![]() ![]() How could the tiles be pounded into the street, seemingly overnight, without the use of construction equipment? Luckily, in one of the tiles, the author included instructions for making more: First, carve your message into a piece of soft linoleum. Of the hundreds of tiles found across the country, nearly all bear the same four-line message: “Toynbee Idea / In Kubrick’s 2001 / Resurrect Dead / On Planet Jupiter.”Ĭolin Smith, one of four tile-obsessed Philadelphians who made the award-winning documentary Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles, argues that this references a plan to bring dead people back to life on Jupiter, using information gleaned from Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and the writings of philosopher Arnold Toynbee, whose book Experiences deals with the concept of resurrection. There were once several tiles downtown, but thanks to thieves and road crews, only one original remains here, situated in a crosswalk near City Garden. ![]() They began popping up in Philadelphia in the mid-’80s others can be found in such places as Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and St. The colorful linoleum plaques are embedded in the asphalt of urban intersections across the Western Hemisphere. But even in this Information Age, when science has settled most questions and Google has all the answers, the Toynbee Tiles remain a mystery. Recently, researchers armed with heat-sensitive cameras proved that people’s cheeks do turn red with the lights off, and the world became less magical. Back then, we didn’t know whether women blushed in the dark, a question that flummoxed both Charles Darwin and every nervous lad who ever dared to unhook a bra strap. ![]() When I was a young man, the world was full of mystery. ![]()
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