Technikgeschichte
16 cards from across every topic, each citing a source. Tap one to open it in the feed.
- Gunpowder was a by-product of the search for immortality.
Daoist alchemists in Tang-era China were mixing substances for an elixir of life. The first relevant recipe appears in …
- How a rope that snaps holds the lift in place.
Lifts existed long before Elisha Otis – nobody trusted them. In 1853 Otis invented the safety brake: while the rope …
- How old shirts turned into books.
European paper was made from linen and hemp rags until the 19th century. At Fabriano a waterwheel drove three wooden …
- Humanity's most-manufactured object was invented in 1947.
In December 1947, John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley at Bell Labs demonstrated the first working …
- James Watt didn't invent the steam engine.
Steam engines built by Thomas Newcomen were pumping water out of English mines from 1712. But they wasted enormous …
- QWERTY was not designed to slow you down.
The popular story says the keys were deliberately spread awkwardly so typists would go slower and the typebars would …
- Reinforced concrete was invented for flower tubs.
Joseph Monier was a gardener at the Paris Tuileries who needed durable tubs for orange trees. He poured cement around …
- The bicycle exists because a volcano killed the horses.
After the 1815 Tambora eruption, harvests failed in 1816 and tens of thousands of horses starved or were slaughtered. …
- The first long-distance car trip refuelled at a pharmacy.
On 5 August 1888 Bertha Benz drove roughly 106 kilometres from Mannheim to Pforzheim without telling her husband. Fuel …
- The internet lies on the seafloor, not in space.
The vast majority of intercontinental data traffic runs through fiber-optic cables on the ocean floor, not via …
- The most famous computer bug was an actual moth.
On September 9, 1947, technicians on the Harvard Mark II found a moth in a relay, taped it into the logbook and wrote …
- The oldest sound recording went unheard for 148 years.
Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville patented the phonautograph in 1857. It scratched sound waves as a curve onto …
- The question "Can machines think?" is 76 years old.
In 1950 Alan Turing proposed a game in his paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence": a person chats in writing with …
- The web is not the internet.
The internet is the road network: cables, routers and protocols that have linked computers since the 1970s. The World …
- Why doubling is so hard to picture.
In 1965 Gordon Moore noticed that the number of transistors on a chip doubled at a regular pace, roughly every two …
- You owe the microwave oven to a melted chocolate bar.
In 1945, engineer Percy Spencer at Raytheon was working on magnetrons, the transmitters in radar sets. He noticed a …