There is a difference between materials that are gathered and materials that are extracted, and it explains why some textiles were cheap and others were not.
Wool is gathered. It…
There is a category of object where the useful part is the absence rather than the substance, and netting is the clearest example.
A net is mostly nothing. The material…
There is a small group of building materials that go round in a circle, and lime is the clearest.
The cycle is truly closed. A rock is heated to drive…
Source: Wikipedia
There is a particular kind of near-miss in the history of technology, where somebody builds the thing and does not realise what they have built.
Sound recording has an…
There is a widespread assumption about roads that is understandable and backwards.
The assumption is that the hard black surface is the road, and that what lies beneath it is…
There is a difference between two ways of putting a mark on a surface, and almost everything about the history of writing materials follows from it.
The first is to…