Nikola Tesla Accurately Predicted the Rise of Wireless Technology & the Smartphone in 1926

in Science, Technology | November 3rd, 2025

Cer­tain cult his­tor­i­cal fig­ures have served as pre­scient avatars for the tech­no-vision­ar­ies of the dig­i­tal age. Where the altru­is­tic utopi­an designs of Buck­min­ster Fuller pro­vid­ed an ide­al for the first wave of Sil­i­con Val­ley pio­neers (a group includ­ing com­put­er sci­en­tist and philoso­pher Jaron Lanier and Wired edi­tor Kevin Kel­ly), lat­er entre­pre­neurs have hewn clos­er to the prin­ci­ples of bril­liant sci­en­tist and inven­tor Niko­la Tes­la, who believed, as he told Lib­er­ty mag­a­zine in 1935, that “we suf­fer the derange­ment of our civ­i­liza­tion because we have not yet com­plete­ly adjust­ed our­selves to the machine age.”

Such an adjust­ment would come, Tes­la believed, only in “mas­ter­ing the machine”—and he seemed to have supreme con­fi­dence in human mastery—over food pro­duc­tion, cli­mate, and genet­ics. We would be freed from oner­ous labor by automa­tion and the cre­ation of “a think­ing machine,” he said, over a decade before the inven­tion of the com­put­er. Tes­la did not antic­i­pate the ways such machines would come to mas­ter us, even though he can­ni­ly fore­saw the future of wire­less tech­nol­o­gy, com­put­ing, and tele­pho­ny, tech­nolo­gies that would rad­i­cal­ly reshape every aspect of human life.

In an ear­li­er, 1926, inter­view in Col­lier’s mag­a­zine, Tes­la pre­dict­ed, as the edi­tors wrote, com­mu­ni­cat­ing “instant­ly by sim­ple vest-pock­et equip­ment.” His actu­al words con­veyed a much grander, and more accu­rate, pic­ture of the future.

When wire­less is per­fect­ly applied the whole earth will be con­vert­ed into a huge brain, which in fact it is…. We shall be able to com­mu­ni­cate with one anoth­er instant­ly, irre­spec­tive of dis­tance. Not only this, but through tele­vi­sion and tele­pho­ny we shall see and hear one anoth­er as per­fect­ly as though we were face to face, despite inter­ven­ing dis­tances of thou­sands of miles; and the instru­ments through which we shall be able to do this will be amaz­ing­ly sim­ple com­pared with our present tele­phone. A man will be able to car­ry one in his vest pock­et. 

The com­plex­i­ty of smart­phones far out­strips that of the tele­phone, but in every oth­er respect, Tesla’s pic­ture maps onto the real­i­ty of almost 100 years lat­er. Oth­er aspects of Tesla’s future sce­nario for wire­less also seem to antic­i­pate cur­rent tech­nolo­gies, like 3D print­ing, though the kind he describes still remains in the realm of sci­ence fic­tion: “Wire­less will achieve the clos­er con­tact through trans­mis­sion of intel­li­gence, trans­port of our bod­ies and mate­ri­als and con­veyance of ener­gy.”

But Tesla’s vision had its lim­i­ta­tions, and they lay pre­cise­ly in his tech­no-opti­mism. He nev­er met a prob­lem that wouldn’t even­tu­al­ly have a tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tion (and like many oth­er tech­no-vision­ar­ies of the time, he hearti­ly endorsed state-spon­sored eugen­ics). “The major­i­ty of the ills from which human­i­ty suf­fers,” he said, “are due to the immense extent of the ter­res­tri­al globe and the inabil­i­ty of indi­vid­u­als and nations to come into close con­tact.”

Wire­less tech­nol­o­gy, thought Tes­la, would help erad­i­cate war, pover­ty, dis­ease, pol­lu­tion, and gen­er­al dis­con­tent, when we are “able to wit­ness and hear events—the inau­gu­ra­tion of a Pres­i­dent, the play­ing of a world series game, the hav­oc of an earth­quake or the ter­ror of a battle—just as though we were present.” When inter­na­tion­al bound­aries are “large­ly oblit­er­at­ed” by instant com­mu­ni­ca­tion, he believed, “a great step will be made toward the uni­fi­ca­tion and har­mo­nious exis­tence of the var­i­ous races inhab­it­ing the globe.”

Tes­la did not, and per­haps could not, fore­see the ways in which tech­nolo­gies that bring us clos­er togeth­er than ever also, and at the same time, pull us ever fur­ther apart. Read Tes­la’s full inter­view here, in which he also pre­dicts that women will become the “supe­ri­or sex,” not by virtue of “the shal­low phys­i­cal imi­ta­tion of men” but through “the awak­en­ing of the intel­lect.”

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2019.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sci-Fi Author J.G. Bal­lard Pre­dicts the Rise of Social Media (1977)

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like in 2014

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

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

Jules Verne Accu­rate­ly Pre­dicts What the 20th Cen­tu­ry Will Look Like in His Lost Nov­el, Paris in the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry (1863)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

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The Genius Engineering of Roman Aqueducts

in Architecture, History, Technology | October 16th, 2025

We tend to think of the Roman Empire as hav­ing fall­en around 476 AD, but had things gone a lit­tle dif­fer­ent­ly, it could have come to its end much ear­li­er — before it tech­ni­cal­ly began, in fact. In the year 44 BC, for instance, the assas­si­na­tion of Julius Cae­sar and the civ­il wars rag­ing across its ter­ri­to­ries made it seem as if the founder­ing Roman Repub­lic was about to go down and take Roman civ­i­liza­tion with it. It fell to one man to ensure that civ­i­liza­tion’s con­ti­nu­ity: “His name was Octa­vian, and he was Caesar’s adopt­ed son,” says sci­ence reporter Car­olyn Beans in the new Cod­ed Cham­bers video above. “At first, no one expect­ed much from him,” but when he took con­trol, he set about rebuild­ing the empire “city by city” before it had offi­cial­ly been declared one.

This ambi­tious project of restora­tion neces­si­tat­ed an equal­ly ambi­tious shoring up of infra­struc­ture, no sin­gle exam­ple of which more clear­ly rep­re­sents Roman engi­neer­ing prowess than the empire’s aque­ducts.

Using as an exam­ple the sys­tem that fed the city of Nemausus, or mod­ern-day Nîmes, Beans explains all that went into their con­struc­tion over great lengths of chal­leng­ing ter­rain — no stage of which, of course, ben­e­fit­ed from mod­ern con­struc­tion tech­niques — with the help of Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas at Austin clas­si­cal archae­ol­o­gy pro­fes­sor Rabun Tay­lor. The most basic task for Rome’s engi­neers was to deter­mine the prop­er slope of the aque­duc­t’s chan­nels: too steep, and the flow­ing water could cause dam­age; too flat, and it could stop before reach­ing its des­ti­na­tion.

Sur­vey­ing the prospec­tive aque­duc­t’s route involved such ancient tools as the diop­tra (used to estab­lish direc­tion and dis­tance over long stretch­es of land), the gro­ma (for straight lines and right angles between check­points), and the choro­bates (to check if a sur­face was lev­el). Then con­struc­tion could begin on a net­work of under­ground tun­nels called cuni­culi. Where dig­ging them proved unfea­si­ble, up went arcades, some of which — like the Pont du Gard in south­ern France, seen in the video — still stand today. They do so thanks in large part to their lime­stone bricks hav­ing been arranged into arch­es, whose geom­e­try directs ten­sion in a way that allows the stone to sup­port itself, with no mason­ry required. When water began run­ning through an aque­duct and into the city, it would then be dis­trib­uted to the gar­dens, foun­tains, ther­mae, and else­where — through con­duit pipes that hap­pened to be made of lead, but then, even the most bril­liant Roman engi­neers could­n’t fore­see every prob­lem.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

The Advanced Tech­nol­o­gy of Ancient Rome: Auto­mat­ic Doors, Water Clocks, Vend­ing Machines & More

Built to Last: How Ancient Roman Bridges Can Still With­stand the Weight of Mod­ern Cars & Trucks

The Amaz­ing Engi­neer­ing of Roman Baths

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

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

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The Advanced Technology of Ancient Rome: Automatic Doors, Water Clocks, Vending Machines & More

in History, Technology | September 9th, 2025

Ancient Rome nev­er had an indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion. Grant­ed, cer­tain his­to­ri­ans have object­ed now and again to that once-set­tled claim, ges­tur­ing toward large heaps of pot­tery dis­cov­ered in garbage dumps and oth­er such arti­facts clear­ly pro­duced in large num­bers. Still, the fact remains that Ancient Rome nev­er had an indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion of the kind that fired up toward the end of the eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry, but not due to a com­plete absence of the rel­e­vant tech­nol­o­gy. As explained in the new Lost in Time video above, Romans had wit­nessed the pow­er of steam har­nessed back in the first cen­tu­ry — but they dis­missed it as a nov­el­ty, evi­dent­ly unable to see its pow­er to trans­form civ­i­liza­tion.

That’s just one of a vari­ety of exam­ples of gen­uine high Roman tech­nol­o­gy fea­tured in the video, many or all of which would seem implau­si­ble to the aver­age view­er if insert­ed into a sto­ry set in ancient Rome.

Take the set of auto­mat­ic doors installed in a tem­ple, trig­gered by a fire that heats an under­ground water tank, which in turn fills up a pot attached to a cable that — through a sys­tem of pul­leys — throws them open. (When the fire cools down, the doors then shut again.) This was the work of the Greek-born inven­tor Hero of Alexan­dria, who would bear com­par­i­son in one sense or anoth­er with every­one from Rube Gold­berg to Leonar­do da Vin­ci.

It was also Hero who came up with that ear­ly steam tur­bine, called the aeolip­ile. He came along too late, how­ev­er, to take cred­it for the “self-heal­ing” Roman con­crete pre­vi­ous­ly much-fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, the mate­r­i­al of build­ings like the Pan­theon, “still the largest unre­in­forced con­crete dome in the world.” Anoth­er inven­tion high­light­ed in the video comes from Alexan­dria, but well before Hero’s time, and even before that of the Roman Empire itself: the accu­rate water clock engi­neered by Cte­si­bius, whose under­ly­ing design remained influ­en­tial in the Roman era. Hydraulic pow­er was also used in Roman mills, which made pos­si­ble com­plex fac­to­ry sys­tems, even in a civ­i­liza­tion that nev­er reached an indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion prop­er. And if a Roman fac­to­ry work­er got thirsty at break time, maybe he could drop a coin into one of Hero’s wine vend­ing machines.

Relat­ed con­tent:

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

The Amaz­ing Engi­neer­ing of Roman Baths

The Roman Colos­se­um Decon­struct­ed: 3D Ani­ma­tion Reveals the Hid­den Tech­nol­o­gy That Pow­ered Rome’s Great Are­na

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

The Ancient Roman Dodec­a­he­dron: The Mys­te­ri­ous Object That Has Baf­fled Archae­ol­o­gists for Cen­turies

Archae­ol­o­gists Dis­cov­er an Ancient Roman Snack Bar in the Ruins of Pom­peii

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

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The 1830s Device That Created the First Animations: The Phenakistiscope

in Animation, Film, History, Technology | August 28th, 2025

The image just above is an ani­mat­ed GIF, a for­mat by now old­er than most peo­ple on the inter­net. Those of us who were surf­ing the World Wide Web in its ear­li­est years will remem­ber all those lit­tle dig­ging, jack­ham­mer­ing road­work­ers who flanked the per­ma­nent announce­ments that var­i­ous sites — includ­ing, quite pos­si­bly, our own — were “under con­struc­tion.” Charm­ing though they could be at the time, they now look impos­si­bly prim­i­tive com­pared to what we can see on today’s inter­net, where high-res­o­lu­tion fea­ture films stream instan­ta­neous­ly. But tech­no­log­i­cal­ly speak­ing, we can trace it all back to what this par­tic­u­lar ani­mat­ed GIF depicts: the phenakistis­cope.

Invent­ed simul­ta­ne­ous­ly and inde­pen­dent­ly in late 1832 by Bel­gian physi­cist Joseph Plateau and Aus­tri­an geom­e­try pro­fes­sor Simon Stampfer, the phenakistis­cope was a sim­ple wheel-shaped device that could, for the first time in the his­to­ry of tech­nol­o­gy, cre­ate the illu­sion of a smooth­ly mov­ing pic­ture when spun and viewed in a mir­ror: hence the deriva­tion of its name from the Greek phenakisti­cos, “to deceive,” and ops, “eye.”

When it caught on as a com­mer­cial nov­el­ty, it was also mar­ket­ed under names like Phan­tas­mas­cope and Fan­tas­cope, which promised buy­ers a glimpse of horse-rid­ers, twirling dancers, bow­ing aris­to­crats, hop­ping frogs, fly­ing ghouls, and even pro­to-psy­che­del­ic abstract pat­terns, many of which you can see re-ani­mat­ed as GIFs in this Wikipedia gallery.

Even­tu­al­ly, accord­ing to the Pub­lic Domain Review, the phenakistis­cope was “sup­plant­ed in the pop­u­lar imag­i­na­tion: first­ly by the sim­i­lar Zoetrope, and then — via Ead­weard Muy­bridge’s Zooprax­is­cope (which pro­ject­ed the ani­ma­tion) — by film itself.” Muy­bridge, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, did pio­neer­ing motion-pho­tog­ra­phy work in the eigh­teen-sev­en­ties that’s now con­sid­ered a pre­cur­sor to cin­e­ma. Under­stand­ing what he was up to is an impor­tant part of under­stand­ing the emer­gence of movies as we know them. But the most instruc­tive expe­ri­ence to start with is mak­ing a phenakistis­cope of your own, instruc­tions for which are avail­able from the George East­man Muse­um and artist Megan Scott on YouTube. The fin­ished prod­uct may not hold any­one’s atten­tion long here in the age of Net­flix, but then, the age of Net­flix would nev­er have arrived had the phenakistis­cope not come first.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Ead­weard Muybridge’s Motion Pho­tog­ra­phy Exper­i­ments from the 1870s Pre­sent­ed in 93 Ani­mat­ed Gifs

How Ani­mat­ed Car­toons Are Made: A Vin­tage Primer Filmed Way Back in 1919

The Trick That Made Ani­ma­tion Real­is­tic: Watch a Short His­to­ry of Roto­scop­ing

Was a 32,000-Year-Old Cave Paint­ing the Ear­li­est Form of Cin­e­ma?

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

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Yuval Noah Harari Explains How to Protect Your Mind in the Age of AI

in Current Affairs, Technology | August 19th, 2025

You could say that we live in the age of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, although it feels truer about no aspect of our lives than it does of adver­tis­ing. “If you want to sell some­thing to peo­ple today, you call it AI,” says Yuval Noah Harari in the new Big Think video above, even if the prod­uct has only the vaguest tech­no­log­i­cal asso­ci­a­tion with that label. To deter­mine whether some­thing should actu­al­ly be called arti­fi­cial­ly intel­li­gent, ask whether it can “learn and change by itself and come up with deci­sions and ideas that we don’t antic­i­pate,” indeed can’t antic­i­pate. That AI-enabled waf­fle iron being pitched to you prob­a­bly does­n’t make the cut, but you may already be inter­act­ing with numer­ous sys­tems that do.

As the author of the glob­al best­seller Sapi­ens and oth­er books con­cerned with the long arc of human civ­i­liza­tion, Harari has giv­en a good deal of thought to how tech­nol­o­gy and soci­ety inter­act. “In the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, the rise of mass media and mass infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy, like the tele­graph and radio and tele­vi­sion” formed “the basis for large-scale demo­c­ra­t­ic sys­tems,” but also for “large-scale total­i­tar­i­an sys­tems.”

Unlike in the ancient world, gov­ern­ments could at least begin to “micro­man­age the social and eco­nom­ic and cul­tur­al lives of every indi­vid­ual in the coun­try.” Even the vast sur­veil­lance appa­ra­tus and bureau­cra­cy of the Sovi­et Union “could not sur­veil every­body all the time.” Alas, Harari antic­i­pates, things will be dif­fer­ent in the AI age.

Human-oper­at­ed organ­ic net­works are being dis­placed by AI-oper­at­ed inor­gan­ic ones, which “are always on, and there­fore they might force us to be always on, always being watched, always being mon­i­tored.” As they gain dom­i­nance, “the whole of life is becom­ing like one long job inter­view.” At the same time, even if you were already feel­ing inun­dat­ed by infor­ma­tion before, you’ve more than like­ly felt the waters rise around you due to the infi­nite pro­duc­tion capac­i­ties of AI. One indi­vid­ual-lev­el strat­e­gy Harari rec­om­mends to coun­ter­act the flood is going on an “infor­ma­tion diet,” restrict­ing the flow of that “food of the mind,” which only some­times has any­thing to do with the truth. If we binge on “all this junk infor­ma­tion, full of greed and hate and fear, we will have sick minds; per­haps a peri­od of absti­nence can restore a cer­tain degree of men­tal health. You might con­sid­er spend­ing the rest of the day tak­ing in as lit­tle new infor­ma­tion as pos­si­ble — just as soon as you fin­ish catch­ing up on Open Cul­ture, of course.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Sci-Fi Writer Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dict­ed the Rise of Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence & the Exis­ten­tial Ques­tions We Would Need to Answer (1978)

Will Machines Ever Tru­ly Think? Richard Feyn­man Con­tem­plates the Future of Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence (1985)

Isaac Asi­mov Describes How Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Will Lib­er­ate Humans & Their Cre­ativ­i­ty: Watch His Last Major Inter­view (1992)

How Will AI Change the World?: A Cap­ti­vat­ing Ani­ma­tion Explores the Promise & Per­ils of Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Stephen Fry Explains Why Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Has a “70% Risk of Killing Us All”

Yuval Noah Harari and Fareed Zakaria Break Down What’s Hap­pen­ing in the Mid­dle East

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

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How Ancient Greek Technology Was Used to Sculpt Mount Rushmore

in History, Technology | August 12th, 2025

Design­ing their new repub­lic, the Found­ing Fathers of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca looked back to ref­er­ence points in clas­si­cal antiq­ui­ty. That instinct con­tin­ued to shape Amer­i­can endeav­ors long there­after, and not just polit­i­cal ones. Take the exam­ple of Mount Rush­more, one of the coun­try’s most pop­u­lar tourist attrac­tions. Orig­i­nal­ly con­ceived in the ear­ly nine­teen-twen­ties as a moun­tain sculp­ture of Amer­i­ca’s wild-west heroes, a means of rais­ing the sta­tus of the fledg­ling state of South Dako­ta, it was soon changed into a stone trib­ute to four pres­i­dents: Found­ing Fathers George Wash­ing­ton and Thomas Jef­fer­son as well as Abra­ham Lin­coln and Theodore Roo­sevelt.

Mount Rush­more’s sculp­tor Gut­zon Bor­glum sug­gest­ed the switch from region­al fig­ures to nation­al ones, and it would­n’t be the last good idea he would bring to the table. As explained in the Pri­mal Space video above, he also fig­ured out how to repli­cate his ini­tial sculp­ture of the four pres­i­dents, made at one-twelfth-scale, on a 500-foot-tall cliff edge.

Build­ing all the nec­es­sary infra­struc­ture on and around the moun­tain con­sti­tut­ed a major project in and of itself. But when the work­ers got into their har­ness­es, how would they know where to direct their jack­ham­mers into the rock? To guide them, Bor­glum adapt­ed a mechan­i­cal tech­nique used by ancient Greeks to copy stat­ues, a “point­ing machine” that could “mea­sure spe­cif­ic points on a sculp­ture rel­a­tive to a ref­er­ence point,” mak­ing a three-dimen­sion­al shape trans­fer­able from one sculp­ture to anoth­er.

Bor­glum designed a large-scale point­ing machine that could be installed atop the moun­tain and posi­tioned to show work­ers where and how deep to drill. Though the sys­tem worked well, the team could only make progress so fast: after four­teen years, Mount Rush­more remained incom­plete when Bor­glum’s death and World War II put a stop to it alto­geth­er. Yet enough had been fin­ished to give it the icon­ic appear­ance that has made it rec­og­niz­able the world over, if not always by name. When I recent­ly gave a talk about Amer­i­can his­to­ry to some young stu­dents in South Korea, where I live, one of them iden­ti­fied a pho­to of Mount Rush­more as Mount Olym­pus — and, in a civ­i­liza­tion­al sense, maybe she was on to some­thing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold Ancient Egypt­ian, Greek & Roman Sculp­tures in Their Orig­i­nal Col­or

The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art Restores the Orig­i­nal Col­ors to Ancient Stat­ues

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

3D Scans of 7,500 Famous Sculp­tures, Stat­ues & Art­works: Down­load & 3D Print Rodin’s Thinker, Michelangelo’s David & More

How Mon­u­ment Val­ley Became the Most Icon­ic Land­scape of the Amer­i­can West

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

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Tomorrow Never Knows: How The Beatles Invented the Future With Studio Magic, Tape Loops & LSD

in History, Music, Technology | July 10th, 2025

“Tomor­row Nev­er Knows” could­n’t be made today, and not just because the Bea­t­les already made it in 1966. Mark­ing per­haps the sin­gle biggest step in the group’s artis­tic evo­lu­tion, that song is in every sense a prod­uct of its time. The use of psy­che­del­ic drugs like LSD was on the rise in the coun­ter­cul­ture, as was the aware­ness of the reli­gion and music of far­away lands such as India. At the same moment, devel­op­ments in record­ing-stu­dio tech­nol­o­gy were mak­ing new approach­es pos­si­ble, involv­ing sounds that musi­cians nev­er would have imag­ined try­ing before — and, when brought togeth­er, pro­duced a result that many lis­ten­ers of just a few years ear­li­er would hard­ly have rec­og­nized as music at all.

In the new You Can’t Unhear This video above, host Ray­mond Schillinger explains all that went into the record­ing of “Tomor­row Nev­er Knows,” which he calls “arguably the most piv­otal song of the Bea­t­les’ career.” It seems that John had under­gone some con­sid­er­able expe­ri­ences dur­ing the group’s five-month-long break after Rub­ber Soul, giv­en that he turned up to EMI Stu­dios after­ward with a song that “defied pret­ty much every con­ven­tion of pop music at the time: the lyrics did­n’t rhyme, the chord pro­gres­sion did­n’t real­ly progress, and instead of roman­tic love, the sub­ject mat­ter was expand­ing one’s psy­chic con­scious­ness through ego death.” A young Geoff Emer­ick, who’d just been pro­mot­ed to the role of the Bea­t­les’ record­ing engi­neer, rose to the chal­lenge of facil­i­tat­ing an equal­ly non-stan­dard stu­dio process.

The whol­ly new son­ic tex­ture that result­ed owes in large part to the use of mul­ti­ple tape loops, lit­er­al sec­tions of audio tape con­nect­ed at the begin­ning and end to allow the­o­ret­i­cal­ly infi­nite rep­e­ti­tion of their con­tent. This was a fair­ly new musi­cal tech­nol­o­gy at the time, and the Bea­t­les made use of it with gus­to, cre­at­ing loops of all man­ner of sped-up sounds — an orches­tra play­ing, a Mel­lotron, a reversed Indi­an sitar, Paul sound­ing like a seag­ull — and orches­trat­ing them “live” dur­ing record­ing. (Ringo’s drum track, despite what sounds like a super­hu­man reg­u­lar­i­ty in this con­text, was not, in fact a loop.) Oth­er tech­no­log­i­cal­ly nov­el ele­ments includ­ed John’s dou­ble-tracked vocals run through a revolv­ing Leslie speak­er and a back­wards gui­tar solo about whose author­ship Bea­t­les enthu­si­asts still argue.

What John had called “The Void,” was reti­tled after one of Ringo’s sig­na­ture askew expres­sions (“a hard day’s night” being anoth­er) in order to avoid draw­ing too much atten­tion as a “drug song.” But lis­ten­ers tapped into the LSD scene would have rec­og­nized lyri­cal inspi­ra­tion drawn from The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the ancient work that also informed The Psy­che­del­ic Expe­ri­ence, the guide­book by Tim­o­thy Leary and Richard Alpert (lat­er Baba Ram Dass) with which John direct­ed his own first trip. But even for the least turned-on Bea­t­le fan, “Tomor­row Nev­er Knows” was “like step­ping from a black-and-white world into full col­or,” as Schillinger puts it. The Bea­t­les might have gone the way of the Rolling Stones and cho­sen to record in an Amer­i­can stu­dio rather than their home-away-from-home on Abbey Road, the uncon­ven­tion­al use of its less-than-cut­ting-edge gear result­ed in what remains a vivid­ly pow­er­ful dis­patch from the ana­log era — even here in the twen­ty-twen­ties, when con­scious­ness expan­sion itself has gone dig­i­tal.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How John Lennon Wrote the Bea­t­les’ Best Song, “A Day in the Life”

The Amaz­ing Record­ing His­to­ry of The Bea­t­les’ “Here Comes the Sun”

The Exper­i­men­tal Move­ment That Cre­at­ed The Bea­t­les’ Weird­est Song, “Rev­o­lu­tion 9”

How “Straw­ber­ry Fields For­ev­er” Con­tains “the Cra­zi­est Edit” in Bea­t­les His­to­ry

Hear Bri­an Eno Sing The Bea­t­les’ “Tomor­row Nev­er Knows” as Part of The Best Live Album of the Glam/Prog Era (1976)

The Bea­t­les’ 8 Pio­neer­ing Inno­va­tions: A Video Essay Explor­ing How the Fab Four Changed Pop Music

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

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A Visualization of the History of Technology: 1,889 Innovations Across Three Million Years

in History, Technology | June 30th, 2025

“Any suf­fi­cient­ly advanced tech­nol­o­gy is indis­tin­guish­able from mag­ic.” So holds the third and most famous of the “three laws” orig­i­nal­ly artic­u­lat­ed by sci­ence fic­tion writer Arthur C. Clarke. Even when it was first pub­lished in the late nine­teen-six­ties, Clarke’s third law would have felt true to any res­i­dent of the devel­oped world, sur­round­ed by and whol­ly depen­dent on advanced tech­nolo­gies whose work­ings they could scarce­ly hope to explain. Nat­u­ral­ly, it feels even truer now, a quar­ter of the way into our dig­i­tal twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry. Indeed, for all we know about how they real­ly work, our cred­it cards, our smart­phones, our com­put­ers, and indeed the inter­net itself might as well be mag­ic.

To best under­stand the tech­nol­o­gy that increas­ing­ly makes up our world, we should attempt to under­stand the evo­lu­tion of that tech­nol­o­gy. Those smart­phones, for exam­ple, could­n’t have been invent­ed in the form we know them with­out the pre­vi­ous devel­op­ments of chem­i­cal­ly strength­ened glass, the mul­ti-touch screen inter­face, and the cam­era phone. Each of those indi­vid­ual tech­nolo­gies also has its pre­de­ces­sors: fol­low the chain back far enough, and even­tu­al­ly you get to the likes of the mobile radio tele­phone, invent­ed in 1946; the phased array anten­na, invent­ed in 1905; and glass, invent­ed around 1500 BC. These and count­less oth­er paths can be traced at the His­tor­i­cal Tech Tree, an ambi­tious project of writer and pro­gram­mer Éti­enne Forti­er-Dubois.

Forti­er-Dubois cred­its among his inspi­ra­tions Sid Meier’s Civ­i­liza­tion games, with their all-impor­tant “tech trees,” and James Burke’s tele­vi­sion series Con­nec­tions, which high­light­ed the unpre­dictable process­es by which one inno­va­tion could lead to oth­ers across the cen­turies or mil­len­nia. Even in the sev­en­ties, Forti­er-Dubois writes, “Burke was already con­cerned that our lives depend on tech­no­log­i­cal sys­tems that very few peo­ple deeply under­stand. It is, of course, pos­si­ble to live with­out com­pre­hend­ing how com­put­ers, mon­ey, or air­planes work. But when every­thing around us feels vague­ly mag­i­cal, reliant on experts whose actions we have no way of ver­i­fy­ing, it’s easy to lose trust in tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tions to our cur­rent prob­lems.” He offers the His­tor­i­cal Tech Tree as a poten­tial cor­rec­tive to that loss of under­stand­ing and the ener­vat­ing atti­tudes it pro­duces.

Forti­er-Dubois him­self admits that the project “made me real­ize how lit­tle I knew about the objects around me. I didn’t real­ly know that ‘elec­tron­ics’ meant con­trol­ling the flow of elec­trons with vac­u­um tubes or semi­con­duc­tors, or that refin­ing petro­le­um into kerosene uses frac­tion­al dis­til­la­tion, or that WiFi and blue­tooth are just the use of cer­tain radio fre­quen­cies that can be detect­ed by a spe­cif­ic kind of chip.” Any­one who explores even this ear­ly ver­sion of the His­tor­i­cal Tech Tree (which, as of this writ­ing, con­tains 1886 tech­nolo­gies and 2180 con­nec­tions between them) will find it an edu­ca­tion­al expe­ri­ence in the same way, pro­vid­ing as it does not just knowl­edge about tech­nol­o­gybut a sense of how much of that knowl­edge we lack. Our civ­i­liza­tion has made its way from stone tools to rob­o­t­axis, mRNA vac­cines, and LLM chat­bots; we’d all be bet­ter able to inhab­it it with even a slight­ly clear­er idea of how it did so. Vis­it the His­tor­i­cal Tech Tree here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Inter­ac­tive Time­line Cov­er­ing 14 Bil­lion Years of His­to­ry: From The Big Bang to 2015

The Tree of Lan­guages Illus­trat­ed in a Big, Beau­ti­ful Info­graph­ic

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy Visu­al­ized

The Tree of Mod­ern Art: Ele­gant Draw­ing Visu­al­izes the Devel­op­ment of Mod­ern Art from Delacroix to Dalí (1940)

The His­to­ry of Mod­ern Art Visu­al­ized in a Mas­sive 130-Foot Time­line

The Map of Com­put­er Sci­ence: New Ani­ma­tion Presents a Sur­vey of Com­put­er Sci­ence, from Alan Tur­ing to “Aug­ment­ed Real­i­ty”

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

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