The Eden Project Built a Rainforest Ecosystem Inside Buckminster Fuller-Inspired Geodesic Domes

in Creativity, Design, Environment, Life, Technology | November 24th, 2020

Buck­min­ster Fuller had a dif­fi­cult time as an inven­tor in his ear­ly years. “Hav­ing been expelled from Har­vard for irre­spon­si­ble con­duct,” notes The Guardian, “he strug­gled to find a job and pro­vide a liv­ing for his young fam­i­ly in his ear­ly 30s.” Despite lat­er suc­cess­es, and a lat­er rep­u­ta­tion as leg­endary as Niko­la Tesla’s, he was often, like Tes­la, seen by crit­ics as a utopi­an vision­ary, whose visions were too imprac­ti­cal to real­ly change the world.

But his body of work remains a tes­ta­ment to an imag­i­na­tion that ris­es above the trends of indus­tri­al design and engi­neer­ing. After a peri­od of decline, for exam­ple, Fuller’s geo­des­ic domes expe­ri­enced a revival in the ear­ly 2000’s when “aging baby-boomers across Amer­i­ca” began “build­ing dream homes in the shape of geo­des­ic domes.” Mean­while in Corn­wall, Eng­land, a few years ahead of the curve, Dutch-born busi­ness­man and archae­ol­o­gist-turned-suc­cess­ful-music-pro­duc­er Sir Tim­o­thy Smit broke ground on what would become a far more British use of Ful­lerist prin­ci­ples.

In the late 90s, Smit start­ed work on an enor­mous com­plex of geo­des­ic bio­mes called the Eden Project, a facil­i­ty “akin to a quin­tes­sen­tial­ly Vic­to­ri­an cre­ation: the Eng­lish green­house,” which reached its apex in the famed “Crys­tal Palace” built for the Great Exhi­bi­tion in Hyde Park in 1851. These were build­ings “born out of a play­ful, deca­dent imagination—yet in their archi­tec­ture and design they often opened new path­ways for the future.” So too do Fuller’s designs, in an appli­ca­tion meld­ing Vic­to­ri­an and Ful­lerist ideas about cura­tor­ship and sus­tain­abil­i­ty.

Look­ing like “clus­ters of soap bub­bles” the Eden Project slow­ly rose above an exhaust­ed clay pit and opened in 2001 (see a short time-lapse film of the con­struc­tion above). Each of the two huge cen­tral domes recre­ates an ecosys­tem. The Rain­for­est Bio­me allows vis­i­tors to get lost in near­ly 4 acres of trop­i­cal for­est and includes banana, cof­fee, and rub­ber plants. The Mediter­ranean Bio­me hous­es an acre and a half of olives and grape vines. Small­er adjoin­ing domes house thou­sands of addi­tion­al plant species. There is a per­for­mance space and a year­ly music fes­ti­val; sculp­tures and art exhi­bi­tions in both the indoor and out­door gar­dens. The facil­i­ty has host­ed well over a mil­lion vis­i­tors each year.

Pho­to via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In 2016, the Eden Project began plant­i­ng red­woods, intro­duc­ing a for­est of the North Amer­i­can trees to Europe for the first time. Next year, it will begin drilling for a geot­her­mal ener­gy project to turn heat from the gran­ite under­ground into pow­er, an under­tak­ing that, unlike frack­ing, will not release con­t­a­m­i­nants into the water sup­ply or addi­tion­al fos­sil fuels into the air and could pow­er and heat the facil­i­ty and 5000 addi­tion­al homes. In 2018, the project began con­struc­tion on Eden Project North, in More­cambe, Lan­cashire, with build­ings designed to look like giant mus­sels and a focus on marine envi­ron­ments.

Eden Project Inter­na­tion­al aims to build unique facil­i­ties all around the world, “to cre­ate new attrac­tions with a mes­sage of envi­ron­men­tal, social and eco­nom­ic regen­er­a­tion” and “to pro­tect and reju­ve­nate nat­ur­al land­scapes.” None of these ambi­tious expan­sions use the geo­des­ic domes of the orig­i­nal Eden Project, but that is not a reflec­tion on the domes’ struc­tur­al sound­ness. Many oth­er trans­par­ent uses of Fuller’s design have encoun­tered dif­fi­cul­ties with water tight­ness and heat flow. The Eden Project’s domes use inno­v­a­tive inflat­able, tri­an­gu­lar pan­els instead of glass to solve those prob­lems. Fuller sure­ly would have approved.

The project also rep­re­sents a poignant per­son­al vin­di­ca­tion for the Fuller fam­i­ly. Fuller “vowed to ded­i­cate his life to improv­ing stan­dards of liv­ing through good design,” The Guardian writes, after his daugh­ter Alexan­dra died in 1922. In 2009, his only sur­viv­ing child, Alle­gra Fuller Sny­der, then 82 and Chair­woman of the Buck­min­ster Fuller Insti­tute, vis­it­ed the Eden Project. “Of all the projects relat­ed to my father’s work,” she remarked after­ward, “I would say that this is the one I am most aware of as being a pow­er­ful, com­pre­hen­sive project…. My father would have been just thrilled. He would feel that it is a mar­vel­lous appli­ca­tion of his think­ing.”

Learn more about the Eden Project, which reopens Decem­ber 3, here. And learn how to “cre­ate Eden wher­ev­er you are” with the project’s free resources for gar­den­ers at home.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Buck­min­ster Fuller Rails Against the “Non­sense of Earn­ing a Liv­ing”: Why Work Use­less Jobs When Tech­nol­o­gy & Automa­tion Can Let Us Live More Mean­ing­ful Lives

Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Map of the World: The Inno­va­tion that Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Map Design (1943)

The Life & Times of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Geo­des­ic Dome: A Doc­u­men­tary

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

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The Geometry of Sound: Watch Artist Kenichi Kanazawa Make Amazing Geometric Designs Out of Sand, Using Sound Waves Alone

in Art, Physics | November 23rd, 2020

Before our eyes, Japan­ese artist Kenichi Kanaza­wa cre­ates crisp shapes and geo­met­ric pat­terns with no spe­cial tools but sand and sound, the kind of work that at first looks express­ly designed to go viral on social media. But he’s been at it much longer than that: “Orig­i­nal­ly a sculp­tor by trade,” accord­ing to Spoon & Tam­ago’s John­ny Wald­man, “Kanaza­wa began work­ing with steel and sound in 1987 after col­lab­o­rat­ing with the late sound artist Hiroshi Yoshimu­ra. Today, his work pri­mar­i­ly involves ele­ments like sound, vibra­tion and heat: mak­ing the invis­i­ble, vis­i­ble.” Or in oth­er words, using what crit­ic and music Ted Gioia calls, in a tweet of one of Kanaza­wa’s short table­top per­for­mances, “the pow­er of sound to cre­ate order out of chaos.”

Kanaza­wa does­n’t use just any old tables, but spe­cial ones made of steel, the bet­ter to res­onate when he taps and strokes them with his vari­ety of mal­lets. Nor does he use just any old sand, opt­ing instead for either a pure white — for max­i­mum visu­al stark­ness against the black steel — or a set of bright col­ors, as in the video at the top of the post.

What­ev­er its place on the spec­trum, the stuff seems to rearrange itself across the sur­face in response to the tones cre­at­ed by the artist. The strik­ing pre­ci­sion of the effects pro­duced by this inter­ac­tion of sand, steel, and sound gets view­ers won­der­ing what, sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly, is going on here. The under­ly­ing set of phe­nom­e­na has a name: cymat­ics, coined in the 1960s by a Swiss doc­tor named Hans Jen­ny.

In his book Heal­ing Songs, Gioia calls Jen­ny’s study of cymat­ics “the most impres­sive and rig­or­ous inquiry yet made into the nature of vibra­tions and their impact on phys­i­cal objects of var­i­ous sorts.” In such a medi­um sen­si­tive to son­ic vibra­tions, Jen­ny him­self writes, “a pat­tern appears to take shape before the eye and, as long as the sound is spo­ken, to behave like some­thing alive.” This also fair­ly describes Kanaza­wa’s danc­ing sand, whether seen from up close or at a dis­tance. Phys­i­cal­ly speak­ing, sound is, of course, a form of vibra­tion, which is itself a form of motion. But for an observ­er like Jen­ny — an adher­ent of eso­teric philoso­pher Rudolf Stein­er’s anthro­pos­o­phy, a school of thought ori­ent­ed toward the obser­va­tion of the spir­i­tu­al world through sen­so­ry expe­ri­ence — Kanaza­wa’s work would sure­ly have, as it were, much deep­er res­o­nances.

via @Ted­Gioia

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Geom­e­try of Sound Waves Visu­al­ized

What Does Sound Look Like?: The Audi­ble Ren­dered Vis­i­ble Through Clever Tech­nol­o­gy

The Physics of Play­ing a Gui­tar Visu­al­ized: Metallica’s “Noth­ing Else Mat­ters” Viewed from Inside the Gui­tar

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

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A Curious Herbal: 500 Beautiful Illustrations of Medicinal Plants Drawn by Elizabeth Blackwell in 1737 (to Save Her Family from Financial Ruin)

in Art, Books, History, Science | November 23rd, 2020

Some­times beau­ti­ful things come out of ter­ri­ble cir­cum­stances. This does not jus­ti­fy more ter­ri­ble cir­cum­stances. But as evi­dence of the resilience, resource­ful­ness, and cre­ativ­i­ty of human beings—and more specif­i­cal­ly of moth­ers in dire straits—we offer the fol­low­ing: A Curi­ous Herbal, Eliz­a­beth Blackwell’s fine­ly illus­trat­ed, engraved, and col­ored “herbal,” the term for a “book of plants, describ­ing their appear­ance, their prop­er­ties and how they may be used for prepar­ing oint­ments,” the British Library writes.

Born some­time around 1700 to a suc­cess­ful mer­chant fam­i­ly in Scot­land, Eliz­a­beth mar­ried Alexan­der Black­well, a “shady char­ac­ter” who pro­ceed­ed to drag her through a series of mis­ad­ven­tures involv­ing him pos­ing as a doc­tor and a print­er, despite the fact that he’d had no train­ing in either pro­fes­sion.

Black­well incurred sev­er­al hefty fines from the author­i­ties, which he could not pay, and he was final­ly remand­ed to debtor’s prison, an insti­tu­tion that often left women with young chil­dren to fend for them­selves.

“With Alexan­der in prison, Eliz­a­beth was forced to rely on her own resources to keep her­self and her child.” For­tu­nate­ly, she had been pre­pared with life skills dur­ing her pros­per­ous upbring­ing, hav­ing learned a thing or two about busi­ness and “received tuition in draw­ing and paint­ing, as many well-to-do young women then did.” Black­well real­ized a pub­lish­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty: find­ing no high-qual­i­ty herbals avail­able, she decid­ed to make her own in “a rare tri­umph of turn­ing des­per­a­tion into inspi­ra­tion,” Maria Popo­va writes.

After befriend­ing the head cura­tor Chelsea Physic Gar­den — a teach­ing facil­i­ty for appren­tice apothe­caries estab­lished sev­er­al decades ear­li­er — she real­ized that there was a need for a hand­book depict­ing and describ­ing the garden’s new col­lec­tion of mys­te­ri­ous plants from the New World. A keen observ­er, a gift­ed artist, and an entre­pre­neur by nature, she set about bridg­ing the world’s need and her own.

The gor­geous book, A Curi­ous Herbal (1737–39), was not all Blackwell’s work, though she com­plet­ed all of the illus­tra­tions from start to fin­ish. She also enlist­ed her husband’s help, vis­it­ing his cell to have him “sup­ply each plant’s name in Latin, Greek, Ital­ian, Span­ish, Dutch, and Ger­man.” Black­well pro­duced 500 illus­tra­tions in total. She adver­tised “by word of mouth,” notes the British Library, “and in sev­er­al jour­nals” and “showed her­self an adept busi­ness­woman, strik­ing mutu­al­ly advan­ta­geous deals with book­sellers that ensured the finan­cial suc­cess of the herbal.”

Black­well not only ben­e­fit­ed her fam­i­ly and her read­ers, but she also gave her book to posterity—though she couldn’t have known it at the time. Her herbal has been dig­i­tized in full by the Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library. The herbal will also give back to the nat­ur­al world she lov­ing­ly ren­dered (includ­ing plants that have since gone extinct). Popo­va has made a selec­tion of the illus­tra­tions avail­able as prints to ben­e­fit The Nature Con­ser­van­cy. See Blackwell’s dig­i­tized book in full here and order prints at Brain Pick­ings.

via Brain­Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Dis­cov­er Emi­ly Dickinson’s Herbar­i­um: A Beau­ti­ful Dig­i­tal Edi­tion of the Poet’s Col­lec­tion of Pressed Plants & Flow­ers Is Now Online

His­toric Man­u­script Filled with Beau­ti­ful Illus­tra­tions of Cuban Flow­ers & Plants Is Now Online (1826)

The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library Makes 150,000 High-Res Illus­tra­tions of the Nat­ur­al World Free to Down­load

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

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Watch How to Be at Home, a Beautiful Short Animation on the Realities of Social Isolation in 2020

in Animation, Books, Film, Life, Poetry | November 23rd, 2020

I think, as social pri­mates, we want to feel a strong sense of belong­ing either in a rela­tion­ship or to a community—or both. But also intrin­sic to our human­i­ty is a feel­ing that we are tru­ly alone.

—Film­mak­er Andrea Dorf­man, 2010

When they first became friends, poet Tanya Davis and film­mak­er Andrea Dorf­man talked a lot about the plea­sures and hard­ships of being alone. Davis had just gone through a break up, and Dorf­man was just embark­ing on a rela­tion­ship after four years of fly­ing solo.

These con­ver­sa­tions led to a col­lab­o­ra­tion, 2010’s How to Be At Alone (see below), a whim­si­cal videopo­em that com­bines live action and ani­ma­tion to con­sid­er some of soli­tude’s sweet­er aspects, like sit­ting on a bench as sig­nal to the uni­verse that one is avail­able for impromp­tu con­ver­sa­tion with a stranger.

That bench reap­pears in their 2020 fol­low up, How to Be At Home, above. Now it is cor­doned off with black and yel­low cau­tion tape, a famil­iar pub­lic health mea­sure in 2020.

As with the ear­li­er project, a large part of Davis’ pur­pose was to reflect and reas­sure, both her­self, and by exten­sion, oth­ers.

Although she has become a poster child for the joys of soli­tude, she also rel­ish­es human con­tact, and found her­self miss­ing it ter­ri­bly while shel­ter­ing alone in the ear­ly days of the pan­dem­ic. Writ­ing the new poem gave her “an anchor” and a place to put her anx­i­ety.

Dorf­man notes that the project, which was com­mis­sioned by the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da as part of a short film col­lec­tion about Cana­di­ans nav­i­gat­ing life dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, was “essen­tial­ly cat­alyzed by COVID.”

As she embarked on the project, she won­dered if the pan­dem­ic would be over by the time it was com­plete. As she told the CBC’s Tom Pow­er:

There was this feel­ing that this could go away in a month, so this bet­ter be fin­ished soon, so it’s still rel­e­vant. So as an artist, as a film­mak­er, I thought, “I have to crank this out” but there’s no fast and easy way to do ani­ma­tion. It just takes so long and as I got into it and real­ized that this was going to be a marathon, not a sprint, the images just kept com­ing to me and I real­ly just made it up as I went along. I’d go into my stu­dio every day not know­ing what lay ahead and I’d think, “Okay, so, what do we have up next? What’s the next line? And I’d spend maybe a week on a line of the poem, ani­mat­ing it. 

It appears to have been an effec­tive approach.

Dorfman’s paint­ed images rip­ple across the fast turn­ing pages of an old book. The titles change from time to time, and the choic­es seem delib­er­ate—The Lone Star Ranger, Le Secret du Manoir Han­té, a chap­ter in The Bro­ken Halo—“Rose­mary for Remem­brance.”

“It’s almost as though the way the poem is writ­ten there are many chap­ters in the book. (Davis) moves from one sub­ject to anoth­er so com­plete­ly,” Dorf­man told the Uni­ver­si­ty of King’s Col­lege stu­dent paper, The Sig­nal.

In the new work, the absence of oth­er peo­ple proves a much heav­ier bur­den than it does in How To Be Alone.

Davis flirts with many of the first poem’s set­tings, places where a lone indi­vid­ual might have gone to put them­selves in prox­im­i­ty to oth­er humans as recent­ly as Feb­ru­ary 2020:

Pub­lic trans­porta­tion

The gym

A dance club

A descrip­tion from 2010:

The lunch counter, where you will be sur­round­ed by chow-down­ers, employ­ees who only have an hour and their spous­es work across town, and they, like you, will be alone.

Resist the urge to hang out with your cell phone.

In 2020, she strug­gles to recre­ate that expe­ri­ence at home, her phone serv­ing as her most vital link to the out­side world, as she scrolls past images of a Black Lives Mat­ter protests and a masked essen­tial work­er:

I miss lunch coun­ters so much I’ve been eat­ing [pick­les and] toast­ed sand­wich­es while hang­ing unabashed­ly with my phone.

See How to Be at Home and the 29 oth­er films that com­prise The Curve, the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da series about life in the era of COVID-19 here.

How to be at Home

By Tanya Davis

If you are, at first, real­ly fuck­ing anx­ious, just wait. It’ll get worse, and then you’ll get the hang of it. Maybe. 

Start with the rea­son­able feel­ings – dis­com­fort, lack of focus, the sad­ness of alone

you can try to do yoga

you can shut off the radio when it gets to you

you can mes­sage your fam­i­ly or your friends or your col­leagues, you’re not sup­posed to leave your home any­way, so it’s safe for you

There’s also the gym

you can’t go there but you could pre­tend to

you could bendy by your­self in your bed­room

And there’s pub­lic trans­porta­tion

prob­a­bly best to avoid it

but there’s prayer and med­i­ta­tion, yes always

employ it

if you have pains in your chest ‘cause your anx­i­ety won’t rest

take a moment, take a breath

Start sim­ple

things you can han­dle based on your inter­ests

your issues and your trig­gers

and your inner logis­tics 

I miss lunch coun­ters so much I’ve been eat­ing [pick­les and] toast­ed sand­wich­es while hang­ing unabashed­ly with my phone

When you are tired, again of still being alone

make your­self a din­ner

but don’t invite any­body over

put some­thing green in it, or maybe orange

chips are fine some­times but they won’t keep you charged 

feed your heart

if peo­ple are your nour­ish­ment, I get you

feel the feel­ings that undo you while you have to keep apart

Watch a movie, in the dark

and pre­tend some­one is with you 

watch all of the cred­its

because you have time, and not much else to do

or watch all of the cred­its to remem­ber 

how many peo­ple come togeth­er

just to tell a sto­ry

just to make a pic­ture move

And then, set your­self up danc­ing

like it’s a club where every­one knows you

and they’re all gonna hold you

all night long

they’re gonna dance around you and with you and on their own

it’s your favourite song 

with the hard­est bass and the cathar­tic drums

your heart pumps along/hard, you belong

you put your hands up to feel it

With the come down comes the weep­ing

those down­cast eyes and feel­ings

the truth is you can’t go danc­ing, not right now

not at any club or par­ty in any town

The heart­break of this astounds you

it joins old aches way down in you

you can vis­it them, but please don’t stay there

Go out­side if you’re able, breathe the air

there are trees for hug­ging

don’t be embar­rassed

it’s your friend, it’s your moth­er, it’s your new crush

lay your cheek against the bark, it’s a liv­ing thing to touch

Sad­ly, leave all bench­es emp­ty

appre­ci­ate the kind­ness in the dis­tance of strangers

as you pine for com­pa­ny and wave at your neigh­bours

savour the depths of your con­ver­sa­tions

the lay­ers uncov­ered

in this strange space and time

Soci­ety is afraid of change

and no one wants to die

not now, from a tiny virus

not lat­er from the world on fire

But death is a truth we all hate to know

we all get to live, and then we all have to go

In the mean­time, we’re sur­round­ed, we’re alone

each a thread woven in the fab­ric, unrav­el­ling in moments though

each a solo enti­ty spin­ning on its axis, for­get­ting that the galaxy includes us all

Here­in our fall

from grace from each oth­er from god what­ev­er, doesn’t mat­ter

the dis­as­ter is that we believe we’re sep­a­rate 

we’re not

As evi­denced by virus­es tak­ing down soci­eties

as proven by the lone­li­ness inher­ent in no gath­er­ings

as pal­pa­ble as the vacan­cy in the space of one per­son hug­ging

If this dis­rup­tion undoes you

if the absence of peo­ple unrav­els you

if touch was the teth­er that held you togeth­er

and now that it’s sev­ered you’re frag­ile too 

lean into lone­li­ness and know you’re not alone in it 

lean into lone­li­ness like it is hold­ing you

like it is a gen­er­ous rep­re­sen­ta­tive of a glar­ing truth

oh, we are con­nect­ed

we for­get this, yet we always knew.

How to Be at Home will be added to the Ani­ma­tion sec­tion of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch 66 Oscar-Nom­i­nat­ed-and-Award-Win­ning Ani­mat­ed Shorts Online, Cour­tesy of the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da

Watch “Ryan,” Win­ner of an Oscar and 60 Oth­er Awards

2020: An Iso­la­tion Odyssey–A Short Film Reen­acts the Finale of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, with a COVID-19 Twist

 

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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David Lynch Explains How Simple Daily Habits Enhance His Creativity

in Creativity, Film, Life | November 20th, 2020

At first glance, Madame Bovary and Blue Vel­vet would seem to have lit­tle in com­mon, as would their cre­ators. But the artis­tic life Gus­tave Flaubert led and the one David Lynch now leads share a basic pre­cept: “Be reg­u­lar and order­ly in your life,” as the for­mer once put it, “so that you may be vio­lent and orig­i­nal in your work.” Lynch has spo­ken about his ways as an artis­tic crea­ture of habit many times over the years, as demon­strat­ed by the inter­view clip com­pi­la­tion above. “Some peo­ple have heard the sto­ry that I went to Bob’s Big Boy for sev­en years every day at 2:30 and had the same thing,” he told Jay Leno in 1992. “That was my longest habit pat­tern, I think.”

Lynch’s reg­u­lar­i­ty at that Los Ange­les burg­er joint is just one of the rou­tines that has struc­tured his exis­tence. “I like habit­u­al behav­ior because it’s a known fac­tor,” he says, “and then your mind is free to think about oth­er things.” When life has an order, he lat­er told Char­lie Rose, “then you’re free to men­tal­ly go off any place. You’ve got a safe sort of foun­da­tion, and a place to spring off from.”

More recent­ly, on a phone Q&A for the David Lynch Foun­da­tion, the auteur described his rou­tine thus: “I wake up and I brush my teeth and I use the bath­room. Then I have a cap­puc­ci­no and some cig­a­rettes. Then I medi­ate, and then I have either some amrit nec­tar or a small smooth­ie with pro­tein pow­der and blue­ber­ries and peach­es. And then I go to work.”

How­ev­er con­tra­dic­to­ry they may seem, Lynch’s long-stand­ing twin loves of smok­ing and med­i­ta­tion both express them­selves as rou­tine actions. And if the back­grounds of his Youtube videos — includ­ing his lit­tle-vary­ing dai­ly Los Ange­les weath­er reports — are any­thing to go by, he per­forms them in the kind of unclut­tered phys­i­cal space he’s long pre­ferred: “The pur­er the envi­ron­ment,” as he puts it, “the more fan­tas­tic the inte­ri­or world can be.” His 1980s and 90s com­ic strip The Angri­est Dog in the World took place in such an envi­ron­ment, its near­ly unchang­ing visu­als and increas­ing­ly bizarre text an artis­tic cor­rel­a­tive to his ideas about dai­ly life and the imag­i­na­tion. But what­ev­er their inter­est in his meth­ods, Lynch’s fans want to know one thing above all: what the imag­i­na­tion of this least angry of all artists will bring forth next.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How David Lynch Got Cre­ative Inspi­ra­tion? By Drink­ing a Milk­shake at Bob’s Big Boy, Every Sin­gle Day, for Sev­en Straight Years

An Ani­mat­ed David Lynch Explains Where He Gets His Ideas

David Lynch Explains How Med­i­ta­tion Boosts Our Cre­ativ­i­ty (Plus Free Resources to Help You Start Med­i­tat­ing)

David Lynch Cre­ates Dai­ly Weath­er Reports for Los Ange­les: How the Film­mak­er Pass­es Time in Quar­an­tine

The Dai­ly Rou­tines of Famous Cre­ative Peo­ple, Pre­sent­ed in an Inter­ac­tive Info­graph­ic

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

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Lou Reed Concert Film Berlin Streaming Free Online for the Next Week

in Film, Music, Theatre | November 20th, 2020

Last laughs can be sweet, and accord­ing to music jour­nal­ist, Antho­ny DeCur­tis, his friend, the late Lou Reed, “rev­eled” in the crit­i­cal drub­bing that greet­ed his 3rd solo album, 1973’s Berlin.

Not imme­di­ate­ly, how­ev­er.

Berlin, which fol­lowed hard on the heels of Reed’s wide­ly adored Trans­former, had a painful, pro­tract­ed deliv­ery.

This was due in part due to RCA execs get­ting cold feet about releas­ing Reed’s grim con­cept record as a dou­ble album. This neces­si­tat­ed a lot of prun­ing, a week before dead­line.

Pro­duc­er Bob Ezrin, who had plant­ed the idea for a con­cept album based on a track from Reed’s epony­mous first solo effort, was detox­ing in the hos­pi­tal, and thus not present for the final mas­ter­ing.

But much of the hell lead­ing to Berlin’s release was a hell of Reed’s own mak­ing.

His depen­dence on drugs and alco­hol ham­pered the writ­ing process, as per Reed’s first wife, Bet­tye Kro­n­stad, who filed for divorce mid­way through the process.

If you want a glimpse of what that marriage’s final days might have been like, look to Berlin.

Kro­n­stad was dis­tressed to find many pri­vate details from their rela­tion­ship on dis­play in the trag­ic rock opera. There was some fic­tion­al­iza­tion, but Reed also put his thumb on the scales when it suit­ed him, in songs like “The Kids,” which recast Kronstad’s late moth­er in a par­tic­u­lar­ly unfair way.

Reed once took a shot at the album’s crit­i­cal recep­tion, sug­gest­ing that peo­ple didn’t like it because its depic­tion of a mis­er­able cou­ple, whose union is marred by infi­deli­ty, domes­tic abuse, addic­tion, and sui­cide, was “too real”:

It’s not like a TV pro­gram where all the bad things that hap­pen to peo­ple are tol­er­a­ble. Life isn’t like that. And nei­ther is the album.

Some­times he bluffed:

I have nev­er been inter­est­ed in crit­i­cal recep­tions, decep­tions, hel­los, good­byes, huz­zahs, hur­rahs. I don’t read them, so I don’t care.

At oth­er times, he raged:

There are peo­ple I’ll nev­er for­give for the way they fucked me over with Berlin. The way that album was over­looked was the biggest dis­ap­point­ment I ever faced.

In a more vul­ner­a­ble mood, he admit­ted:

Berlin was a big flop and it made me very sad. The way that album was over­looked was prob­a­bly the biggest dis­ap­point­ment I ever faced. I pulled the blinds shut at that point, and they’ve remained closed.

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, his ear­ly plans for stag­ing a the­atri­cal com­pan­ion piece to the album, with pos­si­ble par­tic­i­pa­tion by Andy Warhol, were shelved.

34 years lat­er…

Cue direc­tor Julian Schn­abel, the Brook­lyn Youth Cho­rus, and St. Ann’s Ware­house, the New York City venue that had pre­vi­ous­ly co-com­mis­sioned Songs for Drel­la, a musi­cal Warhol trib­ute by Reed and John Cale.

In 2006, Reed took cen­ter­stage in Brook­lyn for a 5‑night the­atri­cal run of Berlin that also fea­tured a 35-piece ensem­ble, orig­i­nal gui­tarist Steve Hunter, and dreamy videos by the director’s daugh­ter, Lola, star­ring Emmanuelle Seign­er as an abstract sketch of the doomed pro­tag­o­nist, Car­o­line.

The result­ing con­cert film, which St. Ann’s Ware­house is stream­ing for free through Novem­ber 29, proved far more pop­u­lar with crit­ics than the 1973 record had been. (Three years pri­or to the St Ann’s stag­ing, Rolling Stone upgrad­ed its orig­i­nal opin­ion of the album from career end­ing dis­as­ter to 344th Great­est Album of All Time.)

Stephen Holden’s glow­ing New York Times review of the film made mul­ti­ple men­tion of angels and demons, as is per­haps to be expect­ed when a work com­bines Lou Reed, a Sid and Nan­cy-ish romance, a children’s choir, and the ethe­re­al voice of Anohni, late of Antony and the John­sons.

Read­ers, see for your­self, and let us know—did RCA’s pro­mo­tion­al poster for the orig­i­nal album get some­thing right near­ly 50 years ago? Is this “a film for the ears?”

Lis­ten to the orig­i­nal 1973 album and the live con­cert ver­sion at St. Ann’s for free on Spo­ti­fy.

Stream Julian Schnabel’s Lou Reed’s Berlin, Live at St. Ann’s Ware­house here through Novem­ber 29.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Lou Reed Sings “Sweet Jane” Live, Julian Schn­abel Films It (2006)

Lou Reed’s Mix­tape for Andy Warhol Dis­cov­ered by Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty Pro­fes­sor: Fea­tures 12 Pre­vi­ous­ly Unre­leased Songs

Lou Reed Cre­ates a List of the 10 Best Records of All Time

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Behold One of the Earliest Known Color Charts: The Table of Physiological Colors (1686)

in Art, Science | November 20th, 2020

The peri­od called the Enlight­en­ment pro­duced a rev­o­lu­tion in which one sense, vision, became priv­i­leged above all oth­ers. As a result, Sachiko Kusukawa writes at The Roy­al Soci­ety Jour­nal of the His­to­ry of Sci­ence, “sci­ence is supreme­ly visu­al. Indeed, one might say, exces­sive­ly so.” Kusukawa sit­u­ates Eng­lish nat­u­ral­ist and illus­tra­tor Richard Waller at the begin­ning of her his­to­ry about how sight came to dom­i­nate, and Sarah Lowen­gard places Waller’s col­or chart, pre­sent­ed at the Roy­al Soci­ety in 1686, at a for­ma­tive moment in “the cre­ation of col­or in Eigh­teenth-Cen­tu­ry Europe.”

That’s not to say, of course, that col­or didn’t exist before charts like Waller’s, but it did­n’t exist in neat tax­onomies that divid­ed col­or dis­crete­ly, named and cat­e­go­rized it, and mapped the nat­ur­al world by means of col­or the­o­ry. Waller’s “‘Table of Phys­i­o­log­i­cal Col­ors Both Mixt and Sim­ple’ would per­mit unam­bigu­ous descrip­tions of the col­ors of nat­ur­al bod­ies. To describe a plant, for exam­ple, one could com­pare it to the chart and use the names found there to iden­ti­fy the col­ors of the bark, wood, leaves, etc. Sim­i­lar appli­ca­tions of the infor­ma­tion col­lect­ed in the chart might also extend to the arts and trades, he sug­gest­ed.”

The nat­u­ral­ist approach to col­or would inform the arti­fi­cial cre­ation of col­or, help­ing “man­u­fac­tur­ers to pro­duce con­sis­tent dyes and paints,” notes the Smith­son­ian Libraries. Waller’s sys­tem was not pre­cise enough for the task, but many oth­ers, includ­ing board game pio­neer Mil­ton Bradley, picked up his work and refined it, pro­duc­ing not only sci­en­tif­ic and indus­tri­al col­or guides, but also ped­a­go­gies like Bradley’s Ele­men­tary Col­or text­book for chil­dren. Kei­th Moore, Head of Library & Infor­ma­tion Ser­vices at the Roy­al Soci­ety, traces Waller’s col­or dots through the arts, “from the low art Ben-Day dots in the vin­tage com­ic books I used to read as a child to the high art pointil­lism and divi­sion­ism pio­neered by Georges Seu­rat.”

Dozens of col­or sys­tems, wheels, charts, and tables appeared over the next few hun­dred years, from the elab­o­rate to the very sim­ple. All of them have encoun­tered the same basic issue, name­ly the sub­jec­tiv­i­ty of visu­al per­cep­tion. “Waller’s visu­al sys­tem exhibits the same con­cep­tu­al prob­lem… that plagued near­ly all eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tems. Which col­ors can be includ­ed and what is their ‘cor­rect’ order? The answer was always tem­pered by avail­able col­or­ing mate­ri­als and choice of media.” As more pig­ments became avail­able, so too did more col­ors in the col­or charts.

Is the mak­ing of col­or clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tems more of a sci­ence or an art? It depends, per­haps, on what they’re used for, but “col­or remains elu­sive to sci­en­tists and col­or experts,” the Smith­son­ian points out, over 400 years after Waller’s chart. Since then, how­ev­er, the lan­guage of col­or has evolved, as he envi­sioned, into a prac­ti­cal and poet­ic syn­tax and vocab­u­lary.

See a larg­er ver­sion of the chart here and read about it in detail in Lowen­gard’s excel­lent arti­cle.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Werner’s Nomen­cla­ture of Colour, the 19th-Cen­tu­ry “Col­or Dic­tio­nary” Used by Charles Dar­win (1814)

A Pre-Pan­tone Guide to Col­ors: Dutch Book From 1692 Doc­u­ments Every Col­or Under the Sun

The Vibrant Col­or Wheels Designed by Goethe, New­ton & Oth­er The­o­rists of Col­or (1665–1810)

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

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How Errol Morris Became Obsessed with — and Figured Out — the Truth of a Famous War Photograph

in History, Photography | November 19th, 2020

Errol Mor­ris did­n’t go all the way to the Crimean Penin­su­la just because of a sen­tence writ­ten by Susan Son­tag. “No,” he once explained to a friend, “it was actu­al­ly two sen­tences.” Found in Regard­ing the Pain of Oth­ers, Son­tag’s late book-length essay on war pho­tog­ra­phy, these lines deal with the fact that “many of the canon­i­cal images of ear­ly war pho­tog­ra­phy turn out to have been staged, or to have had their sub­jects tam­pered with.” Take Val­ley of the Shad­ow of Death, pio­neer­ing war pho­tog­ra­ph­er Roger Fen­ton’s famous­ly des­o­late 1855 image from the Crimean War. Fen­ton actu­al­ly shot this land­scape twice: in one pic­ture, “can­non­balls are thick on the ground to the left of the road, but before tak­ing the sec­ond pic­ture — the one that is always repro­duced — he over­saw the scat­ter­ing of the can­non­balls on the road itself.”

Or did he? Mor­ris had his doubts — and, as the mak­er of such acclaimed doc­u­men­taries on the nature of truth and its rep­re­sen­ta­tion as The Thin Blue Line and Stan­dard Oper­at­ing Pro­ce­dure and the author of the book Believ­ing is See­ing: Obser­va­tions on the Mys­ter­ies of Pho­tog­ra­phy — he clear­ly has an intel­lec­tu­al invest­ment in the sub­ject.

“I spent a con­sid­er­able amount of time look­ing at the two pho­tographs and think­ing about the two sen­tences,” Mor­ris writes in a 2007 New York Times blog post. “How did Son­tag know that Fen­ton altered the land­scape or, for that mat­ter, ‘over­saw the scat­ter­ing of the can­non­balls on the road itself?’ ” How, for that mat­ter, “did Son­tag know the sequence of the pho­tographs? How did she know which pho­to­graph came first?”

Unable to turn up any per­sua­sive evi­dence, Mor­ris launched an inves­ti­ga­tion of his own, inter­view­ing experts, dig­ging into Fen­ton’s let­ters, and even­tu­al­ly mak­ing his way to the Val­ley of the Shad­ow of Death itself (not to be con­fused with the oth­er, bet­ter-known val­ley across which Ten­nyson’s Light Brigade charged). All of this Mor­ris did in the name of find­ing out which came first, the pho­to with the can­non­balls beside the road, or the one with the can­non­balls on the road. You can hear him dis­cuss this increas­ing­ly obses­sive quest for the truth in the video above from Vox’s Dark­room, the series that pre­vi­ous­ly gave us a break­down of the very first faked pho­to­graph. But then, as this and oth­er inves­ti­ga­tions by Mor­ris into the rela­tion­ship between images, lan­guage, and real­i­ty have under­scored, there is no such thing as a true pho­to­graph.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Errol Mor­ris: Two Essen­tial Truths About Pho­tog­ra­phy

Errol Mor­ris Med­i­tates on the Mean­ing and His­to­ry of Abra­ham Lincoln’s Last Pho­to­graph

How the “First Pho­to­jour­nal­ist,” Math­ew Brady, Shocked the Nation with Pho­tos from the Civ­il War

Why the Sovi­ets Doc­tored Their Most Icon­ic World War II Vic­to­ry Pho­to, “Rais­ing a Flag Over the Reich­stag”

The First Faked Pho­to­graph (1840)

Errol Mor­ris Makes His Ground­break­ing Series, First Per­son, Free to Watch Online: Binge Watch His Inter­views with Genius­es, Eccentrics, Obses­sives & Oth­er Unusu­al Types

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

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Leonardo Da Vinci’s To-Do List from 1490: The Plan of a Renaissance Man

in Art, History | November 19th, 2020

da vinci todo list

Most people’s to-do lists are, almost by def­i­n­i­tion, pret­ty dull, filled with those quo­tid­i­an lit­tle tasks that tend to slip out of our minds. Pick up the laun­dry. Get that thing for the kid. Buy milk, canned yams and kumquats at the local mar­ket.

Leonar­do Da Vin­ci was, how­ev­er, no ordi­nary per­son. And his to-do lists were any­thing but dull.

Da Vin­ci would car­ry around a note­book, where he would write and draw any­thing that moved him. “It is use­ful,” Leonar­do once wrote, to “con­stant­ly observe, note, and con­sid­er.” Buried in one of these books, dat­ing back to around the 1490s, is a to-do list. And what a to-do list.

NPR’s Robert Krul­wich had it direct­ly trans­lat­ed. And while all of the list might not be imme­di­ate­ly clear, remem­ber that Da Vin­ci nev­er intend­ed for it to be read by web surfers 500  years in the future.

[Cal­cu­late] the mea­sure­ment of Milan and Sub­urbs

[Find] a book that treats of Milan and its church­es, which is to be had at the stationer’s on the way to Cor­du­sio

[Dis­cov­er] the mea­sure­ment of Corte Vec­chio (the court­yard in the duke’s palace).

[Dis­cov­er] the mea­sure­ment of the castel­lo (the duke’s palace itself)

Get the mas­ter of arith­metic to show you how to square a tri­an­gle.

Get Mess­er Fazio (a pro­fes­sor of med­i­cine and law in Pavia) to show you about pro­por­tion.

Get the Brera Fri­ar (at the Bene­dic­tine Monastery to Milan) to show you De Pon­deribus (a medieval text on mechan­ics)

[Talk to] Gian­ni­no, the Bom­bardier, re. the means by which the tow­er of Fer­rara is walled with­out loop­holes (no one real­ly knows what Da Vin­ci meant by this)

Ask Benedet­to Poti­nari (A Flo­ren­tine Mer­chant) by what means they go on ice in Flan­ders

Draw Milan

Ask Mae­stro Anto­nio how mor­tars are posi­tioned on bas­tions by day or night.

[Exam­ine] the Cross­bow of Mas­tro Gian­net­to

Find a mas­ter of hydraulics and get him to tell you how to repair a lock, canal and mill in the Lom­bard man­ner

[Ask about] the mea­sure­ment of the sun promised me by Mae­stro Gio­van­ni Francese

Try to get Vitolone (the medieval author of a text on optics), which is in the Library at Pavia, which deals with the math­e­mat­ic.

You can just feel Da Vinci’s vora­cious curios­i­ty and intel­lec­tu­al rest­less­ness. Note how many of the entries are about get­ting an expert to teach him some­thing, be it math­e­mat­ics, physics or astron­o­my. Also who casu­al­ly lists “draw Milan” as an ambi­tion?

Lat­er to-do lists, dat­ing around 1510, seemed to focus on Da Vinci’s grow­ing fas­ci­na­tion with anato­my. In a note­book filled with beau­ti­ful­ly ren­dered draw­ings of bones and vis­cera, he rat­tles off more tasks that need to get done. Things like get a skull, describe the jaw of a croc­o­dile and tongue of a wood­peck­er, assess a corpse using his fin­ger as a unit of mea­sure­ment.

On that same page, he lists what he con­sid­ers to be impor­tant qual­i­ties of an anatom­i­cal draughts­man. A firm com­mand of per­spec­tive and a knowl­edge of the inner work­ings of the body are key. So is hav­ing a strong stom­ach.

You can see a page of Da Vinci’s note­book above but be warned. Even if you are con­ver­sant in 16th cen­tu­ry Ital­ian, Da Vin­ci wrote every­thing in mir­ror script.

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

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book and BlueSky.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Thomas Edison’s Huge­ly Ambi­tious “To-Do” List from 1888

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

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Vision­ary Note­books Now Online: Browse 570 Dig­i­tized Pages

How Leonar­do da Vin­ci Drew an Accu­rate Satel­lite Map of an Ital­ian City (1502)

1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

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. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of bad­gers and even more pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

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The Beautiful Video for David Gilmour’s “The Girl in the Yellow Dress,” Featuring 9,000 Hand-Drawn Frames of Animation

in Animation, Music | November 19th, 2020

The ani­mat­ed video for David Gilmour’s “The Girl in the Yel­low Dress” opens on a sax­o­phon­ist with a famil­iar story—one so well-known to his band­mates they can read it on his face. But then the per­spec­tive shifts, and we fol­low instead the woman (or “girl”) of his woes, as she comes to see him play, gets ogled and turned into a fan­ta­sy by the men in the club, pur­sues the res­i­dent lothario, crush­ing the hearts of them all, includ­ing the sax­o­phon­ist, who plays his blues instead of col­laps­ing into a drink.

At least that seems to be the sto­ry, a typ­i­cal nightlife scene ren­dered in a very dynam­ic, atyp­i­cal way. The video, from a track off Gilmour’s 2015 album Rat­tle that Lock, was direct­ed by Dan­ny Mad­den for Ornana Films, who write, “The music video is made of about 9,000 frames of ani­ma­tion that were touched by sev­er­al hands to get the lay­ered con­tours, vibrant col­ors, and exag­ger­at­ed char­ac­ter design of old French Lith­o­graph posters. We want­ed to cre­ate a mov­ing ver­sion of that look, as if each frame had all the lay­ers stamped on the page.”

An incred­i­ble amount of inten­sive artis­tic labor went into cre­at­ing the boozy, swirling effects in each scene. “We ani­mat­ed with pen­cil, then con­tour lines were gone over with a brush tip mark­er. We used gouache to get nice life in the vary­ing brush­strokes, then we lay­ered the con­tours over the paint lay­er in the com­posit­ing step so that the colours would do inter­est­ing things when they ran togeth­er.” Maybe these images could be recre­at­ed con­vinc­ing­ly with dig­i­tal effects… but I sus­pect not.

The song “looks back at [Gilmour’s] ear­li­est musi­cal influ­ence,” writes a Guardian review of the Rat­tle that Lock. If so, it’s a nascent influ­ence that did not emerge often in his Pink Floyd play­ing, though the song may also indi­rect­ly pay trib­ute to the jazz-trained Richard Wright, memo­ri­al­ized else­where on the album. You can see sev­er­al more scenes from this extra­or­di­nary video at Dezeen.

via Laugh­ing Squid 

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

David Gilmour Talks About the Mys­ter­ies of His Famous Gui­tar Tone

How Pink Floyd’s “Com­fort­ably Numb” Was Born From an Argu­ment Between Roger Waters & David Gilmour

Watch Tom Waits For No One, the Pio­neer­ing Ani­mat­ed Music Video from 1979

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

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Discover the Cyanometer, the Device Invented in 1789 Just to Measure the Blueness of the Sky

in Design, Science | November 18th, 2020

Eng­lish astronomer and physi­cist James Jeans’ 1931 essay “Why the Sky is Blue” has become a clas­sic of con­cise expos­i­to­ry writ­ing since it was first pub­lished in a series of talks. In only four para­graphs and one strik­ing­ly detailed, yet sim­ple anal­o­gy, Jeans gave mil­lions of stu­dents a grasp of celes­tial blue­ness in prose that does not sub­sti­tute nature’s poet­ry for sci­en­tif­ic jar­gon and dia­grams.

Over a hun­dred years ear­li­er, anoth­er sci­en­tist cre­at­ed a sim­i­lar­ly poet­ic device; in this case, one which attempt­ed to depict how the sky is blue. Swiss physi­cist Horace Béné­dict de Saus­sure’s 1789 Cyanome­ter, “a cir­cle of paper swatch­es dyed in increas­ing­ly deep blues, shad­ing from white to black,” Sarah Laskow writes at Atlas Obscu­ra, “includ­ed 52 blues… in its most advanced iter­a­tion,” intend­ed to show “how the col­or of the sky changed with ele­va­tion.”

Saussure’s fas­ci­na­tion with the blue­ness of the sky began when he was a young stu­dent and trav­eled to the base of Mont Blanc. Over­awed by the sum­mit, he dreamt of climb­ing it, but instead used his fam­i­ly’s wealth to offer a reward to the first per­son who could. Twen­ty-sev­en years lat­er, Saus­sure him­self would ascend to the top, in 1786, car­ry­ing with him “pieces of paper col­ored dif­fer­ent shades of blue, to hold up against the sky and match its col­or.”

Saus­sure was tak­en with a phe­nom­e­non report­ed by moun­taineers: as one climbs high­er, the sky turns a deep­er shade of blue. He began to for­mu­late a hypoth­e­sis, the Roy­al Soci­ety of Chem­istry Explains:

Armed with his tools and a small chem­istry set, he trekked round the val­leys and beyond. As his trips car­ried him ever high­er, he puz­zled about the colour of the sky. Local leg­end had it that if one climbed high enough it turned black and one would see, or even fall into, the void — such ter­rors kept ordi­nary men away from the peaks. But to Saus­sure, the blue colour was an opti­cal effect. And because on some days the blue of the sky fad­ed imper­cep­ti­bly into the white of the clouds, Saus­sure con­clud­ed that the colour must indi­cate its mois­ture con­tent. 

At the top of Mont Blanc, the physi­cist mea­sured what he deemed “a blue of the 39th degree.” The num­ber meant lit­tle to any­one but him. “Upon its inven­tion, the cyanome­ter rather quick­ly fell into dis­use,” as Maria Gon­za­lez de Leon points out. “After all, very lit­tle sci­en­tif­ic infor­ma­tion was giv­en.”

The tool did, how­ev­er, accom­pa­ny the famed geo­g­ra­ph­er Alexan­der von Hum­boldt across the Atlantic, “to the Caribbean, the Canary Islands, and South Amer­i­ca,” writes Laskow, where Hum­boldt “set a new record, at the 46th degree of blue, for the dark­est sky ever mea­sured” on the sum­mit of the Andean moun­tain Chimb­o­ra­zo. This would be one of the only notable uses of the poet­ic device. “When the true cause of the sky’s blue­ness, the scat­ter­ing of light, was dis­cov­ered decades lat­er, in the 1860s, Saussure’s cir­cle of blue had already fall­en into obscu­ri­ty.”

via Messy­Nessy/Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

A 900-Page Pre-Pan­tone Guide to Col­or from 1692: A Com­plete Dig­i­tal Scan

The Vibrant Col­or Wheels Designed by Goethe, New­ton & Oth­er The­o­rists of Col­or (1665–1810)

A Vision­ary 115-Year-Old Col­or The­o­ry Man­u­al Returns to Print: Emi­ly Noyes Vanderpoel’s Col­or Prob­lems

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

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