Source: Wikimedia Commons
There is a thing in old barns and basements that defeats everybody: a set of four long wooden strips, adjustable, with small sharp pins or tacks sticking out…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
There is a vehicle in old photographs of American main streets that everybody looks past: a flat wooden platform on four wheels, no sides, no seat to speak…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Rural schools had a shelf or a row of hooks inside the door, and on it sat a line of containers - tin pails with wire handles, small…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Barbed wire looks like the least interesting thing on a farm, and it reorganised the use of an entire continent.
The problem it solved was weight. Across the…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
To make a telephone call, you lifted the receiver and a person answered - and then physically built your call by plugging a cord into a hole.
The…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
America had an electric railway network between its towns, and almost nobody now knows it existed.
Interurban cars ran on their own tracks between communities, frequently alongside the…