical, an obsessive who used his political power to try to impose his rigid ideal of a land of Spartan ‘virtue’? Or was he a principled, self-abnegating visionary, the great revolutionary martyr who, with his Jacobin allies, succeeded in leading the French Revolution and the Republic to safety in the face of overwhelming military odds?

Cheng believes an animator’s first job is to understand any given character’s role in the larger story, and her research suggests that “there is never just one story.”

In the end, animators make choices based on the narrative they wish to push, enlisting palettes and styles that will support their favored approach.

Cheng went into this assignment perceiving Robespierre to be “a prime example of situational irony, a fanatical dictator who had sent hundreds of people to the guillotine only to be guillotined himself in the end.”

This, she readily admits, is a two-dimensional understanding.

Though he only lived to thirty-six, the man evolved. Robespierre, the symbol of the Reign of Terror, is distinct from Robespierre the individual citizen.

This duality led her to concoct a range of Robespierres — evil, good, and neutral.

A not particularly distinguished-looking fellow, he was widely acknowledged to be fastidious about his appearance.

All three animated characters are garbed in the neoclassical fashion typical of a progressive gentleman of the period — shirt, breeches, stockings, waistcoat, coat, a lacy cravat, and a curled wig.

Cheng, in consultation with fellow Cal Arts animator Janelle Feng, equipped the “evil” version with an ominous, figure-concealing black cloak lined in blood red. Angles and points are emphasized, the face draws on his opponents’ sinister descriptions of his habitual expressions, and subtle nods to punk and Goth cater to modern sensibilities.

The “good” version employs rosy Rococo hues to lean into the Robespierre his friends and family knew — a poet who loved his pet pigeons.

History prevents Cheng from ditching his signature wig entirely, but she granted herself some leeway, softening it for a more natural look.

This Robespierre is as dreamy as any Miyazaki hero.

Between these two poles is the “neutral” Robespierre, perhaps the most challenging to depict.

Feng took the lead on this one, seeking to strike a balance between his reportedly unprepossessing appearance and his revolutionary fire.

She retained the striped coat of his most iconic portrait, but updated it to a cool green palette. His nickname — the Incorruptible — is embodied in his firm comportment.

The video draws to a close with a review of the various ways Robespierre has been depicted in art and film over the years, a vivid reminder of Cheng’s assertion that “there is never just one story.”

See more of Michelle Cheng’s animations on her lemoncholy YouTube channel.

See more of Janelle Feng’s French Revolution era designs here.

Enter a Digitized Collection of 38,000 Pamphlets & Periodicals From the French Revolution

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

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Bell Telephone Launched a Mobile Phone During the 1940s: Watch Bell’s Film Showing How It Worked

Robots Are Carving Replicas of the Parthenon Marbles: Could They Help the Real Ancient Sculptures Return to Greece?

The Only Footage of Mark Twain: The Original & Digitally Restored Films Shot by Thomas Edison

The Mystery Finally Solved: Why Has Roman Concrete Been So Durable?

A Virtual Tour of Ancient Athens: Fly Over Classical Greek Civilization in All Its Glory

How Futurists Envisioned the Future in the 1920s: Moving Walkways, Personal Helicopters, Glass-Domed Cities, Dream Recorders & More

Thanks to Artificial Intelligence, You Can Now Chat with Historical Figures: Shakespeare, Einstein, Austen, Socrates & More

A Creative Animation Tells the Story of Maximilien Robespierre, One of the Most Influential Figures of the French Revolution

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