Intellect PlusInventions
983 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 15 of 17.
Elsevier borrowed a 16th-century printer's name and built a scientific publishing giantElsevier's logo, an elm entwined with a vine above the words Non Solus, came from the Elzevirs, Dutch printers of the 1500s. The modern firm, founded in 1880, has no link to them …
Divine right made kings answerable to God alone, and it was newer than it soundsThe idea that a monarch answers only to heaven feels ancient, yet in Europe it hardened only after the Reformation. Medieval kings could be excommunicated and even deposed by the …
Korea holds about 40 percent of the world's dolmens, and Sumba still builds themA dolmen is simple to describe: a few standing stones holding up one huge flat slab. Europe's oldest are about 7,000 years old, yet on the Indonesian island of Sumba people still …
Domesday Book counted England's mills, slaves and households, and nobody could appeal itThe English called William the Conqueror's great survey Domesday because, like the Last Judgment, there was no appeal against it. In the Old English sense, doom simply meant a jud…
Dogs did not come from today's grey wolves but from a vanished wolf lineageFor decades biologists assumed dogs were tamed grey wolves. A 2014 study overturned that: dogs descend from an extinct population of Ice Age wolves, and today's grey wolf is a cou…
Computer makers forced rival camps into one DVD format by threatening a boycottIn 1995 two alliances were racing to replace the CD with a higher-capacity disc: Philips and Sony against Toshiba and its partners. Then IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Compaq and Hewlett-…
Augmented reality was imagined in a 1901 novel long before phones delivered itIn 1901 the novelist L. Frank Baum wrote about electronic spectacles that label everyone you meet with a mark revealing their character. It took most of a century for engineers to…
Der Spiegel's editors went to jail and brought down a defence ministerIn 1962 police raided the Hamburg offices of Der Spiegel and arrested its founder on treason charges after a story questioning West Germany's military readiness. The case collapse…
How Iowa farmers and hybrid corn explained the spread of every new gadgetThe theory now used to plan smartphone launches began with seed corn. In 1943 two researchers, Ryan and Gross, studied how Iowa farmers took up hybrid corn, and found adoption spr…
The digital camera was cooled with dry ice before it fit in a phoneOne early digital camera, built in 1972 for telescopes by researchers at MIT and Caltech, had its detector chilled with dry ice so it could hold exposures of up to an hour. It sto…
The digital divide keeps reopening every time a faster technology arrivesIt seems obvious that as phones and laptops get cheaper, the gap between the connected and the disconnected should shrink on its own. Measured in bandwidth per person, it does not…
The napkin sketch that made Arthur Laffer's name, and its criticsIn 1974 an economist reportedly grabbed a napkin during an afternoon meeting with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and drew a simple hump. Tax nothing and you raise nothing; tax ev…
The astrolabe, a pocket sky that could tell time, latitude and prayer directionLong before calculators, a brass disc etched with wires and cutouts could find the height of a star, identify planets, tell the hour and work out where on Earth you stood. The Gre…
In radio's infancy, the American phone company tried to rent out the airwavesIn the early 1920s the telephone giant AT&T looked at the new craze for radio and saw a phone line to the masses. It launched a New York station, WEAF, rented out airtime, and wir…
Geologists spent 15 years debating the Anthropocene, then voted it downYou may have heard that we now live in the Anthropocene, a new geological age shaped by humans. Officially we do not. In 2024, after roughly 15 years of argument and a chosen Cana…
Antinatalism, the ancient and unsettling idea that being born is a harmAntinatalism is the philosophical judgment that having children is wrong or cannot be justified. The label is new, probably first used in a 2006 French manifesto, but the thought …
The app store existed long before the iPhone, and Apple couldn't own the nameApple made the phrase famous in 2008, but a program called the Electronic AppWrapper was selling software as a digital catalogue in 1992, and one issue was shown to Steve Jobs at …
Apple's Lisa pioneered the mouse-driven desktop and ended up in a Utah landfillIn 1989 Apple buried roughly 2,700 unsold Lisa computers in a guarded landfill in Logan, Utah, to claim a tax write-off. Six years earlier the Lisa had launched as the first mass-…
Why the line between an app and the operating system once landed in courtIs a web browser part of the operating system or a separate program? That sounds like pedantry, yet it was one of the central questions in the United States antitrust case against…
Archie began as a sidekick to a patriotic superhero and took over the companyIn 1939 a small New York publisher called M.L.J. Magazines was betting on superheroes, including the Shield, the first American patriotic comic-book hero. Then an ordinary redhead…
India's Arjun tank took three decades to go from requirement to regimentIndia authorised its home-grown battle tank in 1974 and hoped for a prototype by 1980. The first prototype arrived in 1989, and the tank only joined a regiment in 2004. Along the …
The arquebus gave firearms their first trigger and took 28 steps to fireBefore the arquebus, a gunner held the weapon against his chest and used his free hand to poke a hot wire into the touch hole. The matchlock arquebus of the late 15th century chan…
Queen Anne, the last Stuart, and the long road to Britain's throneAnne was raised a Protestant on her uncle Charles II's orders, even though her father James was Catholic. When James had a son in 1688, she hinted in letters that the baby might b…
The AD calendar began as a monk's Easter table and has no year zeroIn 525 a monk in Rome named Dionysius Exiguus was drawing up tables to predict Easter. Rather than keep counting years from the reign of Diocletian, an emperor who persecuted Chri…
Lego bricks, clarinets and keyboard keys share one tough three-part plasticSince 1963, Lego bricks have mostly been moulded from ABS, a plastic built from three ingredients that each contribute something different. The same material turns up in drainpipe…
An MTV VJ registered mtv.com himself, then got sued for itIn 1993 Adam Curry, then a presenter on MTV, grabbed the unclaimed domain mtv.com to act as the channel's unofficial internet voice. His bosses approved at the time, but when he l…
Diesel engines ignite fuel by squeezing air too fast for heat to escapeA diesel engine has no spark plugs. It compresses air in its cylinders so quickly that the heat generated has no time to leak away, and the temperature climbs high enough to ignit…
Before inventing the mobile, Alexander Calder trained as a mechanical engineerAlexander Calder's parents, both artists, did not want him to become one. So he studied mechanical engineering, a field he admitted he barely understood, chosen because he liked a…
In 2000, AltaVista had more than twice Google's share of web searchersAltaVista launched in December 1995 as the first full-text searchable index of the web, and by 1997 it was handling over 80 million hits a day. As late as 2000 it served 17.7 perc…
Science fiction described 3D printing decades before a Japanese researcher built oneIn a 1945 short story, Murray Leinster imagined a machine arm that traced drawings in the air while plastic flowed out and hardened. Thirty-five years later, a Nagoya researcher n…- The first phones sold as 4G did not meet the official definition of 4GIn 2008 the international telecoms standards body set targets for 4G, including peak speeds of 1 gigabit per second for stationary users. The first networks carriers marketed as 4…
A dead alkaline AA battery bounces, while a fresh one lands with a thudInside an alkaline AA cell, a zinc gel gradually turns into a ceramic as the battery is used. So a fresh cell dropped on a hard floor barely bounces, while a drained one springs b…
ABC News owes its existence to a government order breaking up NBCIn 1942 American regulators decided NBC had too much grip on radio and ordered it to split its two networks. The spun-off NBC Blue Network became ABC in 1943. For decades its news…
Karl Marx once backed free trade because it would speed up revolutionIn an 1848 speech, Karl Marx called free trade destructive, a force that broke up old nations and pushed workers and owners toward open conflict. Then he voted for it, precisely b…- In 1991 India flew its gold to London to avoid defaultingBy mid-1991 India had enough foreign currency for roughly three weeks of essential imports. So the government quietly loaded tonnes of gold onto chartered planes bound for London …
Civil engineering got its name simply by not being military workEngineers once built fortifications and siege works first; everything else needed its own label. In the 18th century the word civil was attached to all the peaceful building, from…- Four ways to hold back a river, and why each dam shape worksSome dams stay put through sheer weight, while others lean on triangular props or push the water's load sideways into the rock of the valley. The shape engineers choose depends on…
Mechanical engineering's roots run through Kush, Persia, China and the Islamic worldA steam-driven spinning toy in Roman Egypt, a Chinese chariot with differential gears, a clock escapement two centuries ahead of Europe. Long before the Industrial Revolution gave…
Utah's flagship university opened, collapsed, and restarted before settling on an army fortThe University of Utah was founded in 1850 as the University of Deseret, just three years after Mormon pioneers reached the Salt Lake valley. Classes met in private homes, money r…
The modern combat drone began with a physicist's model airplane hobbyIn 1971 a nuclear physicist at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory who flew model planes for fun wondered whether his hobby could become a weapon. John Stuart Foster Jr. sketched plans,…- Usenet gave the internet spam, flames and FAQs before the web existedMore than a decade before the World Wide Web, two graduate-school friends in North Carolina built a way for computers to swap public discussions over ordinary phone lines. Usenet …
The first human-made object in space was a Nazi weaponOn 20 June 1944 a German test rocket climbed so high that, by today's 100 km definition, it crossed into space, the first artificial object ever to do so. It was a V-2, a superson…
A 1991 alliance borrowed its name from a medieval royal trade summitWhen the leaders of Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland met in February 1991 to plot their route out of the Soviet orbit, they picked a small Hungarian castle town on purpose. Six …
Every ordinary phone call on 4G or 5G is now internet telephonyInternet calling once meant a headset plugged into a desktop computer. Today, if you ring someone on a 4G or 5G phone, your voice is chopped into data packets and sent over an int…
The University of Michigan started life as the Catholepistemiad in DetroitBefore it was a sprawling campus in Ann Arbor, the University of Michigan was chartered in Detroit under a tongue-twisting name: the Catholepistemiad, a coined blend of Greek and …
The tokamak, a Soviet doughnut of magnetism, still leads the race for fusion powerTo fuse atoms the way the Sun does, fuel must be heated to tens of millions of degrees and held away from any wall. The tokamak does it with magnets, twisting a ring of plasma ins…- Transhumanists want technology to carry humans beyond aging, a dream as old as GilgameshTranshumanism argues that science should be used not just to heal people but to upgrade them: longer lives, sharper minds, perhaps eventually beings who surpass today's humans. Th…
- The trebuchet's name comes from an old French verb for stumblingBefore gunpowder, the mightiest siege weapon was a giant see-saw with a sling. The trebuchet let armies hurl heavy stones at castle walls from a safe distance. Its name grew from …
Stone Age surgeons opened skulls, and many of their patients livedTrepanning, cutting a hole in the skull, may be the oldest surgery with archaeological proof, reaching back 7,000 to 10,000 years. Healed bone around many openings shows patients …- The Atlantic began at a five-hour Boston dinner with Emerson and LongfellowIn 1857 a Boston publisher invited Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes and a few other luminaries to dinner. They sat from three until eight. By…
The Third Way promised a hand-up rather than a hand-outBy the 1980s many centre-left parties doubted that big state spending still worked, while free-market politics was winning elections. Their answer was the Third Way, a blend of ma…
Shock at meeting Soviet T-34s helped rush Germany's Tiger tank into battleWhen German forces invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, they met Soviet tanks that outclassed anything they had. One designer recalled the dismay. The answer was the Tiger I, a …
The King Tiger was Germany's costliest tank, yet bombing capped it at 492Allied troops called it the King Tiger or Royal Tiger. Weighing almost 70 tonnes, it merged the Tiger I's thick armour with the sloping plates of the Panther. Germany ordered 1,50…
The atlatl works like the plastic ball launcher you use to throw for your dogA spear-thrower is a stick about as long as a forearm with a hook or cup at the far end. Seat a long dart against it, swing overhand, and the extra leverage sends the dart far fas…
Sprint's name was a railroad acronym, and its roots were a Kansas farm phone lineSPRINT once stood for Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Networking Telecommunications, the winning entry in a 1970s naming contest. The carrier behind it grew from two unlikely a…
Syndicalists wanted trade unions, not governments, to run the whole economyMost unions bargain for better pay. Syndicalists aimed far higher: organise workers industry by industry, win fights through strikes and direct action, and eventually let those sa…
Ancient Athens charged two percent at the docks; Britain later pushed tariffs past 45Goods landing at Piraeus, the port of classical Athens, paid a two percent levy. Two millennia later Britain, now remembered as the champion of free trade, taxed imported manufact…
Rule by experts sounds efficient until you ask who chooses the goalsCentral banks already set interest rates without asking voters, relying on inflation figures and jobless data. Technocracy pushes that logic further: let trained specialists and h…- Phone numbers began in 1879 when callers stopped asking the operator by nameEarly telephone users simply told the switchboard operator whom they wanted. In 1879, in Lowell, Massachusetts, numbers replaced names. Those first numbers ran just one to three d…
The first tunnel under a navigable river took the Brunels eighteen yearsExperts had declared a tunnel under the Thames impossible after Cornish miners flooded out twice. Marc Brunel disagreed, patented a shield that let 36 men dig in protected cells, …