Source: Wikipedia
Technologies are usually lost for identifiable reasons. A market disappears, a cheaper substitute arrives, a war interrupts a supply chain, or the last people who knew a process die…
The whole subject rests on one transformation: heat driving water out of the clay structure in a way that cannot be undone. Here are sixteen consequences.
1. Clay Works Because…
The useful way to think about paint is as a delivery system. The colour cannot stick to anything by itself, so the entire technology is about getting it onto a…
Sand seems like the least plausible thing to run short of. It is the archetype of abundance — the thing in the metaphor about counting grains, covering deserts and beaches…
The counterintuitive fact underlying all of this is that mixing two soft metals frequently produces something substantially harder than either, and the reason is geometric. Here are twelve.
1. Why…
Source: Wikipedia
There is an object in a museum case in London that does something a piece of fourth-century glass has no business doing.
Look at it with the light coming…