September 14, 2023
Res Obscura has moved to Substack
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Hello readers! After 13 years, I've decided to turn the Res Obscura blog into the Res Obscura Substack newsletter . Very little is chang...
December 13, 2019
1950s Smart Homes and the Longevity of Design
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Aesthetic modes can be surprisingly persistent, even as technologies change. Electric light strips automatically illuminate as the you...
October 30, 2019
Enlightenment-era Ghosts and the History of Technology
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A detail of one of Etienne Gaspard Robertson's "phantasmagoria." Ghosts were in the air in eighteenth-century London. Fe...
March 28, 2019
The Most Wonderful Map in the World: Urbano Monte's Planisphere of 1587
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At some point in 1589, a Milanese cartographer named Urbano Monte made up his mind: his self-portrait needed updating. Monte carefully ...
October 26, 2018
Seven Weeks to Venice: History Through Isochronic Maps
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Detail of a 1921 map that visualizes its own accuracy: red regions are accurately mapped, orange less so, etc. Historians love maps, b...
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