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July 20, 2025 9:09 am
How do you pronounce the word mobile, as in the toy that hangs above a baby’s crib? In the United States, that kind of mobile is pronounced MOH-beel, but in the United Kingdom, it’s MOH-byle. In the early 1930s, the American sculptor Alexander Calder was living in Paris and experimenting with kinetic sculptures that hung suspended from the ceiling and moved. When Calder’s friend Marcel Duchamp observed Calder’s hanging sculptures gently moving on currents of air, he called them mobiles, from French for "moveable." This is part of a complete episode.