antiquity

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The Machine That Made Us

Stephen Fry, best known (to me anyway) for playing Jeeves in the P.G. Wodehouse adaptation Jeeves and Wooster, recently hosted a BBC4 documentary on the Gutenberg Press entitled The Machine That Made Us. The title refers to the movable-type printing press invented by Johann Gutenberg in the fifteenth century. In the course of the one-hour documentary, Fry travels through Europe to understand Gutenberg's story. He also builds a modern replica of the press, which turns out to be a tough job. You can... READ ON

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NOVA: Cracking the Maya Code

This week's NOVA has a great story: Cracking the Maya Code explains how Mayan glyphs were deciphered -- a truly difficult problem with a satisfying solution. The decipherment is a surprising adventure involving limited (and often incorrect) examples of the glyphs themselves, Cold War rivalries, the youngest ever recipient of a MacArthur 'Genius' Award (David Stuart received it at age 18), and some good old-fashioned linguistics. My favorite part is how this Russian linguist (Yuri Knorosov) answered... READ ON

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The Oldest Known Audio Recording

The New York Times has a great piece today on an 1860 phonautogram of the French folk song "Au Clair de la Lune." Before we go any further, you should make sure there are no children or animals present, and listen to this crazy MP3 clip of the recording. Okay, now that you're back, are you freaked out yet? The scratchy audio sounds like the warbling of a madwoman to me, and would be a great jumping-off point for some auditory horror piece. Anyway.... So the reason this is important (and not just... READ ON

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Kelvin is Lord!

If you're planning to worship a dead scientist today, you might as well give it up for Lord Kelvin: Giver of Laws (of thermodynamics). According to the brilliant Kelvin is Lord! website, Lord Kelvin is our only salvation from... READ ON

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Wikipedia's List of "Lost Work"

Having a pleasant Wednesday afternoon? Prepare to get sad! Wikipedia has an excellent article on lost work, explained thusly: "a document or literary work produced some time in the past of which no surviving copies are known to exist. Works may be lost to history either through the destruction of the original manuscript, or through the non-survival of any copies of the work." It's a staggering list, but for your reading convenience I've gone ahead and collected some of the most depressing items... READ ON

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Send Us Your Photos: The Oldest Thing You Own

We're working on a new feature for mentalfloss.com involving reader-submitted photos. To get things rolling, we're putting out a call for photos of the oldest thing you own. 142 readers have already discussed this in text (for the comments, see What's the Oldest Thing You Own and the greatest hits re-post), but now we're looking for photos. To submit your photos for this project, drop them in an email to flossypics@gmail.com, include your name (first name or full name -- your choice), your location,... READ ON

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The Photo Detective

We've written about old photos before. Based on my informal surveys, I think most people are at least slightly obsessed with old photos -- there's a tension between the clear documentation of a moment (a photo) and the common lack of any information about the moment -- who's pictured, where was the photo taken, and when? Earlier this month there was an excellent profile in The Wall Street Journal called The Photo Detective, detailing Maureen Taylor's work with old photos, answering just such questions --... READ ON

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The Whole Five Feet

We've recently discussed authors whose entire catalogs you've read (and boy was it a fun discussion!)...but what about collections of literature by multiple authors? One of the ultimate literary collections is the Harvard Classics (aka Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf) -- my family owns two complete sets, but I have to admit I've only read a few volumes. Writer Christopher R. Beha is spending a year with the Harvard Classics, which amounts to roughly one volume each week. (Be sure to read Beha's reasons for... READ ON

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What's the Oldest Thing You Own?

My friend Lyza recently posed a great question which I'm now stealing: what's the oldest thing you own? Looking around my apartment, it's hard to find anything older than the 90's -- and most of the objects I use every day were made in the last few years. I have a chair and a "chairside stereo" from the 60's that I use as an end table. I have some art prints that may date from before 1950, but it's a little hard to tell. Quite likely, the oldest thing in my apartment is the apartment itself -- it... READ ON

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Daguerreotype Q&A

Since my recent visit to the End of the Oregon Trail, I've been wondering about daguerreotypes. After a bit of research, I bring you this Daguerreotype Q&A: Why doesn't anyone smile in these pictures? The common answer for this is a partially fact-based myth: because it took a long time to expose the image, the subject had to sit still. And, the story goes, frowning is easier to hold in place than smiling. The truth is that very early daguerreotypes (those from 1839-1845) did take 60-90 seconds of... READ ON