There is a category of vanished industry that seems impossible in retrospect, and the ice trade is the clearest example.
The proposition was to cut a perishable product out of…
Source: Wikipedia
There is a category of institution that was built on a wrong explanation and worked correctly anyway, and it is worth understanding because the pattern recurs.
The wrong explanation,…
There is a useful principle in materials: if a substance behaves oddly in several unrelated ways, there is usually one structural feature responsible for all of them.
Wool behaves oddly…
There is a useful exercise in considering how recently an ordinary thing became ordinary, and fire on demand is the most striking example available.
Fire itself is extremely old. Reliable…
The hard part of a clock was never the gears. It was finding something that does the same thing over and over at exactly the same rate, and then extracting…
There is a common experience in a large domed building, which is standing underneath and being unable to work out what is holding it up.
That reaction is appropriate. A…