Alexis C. Madrigal

Many people don't seem to remember that George W. Bush was the first president to put solar electric panels on the White House. That may be because the solar panels Jimmy Carter installed on the White House are (rightly) far more famous, symbolic as they were of Carter's symbolic effort to stimulate alternative energy.

But the curious memory lapse could also stem from the value right-wing media concerns see in linking Obama with Carter, as MediaMatters points out.

So, in the interest of an accurate historical record, and thanks to Google News Archive -- allow me to reintroduce the Bush solar panels back into the discussion.

A January 23, 2003 story by the trade journal GovPro explains:

The Bush administration has installed the first-ever solar electric system on the grounds of the White House. The National Park Service, which manages the White House complex, installed a nine kilowatt, rooftop solar electric or photovoltaic system, as well as two solar thermal systems that heat water used on the premises.

"We believe in these technologies, and they've been working for us very successfully," said James Doherty, the architect and project manager at the National Park Service Office for White House Liaison. "The National Park Service as a whole has long been interested in both sustainable design and renewable energy sources. We also have a mission to lower our energy consumption at all our sites, and we saw an opportunity to do both at the White House grounds."

Solar Design Associates designed and oversaw the installation, which was placed on the roof of the main building used for White House grounds maintenance. The PV system feeds solar generated power into the White House grounds' distribution system, providing electricity wherever it is needed.

Perhaps it would also make sense to note, while we're on energy and environmental history, that it was Richard Nixon who signed the Clean Air and Endangered Species Acts. That one cuts both ways, doesn't it?

Hat tip: Andy Revkin

How to Think About... is a video series that provides you with quick frames for thinking about the world's blizzard of technologies and services. The idea is simple: imagine we're having a beer and you ask me, "What do you think about X?"

I switch on the camera and respond. These videos are informal, extemporaneous affairs and we hope they feel like the start of a talk. We'd love to hear how you think about these things, too.

• How to Think About Scale
• How to Think About Google Books
• How to Think About Algorithms
• How to Think About Twitter and Facebook

Some things from the past are best slathered in supporting information. Others work better Tumblr-style, decontextualized. I think Philip Hubert's 1889 thoughts on the phonograph are the latter:

I really see no reason why the newspaper of the future should not come to the subscriber in the shape of a phonogram. It would have to begin, however, with a table of contents, in order that one might not have to listen to a two hours' speech upon the tariff question in order to get at ten lines of a musical notice. But think what a musical critic might be able to do for his public! He might give them whole arias from an opera or movements from a symphony, by way of proof or illustration. The very tones of an actor's or singer's voice might be reproduced in the morning notice of last night's important dramatic or musical event.

Read the rest of Hubert's "The New Talking Machines."

Revisit more pieces from The Atlantic's archives with the Technology Channel.

Image: NYPL.

The Internet is astir with the news that SunChips are ditching their newish bioplastic bag because it is perceived as being too loud.

Some agree with Frito-Lay's decision, others disagree, and still others point out that bioplastic is not always an environmental win. But we're all dancing around the larger point:

Competition in the snack chip market has reached such a level that the molecular composition of the chip-containing bag as reflected in the magnitude of its sound could cause a firm to lose customers!

This is a miniature portrait of Robert Reich's hyper-competitive supercapitalism at work. And though it is fundamentally a silly story, it's not only a silly story.

Imagine the scientists hunched over the bench constructing the nearly perfect biobag; the process engineers who scaled up the manufacturing line and worked out all the right controls for stuffing and sealing; the business people who cut the supplier deals and sold retailers on the novelty, begging for endcaps; the middle managers who ran the numbers and kept things moving; the quality control folks who noticed "the sound problem" but figured it was no big deal; the focus group consultants who said consumers liked the bag's design and how it made them feel, observing only in the "Use if Needed" slides though the bag had a good handfeel, it might be too noisy.

This is where we put our productive talents to work. These are good, white-collar jobs. Most of them you'd need at least a college degree to have and to hold. The great machinery induced by billion dollar markets for everything (anything) can be reconfigured for any purpose, even something as mindnumbing as flexible, lightweight chip containers.

And as this dawns on you... You think with the soaring, half-serious tone that we reserve for visions of collapse: This is what happens to a country that no longer dreams, that has lost it's sense of national purpose or greatness. You think: Maybe we do need a space program, so that we start looking up again.

You imagine arch historians glossing the year: And in 2010, the most powerful country in the world was consumed with the show Glee, whether or not a political candidate was or had been a witch, and the sound of a bag of not-quite potato chips.

Perhaps all national projects are anachronistically read onto a flattened and unrealistic past. Maybe I am grasping for a time that never existed and a sense of purpose that was Manifest Destiny ugly whenever it did. On the other hand, has it really always been like this -- a time in which every consumer acted like the snobbiest oenophile? (When everyone called themselves consumers?)

I wasn't going to write about SunChips, nor the massive technical knowhow that goes into making perfect plastic bags, but I heard the voice of an Atlantic-cofounder, John Greenleaf Whittier, demanding to be drawn into this debate.

In 1843, Whittier was sent by a magazine to check out Lowell, Massachussets, America's marvelous new manufacturing center, the City of Spindles. One night, overlooking the city, he couldn't help but think about an obscure German protofuturist named John Etzler, who wandered around Jacksonian America promoting a perfect consumer world (only driven by solar and wind energy, incidentally). The best explanation Etzler gave for the future he imagined came in his book, The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men, Without Labour, by Powers of Nature and Machinery: an address to all intelligent men. Etzler's foremost biographer, Steven Stoll, gives us this lovely summation of Etzler's dreams and ideology:

Hot and cold running water, illuminated roofs and walks, agreeable scents, elevators, every convenience, and no work (all by "a turn of some crank")--it sounds like an Arizona retirement village. And that's just the point. Etzler designed not a world to come, but the world that came. His knowledge of physics might have been faulty, but his sense that human happiness would be understood as the application of technology to convenience and leisure was dead-on. [emphasis mine]

Indeed.

So, Whittier, having run into and heard out the "small, dusky-browed German," is staring down at Lowell, the Dubai-like showpiece of new American power. And he wonders to what end would all the factories of Lowell be put? What were all these machines for?

Looking down, as I now do, upon these huge brick workshops, I have thought of poor Etzler, and wondered whether he would admit, were he with me, that his mechanical forces have here found their proper employment of millennium making. Grinding on, each in his iron harness, invisible, yet shaking, by his regulated and repressed power, his huge prison-house from basement to capstone, is it true that the genii of mechanism are really at work here, raising us, by wheel and pulley, steam and waterpower, slowly up that inclined plane from whose top stretches the broad table-land of promise?

He probably would not have been surprised to find out that 167 years later, the genii of mechanism have succeeded largely in placing more kinds of chips upon "the broad table-land of promise."

This is not as anti-consumer culture as it sounds. Change of the big groovy sort seems beyond our reckoning. (After all, I like being particular about what I care about buying.) It's more a question of balance in society, a self-consciousness about means and ends.

Quinn Norton put it brilliantly in another context: "I want to say there are inflection points where the scale of things changes the nature of what they do." So, yeah, we've always had consumer culture and junk food R&D and sales. But somewhere along the line, it got huge. Innovation meant patenting variations on potato chips and their bags.

We stopped fixing bridges and dams and pipelines -- and started turning out ever more complex variations on things that we already have and that work just damn fine.

But perhaps realizing that we expend massive resources developing chip bags with just the right sound is a good thing. The silliness of the enterprise is the sort of thing that could symbolize why we need to do something different. And then we can, as Silicon Valley luminary Tim O'Reilly likes to say, "work on stuff that matters."

Yesterday, British scientist Robert Edwards was honored for a Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work developing in vitro fertilization. IVF has aided the births of some four million babies since the first "test tube baby" was born in 1978.

Along with the different iterations of reproductive technology have come some novel social situations that then-Yale undergraduate Jessica Cohen explored in a 2002 piece in The Atlantic. She responded -- mostly on a whim -- to an ad in the Yale Daily News offering $25,000 for eggs from a very specific type of person.

The ensuing correspondence with her would-be egg users is a mix of forced casual banter and disturbingly precise fantasies of babymaking perfected.

The would-be parents' decision to advertise in the News--and to offer a five-figure compensation--immediately suggested that they were in the market for an egg of a certain rarefied type. Beyond their desire for an Ivy League donor, they wanted a young woman over five feet five, of Jewish heritage, athletic, with a minimum combined SAT score of 1500, and attractive. I was curious--and I fit all the criteria except the SAT score. So I e-mailed Michelle and David (not their real names) and asked for more information about the process and how much the SAT minimum really meant to them. Then I waited for a reply....

David responded to my e-mail a few hours after I'd sent it. He told me nothing about himself, and only briefly alluded to the many questions I had asked about the egg-donation process. He spent the bulk of the e-mail describing a cartoon, and then requested photos of me. The cartoon was a scene with a "couple that is just getting married, he a nerd and she a beauty," he wrote. "They are kvelling about how wonderful their offspring will be with his brains and her looks." He went on to describe the punch line: the next panel showed a nerdy-looking baby thinking empty thoughts. The following paragraph was more direct. David let me know that he and his wife were flexible on most criteria but that Michelle was "a real Nazi" about "donor looks and donor health history."

This seemed to be a commentary of some sort on the couple's situation and how plans might go awry, but the message was impossible to pin down. I thanked him for the e-mail, asked where to send my pictures, and repeated my original questions about egg donation and their criteria.

In a subsequent e-mail David promised to return my photos, so I sent him dorm-room pictures, the kind that every college student has lying around. Now they assumed a new level of importance. I would soon learn what this anonymous couple, somewhere in the United States, thought about my genetic material as displayed in these photographs.

Read the rest of Cohen's "Grade A: The Market for a Yale Woman's Eggs."

Revisit more pieces from The Atlantic's archives with the Technology Channel.

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Frequent commenter cynic chimed in on a discussion of San Francisco's sewer system with a short masterpiece of a history lesson.

I had suggested in the original post that sewers were sort of miraculous and that if we had to build them today, we would fail on account of our inability to stick to long-term projects.

Cynic's narrative is just great reading and it's also valuable for delivering two reminders. One, the short-term, get-off-cheap mentality is no specific feature of our time, even if I would suggest that it is slightly more prevalent now. Two, the "cost" of something is not a fixed entity, particularly with sociotechnical projects that take a long time to build -- and must last even longer. As cynic concludes, "The cost equation, you see, can be inverted." 

American cities once relied on private cesspools and privy chambers, which had to be emptied on a periodic basis. Mounting density and a growing concern with disease stressed these older systems. But it was the spread of municipal water works that really precipitated the change. Raising water from a well, or carrying it from a town pump, served as a natural brake on consumption. With water piped directly into homes, usage shot upward. That's why people started putting in brick sewers in the 1860s. And by the time Grunsky was called in, the residents of San Francisco were using some 23 million gallons of piped-in water each day, and returning three-quarters of it to their sewers. No system of septic tanks and privy vaults could possibly have kept pace with that volume. Running water was a solution that created an enormous problem.

San Francisco's solution to this problem was not as admirable as you suggest. The problems with the sewer system it constructed, although exacerbated by growth, were actually designed into the sewers from their inception. The city realized, quite early on, that rainwater would stress its system beyond its limits. Grunsky estimated that the sewers would overflow twenty-six times a year. But he wasn't overly worried about it. He knew that the rainwater would serve to flush out sewers, performing a necessary task at no cost, and he designed special pipes to ensure the further dilution of the overflowing effluent with rainwater before it exited the system.

There was, of course, and alternative. Every subsequent coastal city in California (which is to say, all of them) installed a separated sewer system. One set of pipes for the storm-drains and rainwater, and one for the sewage itself. San Francisco, too, considered such a system. It alone faced the challenge of a substantial retrofitting of its sewers - portions of its system were separated, but large portions of the hodgepodge were combined. And it opted for the cheaper, easier, quicker fix. It preserved separated systems where they existed, and even planned some new ones in very specific places - flat districts where costly pumping and flushing would be necessary, making it more cost-effective going forward to pump and flush sewage alone than to deal with the combined flow. But the city of some 340,000 residents decided not to shoulder the expense of separating out the entire system, with the attendant infrastructure and higher operating costs. And what looked prohibitively expensive then has become a little less plausible with every passing decade. In retrospect, San Francisco would have saved itself a great deal of money to make the upfront investment in a fully separated system. But it had a cheaper way of solving its pressing problems, and it took it.

I should add that San Francisco isn't unusual in the national context. Almost every nineteenth-century city in America installed combined sewers, and I don't think that any combined system has, as of yet, been fully separated. But if you'll pardon my challenge to your narrative of moral decline, there's reason to hope that we're capable of more far-sighted action today than were the city fathers of San Francisco. In Cambridge, the sewer system is only about a tenth the size of the San Francisco network, but the challenges and costs of replacement are roughly commensurate. The city commenced building separate systems in the 1930s, but by then most of its infrastructure was already in place. It opportunistically replaced small portions of the system over the subsequent decades, but began to do so more systematically about twenty years ago. Over the last decade, in particular, it has used its burgeoning tax base to fund infrastructure projects in general, and the sewer separation scheme in particular. I expect that at some point in the next ten years, Cambridge will hold a press conference to announce that it has become the first American city to fully separate an old, combined system. And though it has received some aid from state agencies in the process, most of the work has been funded out of the capital budget, without further assumption of debt.

Will San Francisco or other major cities follow its lead? That's doubtful. The real problem here isn't lack of leadership; it's the time-horizon. If Cambridge pulls this off, it will have taken decades. The city has had the same city manager in place for the entirety of the project; he seems determined to see it through to its conclusion. Cities run by elected mayors tend to focus on projects with shorter life-cycles. Public authorities are sometimes one way around this problem, but that doesn't seem to have done San Francisco much good. Another answer is to offer water-quality waivers for cities that demonstrate steady and consistent progress toward this longterm solution. The cost equation, you see, can be inverted - it would have been cheaper on a short-term, annual basis for SF to have spent thirty years separating its system, than for the quick-and-inadequate fix that the Feds and the city installed. But I'm not holding my breath.

It's not just profit-driven titans that are trying to figure out the risky world of social media. Non-profits from the Humane Society to the Red Cross are trying to figure out how to connect with people, particularly the young ones, in an age where traditional advertising doesn't work like it used to.

That's the subject of a talk by Alison Fine and Beth Kanter today at the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard. It'll be streamed live from Berkman's website.

Fine, author of the book The Networked Nonprofit, told me that she plans to talk about "the beginning of the second phase of the development of social media."

The Berkman Center is a leading institution for important research into the uses and impacts of digital technologies. We'll be previewing their regular brownbag lunches here on The Atlantic Technology Channel.

The argument is that when non-profits open themselves up to social media, it doesn't just change how they communicate, but how the organization itself runs. They become simpler, more transparent and "part of an ecosystem, rather than a standalone, solve-everything entity."

Is this utopian? Fine doesn't think so. She pointed to Planned Parenthood as a paragon of social media enlightenment. Before the current chief, Cecile Richards, the organization had "closed itself off from the world because they were so afraid of attack and had been under siege," Fine said. "They had no connection to the younger people they were trying to reach."

Now, they provide real-time instant messaging for women in need of advice and they ended up partnering with MTV to push sexually transmitted infection testing through their Facebook page with measurable upticks in testing.

"If Planned Parenthood can open themselves up like that, what organization can't?" Fine asked.

And as for Malcolm Gladwell's contention that the Internet can't serve as an organizing platform for meaningful social change, Fine didn't mince words.

"I thought it was just nonsense. I was just shocked at the lack of thoughtfulness in the article. One, that social change was just one kind of thing -- these big social movements. And two, that online networks only constitute light ties. It's a much more interesting complex situation."

How to Think About... is a video series that provides you with quick frames for thinking about the world's blizzard of technologies and services. The idea is simple: imagine we're having a beer and you ask me, "What do you think about X?"

I switch on the camera and respond. These videos are informal, extemporaneous affairs and we hope they feel like the start of a talk. We'd love to hear how you think about these things, too.

• How to Think About Scale
• How to Think About Google Books
• How to Think About Algorithms
• How to Think About Twitter and Facebook

Sometimes you ask and you really do receive. At the end of my quick commemoration post about Sputnik's launch in 1957, I tossed in a Russian celebration video with a plea for a translation, so we could all follow along. Lo, and behold, not more than seven hours later, one of you dear readers, sent along the following translation. Here is A's preface:

Just for the fun of it (with gratitude for my country achievements' recognition. Wasn't expecting them to push "socialist" card so hard, though):

Here is a "quick and dirty" translation of the little movie you included in your column. I do apologize for the roughness of it, and numerous mistakes - mostly I was trying to give you an impression about what was being said, rather than polishing the grammar. Wherever possible, I kept Russian order-of-words intact. Sometimes it makes English sentence to sound awkward, but consider it "national flavor" :)

Reading and watching, I find it fairly easy to match general scenes with text. And even if you can't, it's a fascinating document all on its own. I particularly like the series of statements from socialist leaders -- and the Chinese poet's ode to Sputnik near the end.

Thank you, again, A. Enjoy everyone!

Translation:

...antennas of the Soviet ships are tuned to receive space signals, too. The magical Sputnik is not just flying around - it is working, constantly sending radio reports; it tells about the mysteries of the Universe. It contains «a clot» of the most recent advances in science and technology. Its signals are proudly received by thousands of radio ham enthusiasts in our country. Radio stations are receiving the readings of the most accurate instruments installed on the artificial satellite. Decoded reports would help to clarify our knowledge of Earth gravity field, Earth structure, the Sun radiation, and the nature of the distant atmosphere layers.

Yesterday, little Moscovites admired Jules Verne's fantasy; today, Motherland moved them closer to distant planets. And soon, - who knows, - maybe they'll become the participants of the first flights to the Moon.

Millions of kilometers flew the artificial satellite around the Earth, and everywhere it is watched closedly. «Saw it, heard it» - reports are coming from North America. The open ground of Moscow Planetarium become the arena of constant observation, space talks, and sometimes even heated arguments. This old man is not completely understands the behavior of the artificial moon - speaking in plain language, how long can it fly? According to the calculations of some scientists, this flying laboratory would survive for more than a year. This amazes everyone. The outstanding achievement of Soviet science stirred up the world.

It is as if here, under the ceilings of the House of Unions, where celebration dedicated to the launch of the first artificial satellite was held, you can hear the voices of our friends from all parts of the world. Column Hall cannot accommodate a one hundredth of all willing to hear about the greatest event in the history of humankind.

Scientists present here were telling Moscovites about the the importance of the artificial satellite for the study of space rays, observation of the Universe and Earth' surface. Many problems would now be solved by astrophysicists, too. Newer and newer details about the birth of the second moon are being telegraphed to editorial offices of the foreign newspapers. The first penetration of the space means a great victory of the intellect, similar to the mastery of the energy of steam and electricity, or the invention of the first airplane. Academician < last name of the scientist, illegible> was telling how the country of the socialism was opening a new ways for scientific and technical revolution. The creation of the artificial satellite of the Earth requited the combined efforts of leading scientists - physicists, mathematicians, mechanics, metallurgists, constructors. It was a heroic deed of the whole Soviet Country.

Professor Kuharkin said: «We don't think that the the following task is very far-fetched - to create the missiles that are able to reach other planets. Such an interplanet missile, equipped by appropriate tools, would help to solve a burning mystery that the humankind cannot help to be excited about, and we all are highly intrigued by it: 'is there life on other planets?' Finally, we are hoping that soon the task of the returning such missiles back to Earth would be solved. Of course, this is a very difficult task - undoubtly, much more difficult than the Sputnik launch, - but we can see by ourselves that many things that seemed to be very difficult to do just yesterday, are put into practice today.

The wonderful French scientist Jouliet Curie (?) made a statement: «This great victory of the man is the turning point of the civilization history - the man is no longer chained to his planet.

The President of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guo Moruo, wrote: «We can see even clearer now the borderless avantages of the Socialist way». The Dean of the Canterbury Cathedral in England, Hewlett Johnson expressed his hope that the brilliant achievements of the Soviet scientists will serve to strengthen the cause of peace.

On behalf of the French communists, Moris Torez said: "Historical victory of the science was achieved under the direction of the soviet authority, liberator of people's creative energy».

Moscow... 7 minutes later Ashgabat... 5 more minutes - Bombay. It flies, our Ambassador of the Peace, with fantastic speed... And praises are sung to the small moon by Chinese poet Dzan Kedzara (?): "It flies, carrying the flame of the hearts; it gleams, it shines in crimson-red rays. Throughout the whole planet, from one end to another, you can hear its rhytmic signals. Risen above the Earth's expanse, it opened the mystic doors of the Universe. One moment - and tens of thousands leagues; it is a flight, a flight of inspired science... Flying amongst the stars, as the fruit of the Earth dream; sparkling amongst the dark abyss like a meteor, with nearly thousand verst height, it calls us to unknown space»...

Artificial Earth Satellite is a messenger of the New Socialistic World, where the most daring dreams of the man to penetrate interplanet space are coming true.

It seems like every gadget in the world can snap photos now; you're almost never without the ability to capture a scene or moment and send it hurtling through the Internet.

But go back to the time when you could first fix images. That's when Oliver Wendell Holmes' wrote this masterpiece: The Stereoscope and The Stereograph. His wide-ranging exposition of the implications of photography and its associated technologies is stunning. We've explored some of the aspects in previous posts in this series like Holmes' precise science writing and fraught times.

Finally, we come to his conclusion. In a sense, he's having an atoms vs. bits kind of realization before there were such terms. "Matter in large masses must always be fixed and dear; form is cheap and transportable," he writes.

The realization that visual information -- how a building looked -- could travel on its own was as exciting to Holmes in 1859 as it was to Negroponte readers in 1999.

Stereoscopes (and photographs) would be housed in enormous visual libraries and no one would have to travel far to see the treasures of the globe. Holmes foresaw a world in which the image mattered more than the thing itself: "Men will hunt all curious, beautiful, grand objects, as they hunt the cattle in South America, for their skins, and leave the carcasses as of little worth."

(What a gorgeous way to describe what we do now on the Internet (in the BoingBoing or Tumblr sense). It is the reproduction that we want, "the skin," in Holmes' terms.)

Even war will mean more as a series of pictures than as a series of battles. "The lightning of clashing sabres and bayonets may be forced to stereotype itself in a stillness as complete as that of the tumbling tide of Niagara as we see it self-pictured," Holmes said.

And the "pencil of fire" handed down to us by an "angel standing in the sun" is a brilliant metaphor for technology's most general purpose. Our tools let us recreate the world we encounter. We redraw what is with our pencils of fire.

Here's Holmes' conclusion. Enjoy.

There is only one Coliseum or Pantheon; but how many millions of potential negatives have they shed,--representatives of billions of pictures,--since they were erected! Matter in large masses must always be fixed and dear; form is cheap and transportable. We have got the fruit of creation now, and need not trouble ourselves with the core. Every conceivable object of Nature and Art will soon scale off its surface for us. Men will hunt all curious, beautiful, grand objects, as they hunt the cattle in South America, for their skins, and leave the carcasses as of little worth.

The consequence of this will soon be such an enormous collection of forms that they will have to be classified and arranged in vast libraries, as books are now. The time will come when a man who wishes to see any object, natural or artificial, will go to the Imperial, National, or City Stereographic Library and call for its skin or form, as he would for a book at any common library. We do now distinctly propose the creation of a comprehensive and systematic stereographic library, where all men can find the special forms they particularly desire to see as artists, or as scholars, or as mechhnics, or in any other capacity. Already a workman has been travelling about the country with stereographic views of furniture, showing his employer's patterns in this way, and taking orders for them. This is a mere hint of what is coming before long.

The next European war will send us stereographs of battles. It is asserted that a bursting shell can be photographed. The time is perhaps at hand when a flash of light, as sudden and brief as that of the lightning which shows a whirling wheel standing stock still, shall preserve the very instant of the shock of contact of the mighty armies that are even now gathering. The lightning from heaven does actually photograph natural objects on the bodies of those it has just blasted,--so we are told by many witnesses. The lightning of clashing sabres and bayonets may be forced to stereotype itself in a stillness as complete as that of the tumbling tide of Niagara as we see it self-pictured.

We should be led on too far, if we developed our belief as to the transformations to be wrought by this greatest of human triumph over earthly conditions, the divorce of form and substance. Let our readers fill out a blank check on the future as they like,--we give our endorsement to their imaginations beforehand. We are looking into stereoscopes as pretty toys, and wondering over the photograph as a charming novelty; but before another generation has passed away, it will be recognized that a new epoch in the history of human progress dates from the time when He who

never but in uncreated light
Dwelt from eternity--¹

took a pencil of fire from the hand of the "angel standing in the sun," and placed it in the hands of a mortal.

Read the rest of Holmes' "The Stereoscope and the Stereograph."

Revisit more pieces from The Atlantic's archives with the Technology Channel.

Image: National Media Museum.

1. If you're wondering, this quote is from an old Latin hymn.

More »

How to Think About... is a video series that provides you with quick frames for thinking about the world's blizzard of technologies and services. The idea is simple: imagine we're having a beer and you ask me, "What do you think about X?"

I switch on the camera and respond. These videos are informal, extemporaneous affairs and we hope they feel like the start of a talk. We'd love to hear how you think about these things, too.

• How to Think About Energy Policy
  
• How to Think About Google Books
• How to Think About Algorithms
• How to Think About Twitter and Facebook
• How to Think About Lifestreaming
• How to Think About Online Music