The conversion of sound to signal was solved early and has changed comparatively little in principle. Connecting any telephone to any other took a century of engineering. Here are fourteen…
There is a small category of technologies where the modern industrial version does exactly what the original did, only faster, and paper is the clearest example.
Most processes have been…
There is a category of historical evidence that is systematically misleading in a way nobody notices, and early photographs are the clearest case.
A photograph feels like direct evidence. It…
Source: Wikipedia
There is an assumption that pre-modern financial systems were crude, and it is worth testing against an example.
The English Exchequer — the department handling royal revenue — kept…
The technical term for this is path dependence: an early decision constrains everything afterwards, not because it was right but because too much was built on top of it. Here…
Weaving was invented independently in every inhabited part of the world, which is a strong indication that the problem has a limited number of solutions. Here are eleven of the…