STUFF: News, Technology, the cool and the plain weird

[MIKA27]

Sture Bergwall: Swedish 'serial killer' released

A man once considered one of Sweden's most prolific serial killers has been released.

The move came after the authorities ruled that his eight murder convictions were based on false confessions.

Sture Bergwall, now 63, has been held in psychiatric detention for more than 20 years.

He confessed to more than 30 killings over three decades and was convicted of eight.

He retracted his confessions six years ago, saying that when he made them he was heavily medicated and seeking attention.

All of his convictions, handed down in a series of trials between 1994 and 2001, were overturned after prosecutors said they had no other evidence linking him to the deaths, some of which may not even have been murders.

"He has been detained for 20 years in a locked psychiatric clinic. It is a miscarriage of justice," his lawyer Thomas Olsson said.

After his convictions were quashed, Mr Bergwall was still kept at the mental institution until a court could decide whether his mental health was good enough to free him.

Now a court in Falun in central Sweden has ruled that although he still suffered from a personality disorder and should continue to receive psychiatric care, he no longer needed to be held in a secure unit.

The case has gripped Sweden for years and the government launched a commission of inquiry last November into possible failings in the legal system that may have resulted in Mr Bergwall's convictions.

His lawyer said Mr Bergwall will now start looking at whether to seek damages.

[MIKA27]

Ypres: World War One weapon explodes, killing two

A shell or grenade buried in western Belgium since World War One, has exploded, killing two people.

At least two more were injured, one of whom is in critical condition.

The device was set off as workmen at a building site in Ypres were trying to dig it up.

A strategic city, Ypres was shelled by German forces for most of the war and unexploded weapons are often found there.

The area, where a factory is being built, has been sealed off and local explosives experts have been brought in.

It is thought that thousands of explosives from the 1914-1918 war still lie buried in and around Ypres, yet to be discovered.

Every year the former battlefields of western Belgium throw up hundreds of Great War armaments. Most are destroyed without incident by a special Belgian army bomb squad.

Despite that, several hundred people have been killed in similar explosions since the end of the war.

The Flanders battlefields cover dozens of cities where Allied forces clashed with their Germany enemies for most of the war.

A British tank destroyed near Ypres - a base for British troops during the war

Captured by the Allies early in the war, the area was heavily shelled for the next four years

[MIKA27]

‘From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series’ – Review

Time to take a look at another online series now, this time courtesy of Netflix (although I understand it will receive a TV transmission in some territories). ‘From Dusk Till Dawn’ as any genre fan will know was a fairly successful 1996 film from Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. Though many critics were baffled by the movie’s abrupt midway shift from fugitive thriller to tongue-in-cheek vampire bloodbath, it achieved something of a cult following and grossed enough profit (a fairly modest $5 million) to warrant a couple of mostly forgotten straight-to-video sequels. Now Rodriguez has chosen to return to ‘ From Dusk Till Dawn’ in episodic form serving as executive producer of the series and director of the pilot. So is there still more life to be drained from the franchise?

It’s clear from the show’s opening moments that this is to be a revisiting of the film’s original story rather than a spin-off or sequel.

This is of course a mixed blessing – while not necessitating any previous knowledge of the series increases the show’s chances of reaching a wide audience, it is likely to lead to unfavorable comparisons from fans of the original, or worse still, boredom at seeing a familiar story re-told at a much more leisurely pace. In the press release and interviews leading up to the show’s debut Rodriguez has stated his intention to expand upon and more fully explore both the characters and concept. In the pilot it seems that notion has been taken to the extreme, with the film’s first 10 minutes or so literally being spread out over a 45 minute running time.

Of course George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino were never likely to reprise their roles for the series – Clooney is currently filming sci-fi mystery ‘Tomorrowland’, while Tarantino is presumably still sulking about ‘The Hateful Eight’ and throwing darts at photos of his once-trusted friends. So instead here we follow the permanently bickering Gecko brothers, Seth (D.J. Cotrona) and Richie (Zane Holtz) as they flee the scene of a bank robbery.

Hot on their trail are Sheriff Earl McGraw (Don Johnson) and his young partner (Jesse Garcia), and when the Gecko brothers stop off at a liquor store, chaos soon erupts as the erratic and seemingly unhinged Richie, in an undisguised attempt at some foreshadowing, begins experiencing disturbing visions warning him of trouble on the horizon. It’s difficult to go much further into the plot without including spoilers, since the aforementioned incidents account for around three quarters of the first episode’s run-time. That fact alone should be a decent indicator as to whether or not ‘From Dusk Till Dawn’ will hold your attention or test your patience.

Cotrona and Holtz slip into their roles quite well. In what is sure to be a divisive move, the pair seem to have been chosen for their slight physical resemblance to their predecessors, and uncanny ability to ape Clooney and Tarantino’s deliveries rather than attempting entirely new approaches to either character. To a newcomer this will likely be inconsequential, but for existing fans who suspect the series of being a cheap rehash it will only add fuel to their argument. Of the supporting cast in episode one, Don Johnson in particular shines – but don’t get too attached. Wilmer Valderrama (best known as Fez from ‘That ’70s Show’) also features as Don Carlos, the powerful drug lord who the Gecko’s call upon to aid in their escape.

One of the more immediately noticeable differences in ‘From Dusk Till Dawn”s TV incarnation is the absence of the film’s more cheerfully absurd moments and nods to B-Movie cheese. Here everything is played straight, with a murky atmosphere, scattered flashbacks and deadly serious tone. While this decision is understandable given the current trends in genre programming (which after all probably contributed to this series being commissioned in the first place), it does no favors to the plodding pace of the pilot.

Thankfully much of the pacing issues are gone in the comparatively action-packed (and just released) second episode, in which Richie’s visions intensify as his relationship with his brother deteriorates, we get to see the aforementioned bank robbery and there’s even some brief vampire action. We are also introduced to the troubled Fullers, a religious Southern family who are traveling cross-country following the death of their mother. Importantly, we are given a clear indicator of how their story will converge with the main plot, along with pick-ups for all the loose threads in episode one. In many ways episode two is a big improvement and hints that with patience and tighter pacing ‘From Dusk Till Dawn’ will develop into rewarding viewing. Whether or not it will contain enough unique elements and plot twists to escape the shadow of the original however, remains to be seen.

[MIKA27]

HARLEY SOFTAIL SLIM ‘CROWNED STALLION’ BY ROUGH CRAFTS

It’s been quite some time since we’ve heard from Winston Yeh and his team over at Rough Crafts. The crew decided to break the silence by unveiling another 2-wheeled gem from their workshop in this Harley-Davidson Softail Slim.

Given the name ‘Crowned Stallion,’ this bobber-style bike fuses vintage design with modern technology seamlessly. In fact, at first glance, you could hardly tell this is the work of a customizer. It actually looks like it rolled right off the Harley showroom. The bike has been outfitted with a 16-inch vintage wheel up front, and a 15-inch one out back, both from the folks at Exile Cycles. This is one of those bikes that everyone will appreciate, whether you’re a fan of Harleys or not.

[MIKA27]

PORT-A-BACH SHIPPING CONTAINER HOME

Designed by the team at Atelierworkshop, this tiny home is just another example of the seemingly endless container possibilities.

The New Zealand based designers started the project with an empty container back in 2007. After some extensive clean-up and renovation, the Port-A-Bach has been equipped with everything one would need to live. The home features a bunk bed, double bed room, dressing room, a kitchen, and even a bathroom complete with shower; providing enough living space for 2 adults and 2 children. The entire space opens up, allowing plenty of natural light and fresh air to ventilate through the container, and there’s even a patio out front. Of course the fact that it’s just a single recycled shipping container means you can literally live anywhere your heart desires.

[MIKA27]

HONDA SPORTWAGON CONCEPT

Looking to push the design envelope in the world of wagons, San Francisco based designer Rene Garcia (Pyschoform) presents his aggressive Honda Sportwagon Concept.

Working full time as a digital modeler for some of the most well known science fiction and action films of our time (The Avengers, Transformers, Star Trek, etc), Garcia is one talented individual. The Cali-based designer gained inspiration from one of nature’s most fearless predators (the shark) for this concept car. The vehicle features a shark-like nose with tiny headlights, and a very interesting rear hatch concept. The massive 20-plus inch wheels are the ultimate finishing touch to a concept car that will probably never see the production line.

[MIKA27]

VINTAGE BLUEPRINTS FOR FAMOUS INVENTIONS

The patent for the Chia Pet? That’s birdcage liner. The patent for Orville and Wilbur Wright’s flying machine? Now that’s wall-worthy.

While these aren’t the genuine articles, Oliver Gal’s artists have done an amazing job of recreating the authentic blueprint applications of a number of world-changing products, from the Harley motorcycle and the revolver, to the surfboard and Gibson guitar. Check out the baseball bat from 1885, the cork extractor patent from 1930, or the blueprint for the bicycle form 1890. Frame it, put it on your wall, and you’ve got a piece of art, history lesson, and motivational poster all in one. That leads us to our philosophical question for the day: What came first, paper, or the patent for paper?

[MIKA27]

The Devil and the Art Dealer

GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN Left, Cornelius Gurlitt; A Nazi rally, circa 1933; Matisse’s Seated Woman, one of 1,280 works of art discovered in the Munich apartment of 81-year-old.

It was the greatest art theft in history: 650,000 works looted from Europe by the Nazis, many of which were never recovered. But last November the world learned that German authorities had found a trove of 1,280 paintings, drawings, and prints worth more than a billion dollars in the Munich apartment of a haunted white-haired recluse. Amid an international uproar, Alex Shoumatoff follows a century-old trail to reveal the crimes—and obsessions—involved.

At about nine P.M. on September 22, 2010, the high-speed train from Zurich to Munich passed the Lindau border, and Bavarian customs officers came aboard for a routine check of passengers. A lot of “black” money—off-the-books cash—is taken back and forth at this crossing by Germans with Swiss bank accounts, and officers are trained to be on the lookout for suspicious travelers.

As reported by the German newsweekly Der Spiegel, while making his way down the aisle, one of the officers came upon a frail, well-dressed, white-haired man traveling alone and asked for his papers. The old man produced an Austrian passport that said he was Rolf Nikolaus Cornelius Gurlitt, born in Hamburg in 1932. He reportedly told the officer that the purpose of his trip was for business, at an art gallery in Bern. Gurlitt was behaving so nervously that the officer decided to take him into the bathroom to search him, and he found on his person an envelope containing 9,000 euros ($12,000) in crisp new bills.

Though he had done nothing illegal—amounts under 10,000 euros don’t need to be declared—the old man’s behavior and the money aroused the officer’s suspicion. He gave back Gurlitt’s papers and money and let him return to his seat, but the customs officer flagged Cornelius Gurlitt for further investigation, and this would put into motion the explosive dénouement of a tragic mystery more than a hundred years in the making.

Cornelius Gurlitt was a ghost. He had told the officer that he had an apartment in Munich, although his residence—where he pays taxes—was in Salzburg. But, according to newspaper reports, there was little record of his existence in Munich or anywhere in Germany. The customs and tax investigators, following up on the officer’s recommendation, discovered no state pension, no health insurance, no tax or employment records, no bank accounts—Gurlitt had apparently never had a job—and he wasn’t even listed in the Munich phone book. This was truly an invisible man.

And yet with a little more digging they discovered that he had been living in Schwabing, one of Munich’s nicer neighborhoods, in a million-dollar-plus apartment for half a century. Then there was that name. Gurlitt. To those with knowledge of Germany’s art world during Hitler’s reign, and especially those now in the business of searching for Raubkunst—art looted by the Nazis—the name Gurlitt is significant: Hildebrand Gurlitt was a museum curator who, despite being a second-degree Mischling, a quarter Jewish, according to Nazi law, became one of the Nazis’ approved art dealers. During the Third Reich, he had amassed a large collection of Raubkunst, much of it from Jewish dealers and collectors. The investigators began to wonder: Was there a connection between Hildebrand Gurlitt and Cornelius Gurlitt? Cornelius had mentioned the art gallery on the train. Could he have been living off the quiet sale of artworks?

The investigators became curious as to what was in apartment No. 5 at 1 Artur-Kutscher-Platz. Perhaps they picked up on the rumors in Munich’s art world. “Everyone in the know had heard that Gurlitt had a big collection of looted art,” the husband of a modern-art-gallery owner told me. But they proceeded cautiously. There were strict private-property-rights, invasion-of-privacy, and other legal issues, starting with the fact that Germany has no law preventing an individual or an institution from owning looted art. It took till September 2011, a full year after the incident on the train, for a judge to issue a search warrant for Gurlitt’s apartment, on the grounds of suspected tax evasion and embezzlement. But still, the authorities seemed hesitant to execute it.

COLLECTION AGENT Josef Gockeln, the mayor of Düsseldorf; Cornelius’s father, Hildebrand; and Paul Kauhausen, director of Düsseldorf’s municipal archives, circa 1949.

Then, three months later, in December 2011, Cornelius sold a painting, a masterpiece by Max Beckmann titled The Lion Tamer, through the Lempertz auction house, in Cologne, for a total of 864,000 euros ($1.17 million). Even more interesting, according to Der Spiegel, the money from the sale was split roughly 60–40 with the heirs of Jewish art dealer Alfred Flechtheim, who had had modern-art galleries in several German cities and Vienna in the 1920s. In 1933, Flechtheim had fled to Paris and then London, leaving behind his collection of art. He died impoverished in 1937. His family has been trying to reclaim the collection, including The Lion Tamer, for years.

As part of his settlement with the Flechtheim estate, according to an attorney for the heirs, Cornelius Gurlitt acknowledged that the Beckmann had been sold under duress by Flechtheim in 1934 to his father, Hildebrand Gurlitt. This bombshell gave traction to the government’s suspicion that there might be more art in Gurlitt’s apartment.

But it took until February 28, 2012, for the warrant to finally be executed. When the police and customs and tax officials entered Gurlitt’s 1,076-square-foot apartment, they found an astonishing trove of 121 framed and 1,285 unframed artworks, including pieces by Picasso, Matisse, Renoir, Chagall, Max Liebermann, Otto Dix, Franz Marc, Emil Nolde, Oskar Kokoschka, Ernst Kirchner, Delacroix, Daumier, and Courbet. There was a Dürer. A Canaletto. The collection could be worth more than a billion dollars.

As reported in Der Spiegel, over a period of three days, Gurlitt was instructed to sit and watch quietly as officials packed the pictures and took them all away. The trove was taken to a federal customs warehouse in Garching, about 10 miles north of Munich. The chief prosecutor’s office made no public announcement of the seizure and kept the whole matter under tight wraps while it debated how to proceed. Once the artworks’ existence became known, all hell was going to break loose. Germany would be besieged by claims and diplomatic pressure. In this unprecedented case, no one seemed to know what to do. It would open old wounds, fault lines in the culture, that hadn’t healed and never will.

In the days that followed, Cornelius sat bereft in his empty apartment. A psychological counselor from a government agency was sent to check up on him. Meanwhile, the collection remained in Garching, with no one the wiser, until word of its existence was leaked to Focus, a German newsweekly, possibly by someone who had been in Cornelius’s apartment, perhaps one of the police or the movers who were there in 2012, because he or she provided a description of its interior. On November 4, 2013—20 months after the seizure and more than three years after Cornelius’s interview on the train—the magazine splashed on its front page the news that what appeared to be the greatest trove of looted Nazi art in 70 years had been found in the apartment of an urban hermit in Munich who had been living with it for decades.

Soon after the Focus story broke, the media converged on No. 1 Artur-Kutscher-Platz, and Cornelius Gurlitt’s life as a recluse was over.

The Lion Tamer, by Max Beckmann, which Cornelius sold in 2011.

Aesthetic Cleansing

How the collection had ended up in Cornelius Gurlitt’s Munich apartment is a tragic saga, which begins in 1892 with the publication of the physician and social critic Max Nordau’s book Entartung (Degeneration). In it, he postulated that some of the new art and literature that was appearing in fin de siècle Europe was the product of diseased minds. As examples of this degeneracy, Nordau singled out some of his personal bêtes noires: the Parnassians, the Symbolists, and the followers of Ibsen, Wilde, Tolstoy, and Zola.

The son of a Budapest rabbi, Nordau saw the alarming rise in anti-Semitism as another indication that European society was degenerating, a point that seems to have been lost on Hitler, whose racist ideology was influenced by Nordau’s writings. As Hitler came to power, in 1933, he declared “merciless war” on “cultural disintegration.” He ordered an aesthetic purge of the entartete Künstler, the “degenerate artists,” and their work, which to him included anything that deviated from classic representationalism: not only the new Expressionism, Cubism, Dadaism, Fauvism, futurism, and objective realism, but the salon-acceptable Impressionism of van Gogh and Cézanne and Matisse and the dreamy abstracts of Kandinsky. It was all Jewish Bolshevik art. Even though much of it was not actually made by Jews, it was still, to Hitler, subversive-Jewish-Bolshevik in sensibility and intent and corrosive to the moral fiber of Germany. The artists were culturally Judeo-Bolshevik, and the whole modern-art scene was dominated by Jewish dealers, gallery owners, and collectors. So it had to be eliminated to get Germany back on the right track.

Maybe there was an element of revenge in the way Hitler—whose dream of becoming an artist had gone nowhere—destroyed the lives and careers of the successful artists of his day. But all forms were targeted in his aesthetic cleansing campaign. Expressionist and other avant-garde films were banned—sparking an exodus to Hollywood by filmmakers Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, and others. “Un-German” books like the works of Kafka, Freud, Marx, and H. G. Wells were burned; jazz and other atonal music was verboten, although this was less rigidly enforced. Writers Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, and others went into exile. This creative pogrom helped spawn the Weltanschauung that made the racial one possible.

The trove of more than $1 billion worth of art discovered in Cornelius Gurlitt’s Munich apartment includes what may be the greatest collection of looted Nazi art found in 70 years. Some of the works discovered: Landscape with Horses, by Franz Marc.

The Degenerate Art Show

The Gurlitts were a distinguished family of assimilated German Jews, with generations of artists and people in the arts going back to the early 19th century. Cornelius was actually the third Cornelius, after his composer great-great-uncle and his grandfather, a Baroque-art and architectural historian who wrote nearly 100 books and was the father of his father, Hildebrand. By the time Hitler came to power, Hildebrand had already been fired as the curator and director of two art institutions: an art museum in Zwickau, for “pursuing an artistic policy affronting the healthy folk feelings of Germany” by exhibiting some controversial modern artists, and the Kunstverein, in Hamburg, not only for his taste in art but because he had a Jewish grandmother. As Hildebrand wrote in an essay 22 years later, he started to fear for his life. Remaining in Hamburg, he opened a gallery that stuck to older, more traditional and safe art. But he was also quietly acquiring forbidden art at bargain prices from Jews fleeing the country or needing money to pay the devastating capital-flight tax and, later, the Jewish wealth levy.

In 1937, Joseph Goebbels, the Reich minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, seeing the opportunity “to make some money from this garbage,” created a commission to confiscate degenerate art from both public institutions and private collections. The commission’s work culminated in the “Degenerate Art” show that year, which opened in Munich a day after “The Great German Art Exhibition” of approved “blood and soil” pictures that inaugurated the monumental, new House of German Art, on Prinzregentenstrasse. “What you are seeing here are the crippled products of madness, impertinence, and lack of talent,” Adolf Ziegler, the president of the Reich Chamber of Visual Arts, in Munich, and curator of the “Degenerate Art” show, said at its opening. The show got two million visitors—an average of 20,000 people a day—and more than four times the number that came to “The Great German Art Exhibition.”

A pamphlet put out by the Ministry for Education and Science in 1937, to coincide with the “Degenerate Art” show, declared, “Dadaism, Futurism, Cubism, and the other isms are the poisonous flower of a Jewish parasitical plant, grown on German soil. . . . Examples of these will be the strongest proof for the necessity of a radical solution to the Jewish question.”

A year later, Goebbels formed the Commission for the Exploitation of Degenerate Art. Hildebrand, despite his Jewish heritage, was appointed to the four-person commission because of his expertise and art-world contacts outside Germany. It was the commission’s job to sell the degenerate art abroad, which could be used for worthy purposes like acquiring old masters for the huge museum—it was going to be the biggest in the world—the Führer was planning to build in Linz, Austria. Hildebrand was permitted to acquire degenerate works himself, as long as he paid for them in hard foreign currency, an opportunity that he took full advantage of. Over the next few years, he would acquire more than 300 pieces of degenerate art for next to nothing. Hermann Göring, a notorious looter, would end up with 1,500 pieces of Raubkunst—including works by van Gogh, Munch, Gauguin, and Cézanne—valued at about $200 million after the war.

Child at a Table, by Otto Griebel.

The Greatest Art Theft in History

As reported in Der Spiegel, after France fell, in 1940, Hildebrand went frequently to Paris, leaving his wife, Helene, and children—Cornelius, then eight, and his sister, Benita, who was two years younger—in Hamburg and taking up residence in the Hotel de Jersey or at the apartment of a mistress. He began a complicated and dangerous game of survival and self-enrichment in which he played everybody: his wife, the Nazis, the Allies, the Jewish artists, dealers, and owners of the paintings, all in the name of allegedly helping them escape and saving their work. He got involved in all kinds of high-risk, high-reward wheeling and dealing, like the wealthy dealer in Paris buying art from fleeing Jews whom Alain Delon played in the 1976 movie Monsieur Klein.

Hildebrand also entered the abandoned homes of rich Jewish collectors and carted off their pictures. He acquired one masterpiece—Matisse’s Seated Woman (1921)—that Paul Rosenberg, the friend and dealer of Picasso, Braque, and Matisse, had left in a bank vault in Libourne, near Bordeaux, before he fled to America, in 1940. Other works Hildebrand picked up at distress sales at the Drouot auction house, in Paris.

With carte blanche from Goebbels, Hildebrand was flying high. He may have agreed to his deal with the Devil because, as he later claimed, he had no choice if he wanted to stay alive, and then he was gradually corrupted by the money and the treasures he was accumulating—a common enough trajectory. But perhaps it is more accurate to say that he was leading a double life: giving the Nazis what they wanted, and doing what he could to save the art he loved and his fellow Jews. Or a triple life, because at the same time he was also amassing a fortune in artworks. It is easy for a modern person to condemn the sellouts in a world that was so inconceivably compromised and horrible.

In 1943, Hildebrand became one of the major buyers for Hitler’s future museum in Linz. The works that were suitable to the Führer’s taste were shipped to Germany. These included not only paintings but tapestries and furniture. Hildebrand got a 5 percent commission on each transaction. A shrewd, inscrutable man, he was always welcome at the table, because he had millions of reichsmarks from Goebbels to spend.

From March 1941 to July 1944, 29 large shipments including 137 freight cars filled with 4,174 crates containing 21,903 art objects of all kinds went to Germany. Altogether, about 100,000 works were looted by the Nazis from Jews in France alone. The total number of works plundered has been estimated at around 650,000. It was the greatest art theft in history.

A self-portrait by Otto Dix.

A Very German Crisis

Top, Cornelius’s Munich apartment building; bottom, Gurlitt shopping in Munich last November. (Nazi-era art hoarders—they’re just like us!)

The day after the Focus story came out, Augsburg’s chief prosecutor, Reinhard Nemetz, who is in charge of the investigation, held a hasty press conference and issued a carefully worded press release, followed by another two weeks later. But the damage was done; the floodgates of outrage were open. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s office was inundated with complaints and declined to make a statement about an ongoing investigation. Germany suddenly had an international image crisis on its hands and was looking at major litigation. How could the German government have been so callous as to withhold this information for a year and a half, and to divulge it only when forced to by the Focus story? How outrageous is it that, 70 years after the war, Germany still has no restitution law for art stolen by the Nazis?

There is a lot of interest among the descendants of Holocaust victims in getting back artworks that were looted by the Nazis, for getting at least some form of compensation and closure for the horrors visited upon their families. The problem, explains Wesley Fisher, director of research for the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, is that “a great many people don’t know what is missing from their collections.”

Cosmetics billionaire and longtime activist for the recovery of looted art Ronald Lauder called for the immediate release of the full inventory of the collection, as did Fisher, Anne Webber, founder and co-chair of the London-based Commission for Looted Art in Europe, and David Rowland, a New York lawyer representing the descendants of Curt Glaser. Glaser and his wife, Elsa, were major supporters, collectors, and influential cognoscenti of the art of the Weimar period, and friends with Matisse and Kirchner. Under Nazi laws forbidding Jews from holding civil-servant positions, Glaser was pushed out as director of the Prussian State Library in 1933. Forced to disperse his collection, he fled to Switzerland, then Italy, and finally America, where he died in Lake Placid, New York, in 1943. Lauder told me that “the artworks stolen from the Jews are the last prisoners of W.W. II. You have to be aware that every work stolen from a Jew involved at least one death.”

On November 11, the government started to put up some of Cornelius’s works on a Web site (lostart.de), and there were so many visits the site crashed. To date it has posted 458 works and announced that about 590 of the trove of what has been adjusted to 1,280—due to multiples and sets—may have been looted from Jewish owners. The provenance work is far from done.

German restitution laws that apply to looted art are highly complex. In fact, the 1938 Nazi law that allowed the government to confiscate Degenerate Art has still not been repealed. Germany is a signatory to the 1998 Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, which say that museums and other public institutions with Raubkunst should return it to its rightful owners, or their heirs. But compliance is voluntary, and few institutions in any of the signatory countries have complied. Even so, the Principles don’t apply to Degenerate Art in Germany, nor do they apply to works possessed by individuals, such as Cornelius. Ronald Lauder told me that “there is a huge amount of looted art in the museums of Germany, most of it not on display.” He called for a commission of international experts to scour Germany’s museums and government institutions, and in February the German government announced that it would set up an independent center to begin looking closely at museums’ collections.

To this date, Cornelius has not been charged with any crime, bringing into question the legality of the seizure—which was probably not covered by the search warrant under which authorities entered his apartment. Furthermore, there is a 30-year statute of limitations on making claims on stolen property, and Cornelius has been in possession of the art for more than 40 years. The pieces are still in a warehouse in a sort of limbo. Numerous parties are making claims to the ones that have been posted on the government’s Web site. It is unclear whether the law requires or enables the government to return the art to its rightful owners, or whether it needs to be returned to Cornelius on the grounds of an illegal seizure or under the protection of the statute of limitations.

“He must not be a happy man, having lived a lie for so many years,” Nana Dix, the granddaughter of the Degenerate artist Otto Dix, said to me about Cornelius. Nana is herself an artist, and we spent three hours in her studio in Schwabing, about half a mile from Cornelius’s apartment, looking at reproductions of her grandfather’s work and tracing his remarkable career—how he had transcendently documented the horrors he had lived through on the front lines of both wars, at one point being forbidden by the Gestapo to paint or even buy art materials. Dix, who came from humble origins (his father worked in an iron foundry in Gera), was one of the great under-recognized artists of the 20th century. Only Picasso expressed himself as masterfully in so many styles: Expressionism, Cubism, Dadaism, Impressionism, abstract, grotesque hyper-realism. Dix’s powerful, searingly honest images reflect—as Hildebrand Gurlitt described the unsettling modern art he collected—“the struggle to come to terms with who we are.” According to Nana Dix, 200 of his major works are still missing.

Don Quichote and Sancho Panza, by Honoré Daumier.

The Ghost

Within hours of the Focus piece’s publication, the sensational story of Cornelius Gurlitt and his billion-dollar secret hoard of art had been picked up by major media all over the world. Every time he stepped out of his building, microphones were thrust in his face and cameras started to roll. After being mobbed by paparazzi, he spent 10 days in his empty apartment without leaving it. According to Der Spiegel, the last movie he saw was in 1967. He hadn’t watched television since 1963. He did read the paper and listened to the radio, so he had some idea of what was going on in the world, but his actual experience of it was very limited and he was out of touch with a lot of developments. He rarely traveled—he had gone to Paris, once, with his sister years ago. He said he had never been in love with an actual person. The pictures were his whole life. And now they were gone. The grief he had been going through for the last year and a half, alone in his empty apartment, the bereavement, was unimaginable. The loss of his pictures, he told Özlem Gezer, Der Spiegel’s reporter—it was the only interview he would grant—hit him harder than the loss of his parents, or his sister, who died of cancer in 2012. He blamed his mother for bringing them to Munich, the seat of evil, where it all began, with Hitler’s abortive Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. He insisted his father had only associated with Nazis in order to save these precious works of art, and Cornelius felt it was his duty to protect them, just as his father had heroically done. Gradually the artworks became his entire world, a parallel universe full of horror, passion, beauty, and endless fascination, in which he was a spectator. He was like a character in a Russian novel—intense, obsessed, isolated, and increasingly out of touch with reality.

There are a lot of solitary old men in Munich, living in the private world of their memories, dark, horrible memories for those old enough to have lived through the war and the Nazi period. I thought I recognized Cornelius several times, waiting for the bus or nursing a weiss beer alone in a Brauhaus late in the morning, but they were other pale, frail, old white-haired men who looked just like him. Nobody had given Cornelius a second glance, but now he was a celebrity.

Storming the Castle

After Allied bombers obliterated the center of Dresden, in February 1945, it was clear that the Third Reich was finished. Hildebrand had a Nazi colleague, Baron Gerhard von Pölnitz, who had helped him and another art dealer, Karl Haberstock, put deals together when von Pölnitz was in the Luftwaffe and stationed in Paris. Von Pölnitz invited the two of them to bring their personal collections and take refuge in his picturesque castle in Aschbach, in northern Bavaria.

On April 14, 1945, with Hitler’s suicide and Germany’s surrender only weeks away, Allied troops entered Aschbach. They found Haberstock and his collection and Gurlitt, with 47 crates of “art objects,” in the castle. The “Monuments Men”—approximately 345 men and women with fine-arts expertise who were charged with protecting Europe’s monuments and cultural treasures, and the subject of the George Clooney film—were brought in. Two men, a captain and a private, were assigned to investigate the works in Aschbach Castle. Haberstock was described on the O.S.S.’s red-flag name list as “the leading Nazi art dealer,” “the most prolific German buyer in Paris,” and “regarded in all quarters as the most important German art figure.” He had been involved in the campaign against Degenerate Art from 1933 to 1939 and in 1936 had become Hitler’s personal dealer. Hildebrand Gurlitt was described as “an art dealer from Hamburg with connections within high-level Nazi circles” who was “one of the official agents for Linz” but who, being partly Jewish, had problems with the party and used Theo Hermssen—a well-known figure in the Nazi art world—as a front until Hermssen died in 1944.

Haberstock was taken into custody and his collection was impounded, and Hildebrand was placed under house arrest in the castle, which was not lifted until 1948. His works were taken away for processing. Hildebrand explained that they were legitimately his. Most of them came from his father, an avid collector of modern art, he said. He listed how each of them had come into his possession, and, according to Der Spiegel, falsified the provenance of the ones that were stolen or acquired under duress. For instance, there was a painting by the Bulgarian artist Jules Pascin. Hildebrand claimed that he had inherited it from his father, but he had actually bought it for far less than it was worth in 1935 from Julius Ferdinand Wollf, the Jewish editor of one of Dresden’s major newspapers. (Wollf had been removed from his post in 1933 and would commit suicide with his wife and brother in 1942 as they were about to be shipped to concentration camps.) The detailed documentation for the works, Hildebrand claimed, had been in his house in Dresden, which had been reduced to rubble during the Allied bombing. Fortunately, he and his wife, Helene, had been offered refuge in Aschbach Castle by Baron von Pölnitz and had managed to get out of Dresden with these works just before the bombing. He claimed that the rest of his collection had to be left behind and was also destroyed.

Hildebrand persuaded the Monuments Men that he was a victim of the Nazis. They had fired him from two museums. They called him a “mongrel” because of his Jewish grandmother. He was doing what he could to save these wonderful and important maligned pictures, which would otherwise have been burned by the SS. He assured them he never bought a painting that wasn’t offered voluntarily.

Later in 1945, Baron von Pölnitz was arrested and the Gurlitts were joined by more than 140 emaciated, traumatized survivors of the concentration camps, most of them under 20. Aschbach Castle had been made into a displaced-persons camp.

The Monuments Men eventually returned 165 of Hildebrand’s pieces but kept the rest, which clearly had been stolen, and their investigation of his wartime activities and his art collection was closed. What they didn’t know was that Hildebrand had lied about his collection having been destroyed in Dresden—much of it had actually been hidden in a Franconia water mill and in another secret location, in Saxony.

After the war, with his collection largely intact, Hildebrand moved to Düsseldorf, where he continued to deal in artworks. His reputation sufficiently rehabilitated, he was elected the director of the Kunstverein, the city’s venerable art institution. What he had had to do in the war was becoming more and more a fading memory. In 1956, Hildebrand was killed in a car crash.

In 1960, Helene sold four paintings from her late husband’s collection, one of them a portrait of Bertolt Brecht by Rudolf Schlichter, and bought two apartments in an expensive new building in Munich.

Not much is known about Cornelius’s upbringing. When the Allies came to the castle, Cornelius was 12, and he and his sister, Benita, were soon sent off to boarding school. Cornelius was an extremely sensitive, desperately shy boy. He studied art history at the University of Cologne and took courses in music theory and philosophy, but for unknown reasons he broke off his studies. He seemed content to be alone, a reclusive artist in Salzburg, his sister reported to a friend in 1962. Six years later, their mother died. Since then, Cornelius has divided his time between Salzburg and Munich and appears to have been spending increasing amounts of time in the Schwabing apartment with his pictures. For the last 45 years, he seems to have had almost no contact with anybody, apart from his sister, until her death, two years ago, and his doctor, reportedly in Würzburg, a small city three hours from Munich by train, whom he went to see every three months.

Couple in a Landscape, by Conrad Felixmueller.

Raubkunst and Restitution

After the artworks were seized, Meike Hoffmann, an art historian with the “Degenerate Art” Research Center at Berlin’s Free University, was brought in to trace their provenance. Hoffmann worked on them for a year and a half and identified 380 that were Degenerate artworks, but she was clearly overwhelmed. An international task force, under the Berlin-based Bureau of Provenance Research and led by the retired deputy to Germany’s commissioner for culture and media, Ingeborg Berggreen-Merkel, was appointed to take over the task. Berggreen-Merkel said that “transparency and progress are the urgent priorities,” and that the confirmed Raubkunst was being put up on the government’s Lost Art Database Web site as quickly as possible. One of the paintings on the site, the most valuable found in Cornelius’s apartment—with an estimated value of $6 million to $8 million (although some experts estimate it could go for as much as $20 million at auction)—is the Matisse stolen from Paul Rosenberg. The Rosenberg heirs have its bill of sale from 1923 and have filed a claim for it with the chief prosecutor. One of the heirs is Rosenberg’s granddaughter Anne Sinclair, the ex-wife of Dominique Strauss-Kahn and a well-known French political commentator who runs Le Huffington Post. In December, the German television show Kulturzeit reported that as many as 30 claims have been made on the same Matisse, which illustrates the problem Ronald Lauder described to me: “When you put them up on the Internet, everybody says, ‘Hey, I remember my uncle had a picture like this.’ ”

Berggreen-Merkel also said the task force, which answers to the chief prosecutor, Nemetz, does not have the mandate to get the artworks back to their original owners or their heirs. There is nothing in German law compelling Cornelius to give them back. Nemetz estimated that 310 of the works were “doubtless the property of the accused” and could be returned to him immediately. The president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Dieter Graumann, responded that the prosecutor should rethink his plans to return any of the works.

In November, Bavaria’s newly appointed justice minister, Winfried Bausback, said, “Everyone involved on the federal and state level should have tackled this challenge with more urgency and resources from the start.” In February, a revision of the statute-of-limitations law, drawn up by Bausback, was presented to the upper house of Parliament. Stuart Eizenstat, Secretary of State John Kerry’s special adviser on Holocaust issues, who drafted the 1998 Washington Principles’ international norms for art restitution, had been pressuring Germany to lift the 30-year statute of limitations. After all, how could anybody have filed claims for Cornelius’s pictures if their existence was unknown?

Couple, by Hans Christoph.

To Protect and Serve

Hildebrand Gurlitt, spinning his heroic narrative in an unpublished six-page essay he wrote in 1955, a year before his death, said, “These works have meant for me … the best of my life.” He recalled his mother taking him to the Bridge school’s first show, at the turn of the century, a seminal event for Expressionism and modern art, and how “these barbaric, passionately powerful colors, this rawness, enclosed in the poorest of wooden frames” were “like a slap in the face” to the middle class. He wrote that he had come to regard the works that had ended up in his possession “not as my property, but rather as a kind of fief that I have been assigned to steward.” Cornelius felt that he had also inherited the duty to protect them, just as his father had from the Nazis, the bombs, and the Americans.

Ten days after the Focus story, Cornelius managed to escape the paparazzi in Munich and took the train for his tri-monthly checkup with his doctor. It was a little expedition, and a welcome change of scenery from his hermetic existence in the apartment, that he always looked forward to, Der Spiegel reported. He left Munich two days before the appointment and returned the day after and had made the hotel reservation months ahead of time, posting the typed request, signed with a fountain pen. Cornelius has a chronic heart condition, which his doctor says has been acting up now more than usual, because of all the excitement.

In late December, just before his 81st birthday, Cornelius was admitted to a clinic in Munich, where he remains. A legal guardian was appointed by the district court of Munich, an intermediate type of guardian who does not have the power to make decisions but is brought in when someone is overwhelmed with understanding and exercising his rights, especially in complex legal matters. Cornelius has hired three lawyers, and a crisis-management public-relations firm to deal with the media. On January 29, two of the lawyers filed a John Doe complaint with the public prosecutor’s office in Munich, against whoever leaked information from the investigation to Focus and thus violated judicial secrecy.

Then, on February 10, Austrian authorities found approximately 60 more pieces, including paintings by Monet, Renoir, and Picasso, in Cornelius’s Salzburg house. According to his new spokesman, Stephan Holzinger, Cornelius asked that they be investigated to determine if any had been stolen, and an initial evaluation suggested that none had. A week later, Holzinger announced the creation of a Web site, gurlitt.info, which included this statement from Cornelius: “Some of what has been reported about my collection and myself is not correct or not quite correct. Consequently my lawyers, my legal caretaker, and I want to make available information to objectify the discussion about my collection and my person.” Holzinger added that the creation of the site was their attempt to “make clear that we are willing to engage in dialogue with the public and any potential claimants,” as Cornelius did with the Flechtheim heirs when he sold The Lion Tamer.

On February 19, Cornelius’s lawyers filed an appeal against the search warrant and seizure order, demanding the reversal of the decision that led to the confiscation of his artworks, because they are not relevant to the charge of tax evasion.

Cornelius’s cousin, Ekkeheart Gurlitt, a photographer in Barcelona, said that Cornelius was “a lone cowboy, a lonely soul, and a tragic figure. He wasn’t in it for the money. If he were, he would have sold the pictures long ago.” He loved them. They were his whole life.

Without admirers like that, art is nothing.

Works from the 1937 “Degenerate Art” show, as well as some Nazi-approved art from “The Great German Art Exhibition,” will be on display at New York’s Neue Galerie through June.

A U.S. soldier, in April 1945, with recovered art stolen by the Nazis and stored in a church in Ellingen, Germany.

[MIKA27]

Meet G4S, the Contractors Who Go Where Governments and Armies Can’t—or Won’t

HANDLE WITH CARE

G4S explosive experts at work in South Sudan. From left: Sila Jopa Mathew, Pierre Booyse, and Adrian McKay. With strife all around, the task they face seems endless.

Death on the Nile.

Late last fall, at the start of the dry season in the new country called South Sudan, a soldier of fortune named Pierre Booyse led a de-mining team westward from the capital city, Juba, intending to spend weeks unarmed in the remote and dangerous bush. Booyse, 49, is an easygoing Afrikaner and ordnance expert who was once the youngest colonel in the South African Army. He has a full gray beard that makes him look quite unlike a military man. After leaving the army he opened a bedding store in Cape Town, where he became the leading Sealy Posturepedic dealer, then opened a sports bar too, before selling both businesses in order to salvage his marriage and provide a better environment for his young daughter. The daughter flourished, the marriage did not. Booyse returned to the work he knew best, and took the first of his private military jobs, traveling to post-Qaddafi Libya to spend six months surveying the munitions depots there, particularly for surface-to-air missiles. It was dangerous work in a chaotic place, as was the next contract, which took him into the conflict zones of eastern Congo. From there he came here to South Sudan to do minefield mapping and battlefield-ordnance disposal for G4S, a far-flung security company engaged by the local United Nations mission to handle these tasks.

G4S is based near London and is traded on the stock exchange there. Though it remains generally unknown to the public, it has operations in 120 countries and more than 620,000 employees. In recent years it has become the third-largest private employer in the world, after Walmart and the Taiwanese manufacturing conglomerate Foxconn. The fact that such a huge private entity is a security company is a symptom of our times. Most G4S employees are lowly guards, but a growing number are military specialists dispatched by the company into what are delicately known as “complex environments” to take on jobs that national armies lack the skill or the will to do. Booyse, for one, did not dwell on the larger meaning. For him, the company amounted to a few expatriates in the Juba headquarters compound, a six-month contract at $10,000 a month, and some tangible fieldwork to be done. He felt he was getting too old to be living in tents and mucking around in the dirt, but he liked G4S and believed, however wearily, in the job. As he set out for the west, his team consisted of seven men—four de-miners, a driver, a community-liaison officer, and a medic. The medic was a Zimbabwean. All the others were soldiers of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, the S.P.L.A., now seconded to G4S, which paid them well by local standards—about $250 a month. At their disposal they had two old Land Cruisers, one of them configured as an ambulance with a stretcher in the back.

The market is called Souk Sita. It occupies a junction of footpaths and dirt tracks in a neighborhood known as Khor William—a garbage-strewn district of shacks and mud huts inhabited largely by impoverished soldiers and their families, and centered on decrepit military barracks belonging to the S.P.L.A. Some of the children there—maybe homeless, and certainly wild—spend their days collecting scrap metal to sell to Ugandan dealers, who occasionally show up in a truck to buy the material for penny-on-the-dollar cash, or for ganja, a potent form of marijuana, apparently laced with chemicals. Routinely the scavenged metal includes live ordnance. That morning the Ugandan traders had arrived as usual, and—in the likeliest scenario—a boy perhaps 10 years old had accidentally detonated a medium-size device while trying to dismantle it. The explosion had killed him and three other boys of about the same age, along with one of the Ugandan adults.

Booyse arrived at Souk Sita at 3:30 P.M., five hours after the explosion. By then the bodies had been taken to the morgue, and all that remained of the carnage was a small crater and some bloody shoes. Booyse’s immediate problem was to remove the visible ordnance before dark, only three hours away, because the place was obviously dangerous and could not be cordoned off. Treading softly among the munitions, he counted three 82-millimeter mortar rounds, two 62-millimeter mortar rounds, seven 107-millimeter rocket warheads, one complete 107-millimeter rocket (fuzed and fired and therefore rigged to blow), seven 37-millimeter anti-tank high-explosive incendiary projectiles, a hand grenade with a sheared-off fuze, and a heavily dented rocket-propelled grenade. He instructed his crew to take a thin-skinned metal box from the ambulance and fill it initially with a few inches of sand to create a stabilizing bed for the ordnance. Over the next few hours he gently laid the items into the box, cradling the pieces and snuggling them into periodic supplements of sand. He drove off with the load at dusk, taking care not to jostle the box on Juba’s atrocious streets, and deposited the lot in a purpose-built bunker at a G4S logistics base on the north side of town.

In the morning he returned with his team and continued with the surface cleaning, gathering scrap metal into piles, and finding plenty of small-arms ammunition. Two days later, when I first met him, he was still at it—a bearded figure in sunglasses and bandanna working with one of his de-miners in intense heat while the rest of the crew went door-to-door to ask about other munitions and to try to establish the identities of the victims. Booyse invited me into the work area, saying, “It’s probably safe—just please don’t bang your feet on the ground.” We stood by the crater. He guessed it had been made by a medium-size mortar. His de-miner swept a patch of ground with a detector that squealed loudly. Booyse raked the patch and uncovered a spoon, a nut, a nail, a twisted wire bundle, and several AK-47 rounds. Leaning on the rake and sweating, he said, “Ach, you just get more and more the more you go down.” But the chance of finding anything large was small. The door-to-door search was hardly better. That morning the team had found five pieces of unexploded ordnance, but two had disappeared before they could be collected. Most of the residents questioned had professed ignorance, and a few had demanded cash. With more fatigue than humor Booyse said, “Because, you know, the African five-point plan is ‘What’s in it for me?’ ”

Four days after the accident, the names of the dead remained unknown, and the South Sudanese government could not be roused to care. This was now high on the list of concerns, because for the U.N. no job is finished until the paperwork is complete. With Booyse busy securing the market, G4S managers decided that someone should go to the morgue to see what could be learned directly. For this they enlisted the company’s indispensable man, a typically tall Dinka named Maketh Chol, 34, who first went to war in 1987 at the age of 9, and now—in street clothes, as a serving S.P.L.A. lieutenant—works as the chief liaison officer and fixer for G4S. The Dinka constitute the dominant tribe of South Sudan, whose men are born to rule and taught to disdain menial labor, but Chol is not just one of them—he is also a member of LinkedIn. On his page he lists G4S as a recreational company, but that is merely a mistake. Feel free to contact him directly if you have a good commercial idea. Beyond his duties at the headquarters compound he is an energetic entrepreneur. Among his ventures already, he owns a sewage-trucking company that empties the septic tanks of certain establishments in town and disposes of the waste somewhere somehow. And he would be a good partner in other affairs. He speaks at least four languages. He is reliable. He has a wife and three young children whom he supports in Kenya because the schools are better there. He spent 20 years in a particularly brutal liberation war—two million dead among huge populations uprooted—but he seems not to know that he should be traumatized.

He invited me to accompany him to the morgue. It occupies a small building behind the so-called Juba Teaching Hospital, a facility overwhelmed by needs. We parked our Land Cruiser a short walk away and approached a small group of people waiting somberly on a concrete veranda. An old ambulance waited beside them with its rear doors open, exposing an empty interior and a battered steel floor. Chol quietly got the story. When word of the explosion spread through Juba, it caused no immediate concern, because so many children are wayward now, and in recent memory so many went to war. But after four days without sight of two young cousins, a family in Khor William began to fear the worst and sent two emissaries—an uncle and aunt—on a trip to the morgue. These people were Nuer, traditional adversaries of the Dinka, who had been nominally integrated into the government—some of them as members of the presidential guard—but were increasingly marginalized. The aunt was 20, the uncle somewhat older. At the morgue, the uncle left the aunt outside and went inside alone.

There he found—his nephews lying dead in front of him. He recognized the other boy too. He was a kid from the neighborhood, but the uncle did not know his name. The shredded remains of the fourth boy—the one who apparently triggered the explosion—had been taken away, as had the Ugandan man. The uncle arranged for transport of the remaining three back to the neighborhood for immediate burial. The morgue lacked power and refrigeration, so decomposition had set in fast, and the stench was strong. Chol collected names from the staff. The dead Ugandan was Malau Daniel, maybe 24 years old. The boy who had been shredded and taken away was James Fari Lado, about 10, a Mandari from the cattle country north of town. The two cousins were Garmai Biliu Ngev and Lim Sil Koh, both 13 and from Khor William. The name of the last boy, their friend and neighbor, remained unknown.

A door opened. Workers in surgical masks carried out the dead boys on metal stretchers, and flopped them into the back of the waiting ambulance. The corpses were naked, hunger-thin, and younger-looking than 13. Their blood had smeared the stretchers and dribbled red trails across the ground. They lay loosely intertwined with their mouths stretched open in ghastly screams, their teeth contrasting sharply with the color of their skin. The driver shut the ambulance doors and prepared to leave. The aunt began to sob, her shoulders heaving. The uncle stood by helplessly, holding his hand over his heart. Chol offered them a ride, assisted the aunt into the front seat, and followed the ambulance as it set out through the city traffic. The uncle and I sat in the back on benches along the side. In Khor William, out beyond the S.P.L.A. barracks, the ambulance climbed a hillock and parked in the shade of a tree for the burial; we climbed another hillock to the Nuer encampment. As we arrived at the huts the aunt began to wail. A crowd of women rushed from their households, shrieking and crying around the mothers, who collapsed to the ground.

It was a rough scene. Chol was still missing the name of the cousins’ dead friend. He asked women standing near the grieving crowd. They indicated a cluster of huts a short distance away and said the men there might know. Leaving our vehicle behind, Chol and I walked to the huts, where the men came out to meet us. These were the Nuer presidential guards. Only a few were in uniform, and several were drunk. They were wary of Chol, this Dinka who towered over them asking questions that might have been traps. Finally one of them volunteered that the dead friend was known only as Gafur, and that his mother had been missing for days. That was enough for Chol, and we started back toward the vehicle. The men kept pace with us and the group grew larger. The mood turned ugly, subtly at first, then with accusations that we had allowed the boys to die. Chol calmly kept explaining his role, even as we got into the Land Cruiser and, after several tries, got the engine to start. The men had surrounded the car, but eventually they parted, and we rolled away slowly, down past the S.P.L.A. barracks and toward the center of town.

On a main street we passed a convoy of ambulances moving in the opposite direction. They were carrying victims from villages attacked by insurgents the night before. The insurgents were from a despised group called the Murle, and led by a former political candidate named David Yau Yau, who was angry because he had lost a rigged election. The men under Yau Yau’s command were perhaps less interested in politics than in the chance to capture women, children, and cattle. Merely two years after official independence, South Sudan was fracturing as a country, but the names of the Souk Sita victims could be inserted into the U.N. forms, and for G4S the day had been a success.

[MIKA27]

The Tech Australia Is Using In The Search For Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

Australia and New Zealand have today found a new lead in relation to the hunt for missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370 which has now been missing for almost two weeks, and it’s dumping a whole lot of maritime tech on the situation to try and determine whether it’s credible.

This morning, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) was handed new satellite images taken by the Australian Geospatial Intelligence Organisation (AGO).

The AGO has spent the week retasking loads of commercial satellites capable of taking high resolution images of the Australian search corridor, and turned up new evidence that indicates a potential piece of wreckage in an area South-by-South-West of the Western Australian coastline.

The search area. Credit: ABC News 24

Over the next few hours, more search and rescue jets will arrive on scene, including RAAF Orion search aircraft, an Orion search plane from New Zealand and a US Air Force plane.

An RAAF C-130 Hercules is also being tasked to the search area to drop marker buoys around the site. Those buoys will be used to track water movement, and the data will then be used to generate a drift model so that the wreckage can be tracked in the days ahead.

A merchant ship is in the area, followed by the HMAS Success which will search the area and recover any wreckage of what might be Flight 370.

The AMSA is tempering expectations, however, saying that the images may not be of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. The officials did add, however, that they still have grave fears for the flight.

[MIKA27]

The Experimental Satellite That Gave Us Live International Television

Throughout the 1950s, broadcast television was limited to domestic transmissions simply because we didn’t have a means to relay signals far enough to span the vast expanse of the oceans around us. It wasn’t until NASA shot Telstar, an unproven, newfangled “active” communications satellite into orbit in 1963, that mass media truly become an international phenomenon.

Science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke may be credited with first envisioning an active satellite (one that “actively” re-transmits signals, not just reflect them) in 1945 but it was John Pierce of Bell Telephone Laboratories that proved they could work in his 1955 paper “Orbital Radio Relays” in the journal, Jet Propulsion. However, it took five years of cajoling his management — during which time Soviet Russia launched Sputnik and started the Space Race — and the formation of NASA for Pierce’s idea to come to fruition.

In January 1960, AT&T, NASA, Bell Telephone Labs, GKO (a British telecom), and National PTT (a French telecom) all entered into an agreement to develop satellite communications over the Atlantic Ocean by building, launching, and operating an experimental satellite based on Pierce’s design. Bell Labs would build the satellite, NASA would launch it, and the telecoms would be responsible for its operation. This sort of public-private cooperation was unheard of in the fledgling aerospace industry and would become the first privately sponsored space launch in history.

The nearly spherical, spin-stabilised satellite, dubbed Telstar 1 , measured 34.5 inches wide at its equator and weighed just 170 pounds, which is the only way they could get it to fit aboard a Delta rocket. It’s outer surface was blanketed in solar panels that generated 14 watts of power, just enough to drive the active relay. The satellite received 6 GHz signals via a ring of antenna elements running around its waist, converted that signal to 4GHz and then re-transmitted it through an omnidirectional antenna mounted in the surface of the satellite. Because the signal from the satellite wasn’t particularly powerful, the receiving dish on the ground, located in Andover, Maine, had to be huge — like a 160-foot-diameter horn antenna — and had to be protected from the elements by the largest air-supported structure in history.

Launched aboard a Thor-Delta rocket in July of 1962, Telstar 1 entered into its elliptical orbit without trouble and, unlike modern geosynchronous com-sats, began circling the globe roughly once every two and a half hours. This allowed for just 20 minutes of live transatlantic feeds out of every 150. Still, it was better than nothing.

The satellite immediately went into service upon being launched, transmitting the first privately-broadcast television pictures in history, depicting a flag outside Andover Earth Station out to Pleumeur-Bodou, France, the very next day. It successfully tested its ability to relay fax and telephone transmissions as well. Two weeks later, Telstar 1 again made history by relaying the first publicly available live transatlantic television signal on July 23.

The first broadcast was supposed to be of President Kennedy addressing the strength of the dollar — an issue that was of keen concern to Europe at the time — but the satellite’s transmission window hit before the president was ready so CBS had to fill in with a televised baseball game between the Phillies and Cubs at Wrigley Field. Tony Taylor flew out to right fielder George Altman off a pitch by Cal Koonce before the feed flipped back to President Kennedy.

Telstar 1 continued to operate throughout most of 1962 before we kinda accidentally killed it with a nuclear missile test. The day before the Telstar 1 launched in 1961, the DoD conducted a high-altitude nuclear bomb test in the upper atmosphere. The fallout from the test energized the Van Allen Belt, where the Telstar would operate, with a potent dose of radiation. This, along with similar and subsequent hihg-altitude tests by both the West and the Soviets, quickly fried Telstar’s transistors. The satellite failed in November, 1962, was briefly revived in January, 1963 before dying completely and being replaced by its identical twin, Telstar 2, in May, 1963. Telstar 2, however, launched to a higher orbit where it would be clear of the harmful radiation.

The success of the Telstar experiment ushered in the ages of privately-funded satellites and global communications alike. Telstar’s successors now float in geosynchronous orbits high overhead, instantly bouncing digital communications anywhere on Earth.

[MIKA27]

The $3.5 Million Bulletproof, Diamond-Studded Suit With A Built-In A/C

A bulletproof, air-conditioned, diamond-covered, $US3.2 million suit? Even James Bond would drool over this. Not that it would matter; it’s also waterproof. Naturally.

Developed by Swiss company Suitart, the Diamond Armour suit comes custom-tailored to each individual (ludicrously wealthy) owner. But that’s only the beginning of this suit’s many features. For the price of a small island, you’ll get:

• NATO-certified bulletproofing, shielding you from handgun-fired bullets ranging from 9mm pistols all the way to .57 Magnums
• An air-conditioned suit system that pumps humidified water through the jacket at the push of a button
• Water- and dirt-proof nanotechnology inspired by the finely textured surface of dirt-resistant plants found in nature
• Steel, black diamond-encrusted buttons weighing in at 140 carats a piece with 600 black diamonds gracing the suit in total
• Silk lining signed by the artist Lucian Goizueta, who won the Valoarte Art Show and whose piece “Rheinhafenkrah” graces the interior of the suit
• Matching watch and 24-carat golden silk tie, because anything else would be tacky

I couldn't possibly imagine a situation in which a suit like this would be practical, but then that’s not really the point of diamond, air conditioned magic suits. So if you’re obscenely wealthy with a healthy dose of paranoia, head on down to Switzerland to have yours custom-fitted today.

[MIKA27]

Watch What People Are Doing With Crytek's Fancy New Engine

Regardless of what you thought of Ryse, the consensus was that it was very, very pretty. That was partly a result of Crytek’s fancy new next-generation engine. Now at GDC, Crytek has released some fancy videos showing what other developers have been doing with its technology.

Above is an overview of work from your major development teams, but below? That’s what’s being done with the CRYENGINE Free SDK used for non-commercial development. In a lot of ways I find what they’ve been creating far more interesting.

All very fancy looking stuff.

[MIKA27]

Let The Next-Gen Engine For The Division Blow Your Mind Even More

Quick, think of the burliest video game engines that you’ve seen lately. Frostbite 3. Unreal Engine 4. That Luminous Studio demo Square Enix showed off at E3 2012. Project Cars. Pretty soon, you’re going to have to add Snowdrop to that list.

Ubisoft first showed the tech behind its upcoming Tom Clancy game at E3 last year , with a surprise reveal that no one saw coming. With the Game Developers Conference happening right now, the French company’s offering another peek under the hood of Snowdrop.

Right now, it appears that Snowdrop is only being used for The Division but when companies invest in building tech like this, you better believe they’re going to us for as many games as they can.

[MIKA27]

Clever Bus Stop Ad Makes People Believe Meteors Are Striking The Street

If we have to get advertising everywhere, is should all be as fun as this bus shelter ad in London, where they used augmented reality to make passengers believe that meteors were striking the city or a tiger was freely roaming through the street.

[MIKA27]

This Has To Be One Of The Coolest Car Pranks Ever

Apart from Jeff Gordon’s insane prank on Jalopnik’s Travis Okulski, this has to be the coolest car prank ever: A car company convinces two guys that they are racing in a simulator, but they’re actually zooming through a real life obstacle course in a port.

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Just Tap Your Phone On Every Wall And This App Will Draw A Floorplan

It’s not a bad idea to measure a room before you go out and buy a bunch of new furniture. And if you’ve got an iPhone, that becomes less of an ordeal because you can trade your tape measure for this slick app called RoomScan. It automatically generates floorplans by simply tapping your phone on every wall.

Presumably relying on your phone’s built-in GPS and gyroscope to determine distances and the orientation of walls, RoomScan is accurate to within about half a foot. If you’re roughing out a floorplan, that should be adequate enough. But if it’s not, you can opt for the $5.49 “pro” version that lets you specify exact distances (if you have a separate laser measure) and easily place doors and windows. Now if only there was an app that automatically moved furniture too.

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How Spielberg, Lucas, And Kasdan Came Up With Indiana Jones

How did a “scruffy”, “rough and tumble”, “bounty hunter of antiquities” become one of the most beloved heroes in film history? Read this transcript from a 1978 meeting featuring Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Lawrence Kasdan, as they workshop the concept of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The best parts are hearing them figure out in real time exactly what kind of hero Indiana Jones — originally named Indiana Smith — will be:

Kasdan: Is it necessary that he really be trained?

Lucas: It’s not absolutely necessary. I just thought it would be amusing if people could call him a doctor.

Spielberg: I like that. The doctor with the bullwhip.

Other gems include the origin of one of the most famous scenes in the film:

Spielberg: I have a great idea! There is a sixty-five-foot boulder, that’s form-fitted to only roll down the corridor, coming right at him. And it’s a race. He gets to outrun the boulder!

A hint at why Indy has a snake phobia:

Kasdan: It seems like it would be nice if, once stripped of his bullwhip, left him weak, if we had to worry. Just a little worried about him being too…

Lucas: That was what I thought. That’s why I was sort of iffy about throwing it in. If we don’t make him vulnerable…

Spielberg: What’s he afraid of? He’s got to be afraid of something.

And perhaps the most telling line of all:

Spielberg: What we’re just doing here, really, is designing a ride at Disneyland.

Which, of course, is what the Indiana Jones franchise became, eventually. The transcript is long but really quite amazing and a must-read for any fan.

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This Serpent-like Hotel, Coiled Around The Glacial Outcroppings Of Norway's Gorgeous Lofoten Islands

Architecture firm Snøhetta has unveiled images of a hotel that will wind across a rocky outcrop in Norway's Lofoten archipelago.

Expected to start on site later this year, the Lofoten Opera Hotel will be located on an outlying site in Glåpen flanked by a mountain range. The new low-rise structure will loop a central courtyard, but will offer views out across the sea to the south and west.

"The spectacular view and the feeling of being 'in the middle' of the elements are the premier qualities of the site," said Snøhetta in a statement.

"In a unifying gesture the site is captured in a circular movement, the complex layers of references to nature, culture, land qualities are translated into a band that transforms the site into a place."

The 11,000 square-metre building will accommodate a mix of hotels and apartments within its curved body. There will also be spa facilities, seawater basins, hiking resources and an amphitheatre.

The project looks set to attract new guests to Lofoten, which is home to one of Norway's 18 national tourist routes. Stretching along an 184-kilometre road, the route encompasses facilities for tourists exploring the natural landscape, including the Eggum rest stop completed by Snøhetta in 2007.

Here's a description of the project from Snøhetta:

Lofoten Opera Hotel

Furthest west of Lofoten, in Moskenes community close to the town Sørvagen, is Glåpen.

The site extends out to sea to the south and west, linking the contact between ocean and the tall, shielding mountains to the north and northwest. The location is spectacular, sunny, in the mighty landscape elements, yet in touch with old settlement and sheltered harbors.

Snøhetta has developed a project and looked at a number of factors: the landscape "critical load" vs. new construction, functional and technical aspects of access, infrastructure, ecology and sustainability, connection to outdoors areas and existing buildings. The main goal is to find the development patterns and shapes that trigger the functional, architectural and experiential triggers the plot's formidable potential. We think it will be essential to find a building program and a scale that "hits", both in terms of economy, market and individual experience opportunities.

The spectacular view and the feeling of being "in the middle" of the elements are the premier qualities of the site. Plot view, organisation and habitat as form have been inspiring elements behind the concept. In a unifying gesture the site is captured in a circular movement, the complex layers of references to nature, culture, land qualities are translated into a band that transforms the site into a place.

This form creates an inner and outer space, and enhances the site's inherent potential of an architectural expression. Concept and program are balanced in a mix of hotels, apartments, amphitheatre, spa, hiking and sea water basins within a total size of 11,000 m2. The local beach culture and storstuga are included in the project. The organic form protects and opens at the same time.

Location: Lofoten

Typology: Residential & Hotel

Client: Lofoten Opera AS

Status: Ongoing

Size: 11,000 sqm

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This Walking City Farms The Desert As It Moves

Living in the desert is no piece of cake. So to imagine a glittering city in the desert is to imagine something awesome and fantastical — and maybe a touch of crazy. Like architect Stephane Malka’s, “The Green Machine,” a mobile city on caterpillar treads that farms the desert as it walks.

A Walking City is not a new idea. Ron Herron first proposed his utopian-inflected idea of cities that roam the the globe in 1964. “The Green Machine” is both a throwback and a look forward into the potentially green future of the Sahara.

Malka’s vision is simultaneously an industrial city with houses, schools, restaurants, parks, and a farm that produces 20 million tons of crops per year. Its “bread basket” is the desert underneath the city. The caterpillar treads — inspired by the machines NASA uses to transport rockets — also double as agricultural infrastructure. As designboom explains, the first pair of treads plow the land, and the rear ones inject water, fertiliser and seeds.

The idea, however fantastical, is that over the years the land underneath would progress through the stages of ecological succession, making the leap from desert to shrubs to trees.

“The Green Machine” is also meant to be entirely self-sufficient. Nines balloons float above the city to condense water from the air. Electricity comes from its nine solar towers and turbines inside the balloons.

What’s interesting about these renderings is that they don’t show a shiny new city. The Green Machine is rusty. The paint is peeling. It’s as if Malka wants to present us with a Walking City successful in middle age, rather than newly created one with an uncertain future.

The Green Machine questions the idea that the desert is meant to be a barren landscape forever. It roams the the sands like a gigantic creature tending to its nest, remaking the landscape around it.

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Why Did Lockheed Blow Up Its Own Prototype UAV Bomber?

Even with recent advances in rapid prototyping techniques and computer aided design, developing new aircraft is an expensive venture — especially when the DoD isn’t footing the bill. So what on Earth could have coerced Lockheed to destroy the only prototype of its blended wing UAV bomber in mid-flight?

Developed and funded by Lockheed’s Skunk Works advanced research department, the P-175 Polecat unmanned high-altitude, long-range flying wing demonstrator was envisioned as both a stealthy surveillance platform and long-range bomber — equal parts Global Hawk and B-2 Spirit. Its all-composite body measured 90 feet from wingtip to wingtip and was built from just 200 individual components. A pair of 3,010 lbf turbofan engines enabled the 9,000 pound Polecat to carry up to 1,000 pounds of ISR sensors and munitions for up to four hours at a time.

The Polecat made its public debut at the 2006 Farnborough Airshow, reportedly just 18 months after its construction began. Lockheed lauded the P-175 as a test-bed for not just the company’s rapid prototyping technology but also its next-gen autonomous flight systems as well. However, these cutting-edge flight controls would soon prove to be the UAV’s downfall.

During a test flight above the Nellis test site in Nevada in December of 2006, the P-175 suffered from what Lockheed vaguely described as an “irreversible unintentional failure in the flight termination ground equipment, which caused the aircraft’s automatic fail-safe flight termination mode to activate.” Essentially, an undisclosed malfunction in the UAV’s command station inadvertently triggered the P-175′s self-destruct routine — an irreversible fail safe installed to prevent the aircraft from straying beyond Nellis’ airspace and venturing into civilian areas — which sent the prototype crashing to the ground, damaging it beyond repair. Though, if it’s that easy to install geographic-based self-destruct routines during the testing phase, why aren’t we putting it on every UAV we operate?

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The Huge Mist Cannons That Keep The Air Clean In NYC's New Tunnels

We’ve followed the $US10.8 billion East Side Access project, which will extend the Long Island Railroad from Queens to Grand Central, all year. But now that the tunnels have been blasted, new machines are arriving — and they’re just as cool as the tunnel borers.

This month, crews are working on turning empty rock caverns into actual train tunnels, which involves installing insulation along the raw bedrock surfaces of the tunnels:

One photo in particular caught my eye, showing a cannon-like device spraying water into the cavern:

I asked the MTA’s Kevin Ortiz what was going on here. He told me that, paradoxically, it’s all part of the waterproofing process. That’s a Dust Boss, an industrial water cannon that sprays mist to the air to control dust.

They’re usually used at demolition sites to control the amount of dust flung into the sky at demolition sites. This one looks like the DB-100, the largest model ever built, which is recommended for large spaces like mines and quarries — and subway tunnels, too, apparently. It’s actually a similar concept to the one proposed by a Chinese scientist to control smog in cities using huge sprinkler-like apparatuses .

“The device sprays a mist to take the dust down in the cavern while they are applying the Shotcrete in the caverns,” says Ortiz. What’s shotcrete? It’s a concrete mixture that’s applied using a pressurised hose; it will help keep the tunnels clear of ground water leaking through the rock.

Go take a look at the full set on the MTA Flickr page — after all, this is the very last time humans eyes will get to look upon the raw bedrock that our trains will eventually run through. [MTA]

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The College Kid Who Built A Secret Tunnel Underneath The Berlin Wall

At its peak, the Berlin Wall was 100 miles long. Today only about a mile is left standing. Compared with other famous walls in history, this wall had a pretty short life span.

The Great Wall of China has been around for 2500 years. So have the walls of ancient Babylon — although its most famous part, the Ishtar Gate, is actually in a museum in Berlin.

But even though the wall dividing Berlin into East and West was only up for 30 years, it had a huge impact on the psyche of the city.

It broke families in two. In the decade that followed, more than 2 million people fled from east to west. East Germany was losing its most skilled workers as they sought jobs — and to reunite with their families — across the border. And East Germany was losing face with every East Berliner who chose to defect.

And that’s why, in 1961, East Germany closed its border to West Berlin with a wall. But this isn’t a story about the design of the Berlin Wall. This is a story about one design to get through it — or really, underneath it. Ralph Kabisch, then a 20-something-year-old university student, was there.

Now to be clear, Ralph and his crew were tunneling from west to east. They were tunneling into what was arguably the most militarized city in the world at the time.

Construction on the tunnel began at a defunct bakery along the border. (The bakery had closed because too many of its customers were stuck in the East). Near the bakery’s entrance, you could actually see the East German guard towers looming over the wall. And in that bakery, young Berliners were tearing into the ground, trying to dig a tunnel under the wall and into east Berlin.

At left, tunnel entrance (“Eingang”), just in front of the guard post (“Postenstand”). Tunnel exit (“Tunnel-Ausgang”) at right. Courtesy of Ralph Kabisch.

Lessons learned from digging the tunnel:

• To make sure your tunnel doesn’t flood, dig vertically until you get to the water table, and no further. Then dig forward.
• It is possible to move enough dirt to fill four eighteen-wheeler big rigs with garden spades.
• A password system can help expose Stasi spies.
• To keep the East German police from finding out about the tunnel, minimize people going in and out of the work site. In other words, live there.
• You can make a shower out of a faucet and a bicycle inner tube.
• A screwdriver will melt if it touches the power grid.

Ralph and his friends may not have had expertise in tunnel-digging, but they did have enough gumption — and love for their friends and family stuck in the East — to reach the other side. Thanks to them, 57 people escaped into free West Berlin.

Oddly, this tunnel served as a sort of apprenticeship for Ralph. After he finished university — and the Cold War ended — he became an international engineering consult on underground train systems all over the world. He helped build train stations in Korea, China, Thailand, Taipei, and Athens.

Ralph Kabisch giving a tour in 2013 in Berlin.

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A Nick In Time: How Shaving Evolved Over 100,000 Years Of History

Removing unwanted body hair has been a part of human hygiene since the dawn of history. Over the centuries, this practice has served to denote everything from high-ranking social status to acts of contrition. And as the tradition of shaving has evolved in step with global culture, so too have the tools of the trade.

Shaving in the Stone Age

Flaked obsidian was equally useful as a hand ax and shaving stone

While our early ancestors are routinely depicted as scraggly vagabonds, in the unending winter of our last Ice Age, facial hair was a liability. Once wet, it would hold water against the skin until frozen, accelerating the onset of frostbite. To remove the dangerous stubble, early humans are believed to have begun pulling out their hairs about 100,ooo years ago — mainly using seashells like tweezers, based on cave paintings depictions. 60,000 years later, the technique had advanced from plucking to actually shaving using flakes of obsidian and clam shell shards.

The first depilatory creams — rendered from arsenic, quicklime, and starch — made their first appearance around 3000 BC, and were employed primarily by women. At the same time, the new agricultural revolution allowed for the development of settlements, metalworking, and consequently, metal blades.

Shave Like an Egyptian

Egyptian King Narmer wearing the White Crown and a false beard

In the fourth century BC, Greek historian Herodotus (485-425BC) derisively noted that the Egyptians “set cleanliness above seemliness” by bathing several times daily and maintaining a strict regimen of shaving their bodies clean — men, women, even children. Everybody, especially the upper classes, went completely bare. And for good reason.

Egypt is insanely hot — and living along the muggy shores of Nile River with shoulder length hair is intolerable. What’s more, long hair can house pests and diseases alike (looking at you, head lice). And given the general lack of effective medicine available to the majority of the public — or soap, for that matter — going bald was a much safer and more hygienic alternative. This early health advantage eventually evolved into the mark of the “superior” Egyptian civilisation, wherein only barbarians, peasants, slaves, mercenaries, and criminals sported hair.

To achieve this hairless state, Egyptians routinely applied depilatory creams and repeated rubbings with a pumice stone to remove every trace of stubble. Archaeologists have also found both circular bronze razors and hatched-shaped “rotary” blades in many burial chambers, for use in the afterlife.

an Egyptian rotary razor

To protect their superior chrome domes from the intense rays of the desert sun, the Egyptians wore wigs designed to maximise airflow over the scalp while defending against harmful rays. Going bald in public, however, was still seen as a social faux pas.

Similarly, growing facial hair was viewed as a sign of personal neglect — like wearing the same outfit to the office three days in a row. As such, anybody who could afford the luxury hired a household barber to keep everybody tidy. The position of barber was a well-regarded station in that society, comparable to doctors and other professional trades. Now, that doesn’t mean that the Egyptians didn’t still regard a man with a full beard as more masculine than a clean shaven one — they absolutely did. But as with the hair on their heads, Egyptians preferred false beards if they were to wear hair on their faces. This is why every Pharaoh, even the female ones, are depicted wearing false beards in the hieroglyphic record.

When in Rome, Shave as the Romans Do

Not everybody was as unimpressed by the Egyptians’ fanatical hygiene as Herodotus. And by the fourth century BC, the practice had made its way north to Greece and Rome — thanks in no small part to Alexander the Great’s order that his troops shave off their locks. This gave the enemy nothing to grab onto during hand to hand combat.

Alexander’s tacit endorsement of shaving immediately made it not only socially acceptable, but fashionable as well. In the years to follow, the original circular razor design pioneered by the Egyptians was straightened into a form very close to the razors still used today. The quality of the construction also improved, replacing easily dulled bronze with copper and iron.

The lower edge of a novacila, such as this, would hold a thin metal blade

After the requisite swipes of the razor blade, known as a novacila, Romans would then rub the stubble off with pumice stones, and massage oils and perfumes into the skin. Nicks from a dull razor would be treated with a plaster ointment made from spider webs soaked in oil and vinegar.

The trend in shaving was initially spurred by Alexander’s celebrity endorsement, but it quickly became an integral part of Roman society. Barbershops, or “tonsors,” were not just a service but also a local meeting place where the day’s gossip and news could be freely exchanged. This was only among the classes that could afford it, of course, and if you were rich enough, you’d have a household barber. The richer you were, the less body hair you sported — yes, even pubic hair.

Hairlessness Was Next to Godliness in the Middle Ages

The practice of shaving saw a slight decline during the Middle Ages, though it remained popular, even if for an entirely different set of reasons from the Romans. See, after the Catholic church split from the Eastern Orthodox in 1054, Western church leaders encouraged shaving among its clergy to distinguish its members from the their Jewish and Muslim counterparts. That trend was put into canonical law in 1096, when the Archbishop of Rouen banned beards outright save for Crusaders in the Holy Land.

Shaving, similarly, remained popular among women in the Middle Ages, who followed the example of Queen Elizabeth I. She started the trend of tweezing the eyebrows (or applying a walnut oil, vinegar, and ammonia concoction) to elongate the forehead, but left everything below the neck au naturale.

The First Modern Safety Blades

It wasn’t until the late 18th century that razors became more than sharp, exposed slabs of metal. Up until then, they were still regarded as specialised professional tools and everybody still went to barbers. Men of the day would shave themselves just as soon as they’d lay their own brick garden wall — it simply didn’t happen.

However, French inventor Jean-Jacques Perret dared to dream of a world where men would spend each morning leaning over a bathroom mirror removing their own stubble, and to that end, Perret developed the world’s first safety razor — by installing a wooden guard onto a standard straight razor.

The Kampfe Brothers Star Razor Blade Kit

This design evolved again, in the early 19th century, into the modern Sheffield straight razor, featuring a rotating guard the doubled as a handle. Then, in 1880, the Kampfe brothers patented and marketed the world’s first safety razor, incorporating a wire guard along the edge of the blade as well as a lather-catching head.

King C. Gillette and His Incredible, Replaceable Head

The problem with the Kampfe brothers’ safety razor was the fact the head had to be routinely removed from the handle and sharpened on a whet stone. But rather than go through the trouble of sharpening that head, why not just replace it with a new one? That was the idea concocted by a travelling salesman by the name of King C. Gillette in 1895. And it would soon prove to be a money-making bonanza — just as soon as Gillette could figure out how to make a thin, sharp, disposable blade cheaply enough to work.

It took Gillette another eight years and the help of MIT professor William Nickerson to develop the first modern, double-edged safety razor. By 1906, Gillette was selling more than 300,000 razors a year, and a US Army contract supplying every WWI American soldier with a Gillette safety razor in his DOP kit helped further cement the Gillette brand name in the annals of American history.

The Milady Decolletée

By the middle of the next decade, Gillette was more than a household name, it was a ubiquitous brand found in bathroom cabinets across the country. But still only for the gents.

However, rapidly changing social mores of the time saw women exposing more skin above the ankle and wrist — a leading fashion magazine of the time went so far as to show a woman in a swimming suit with her arms raised and armpits bare. Until that point, depilatory cremes were the defacto method of ladies hair removal. That changed in 1915, when Gillette debuted the Milady Decolletée, the first razor built specifically for women.

The Milady Decolletée instruction manual

Being a primarily manual razor manufacturer, Gillette wasn’t involved with the advent of the electric razor in the 1920s (which we’ll get to in a second) and didn’t really see any major technological breakthroughs until 1960, when its engineers perfected production of stainless steel blades. Unlike older blades, which would rust almost immediately after their first use, these blades remained sharp and oxide-free for multiple uses. This directly influenced the invention of the first fully disposable razor — where the entire device, handle and all, could be thrown away once dulled.

A two-page advertisement in Life Magazine Dec 10, 1971

Gillette once again revolutionised shaving in 1971, with its debut of the first two-blade razor, the Trac II. The multi-blade approach reduced the amount of force that had to be applied to shave — which in turn reduced the amount of irritation the skin endured — and has proven so popular that the number of blades per head has exploded from three blades, to five, to seven or more.

Jacob Schick and His Modern Method

As electricity in the American home became more common at the turn of the 20th century, the razor — like many previously manual devices — grew a corded tail and mechanical guts. The initial entries into the electric razor market, however, were met with only limited success. Electric razors wouldn’t come into their own until 1928, when a retired Army colonel named Jacob Schick patented his own design — consisting of a cutting head driven by a handheld motor, connected by a flexible rotating shaft.

This model, which went on sale in 1929 (just in time for the stock market crash!), did not sell well — both because of the sudden crushing poverty that engulfed the nation and its unwieldy design. Schick’s second attempt dropped the flexible shaft and instead plopped a smaller motor inline behind the cutting head, consolidating the clumsy motor and hose setup into a single sleek device. It was the iPod of its day, retailing for $US25 each ($350 in today’s money), and moving 3,000 units the first year. By 1937, Schick had sold 1.5 million of them and cracked open the new $US20 million “dry shave” market.

The Lady Schick

In 1940, at the start of WWII, Remington opened the dry shave market further by designing and selling the first women’s electric razor. Since nylon was a valuable wartime commodity, women were forced to go bare legged more often — and Remington’s razor was billed as an easier, cheaper, and faster alternative to manual shaving.

Since the 1940s, hair removal technology has continued to advance. Waxing strips and laser hair removal methods both debuted in the mid-1960s, though laser’s tendency to singe the skin as well as the hair quickly led to its disuse in favour of electrolysis, wherein a very fine heat probe is used to destroy a hair follicle, after which the hair itself is tweezed out.

These days, electric razors come in a huge variety shapes and sizes — from little finger-sized nosehair trimmers to vacuum-powered Flowbees — depending on their application. Though, just as with manual multi-blade razors, electric razors with multiple cutting heads are now more rule than exception.

They’re just as often powered by rechargeable Li-ion batteries packs rather than wall cords, and use swiveling, rotating cutting heads as they employ the linear cutter devised by Schick nearly a century before. The problem now? Picking the best one .

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Report: Christian Bale Could Star In The Good Steve Jobs Biopic

Still bummed about Ashton Kutcher’s I-kinda-look-like-the-guy big screen portrayal of Steve Jobs? Well hang tight, as Hollywood’s cinematic Bat-Signal for a Real Actor has been answered. Christian Bale is being rumoured to take on the role in the upcoming, Aaron Sorkin-penned, project.

It’s still early days for the film, but David Fincher is in talks to direct, and will apparently only go for it if Bale’s also on board. A Sorkin-Fincher pairing makes sense following the success of The Social Network — maybe they will do Twitter’s origin story next? — but how do you feel about Bale? The resemblance is there, the skills are there, but we’ll wait until Woz weighs in .