Mortar is the least glamorous part of any building and frequently the part that determines whether it survives. Stone and brick last for millennia on their own; what usually fails…
Source: Wikipedia
None of these vanished dramatically. They thinned out over a decade or two, until the last practitioners were curiosities rather than colleagues. Here are fifteen.
1. Switchboard Operator
Source:…
A pier is an odd piece of architecture: a road to nowhere, built at considerable expense, whose purpose is the walking rather than the arriving. Here are fifteen worth doing.…
There is a jar in a great many kitchens containing a pinch of thin red threads that cost more per gram than almost anything else in the house. Most people…
Before anyone thought to define units against physical constants, they were defined against whatever was to hand — literally. Most of those origins are still buried in the words. Here…
A complete circuit of walls is rare, because walls are expensive to maintain and inconvenient to keep once nobody is attacking. These fifteen survived, and most can be walked.
1.…