Introduction
“Every household was plentifully supplied”: William Stearns Davis, ed., Readings in Ancient History: Illustrative Extracts from the Sources, 2 vols. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1912–1913), Vol. II: Rome and the West, 365–67.
Al-Mansur founded a palace library: Jonathan Lyons, The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, Kindle edition), 52.
“Paradise Translated and Restored”: Richard Daniel Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 56.
Jaquet-Droz’s son, Henri-Louis: Ibid., 63.
“Ladies and Gentlemen”: “John Joseph Merlin—Part One,” Georgian Gentlemen, March 11, 2013, http://mikerendell.com/john-joseph-merlin-part-one/.
“prowled the borderlines”: Simon Schaffer, “Babbage’s Dancer and the Impresarios of Mechanism,” Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time, and Invention, Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow, eds. (London: Faber & Faber, 1996): 54.
“The motions of her limbs”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 32.
“the hummingbird effect”: Steven Johnson, How We Got to Now: Six Innovations that Made the Modern World (New York: Riverhead, 2014), 4–7.
“It may sometimes happen”: Samuel Johnson, Rambler, no. 8.
Chapter 1. Fashion and Shopping
“The Phoenicians’ now-proven aptitude”: Simon Winchester, Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories (New York: Harper, 2010), 68.
And yet the archeological record: “By c. 36,000 to 28,000 BCE grinding, shaping, and polishing allowed Neolithic ‘jewelers’ to produce beads in the shape of female breasts and torsos, while others benefited from advances in ceramic technology and created miniature clay-fired animal figurines that they mounted on cords. Archeologists often find beads in burial sites of the Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic Periods.” Phyllis G. Tortora, Dress, Fashion and Technology: From Prehistory to the Present (Dress, Body, Culture) (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, Kindle edition), Kindle locations 659–663.
“The seductive design of shops”: Claire Walsh, “Shop Design and the Display of Goods in Eighteenth-Century London,” Journal of Design History 8.3 (1995), 162.
“a kind of enchantment which blinds”: Walsh, 171.
“Painting and adorning”: Walsh, 163.
“This afternoon some ladies”: Walsh, 171.
“a taudry Callico Madam”: Chloe Wigston Smith, “Calico Madams: Servants, Consumption, and the Calico Crisis,” Eighteenth-Century Life 31, no. 2 (2007), 32–33.
“The spectacular early triumph”: John Styles, The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 321.
“It is not Necessity”: Nicholas Barbon, A Discourse of Trade, Printed by Tho. Milbourn for the author (London: 1905), 35.
But the Calico Madams suggest: McKendrick et al. pose the question clearly, though they are themselves still working under the convention that the consumer revolution was largely the work of men: “Some discussion is required of why attention centred on the great industrialists and the supply side of the supply-demand equation, and why so little attention has been given to the hordes of little men who helped to boost the demand side and who succeeded in exiting new wants, in making available new goods, and in satisfying a new consumer market of unprecedented size and buying power.” Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and John Harold Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 5.
The first full-color fashion image: McKendrick et al., 46.
“It is often said”: Raymond Williams, “Advertising: The Magic System,” The Advertising and Consumer Culture Reader, Matthew P. McAllister and Joseph Turow, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2009), 13–24.
“The present rage”: McKendrick et al., 53.
“Is fashion in fact”: Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century: The Structure of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 323.
“What’s necessary”: Quoted in Elaine Showalter’s introduction to Émile Zola, Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies’ Delight), trans. Robin Buss (New York: Penguin Classics, 2007), 415.
“Dazzling and sensuous, the Bon Marché”: Michael Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 162.
“department store thefts”: Quoted in Miller, 202–8.
“a pitcher plant”: Quoted in M. Jeffrey Hardwick, Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 33.
“avenues of horror”: Quoted in Malcolm Gladwell, “The Terrazzo Jungle. Fifty Years Ago, the Mall Was Born. America Would Never Be the Same,” The New Yorker 15 (2004).
“Southdale was not a suburban alternative”: Ibid.
“The service done by the Fort Worth”: Quoted in Hardwick, 181.
“giant shopping machine”: Quoted in Hardwick, 211.
Chapter 2. Music
“We enjoy strawberry cheesecake”: Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1999), 535.
“The presence of music”: Nicholas J. Conard, Maria Malina, and Susanne C. Münzel, “New Flutes Document the Earliest Musical Tradition in Southwestern Germany,” Nature 460:7256 (2009), 739.
Others take the sexual conquests: A fine overview of the arguments for the evolutionary roots of music can be found in Daniel J. Levitin’s This Is Your Brain on Music: Understanding a Human Obsession (London: Atlantic Books Ltd., 2011).
“We wish to explain,” the brothers: Imad Samir, Allah’s Automata: Artifacts of the Arab-Islamic Renaissance (800-1200) (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2015), 68–86.
“Using the Jacquard loom”: James Essinger, Jacquard’s Web: How a Hand-Loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age (New York: Oxford University Press, Kindle edition), 38.
“You are aware”: Essinger, 47.
When his collaborator Ada Lovelace: Quoted in Johnson, How We Got to Now: Six Innovations that Made the Modern World, 249.
A roster of instruments: Tim Carter, “A Florentine Wedding of 1608,” Acta Musicologica 55, Fasc. 1 (1983), 95.
The chips might have followed: It would seem that typewriter-style keyboards are a condition of possibility for advanced computers, almost the way capturing and transmitting electricity was a condition of possibility for the lightbulb. The former needs to come before the latter. And yet, strangely enough, computers were invented before typewriters, if you consider Babbage’s analytic engine to be the first computer. Babbage figured out how to swap algorithms in and out of random access memory before the rest of us figured out how to strike a few keys with our fingers and make letters appear on a page.
“From a mechanical point of view”: Michael H. Adler, The Writing Machine (London: Allen and Unwin, 1973), 5.
The very first long-distance: For more on the talking drums, see James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (New York: Vintage, 2012).
“The Ballet began”: Richard Rhodes, Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World (New York: Doubleday, 2011), 68.
“outsacked the Sacre”: Paul Lehrman, “Blast from the Past,” Wired, November 1, 1999, http://www.wired.com/1999/11/ballet.
“From this moment on”: Ibid.
Antheil later wondered: Quoted in Anna Corey, “How ‘The Bad Boy of Music’ and ‘The Most Beautiful Girl in the World’ Catalyzed a Wireless Revolution—in 1941.” http://people.seas.harvard.edu/~jones/cscie129/nu_lectures/lecture7/hedy/lemarr.htm.
“We shall see orchestral machines”: Quoted in Lehrman, “Blast from the Past.”
“I was allowed to sing”: All quotations from Oram cited in Jo Hutton, “Daphne Oram: Innovator, Writer and Composer,” Organised Sound 8, 49–56.
Chapter 3. Taste
Archeologists in Syria: Daniel T. Potts, Mesopotamian Civilization: The Material Foundations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 269.
Somehow, in an era before compasses: “By the turn of the millennium, they crop up in the records of cities spread around its shores: Marseilles, Barcelona, Ragusa. Some spices arrived via Byzantium and the Black Sea, following the Danube to eastern and central Europe, but the greatest volume of traffic passed through Alexandria and the Levant to Italy. From Italy a number of routes led north over the Alpine passes toward France and Germany.” Jack Turner, Spice: The History of a Temptation (New York: Knopf, Kindle edition), Kindle location 1108.
“King of England, Scotland”: Ibid., loc. 956.
“Nowhere is the history of East and West”: Ibid., loc. 5879.
But the real treasure: Filipe Castro, “The Pepper Wreck, an Early 17th-Century Portuguese Indiaman at the Mouth of the Tagus River, Portugal,” International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 32:1 (August 2003), 6–23.
The custom of paying: “As late as 1937, the king of England received rent from the mayor of Launceston consisting of a hundred shillings and one pound of pepper— the mayor might have reflected that this particular rent ceiling had proved very much to his financial advantage. When Prince Charles crossed the River Tamar in 1973 to take symbolic possession of the Duchy of Cornwall, his tribute included a pound of pepper. According to the OED, a token pepper rent remained a form of payment until the end of the nineteenth century.” Turner, Kindle location 1932.
When the Portuguese queen Isabella: Marjorie Shaffer, Pepper: A History of the World’s Most Influential Spice (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2013), Kindle location 439.
“a variety of spiced desserts”: Turner, Kindle location 1626.
“There is no year in which India”: Quoted in Abraham Eraly, The First Spring: The Golden Age of India (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2011), 244.
The Dutch East India Company: The Dutch East India Company also served the aims of the Dutch state itself, and not simply the company’s investors. “The VOC had a dual purpose, in order to obtain commercial as well as political objectives: to trade in Asia, but at the same time to make war on the enemies of the newborn Dutch Republic, Spain and Portugal. It received sovereign rights within its chartered area, such as the right to declare war, enter into diplomatic negotiations or sign treaties with local rulers, or to organize and execute military operations. As an institution, it was virtually a state within the state.” Vincent C. Loth, “Armed Incidents and Unpaid Bills: Anglo-Dutch Rivalry in the Banda Islands in the Seventeenth Century,” Modern Asian Studies 29:4 (1995), 708.
“The Mallayans”: Shaffer, Kindle location 2201.
“Nothing is more certain”: Ibid., loc. 2228.
In what the historian Vincent Loth: Loth, 725.
One theory holds: Tim Ecott, Vanilla: Travels in Search of the Ice Cream Orchid (New York: Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 2004, Kindle edition), 75–76.
“I knew from experience”: Lewis A. Maverick, “Pierre Poivre: Eighteenth Century Explorer of Southeast Asia,” Pacific Historical Review 10:2 (1941), 171.
“Nearly two hundred years later”: Turner, Kindle locations 5718–5719.
“Perhaps the earliest known use”: Ecott, 6.
“Everyone uses this confection”: Quoted in Ecott, 21–22.
“[My butler] informs me”: Ibid., 83.
Vanilla plants: Joseph Arditti, A. N. Rao, and H. Nair, “Hand-Pollination of Vanilla: How Many Discoverers,” Orchid Biology: Reviews and Perspectives 11 (2009), 233–49.
“This clever boy had realized”: Quoted in Ecott, 151.
“The very man”: Ecott, 106.
In medieval England: “When Edward I returned to London from the wars in Wales at the end of the thirteenth century, his officers spent more than £1,775 on spices out of a total expenditure on luxuries of just under £10,000—a staggering sum, even taking into account that many of his ‘spices’ included items such as oranges and sugar. To put the figure into perspective, his spice expenditure was about the same as the total annual income of an earl.” Turner, Kindle location 2731.
“To limit their function”: Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 6.
According to Turner: Turner, Kindle location 2568.
“a decoction of vanilla beans”: Ecott, 16–17.
“electuary that I made”: Paul Delany, “Constantinus Africanus’ ‘De Coitu’: A Translation,” Chaucer Review (1969), 55–65.
“No fewer than 342 impotent men”: Ecott, 23.
“Doubtless a vigorous error”: George Eliot, Middlemarch (New York: Penguin Classics, 2002), 478.
“a powder of cinnamon”: Turner, Kindle location 3527.
“three galleys put in at Genoa”: Quoted in Tom Standage, An Edible History of Humanity (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), 82.
“good things of his creation”: Shaffer, Kindle location 1142.
“It is remarkable that [pepper’s]”: Cited in Standage, 71.
Chapter 4. Illusion
“a hoarse and terrible tone”: Laurent Mannoni and Ben Brewster, “The Phantasmagoria,” Film History 8:4 (1996), 392.
“something you have never seen before”: Deac Rossell, The 19th Century German Origins of the Phantasmagoria Show (February 16, 2001), 3.
“In dying,” Deac Rossell writes: Ibid, 4.
“As soon as the peroration”: Ibid, 5.
“This is the night . . . phantasmagoria”: Stefan Andriopoulos, Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media (New York: Zone Books, 2013, Kindle edition), Kindle locations 19–21.
“We sit in a boundless Phantasmagoria”: Quoted in Kevin Hetherington, Capitalism’s Eye: Cultural Spaces of the Commodity (New York: Routledge, 2011), 244.
“As against this, the commodity-form”: Karl Marx, Capital: Volume One (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 165.
“[The] phenomena were produced”: David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic (London: Chatto & Windus, 1883), 85.
“At all times, curiosity”: Richard Daniel Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 3.
“The eye,” he wrote: Brewster, 21.
“an entire new Contrivance”: Altick, 131.
“The greatest IMPROVEMENT”: Erkki Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 1.
“No device . . . has approached”: Charles Taylor, The Literary Panorama (London: Cox, Son, and Baylis, 1810), 447.
“It is a delightful characteristic”: Charles Dickens, Household Words, Vol. 1, 1850, 73–77.
“musicians, snipers, cavalry”: John F. Ohl and Joseph Earl Arrington, “John Maelzel, Master Showman of Automata and Panoramas,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 84:1 (1960), 79.
“The city was before us”: Ibid.
“A musket machine”: Ibid.
“Novel Mechanical and Pictorial Exhibition”: Altick, 131.
“TRADITIONARY GHOST WORK!”: Ibid.
“You are allowed to look”: Altick, 231.
“no one thought of clothing”: Neal Gabler, Walt Disney (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2006, Kindle edition), Kindle locations 3758–3763.
pencil tests: “In short order, Walt installed a Moviola in a cramped, stifling, windowless closet that was soon dubbed the ‘sweatbox.’ Hunched over the tiny screen, no more than four inches by four inches, Walt and the animator would view and analyze the action by the hour, over and over and over again, trying to determine what would make it right, make it funnier. ‘I think it is astounding that we were the first group of animators, so far as I can learn, who ever had the chance to study their own work and correct its errors before it reached the screen.’” Gabler, Kindle locations 3644–3654.
“[The device] consists of four”: Andrew R. Boone, “The making of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Popular Science, January 1938, 50, http://blog.modernmechanix.com/the-making-of-snow-white-and-the-seven-dwarfs/.
“No animated cartoon”: Gabler, Kindle locations 5823–5828.
“Before the film was shown”: “They were the scenes in which the audience would be invited to cry along with the dwarfs, an emotional province that animations had not previously entered, and they would constitute the major test of the film’s effectiveness, though by this time Walt had little doubt they would succeed. ‘There is going to be a lot of sympathy for these little fellows,’ he said at a story conference that July. ‘We can tear their [the audience’s] hearts out if we want to by putting in a little crying.’ Frank Thomas, Fred Moore’s onetime assistant, was given the assignment of animating the dwarfs’ grief from Albert Hurter’s drawings, and he animated it with as little movement as possible—basically held poses with tears crawling down the dwarfs’ cheeks and, as Walt had instructed at a story meeting, ‘concentrating on Grumpy when he breaks down and starts to cry,’ cracking his stoic facade.” Gabler, Kindle locations 5714–5723.
“celebrity was . . . acknowledgement of achievement”: Fred Inglis, A Short History of Celebrity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010, Kindle edition), 53.
“We still try to make our celebrities”: Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 74.
“knowability combined with distance”: “This is the powerful contradiction at the heart of our phenomenon. It combines knowability with distance. Political leader and cinema star are intensely familiar (one of the family) by way of the cinema screen, and (at first) by way of their voices on the living room radio, but physically and in terms of how we all need to feel the directness of experience, they have the remoteness of the supernatural.” Inglis, 11.
Chapter 5. Games
Over the years, his name: William Caxton, Game and Playe of the Chesse (Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar, LLC, 2007), Google Scholar, xxiv.
“The original was not just copied”: Jacobus de Cessolis, The Book of Chess (New York: Italica Press, 2008, Kindle edition), Kindle locations 136–143.
“Both knights have three”: de Cessolis, Kindle locations 113–114.
“The king has dominion”: de Cessolis, Kindle locations 1245–1251.
“If women want to remain chaste”: de Cessolis, Kindle locations 1318–1319.
“The chess allegory”: Jenny Adams, Power Play: The Literature and Politics of Chess in the Late Middle Ages, The Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006, Kindle edition), Kindle locations 420–425.
Authority no longer trickled: “When someone in the game says ‘Check!’ to a king, he’s signifying a demand for rights. It is the same as saying, ‘Your honor, allow me to pass.’ The king has to grant the move unless, through wisdom or power, he can defend himself.
“It is often the case that when a knight, servant, nobleman, or commoner feels that an injustice has been done to him, or an excessive constraint put on him, if he can’t otherwise get revenge on the king, he waits until the king comes with him to the battlefield, and then he flees, leaving the king exposed to the enemy.” De Cessolis, Kindle locations 1285–1289.
“Kings cajoled”: David Shenk, The Immortal Game: A History of Chess (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2006, Kindle edition), Kindle locations 221–225.
“Can [a] machine play chess”: Cited in Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 336.
Some cognitive scientists compared: “Just as biologists need model organisms to explore genetics,” writes the University of Waterloo’s Neil Charness, “so too do cognitive scientists need model task environments to study adaptive cognitive mechanisms. Chess playing provides a rich task environment that taps many cognitive processes, ranging from perception, to memory, to problem solving.” Quoted in Shenk, Kindle location 1742.
“[The] board had an Intemperance”: Mary Pilon, The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015, Kindle edition), Kindle locations 729–735.
“Representative money”: Lizzie J. Magie, Land and Freedom: An International Record of Single Tax Progress, Vol. II (1904).
“The little landlords take”: Ibid.
A lesson in the abuses: Magie would finally warrant a grudging acknowledgment on starting with the 1991 edition of Monopoly: “It all started back in 1933 when Charles B. Darrow of Germantown, Pennsylvania was inspired by The Landlord’s Game to create a new diversion to entertain himself while he was unemployed.” Pilon, Kindle locations 3501–3510.
“Like the Bible”: Shenk, Kindle locations 329–335.
The practice of announcing the king’s: de Cessolis, Kindle locations 50–55.
“The wearingness which players experienced”: Quoted in Shenk, Kindle location 874.
Enraged at this deception: Artur Ekert, “Complex and Unpredictable Cardano,” International Journal of Theoretical Physics 47:8 (2008), 2102.
“hot tempered, single-minded”: Ibid.
“The pundits”: Keith Devlin, The Unfinished Game: Pascal, Fermat, and the Seventeenth-Century Letter That Made the World Modern (New York: Basic Books, 2008, Kindle edition), Kindle location 99.
Before Cardano: “The first known attempt to discern numerical patterns in games of chance seems to have come around 960, when Bishop Wibold of Cambrai correctly enumerated the 56 outcomes that can arise when three dice are thrown simultaneously: 1, 1, 1; 1, 1, 2; 2, 3, 5; and so on. A thirteenth-century Latin poem, De Vetula, listed the 216 (= 6 × 6 × 6) outcomes that may result when three dice are thrown in succession.” Devlin, Kindle location 141.
“[Each] had two rounded sides”: Devlin, Kindle location 132.
Two sets of statutes: Steven A. Epstein, Wage Labor and Guilds in Medieval Europe (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1991), 127–28.
“a stuffed ball”: John Fox, The Ball: Discovering the Object of the Game (New York: Harper Perennial, 2012), Kindle location 355.
“Jumping and bouncing”: Quoted in Fox, Kindle location 1269.
“I don’t understand”: John Tully, The Devil’s Milk: A Social History of Rubber (New York University Press, 2011, Kindle edition), 31.
“The demand for rubber . . . in Peru”: Tully, 23.
But the Mesoamericans: “In the 1940s, Paul Stanley, a botanist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, identified the vine as Ipomoea alba, a kind of night-blooming morning glory commonly known as moon vine or moonflower. Recent studies show that when latex from Castilla elastica is boiled with the juice of moon vine, sulfonic acids that occur naturally in the vine increase the plasticity and elasticity of the rubber and produce a degree of vulcanization.” Fox, Kindle location 1300.
“It should demonstrate”: J. M. Graetz, “The Origin of Spacewar!,” Creative Computing, August 1981, www.wheels.org/spacewar/creative/SpacewarOrigin.html.
“The game of Spacewar!”: Stewart Brand, “Spacewar!,” Rolling Stone, December 7, 1972, www.wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html.
“Using data from the American Ephemeris”: Graetz, “The Origin of Spacewar!”
“mechanically well made”: Edward O. Thorp, “Wearable Computers,” Digest of Papers, Second International Symposium on. 1998.
“It had perhaps a hundred thousand”: Ibid.
“As we worked and during”: Ibid.
“The computer’s techniques”: Ken Jennings, “My Puny Human Brain,” Slate, Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC, February 2012.
Chapter 6. Public Space
“Someone might play”: Leopold S. Launitz-Schurer, “Slave Resistance in Colonial New York: An Interpretation of Daniel Horsmanden’s New York Conspiracy,” Phylon (1960), 144.
“young gentlemen inclined”: Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 165.
“more than happy”: Christine Sismondo, America Walks into a Bar: A Spirited History of Taverns and Saloons, Speakeasies and Grog Shops (Oxford University Press, 2011, Kindle edition), Kindle locations 751-752.
“a penny dram of a penny worth”: Launitz-Schurer, 148.
“For people who have been”: Launitz-Schurer, 151.
“For one [coin] you can drink”: Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol (New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2008, Kindle edition), 35.
“the stages of travel”: W. C. Firebaugh, The Inns of Greece and Rome (Chicago: Pascal Covici, 1928), 122.
The census of 1577: Gately, 110–111.
“[Pubs] were run”: Gately, 85–86.
“becoming in many places the nurseries”: David W. Conroy, In Public Houses: Drink and the Revolution of Authority in Colonial Massachusetts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 204.
“beautiful young men . . . with bright eyes”: Sismondo, Kindle location 4402.
“kissing other men”: Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons, Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians (New York: Basic Books, 2006, Kindle edition), Kindle locations 1864–1872.
“paralyzing political skepticism”: Craig Calhoun, Contemporary Sociological Theory (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2012), 256.
Habermas observed: Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 26.
“a kind of social intercourse”: Ibid.
“When insects feed on caffeine-spiked nectar”: Carl Zimmer, “How Caffeine Evolved to Help Plants Survive and Help People Wake Up,” The New York Times (September 4, 2014).
“syrup of soot”: Matthew Green, “The Lost World of the London Coffeehouse,” Public Domain Review 7 (2013).
“Where it is most apparent”: Quoted in J. H. Brindley, “Commercial Aspects of Coffee,” in Coffee and Tea Industries and the Flavor Field (April 1914), 37.
Amsterdam, at that point: Green, 2013.
“At the Bedford Coffeehouse”: Ibid.
“All accounts of gallantry, pleasure”: Quoted in Brindley, “Commercial Aspects of Coffee.”
“Unexpectedly wide-ranging discussions”: Green, 2013.
“A Swedish owl”: Richard Daniel Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 15.
“not only for the inspection”: Ibid, 26.
“It reason seems that liberty”: Bonnie Calhoun, “Shaping the Public Sphere: English Coffeehouses and French Salons and the Age of the Enlightenment,” Colgate Academic Review 3:1 (2012), 83.
“First, Gentry, Tradesmen”: Ibid.
“Blue and Green Ribbons”: John Macky, “A Journey Through England. In Familiar Letters. From a Gentleman Here, to his Friends Abroad (1714),” Eighteenth-Century Coffee-House Culture, Vol. I, Ellis Markman, ed. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2006), 339.
In 1620, when the first Pilgrims: William Bradford Of Plymouth Plantation (Chelmsford, MA: Courier Corporation, 2012), 62.
“I could hardly believe my eyes”: Quoted in Cian Duffy and Peter Howell, Cultures of the Sublime: Selected Readings, 1750–1830 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
The wellsprings that fed this new form: Wordsworth had seen a prophesy of this future back in the late 1700s, during a visit to the St. Bartholomew fair, famously described in a passage from The Prelude that includes a sly reference to Merlin’s Mechanical Museum:
All moveables of wonder, from all parts,
Are here—Albinos, painted Indians, Dwarfs,
The Horse of knowledge, and the learned Pig,
The Stone-eater, the man that swallows fire,
Giants, Ventriloquists, the Invisible Girl,
The Bust that speaks and moves its goggling eyes,
The Wax-work, Clock-work, all the marvellous craft
Of modern Merlins, Wild Beasts, Puppet-shows,
All out-o’-the-way, far-fetched, perverted things,
All freaks of nature, all Promethean thoughts
Of man, his dullness, madness, and their feats
All jumbled up together, to compose
A Parliament of Monsters.
“In his mind’s eye”: Also from the same handbook: “Not only will there be satisfaction of the natural and rational curiosity of an observer, in the sight of creatures strange to our clime and notions, brought from different lands, of which from our childhood we all have heard so much, but his imagination will be gratified by being carried out to them by their denizens being now actually before him.” Quoted in Robert W. Jones, “The Sight of Creatures Strange to Our Clime: London Zoo and the Consumption of the Exotic,” Journal of Victorian Culture 2:1 (1997), 6.
she wrote in her diary: Randal Keynes, Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution (New York: Penguin, 2002, Kindle edition), Kindle locations 784–786.
“She threw herself on her back”: Ibid.
“Let man visit Ourang-outang”: Ibid., Kindle locations 854–858.
“An enormous task lay”: Eric Ames, Carl Hagenbeck’s Empire of Entertainments (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 163.
At the summit of the “Northern Plateau”: Ibid., 180.
“When you approach the Lions’ Ravine”: Ibid., 184.
“Disneyland is presented”: Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 12.
Conclusion
The model has several variants: R. A. Rescorla and A. R. Wagner, “A Theory of Pavlovian Conditioning: Variations in the Effectiveness of Reinforcement and Nonreinforcement,” in A. H. Black and W. F. Prokasy, eds., Classical Conditioning II (New York: Appleton-Century-Crafts, 1972), 64–99.
A new theory proposes that dopamine: Andrew Barto, Marco Mirolli, and Gianluca Baldassarre, “Novelty or Surprise?,” Frontiers in Psychology 4 (2013).
The computer scientist Jürgen Schmidhuber: Rafal Salustowicz and Jürgen Schmidhuber, “Probabilistic Incremental Program Evolution,” Evolutionary Computation 5:2 (1997), 123–41.
because of our instincts and nature: I suspect this strange relationship between genetic determination and cultural exploration that play activates may be one reason that Johan Huizinga divorced his otherwise brilliant 1938 analysis of play, Homo Ludens, from any biological grounding. “The aim of the present full-length study,” he wrote, “is to try to integrate the concept of play into that of culture. Consequently, play is to be understood here not as a biological phenomenon but as a cultural phenomenon.” The surprise instinct suggests that the two domains are in fact profoundly intertwined, perhaps more so than in any other form of human experience. Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, Kindle edition), Kindle locations 48–49.