You want an idea to survive hundreds or thousands of years? Step one: Don’t write it on paper. Alexander Konta believed this deeply. Paper yellows and withers and crumbles; it is the printed form of Alzheimer’s. “Why not make [text] imperishable by photographing the written word after it has been printed in books and newspapers and preserve the plate in a fireproof vault?” he asked the New York Observer. It was a hell of an idea, considering he said that in 1911. A century later, that’s more or less how those words of his were preserved: They had been scanned and stored on Google Books. Konta was just getting started. He was a wealthy New York banker, and in 1911 founded a group called the Modern Historic Records Association. It billed itself as “the first society ever organized to provide a living history of the times,” and its goal was wildly ambitious: It wanted to marshal the power of the day’s technology--new, exciting machines that captured moving images and recorded voices--to document everything, or at least as much as they could, so that time wouldn’t erase their era as it had at least partially wiped out all of preceding human history.Read Full Story Continue reading at 'Fast Company'
[ Fast Company | 2013-01-17 00:00:00 UTC ]