Intellect PlusCars
764 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 10 of 13.
Mercury climbs the food chain, concentrating most in the biggest predatory fishSmall organisms absorb a little mercury, the fish that eat them store more, and the hunters at the top carry the most. This build-up, called biomagnification, is why tuna and swor…
Buying a company can mean buying its shares, its assets, or a shellWhen one firm swallows another, the deal's legal shape matters as much as its price. Buy the shares and you inherit every old liability. Buy only the assets and you can leave the …
The Me 163 Komet remains the only rocket fighter ever flown operationallyIn 1941 a tailless German rocket plane descended from glider designs became the first piloted aircraft to top 1,000 km/h in level flight. Yet the Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet could …
McDonnell Douglas joined a cash-poor airliner maker with a military jet specialistBy 1967 Douglas Aircraft had order books full of airliners yet was reckoned to be under a year from bankruptcy, with its jets months behind schedule. McDonnell, a fighter maker wi…
The McLaren F1 began as a sketch drawn at an airport gateWaiting for a flight home from the 1988 Italian Grand Prix, Gordon Murray sketched a three-seat sports car with the driver sitting dead centre. He pitched it to McLaren boss Ron D…
McLaren's P1 hybrid used an electric motor to erase turbo lagTurbocharged engines hesitate for a moment before the boost arrives. McLaren's P1 solved that by letting an electric motor fill the gap instantly, giving a combined 903 horsepower…
Chios built its mastic villages with no street-level doors to guard a tree resinUnder Ottoman rule, a sticky resin from a shrub on the Greek island of Chios was worth its weight in gold. Villages that produced it were walled like fortresses, hidden from the s…
A journalist's offhand wish in 1976 became the best-selling two-seat roadster everIn 1976 a Motor Trend writer named Bob Hall told Mazda's research chief that nobody built the cheap, wind-in-your-hair British sports car anymore, and somebody should. The executi…- The first Miata revived the small roadster by stripping out almost every luxuryWhen Mazda showed the MX-5 in Chicago in February 1989, the cheapest version had no power steering, no power windows, no stereo and no air conditioning. That spartan approach kept…
- The fourth MX-5 went smaller and lighter while rivals kept growingMost new car generations put on weight. Mazda went the other way with the fourth MX-5, cutting 100 kg and 105 mm from its predecessor so the roadster weighed roughly a tonne again…
The first RX-7 was so smooth it needed a buzzer to warn of redlineA piston engine shakes and roars as it nears its limit. The rotary engine in Mazda's first RX-7 spun so smoothly that drivers could hit 7,000 rpm without noticing, so Mazda fitted…- A hidden cockroach car kept Mazda's rotary engine alive into the RX-8In the late 1990s Mazda had shelved its rotary sports car plans. A small team kept working anyway, cramming the engine into a stretched MX-5 they nicknamed the cockroach car. Thei…
- Mazda had to tame the devil's fingernails before its rotary engine could workWhen Mazda first tested a Wankel rotary in the early 1960s, the seals at the rotor tips vibrated so hard they gouged ripples into the housing. Engineers called the scars devil's f…
One litre of maple syrup starts as 20 to 50 litres of sapA maple tree gives only about seven percent of its sap in a season, and that sap is mostly water, around two to five percent sugar. Producers boil away the rest until the liquid r…
Martha's Vineyard once threatened to leave Massachusetts and join HawaiiIn 1977, angry at losing their guaranteed seat in the state legislature, residents of Martha's Vineyard talked seriously about seceding. Vermont and Hawaii both offered to take th…
Maserati's trident comes from the Neptune statue in Bologna's main squareThe trident on every Maserati grille was borrowed from the Fountain of Neptune in Bologna's Piazza Maggiore, a nod to the city where five brothers started the firm in 1914. Since …
The oil-shock agency: how the IEA grew from crisis response to clean energyThe International Energy Agency was founded on November 18, 1974, in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis, to keep oil flowing through emergencies. Its members must still hold 90 days …
International Harvester: from McCormick's reaper to Farmall tractors and Navistar trucksCyrus McCormick showed off his horse-drawn reaper in 1831. Seven decades later his family firm joined Deering and three smaller rivals in a merger financed by J. P. Morgan, creati…
Navistar to International Motors: the truck maker left standing after Harvester's breakupWhen International Harvester sold its farm machinery business in 1985, what remained was a truck and engine maker renamed Navistar on February 20, 1986. Over the following decades…
ISO is not an acronym: the Greek-rooted name behind 25,000 global standardsPlenty of people assume ISO stands for International Standardization Organization. It doesn't. Because the full title would shorten differently in each language, the founders sett…
What makes a car luxury, and why the segment's leaders keep changingNo hard line separates a luxury car from a premium one; the label rests as much on a badge's image as on fine materials and careful assembly. Over a century, leadership has swung …
Madison, Wisconsin: a capital chosen on paper and sold with buffalo robesIn 1836 Wisconsin's territorial lawmakers chose a capital that existed only as a surveyor's plan on an isthmus between two lakes. James Duane Doty had lobbied hard, handing out bu…
Maglev: over a century of floating trains, yet only six in serviceTrains that hover on magnets instead of rolling on wheels have been patented since 1902, and a Japanese test train touched 603 kilometres an hour in 2015. Even so, just six maglev…- Named for a department store owner, Hudson made the best debut in motoring historyHudson Motor Car Company took its name from Joseph L. Hudson, the Detroit department store founder who put up the starting money. Its first model, the low-priced Hudson Twenty, so…
HuffPost went from a 2005 startup to a Pulitzer and a $315 million saleLaunched on May 9, 2005 by Jonah Peretti, Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer and Andrew Breitbart, The Huffington Post sold to AOL for $315 million six years later. In 2012 it beca…
Hyperloop: the fifth mode of transport that inspired a movement, then a bankruptcyIn 2013 Elon Musk published an open-source design for pods gliding on air bearings through low-pressure tubes, likening it to a cross between a Concorde, a railgun and an air hock…
Honda began by strapping surplus radio-generator engines to bicyclesIn 1946 Soichiro Honda and a dozen men worked in a tiny shack, bolting 500 war-surplus engines, originally built to power radio generators, onto ordinary bicycles. When the supply…- Two NSX generations shared a name but almost nothing underneathHonda's NSX came in two very different forms. The first, made in Japan from 1990, was a light, rear-drive car with a high-revving V6 and no turbos. The second, built in Ohio from …
- Honda scrapped a V10 supercar, then returned with a hybridBy 2008 Honda had a V10-powered successor to its NSX lapping the Nürburgring, with orders to beat Nissan's GT-R. Then the financial crisis hit, profits sank 81 percent, and the ca…
- The Honda Prelude steered with its back wheels and outran a CorvetteIn 1987 Honda offered the Prelude with something no mass-produced passenger car had tried before: mechanical steering for the rear wheels. Honda guessed three in ten Japanese buye…
- Honda's S2000 was built by engineers who ignored the marketing teamFor its fiftieth birthday in 1999, Honda released a two-seat roadster whose chief engineer admitted marketing staff had barely been consulted. Listen to everyone, Shigeru Uehara a…
Honeywell grew from a coal-furnace gadget into a computer makerIn 1885 a Swiss-born inventor named Albert Butz patented a device he called the damper-flapper, which opened and closed a coal furnace's air supply automatically so homes stayed w…
Holding companies make nothing, yet control the firms that doSome of the most powerful companies produce no goods and offer no services. They simply own enough shares in other businesses to steer them. This arrangement, the holding company,…- The Honda Accord began as a bigger Civic, not a Mustang rivalHonda's first sketch for a larger car was a six-cylinder saloon, and rumours even cast it as a rival to the Ford Mustang. Costs killed that plan. Instead engineers stretched the f…
- An emperor's everyday car and Honda's first VTEC engineFor decades Japan's Emperor Akihito kept a modest grey 1991 Honda Integra saloon and drove it himself around the Imperial Palace grounds, giving up the wheel only after turning 85…
- A sawn-in-half city car led Honda to build a Ferrari fighterAround 1984 Honda engineers cut a tiny City hatchback in two, moved its engine behind the driver and took it for giddy laps of the company car park. The fun persuaded management t…
How the History Channel drifted from war documentaries to ancient aliensIn 1997 one critic complained the History Channel aired so much Second World War material that it could run 12 hours of it in a day. A decade later the same network was better kno…
Before petrol won, cars ran on clockwork, steam, hydrogen and batteriesIn 1878 Wisconsin staged America's first city-to-city car race, offering a prize for any machine that could replace horses. Seven vehicles registered, two started, and the faster …
In 1900, more than a quarter of American cars ran on electricityElectric cars are often treated as a modern invention, yet in 1900 some 28 percent of cars on American roads were electric. The first car to break 100 kilometres an hour was batte…
Heat pumps warm homes by moving heat instead of making itFor every unit of electricity it uses, a heat pump can deliver between one and four and a half units of heat into a building. The trick is that it does not generate heat at all. L…- Chemists can't agree which elements count as heavy metalsHeavy metals are everywhere in science writing, yet nobody agrees what they are. Published definitions sweep in anything up to 96 of the 118 known elements, and only three, mercur…
The first jet plane flew in secret, and officials were unimpressedOn 27 August 1939 the Heinkel He 178 became the first aircraft ever to fly on turbojet thrust. Its maiden flight lasted six minutes and nearly ended badly on landing. When senior …- Direct current lost the war of the currents, then returned for long distancesAround 1900 alternating current pushed direct current out of power grids because transformers could easily step AC voltage up and down. Yet today the world's longest power line, s…
- The Toyota HiLux began life as a pickup built by truck maker HinoToyota's famously tough HiLux pickup has an unexpected ancestor: the Hino Briska, a small truck built by a struggling Japanese maker of buses and heavy lorries. After Hino became …
Hispano-Suiza's aluminium aircraft engine shaped the luxury cars that followedDuring the First World War, Swiss engineer Marc Birkigt cast an entire aircraft engine block from a single piece of aluminium and slid thin steel liners inside. The result was lig…
Groningen, the Dutch city that fireworks its survival every AugustEvery 28 August, Groningen marks the day in 1672 when a besieging bishop gave up and went home, with music and fireworks nicknamed Bombing Bernard. Far from the Dutch centres of p…
Gum arabic, the tree sap in your soda, stamps and watercoloursThe glue on an old postage stamp, the gloss on M&M's, the binder in a box of watercolours and the stabiliser in soft drink syrup can all come from the same place: hardened sap ooz…
London's black cabs descend from 17th-century hackney coachesNo law has ever required London taxis to be black. They simply came in one standard colour after the Second World War, and the nickname black cab caught on in the 1970s. The offic…
The first hatchback was a 1938 Citroën built for butchers and bakersLong before the hatchback became the default small family car, Citroën built one in 1938 for tradesmen hauling bulky goods: butchers, bakers, wine merchants and grocers. The idea …- What makes a real grand tourer, and why GT badges often lieA true grand tourer should be able to cross a continent quickly and comfortably, then thrill its driver when asked. That is the ideal, anyway. Few motoring terms have been stretch…
Green Bay was founded by a Frenchman hunting a route to ChinaIn 1634 Jean Nicolet paddled into a bay on Lake Michigan hoping he had found the people of the sea and a shortcut toward China. He had not, but the trading post he set up became G…
Why a trace of carbon dioxide can warm a whole planetNitrogen and oxygen make up 99% of Earth's dry air, yet they barely interact with heat radiation. Carbon dioxide, at just 0.04%, does. Without such trace greenhouse gases, the pla…
The Grisons: a Swiss canton that holds a whole country's varietyIn one Swiss canton you can find olive groves and year-round snow, rivers draining to the North Sea, the Black Sea and the Adriatic, and three official languages. The Grisons, or …
Grocers were once wholesale spice dealers, and groceries were barsThe word grocer comes from an old French term for wholesaler, because medieval grocers sold spices, sugar and later tea and coffee in bulk. For roughly two centuries afterwards, a…
Mandelbrot's warning: most risk managers mistake wild risk for mildSome dangers behave politely, clustering around an average so that big samples make them predictable. Others have fat tails, where one extreme event can dwarf everything before it…
Robotaxis arrived years late and still lose moneyForecasters once expected driverless taxis to be widespread by 2018. That never happened. By 2025 services run by companies such as Waymo, Baidu, Pony.ai and Zoox were spreading q…
Rochester, the canal boomtown that went from flour to flowers to filmRochester, New York, has reinvented itself several times. The Erie Canal turned a village by the Genesee River's waterfalls into America's first boomtown, and by 1838 it produced …
The Radium Girls were told their glowing paint was harmlessIn the 1910s and 1920s, young American women painted watch dials with glowing radium paint, shaping their brushes between their lips to keep a fine tip. Their employers insisted t…- Rare earths are not rare, just maddeningly hard to separateCerium, one of the 17 rare-earth elements, is more common in Earth's crust than copper. The name misleads: these metals are plentiful but spread thinly, locked in compounds and ch…
Rattan is a climbing palm that can stretch hundreds of metresThe cane in a wicker chair comes from a palm, not a vine. Rattan is a group of roughly 600 climbing palm species from the tropical forests of Asia and Africa, whose hooked spines …