Class Assignment: Explain a piece of modern day technology to someone who lived and died before 1900.
“I chose to explain the Kindle to Charles Dickens because I thought it could’ve been a helpful piece of technology to have,” Rachel Walsh, a second year Illustration student studying at Cardiff School of Art & Design, explains. “He must’ve lugged a lot of heavy books around with him in his day!”
Walsh came up with the novel solution (pun intended) of making 40 little books and placing them inside another book.
“I made the book start to finish over five days, and it took about 35 hours to make I reckon. It was pretty painstaking cutting out all the gaps in the book itself, and making the books to go inside. They’re all bound like actual books, so as I waited for them to glue and dry I would design the covers for them. All the covers are copies of real book covers. They include many of Dickens’s novels, his favorite childhood books, and some of my own.”
Although Walsh hasn’t received her grade yet, the Internet is sending her lots of love for her project. One post with photos of the books-in-book has 756 shares on Tumblr.
I doubt she does requests, but I’d like to see Rachel take on explaining the iPhone to Alexander Graham Bell for her next project.
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I was thinking about this just the other day. If I ever traveled back in time all I would have to do to prove I was from the future was to break out my smartphone and dazzle. Explanations on geosynchronous satellites, triangulation, and light emitting diodes would totally stop them from whisking me away in secret and probing my anus for more future clues.
Good luck with that. Steve Jobs would send his Time Lawyers after you.
You only need one word “magic” If you find someone who is smart enough to not believe that then they are probably smart enough to grasp the basic principles of modern circuitry.
I believe that that vast majority of people who use these devices every day have no better understanding of how they work than a reasonably intelligent person from a hundred years ago. My god they didn’t live in caves.
It is easy for us to say “it uses a satellite” but really that’s just a magic box we put into space. People do not really understand the technical complexities of manufacturing, programming, and not to mention the implementation of such technologies. if you walked outside and rounded up the first fifty people you saw and gave them all the raw materials and instructions they most likely couldn’t build and launch a working communications satellite, unless you gathered them from outside an aerospace engineering company.
The sum of humanity’s collective information at one time was knowable by one person, and i’m gonna guess it was as late as 1200 AD.
Could somebody explain to me today what these devices are and how they work?
dear essequemodeia,
I think you would feel rather hopeless without the support of a 3g land-network and geo-positioning satelites, you would hold a non-communicating box, till the battery dies, as there will be no way to recharge the thing ;-)
Yeah jos, but you could play the f*ck out of Angry Birds on it until it dies.
@essequemodeia Ever heard of the TV series “Supernatural”? They did exactly that.
We are long past the state of living with magic. In ancient Rome, a stainless steel steak knife that doesn’t rust would be a seemingly magic-imbued object forged by the gods, and that technology is about 190 years old.
Remember Mr. Dickens when you gave that speech on top of the Allegheny Portage Railroad at the Lemon Tavern? Well this here device has an engine, like each of the inclined planes, pulling a canal boat up to the next level, a page or a book if you will, and displays each one, like a small newspaper, using an electrical ink, like iron filings around a magnet. I hope you know that that railroad after they replaced the manilla rope with newly invented steel cable, used in bridges now, went out of business when they dug-out the “Horseshoe Bend” so the steam engine trains could climb the grade onto Pittsburgh.