An explainer video from 1923 about Einstein’s theory of relativity

In 1923, Inkwell Studios¹ released a 20-minute animated explanation of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, perhaps one of the very first scientific explainer videos ever made. Films were still silent in those days and the public’s scientific understanding limited (the discovery of Pluto was 7 years in the future, and penicillin 5 years) so the film is almost excruciatingly slow by today’s standards, but if you squint hard enough, you can see the great-grandparent to YouTube channels like Kurzgesagt, Nerdwriter, TED Ed, minutephysics, and the 119,000+ videos on YouTube returned for a “einstein relativity explained” search. (via open culture)

1. Inkwell later became Fleischer Studios, which made cartoons like Betty Boop, Popeye, and the first animated Superman series. They also introduced the bouncing ball as a technique for singing along to on-screen lyrics.↩

• Albert Einstein
• physics
• science
• video