Intellect Plus
Technology
1,389 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 10 of 24.
- 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, …
- Soho takes its name from an old hunting cry shouted across royal fieldsLong before the theatres, jazz clubs and film studios, Soho was farmland that Henry VIII seized in 1536 as a royal hunting park. Its name, first recorded around 1636, comes from a…
- Crew Dragon has seats for seven but has never flown more than fourSpaceX's Dragon 2 capsule was designed to carry seven astronauts, yet on real missions it takes two to four. It docks itself to the International Space Station without human help,…
- Junk email is named after singing Vikings in a 1970 Monty Python sketchIn a 1970 Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch, a café menu puts Spam in nearly every dish while a chorus of Vikings drowns out all talk by chanting its name. Early internet users …
- Singer sold sewing machines on credit and built the world's biggest factory in ScotlandIsaac Singer did not invent the sewing machine, and he lost a patent fight over it. What his company mastered was selling: door-to-door demonstrators, rent-to-own deals and a Scot…
- Siri's first voices were recorded years before anyone knew they would talk backIn July 2005 voice actor Susan Bennett spent sessions reading odd phrases for a speech company, with no idea what they were for. Six years later her voice was answering questions …
- Soviet socialist realism required art to be cheerful, clear and loyalFrom 1934 the Soviet state allowed exactly one way to make art: socialist realism. Paintings had to show muscular workers, sunlit fields and busy factories, and tragedy was banned…
- Civilizations last about 340 years on average, and age may not matterOne researcher surveyed dozens of ancient civilizations and found they typically endured for roughly 340 years. The Kushite Kingdom managed 1,150; China's Qin dynasty fell after j…
- Sennacherib built a Palace without Rival and was killed by his sonsSennacherib's name means the moon god has replaced the brothers, a hint that his older siblings died before he was born. He became one of Assyria's mightiest kings, rebuilt Nineve…
- Can they suffer? How sentience became the test for moral concernJeremy Bentham argued that what matters about an animal is not whether it can reason or talk, but whether it can suffer. That question about sentience, the capacity to feel, now s…
- The Sentinelese have refused the outside world for centuries, and India protects that choiceOn a small, reef-ringed island in the Bay of Bengal live the Sentinelese, one of the most isolated peoples on Earth. They hunt with bows, push canoes with poles, and have met near…
- Five centuries after expulsion, Sephardic Jews still carry medieval SpanishWhen Spain expelled its Jews in 1492, many exiles carried their Castilian speech to Istanbul, Salonica and North Africa. Their descendants kept it alive as Ladino, a language root…
- Dušan built a Balkan empire by sieges alone, and it lasted barely 25 yearsIn the 1340s Stefan Dušan doubled the size of Serbia without fighting a single field battle, taking city after city by siege. By 1346 he ruled from the Danube to the Gulf of Corin…
- Your SIM card guards a secret key it will never hand to your phoneInside every SIM sits a 128-bit key that the chip is built never to reveal, not even to the handset it lives in. Instead the card signs random challenges from the network, proving…
- Secular humanism, from Victorian positivist churches to ethics without GodVictorian London briefly had a Church of Humanity, complete with sacraments, founded by followers of the French thinker Auguste Comte. It was one odd branch of a family tree that …
- The Great Reform Act of 1832 and the rotten boroughs it swept awayBefore 1832, the rotten borough of Gatton had just 7 voters, while booming Birmingham had no seat at all. Old Sarum, the most notorious case, kept 13 burgage plots so a patron cou…
- Rent-seeking, and the puzzle of why political favours come so cheapSuppose a single government rule would hand a company a billion dollars. Economist Gordon Tullock noticed that such favours can often be bought for around ten million, roughly one…
- The Republic of Florence, a merchant state whose gold coin ruled European tradeIn 1252 Florence minted a gold coin with a fixed, trustworthy weight. Within decades the florin had become the standard money for big deals across Western Europe, displacing bars …
- How spiral grooves in a gun barrel made bullets fly straightA bullet leaving an M4 carbine spins more than 300,000 times a minute. That rotation comes from rifling, the spiral grooves cut inside a barrel, and it works like a gyroscope to k…
- SanDisk and the 20-megabyte flash drive that cost a thousand dollarsIn 1991 a young company called SunDisk built IBM a solid-state drive in the shape of a laptop hard disk. It held 20 megabytes and cost about $1,000. The idea behind it, storage th…
- Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin's creator, who vanished leaving a fortune untouched since 2010Bitcoin's first block, mined on 9 January 2009, carries a hidden line of text: a front-page headline from The Times about a second bank bailout. Its author signed himself Satoshi …
- The Schengen Area, where 29 countries dropped the checkpoints between themEvery day about 1.7 million people cross an internal European border on the way to work without showing a passport. That freedom traces back to a deal signed in 1985 by just five …
- Scramjets, the engines that burn fuel in air rushing faster than soundA scramjet has no fans, no turbine and no moving parts at all. It relies on sheer speed to squeeze incoming air, then burns fuel in a stream still moving at supersonic pace. The c…
- The ramjet: a jet engine that only works once it's already flying fastA ramjet has no spinning compressor. It simply scoops air by rushing forward, so it cannot start from a standstill and must be flung to speed first. Once there, it thrives, workin…
- How a missile maker ended up giving kitchens the microwave ovenIn 1945 Percy Spencer, an engineer at Raytheon, noticed that the magnetron tubes his company built for wartime radar could heat food very quickly. Two years later Raytheon showed …
- Two shrinking quarters is not the official definition of a recession everywhereAsk most people what a recession is and they'll say two quarters in a row of falling GDP. In Britain and Canada that is roughly right. In the United States it is not: the governme…
- The nearest known exoplanet circles its star in just eleven daysProxima Centauri b orbits the closest star to the Sun, about 4.2 light-years away, and sits in that star's habitable zone. It is probably rocky and a little heavier than Earth. Bu…
- Punctuation was invented for reading aloud, not for grammarFor most of history, Western scribes wrote words in one unbroken stream, without spaces or sentence breaks. The earliest marks were there to help people read aloud: Greek playwrig…
- India's income per person nearly quadruples once you compare local pricesConvert India's output per person into US dollars at market exchange rates and you get about 1,965. Measure it instead by what that money actually buys at home, and the figure jum…
- Quakers took their name from a magistrate's insult in 1650Hauled before magistrates on a blasphemy charge in 1650, George Fox told them to tremble at the word of the Lord. One of them, Gervase Bennet, mockingly called Fox and his followe…
- Google's quantum milestone: 10,000 years, or two and a half days?In 2019 Google and NASA announced that a 54-qubit machine had finished in minutes a calculation that would take classical supercomputers about 10,000 years. IBM promptly countered…
- RadioShack's name came from the cramped radio room on shipsOn a ship, the radio shack was the small wooden hut that housed the wireless gear. When brothers Theodore and Milton Deutschmann opened a Boston store for ship radio officers and …
- A railgun fires with magnetism and millions of amps, no gunpowderA railgun has no powder charge and usually no explosive warhead. Instead a surge of current, on the order of a million amperes, races down one metal rail, through a sliding projec…
- Americans called the slump after 1873 the Great Depression until 1929 came alongThe crash of 1873 started in Vienna and spread across Europe and North America, dragging economies down until 1877 and in Britain and France until 1879. Americans named it the Gre…
- A rope maker's failed bid to corner hemp helped sink markets in 1893The National Cordage Company, a rope manufacturer and the most actively traded stock of its day, tried to corner the market in imported hemp. Rumours of trouble made lenders call …
- The PDF began as Camelot, a plan to tame PostScript for screensIn 1991 Adobe co-founder John Warnock wrote a paper for a project code-named Camelot. He wanted a trimmed-down PostScript, the language printers used, that would show a page exact…
- A penny dreadful gave literature its first vampire with sharpened teethVarney the Vampire, a cheap weekly serial that ran from 1845 to 1847, set down many of the habits fictional vampires still have, and it was the first story to give one sharpened t…
- The plastic in most 3D printers starts life as fermented corn or sugarcanePLA, the most common filament in desktop 3D printers, is a plastic made from plants. Starch from corn, cassava, sugarcane or beet pulp is fermented into lactic acid, which is link…
- Pope Leo X was made a cardinal at 13 and a priest only after his electionGiovanni de' Medici received the tonsure at seven, held dozens of income-paying church posts by ten and was named a cardinal at 13. When he was elected pope on 9 March 1513, he wa…
- All eight billion people could stand in an area smaller than Puerto RicoPack every person on Earth into a loose crowd, allowing each just under a square metre, and the whole of humanity would fit into about 8,000 square kilometres. That is a little sm…
- Our nearest stellar neighbour will keep shining for another four trillion yearsProxima Centauri, the closest star after the Sun at 4.25 light-years, is too dim to see without a telescope. Yet this small red dwarf will outlast the Sun by an enormous margin, s…
- Online video hosting existed eight years before YouTube, but it could not streamShareYourWorld.com launched in 1997, letting people upload clips and whole films in various formats. Bandwidth was thin and transcoding primitive, so nothing played smoothly in th…
- NASA's Orion capsule packs a gym that doubles as a doorstepSpace inside a deep-space capsule is precious, so objects earn their keep twice. Orion's compact flywheel exercise device lets astronauts do aerobic and resistance workouts on a c…
- Why emergency crews still carry pagers in the smartphone ageA commercial paging transmitter typically radiates about 1,000 watts, while a mobile phone tower puts out roughly 0.6 watts per channel. Each paging mast therefore blankets a far …
- A Scottish mill town gave its name to a Kashmiri teardrop designThe curling teardrop known across the Western world as Paisley originated in Kashmir and was woven in several European countries. Yet Paisley, a weaving town just west of Glasgow,…
- Volcanic glass carries a chemical fingerprint that maps ancient trade routesEach volcano, and sometimes each single eruption, yields obsidian with its own chemical signature. That lets archaeologists match a blade to the hillside it came from. Pieces from…
- The first steamship across the Atlantic sailed with none of its booked passengersWhen SS Savannah left for Liverpool in 1819, all thirty-two people who had reserved places stayed ashore. Their caution was understandable: the ship ran on steam for no more than …
- Athens used red-dyed ropes to herd citizens into the AssemblyWhen the Athenian Assembly was summoned, public slaves swept the Agora with ropes soaked in red ochre. Anyone dawdling there instead of heading to vote risked a stained cloak, and…