At its peak in the second century, the Roman Empire dominated nearly two million square miles of the world. As with most such grand achievements, it couldn’t have happened without the development of certain technologies. The long reach of the Eternal City was made possible in large part by the humble technology of the road — or at least it looks like a humble technology here in the twenty-first century. Roads existed before the Roman Empire, of course, but the Romans built them to new standards of length, capacity, and durability. How they did it so gets explained in the short video above.
On a representative stretch of Roman-road-to be, says the narrator, a “wide area would be deforested.” Then “the topsoil would be removed until a solid base was found.” Atop that base, workers laid down curbs at the width determined by the road plan, then filled the gap between them with a foundation of large stones.
Atop the large stones went a layer of smaller stones mixed with fine aggregates, and finally the gravel, sand, and clay that made up the surface. All of this was accomplished with the old-fashioned power of man and animal, using tipper carts to pour out the materials and other tools to spread and compact them.
Roman road-builders didn’t just use any old rocks and dirt, but “carefully selected materials of the highest quality” — including formidably long-lasting Roman concrete, the secrets of whose sturdiness have only been fully understood in the past decade. In another ingenious design choice recently discovered, “ditches were placed to prevent access to the road from unauthorized vehicles,” as well as to widen the peripheral view of the road’s users. In the video just above, civil-engineering specialist Isaac Moreno Gallo takes a closer look at a section of a real Roman road being excavated where it will intersect with a modern highway under construction. The new road will surely stand for a long time to come — but will it inspire fascination a couple millennia from now?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
Quite a few generations of American children have by now grown up knowing the names of Max and Dave Fleischer — albeit knowing even better the names of the characters they animated, like Betty Boop, Popeye the Sailor, and Superman. The kids who first thrilled to Max Fleischer’s early “Out of the Inkwell” series, which he started in the late nineteen-tens and continued into the late nineteen-twenties, would naturally have seen them in a movie theater. But most of us under the age of eighty would have received our introduction to the lively, whimsical, and often bizarre world of the brothers Fleischer through the television, a medium hungry for cartoons practically since its inception.
The charm of Fleischer cartoons may still feel effortless a century after their creation, but anyone familiar with animation knows how painstaking that creation would have been; by the same token, bringing the surviving films back to pristine condition is a more complicated job than most viewers would imagine.
The current offerings on Fabulous Fleischer Cartoons Restored’s channel include Betty Boop and Pudgy in “Happy You and Merry Me,” Bimbo the Dog in “Teacher’s Pest,” and even the short but lavish Technicolor fantasy “Somewhere in Dreamland,” which brightened up the grim days of the Great Depression for all who saw it. The restorers have also worked their magic on Fleischer holiday cartoons like “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “Christmas Comes But Once a Year” (including with the latter a side-by-side comparison of the new restoration with the existing sixteen-millimeter DVD print). Yes, Christmas has just passed, but it will come again next year, and bring with it the latest generation’s chance to be delighted by Fleischer cartoons crisper and more vivid than the ones with which any of us grew up.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
More than a millennium and a half after its fall, we still look back with wonder on the accomplishments of the ancient Roman Empire. Few elements of its legacy impress us as much as its built environment — or in any case, what’s left of its built environment. Still, the fact that anything remains at all of the structures built by the Romans tells us that they were doing something right: specifically, they were doing concrete right. Just how they made that astonishingly durable building material has been a subject of research even in recent years, and we even featured it here on Open Culture back in 2017. But could we make Roman concrete today?
Such is the task of Shawn Kelly, host of the Youtube channel Corporal’s Corner, in the video above. Using materials like volcanic ash, pumice and limestone, he makes a brick that looks more than solid enough to go up against any modern concrete.
As of this writing, this simple video has racked up more than three million views, a number that reflects our enduring fascination with the question of how the ancient Romans created their world — as well as the question addressed in the higher-tech Practical Engineering video below, “Was Roman Concrete Better?”
The fact of the matter is that, despite possessing technologies the Romans could hardly have imagined, their concrete lasts longer than ours. Why that should be the case comes down, in large part, to water: we put a great deal more of it into our concrete than the Romans did, in order to pour it more cheaply and easily. But this makes it more fragile and subject to deterioration over time (as seen in the early dilapidation of certain Brutalist buildings), even despite our use of chemical additives and steel reinforcement. Roman concrete was also mixed with seawater, which caused the formation of crystals within the material that actually strengthened it as it aged — thus cementing, as one wag in the comments puts it, the Romans’ place in history.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
What is the most American institution of all? The mind first goes in the directions of church, of the military, of football. But if we consider only the systems of modern life developed on United States soil, the most influential must surely be fast food. That influence manifests in not just the homeland but the rest of the world as well, and like every robust American creation, fast food both changes and adapts to the foreign lands in which it takes root. Though unknown in the U.S., the yellow motorcycles of McDonald’s deliverymen are an everyday sight in the capital of South Korea, where I live. That could hardly have figured in even the farthest-reaching visions Richard and Maurice McDonald had for the entirely new model of hamburger stand they launched in San Bernardino, California, in 1948.
Back in postwar America, “car culture reigns supreme. Drive-in movies and drive-in restaurants become all the rage, taking convenience to another level.” So says the narrator of the clip above, from the fast-food episode of the Netflix series History 101. But before long, drive-ins would be relegated to the status of historical curiosity, and fast food on the McDonald’s model would become nearly omnipresent.
As with much else in American industrial history, the key was efficiency. Having previously run a drive-in, the McDonald brothers understood well how cumbersome such operations could be, and how they encouraged customers to linger rather than spend their money and be on their way. The stripped-down menu, the streamlined cooking process: every element was now engineered for speed above all.
McDonald’s did not, however, invent the drive-through. That honor goes to a Texas establishment called Pig Stand, which first erected that pillar of the American way of life back in 1921. In Fast Food: The Fast Lane of Life, the History Chanel documentary above, the president of Texas Pig Stands says that the chain’s founder Jessie G. Kirby “was famous for his quote of saying that people with cars are so lazy that they don’t want to get out of them to go eat. That prophecy proved to be very true.” Even as the spread of car ownership across America and then the world made drive-through fast food into a viable proposition, it put (and continues to put) greater and greater pressure on the businesses to deliver their product in shorter and shorter times.
“Beyond the challenges of technical hardware that delivered things fast, the industry had to deliver a pipeline to deliver the food,” says the documentary’s narrator. “Throughout the eighties, the burger giants set about designing a network of suppliers that could deliver millions of tons of foods to thousands of restaurants at exacting standards of uniformity.” This uniformity — hamburgers that cost and taste exactly the same, everywhere — enchanted Andy Warhol, that maven of American mass culture. It has also, arguably, done its part to trivialize the rituals of preparing and consuming food, to say nothing of the health dangers posed by frequent indulgence in salty, sugary, oily meals, especially in the context of a sedentary automotive lifestyle. But if you don’t understand fast food — and all the technological, economic, and social factors that have made it not just possible but world-dominant — can you claim understand America?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
“We should fear Grant Wood. Every artist and every school of artists should be afraid of him, for his devastating satire.” Gertrude Stein wrote those words after seeing American Gothic, the 1930 painting that would become one of the most iconic images created in the United States. Yet Wood himself “said he painted American Gothic to extol rural American values, real people in their well-ordered world: an image of reassurance during the onset of the Great Depression.” That’s how Art History School host Paul Priestley puts it in the video above, which asks of the painting, “Is it a satire, or a positive statement of American rural life?”
It could be neither; then again, it could be both. That very ambiguity goes some way to explaining American Gothic’s success — as well as its persistence in the culture through frequent and unceasing parody. Yet in its day, the painting also angered some of its viewers: “An Iowan farmer’s wife who’d seen the picture in the papers in 1930 telephoned Wood to express her anger,” says Priestly.
“She claimed she wished to come over and smash his head for depicting her countrymen as grim Bible-thumpers.” Wood maintained that he was one of them, “dressing in rugged overalls after the painting was completed and telling the press, ‘All the really good ideas I’d ever had come to me while I was milking a cow.’
Yet Wood was no farmer. A son of Cedar Rapids, he traveled extensively to Europe to study Impressionism and post-Impressionism. There he first saw the work of Jan van Eyck, whose combination of visual clarity and complexity inspired him to develop the signature look and feel of the movement that would come to be known as Regionalism. He became “half European artiste, half Iowan farm boy,” as Vox’s Phil Edwards puts it in the video just above, all the better to straddle his homeland’s widening divide between town and country. “In 1880, almost half of all Americans were on the farm,” but by 1920 more than half the population lived in cities. American Gothic came a decade later, and most of a century thereafter, it still makes Americans ask themselves — earnestly or sardonically — just what kind of people they are.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
The exalted status of Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica is reflected by the fact that everybody knows it as, simply, the Principia. Very few of us, by contrast, speak of the Historia when we mean to refer to John Ray and Francis Willughby’s De Historia Piscium, which came out in 1686, the year before the Principia. Both books were published by the Royal Society, and as it happens, the formidable cost of Willughby and Ray’s lavish work of ichthyology nearly kept Newton’s groundbreaking treatise on motion and gravitation from the printing press.
According to the Royal Society’s web site, “Ray and Willughby’s Historia did not prove to be the publishing sensation that the Fellows had hoped and the book nearly bankrupted the Society. This meant that the Society was unable to meet its promise to support the publication of Isaac Newton’s masterpiece.”
Fortunately, “it was saved from obscurity by Edmund Halley, then Clerk at the Royal Society” — and now better known for his eponymous comet — “who raised the funds to publish the work, providing much of the money from his own pocket. ”
Halley’s great reward, in lieu of the salary the Royal Society could no longer pay, was a pile of unsold copies of De Historia Piscium. That may not have been quite the insult it sounds like, given that the book represented a triumph of production and design in its day. You can see a copy in the episode of Adam Savage’s Tested at the top of the post, and you can closely examine its imagery at your leisure in the digital archive of the Royal Society. In the words of Jonathan Ashmore, Chair of the Royal Society’s Library Committee, a browsing session should help us “appreciate why early Fellows of the Royal Society were so impressed by Willughby’s stunning illustrations of piscine natural history.”
Though Savage duly marvels at the Royal Society’s copy of the Historia — a reconstruction made up of pages long ago cut out and sold separately, as was once common practice with books with pictures suitable for framing — it’s clear that much of the motivation for his visit came from the prospect of close proximity to Newtoniana, up to and including the man’s death mask. But then, Newton lays fair claim to being the most important scientist who ever lived, and the Principia to being the most important science book ever written. Almost three and a half centuries later, physics still holds mysteries for generations of Newton’s successors to solve. But then, so do the depths of the ocean.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
They’re almost an endangered species, the victim of the Internet, postal rate increases, and the jettisoning of any time consuming tradition whose execution has been found to bring the opposite of joy.
Christmas cards must hold a special place in both the V&A’s collections and heart, given that the museum’s founder, Henry Cole, inadvertently invented them in 1843.
As a well respected man about town, he received a great many more holiday letters than he had time or inclination to respond to, but neither did he wish to appear rude.
So he enlisted his friend, painter J.C. Horsley, to create a festive illustration with a built-in holiday greeting, leaving just enough space to personalize with a recipient’s name and perhaps, a handwritten line or two.
He then had enough postcard-sized reproductions printed up to send to 1000 of his friends.
Part of the reason the cards in the V&A’s collection are so well preserved is that their recipients prized them enough to keep them in souvenir albums.
Understandably. They’re very appealing little artifacts.
The upper crust could afford such fancy design elements as clever die-cut shapes, pop up elements, and translucent windows that encouraged the recipients to hold them up to actual windows.
Technological advances in the printing industry, and the creation of the cost-effective Penny Post allowed those whose budgets were more modest than Mr. Cole’s to participate too.
Their cards tended to be simpler in execution, though not necessarily concept.
In addition to the views we’ve come to expect — winter, Father Christmas, holly — the Victorians had a thing for jolly anthropomorphized food and some truly shameless puns.
Enjoy these Ghosts of Christmas Past, dear readers. We’re almost inspired to revive the tradition!
Read more about the advent of this tradition, including how it jumped the pond, in Smithsonian Magazine’sHistory of the Christmas Card.
I never use a metal detector and I often walk little more than a mile in 5 hours, yet I can travel 2,000 years back in time through the objects that are revealed by the tide. Prehistoric flint tools, medieval pilgrim badges, Tudor shoes, Georgian wig curlers and Victorian pottery, ordinary objects left behind by the ordinary people who made London what it is today.
As she says in the short film above, her first find has become one of her most common — a clay pipe fragment.
The term mudlark was invented to describe the poverty stricken Victorians who scoured the foreshore for copper, wire, and other items with resale value, as well as things they could clean off and use themselves.
Today’s mudlarks are primarily history buffs and amateur archeologists.
The hobby has become so popular that The Port of London Authority, which controls the Thames waterway along with the Crown Estate, has started to require foreshore permits of all prospective debris hunters.
Permitted mudlarks can claim as souvenirs however many Victorian clay pipes and blue and white pottery shards they dig up, but are legally obliged by the Portable Antiquities Scheme to report items of potentially greater historic and monetary value — i.e. Treasure — to a museum-trained Finds Liason Officer:
Any metallic object, other than a coin, provided that at least 10 per cent by weight of metal is precious metal (that is, gold or silver) and that it is at least 300 years old when found. If the object is of prehistoric date it will be Treasure provided any part of it is precious metal.
Any group of two or more metallic objects of any composition of prehistoric date that come from the same find (see note below).
Two or more coins from the same find provided they are at least 300 years old when found and contain 10 per cent gold or silver (if the coins contain less than 10 per cent of gold or silver there must be at least ten of them). Only the following groups of coins will normally be regarded as coming from the same find: Hoards that have been deliberately hidden; Smaller groups of coins, such as the contents of purses, that may been dropped or lost; Votive or ritual deposits.
Any object, whatever it is made of, that is found in the same place as, or had previously been together with, another object that is Treasure.
How did all this historic refuse come to be in the Thames? Maiklem told Collectors Weeklythat there are many reasons:
Obviously, it’s been used as a rubbish dump. It was a useful place to chuck your household waste. It was essentially a busy highway, so people accidentally dropped things and lost things as they traveled on it. Of course, people also lived right up against it. London was centered on the Thames so houses were all along it, and there was all this stuff coming out of the houses and off the bridges. It was the biggest port in the world in the 18th century, so there was all the shipbuilding and industry going on.
And then of course, there’s the rubbish that was used to build up the foreshore and create barge beds. The riverbed in its natural state is a V shape, so they had to build up the sides next to the river wall to make them flatter so the flat-bottom barges could rest there at low tide. They did that by pouring rubbish and building spoil and kiln waste, anything they could find—industrial waste, domestic waste. When they dug into the ground further up, they’d bring the spoil down and use it to build up the foreshore, and cap it off with a layer of chalk, which was soft and didn’t damage the bottom of the barges.
One of the reasons we’re finding so much in the river now is because there’s so much erosion. While it was a “working river,” these barge beds were patched up and the revetments, or the wooden walls that held them in, were repaired when they broke. But now, they’re being left to fall apart, and these barge beds are eroding as the river is getting busier with river traffic.
There are numerous social media groups where modern mudlarks can proudly share their finds, and seek assistance in identifying strange or fragmented objects.
Maiklem’s London Mudlark Facebook page is an education in and of itself, a reflection of her abiding interest in the historic significance of the items she truffles up.
Witness the pewter buckle plate dating to the 14th or 15th-century that she spotted on the foreshore in late November, turned over to her Finds Liaison Officer and researched with the help of historic pewter craftsman Colin Torode:
Prior to c.1350 pewter belt fittings seem to have been rather rare, although a London Girdlers’ Guild Charter of 1321 which banned the use of pewter belt fittings does show that the metal was certainly in use. In 1344 the Girdlers’ guild again reiterated the ban on what they felt were inferior metals such as pewter, tin and lead. In 1391 however, a statute recognized that these metals had been in use for some time and that their use could continue without restriction
This ornate plate would have had a separate buckle frame attached to it and is probably a cheaper copy of the more upmarket copper alloy or silver versions that were produced at the time.Although the the openwork design is similar to those found in in furniture or church screens, it’s not religious or pilgrim related.
Maiklem also challenges fans to play along from home with “spot the find” videos for such items as a Tudor clothes hook, Georgian cufflink, and a German salt glazed, stoneware bottle’s neck embossed with a human face.
The river also spews up plenty of drowned rats, flushing them out with the sewage after a heavy rain. Other potential hazards include hypodermic needles and broken glass.
In addition to such safety precautions as gloves, sturdy footwear, and remaining mindful of incoming tides, Maiklem advises novice mudlarks to look for straight lines and perfect circles — “the things that nature doesn’t make.”
It takes practice and patience to develop a skilled eye, but don’t get discouraged if your first outings don’t yield the sort of jaw dropping discoveries Maiklem has made — an intact glass Victorian sugar crusher, a 16th-century child’s leather shoe and Roman era pottery shards galore.
Sometimes even plastic comes with a compelling story.
I’m still feeling quite giddy over this bit of plastic. I came to Cornwall this week to write and to beachcomb. I hoped I might find a small piece of Lost Lego, but I wasn’t holding out much hope. Calm weather means less plastic: good for the beach, bad for the Lego looker. Then I found this wedged between two boulders. It’s one of the black octopuses from the Lego spill of 1997 when, 20 miles from Land’s End, a huge wave hit the cargo ship Tokio Express. It tilted 45 degrees and 62 containers slid into the water. One container was filled with nearly 5 million pieces of Lego, much of which was sea themed. Little scuba tanks, flippers, octopuses, cutlasses, life rafts, spear guns, dragons and octopuses like this still wash up on the beaches of Cornwall and further afield.
Stay abreast of Lara Maiklem’s mudlarking finds here.
Try your hand at mudlarking the Thames in person, during a guided tour with the Thames Explorer Trust.
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