There is a category of change so complete that the previous state becomes difficult to imagine, and street lighting is among the largest.
The state it replaced was real darkness.…
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 fundamental constraint is that ink is either present or absent. Everything printers have done for a century and a half is a way of simulating tones that the process…
There is a tendency to think of agricultural history as a matter of which crops were grown, and the tools receive far less attention than the plants.
That gets the…
Source: Wikipedia
There is a class of invention that is invisible because it is too small to notice, and fastenings are the clearest example on any person's body right now.
The…
There is a fact about the past that is difficult to hold onto because it contradicts something we do daily without thinking.
For most of human history, almost nobody had…