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1,389 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 14 of 24.

781. Spain's Alfonso XIII was king from birth and a Nobel Peace nomineeAlfonso XIII never knew a day when he was not king. His father died months before he was born, so the crown passed to him the moment he arrived in 1886. Decades later he remains t…
782. The 1932 Ford put a V8 within reach of ordinary buyersFor ten dollars more than its four-cylinder twin, a 1932 Ford buyer could drive home with a V8, an engine that until then had belonged to Lincoln. Almost nobody chose the cheaper …
783. The 1970s oil shocks began with quietly peaking wells, not just embargoesMost people remember the 1970s energy crisis as a story of embargoes and petrol queues. Underneath it ran a slower shift: American oil output had already peaked around 1970, leavi…
784. The AC Cobra was a British roadster shipped to California for its heartEvery early AC Cobra crossed the Atlantic unfinished. Craftsmen in Surrey built and painted the aluminium-bodied cars, then sent them without engines to Carroll Shelby in Los Ange…
785. Acetaldehyde, the chemical your liver makes from a drinkBetween a glass of wine and the harmless acetic acid your body finally turns it into sits a middle step: acetaldehyde, a small, volatile molecule that helps cause hangovers. It is…
786. Why radiation sickness hits fast-dividing cells firstRadiation sickness is less a single illness than a sliding scale. The dose a body absorbs in a short burst decides which organs falter and how quickly, because ionising radiation …
787. After winning the Second World War, Britain rationed bread for the first timeBritain got through six years of war without ever rationing bread. It started in 1946, a year after victory. Winning had drained the country's wealth, American support stopped alm…
788. The first airliners were mostly leftover bombers with seats bolted inWhen the First World War ended, Europe had a glut of big military aircraft and no war for them. Builders stripped out the bomb gear, added cabins and started flying paying passeng…
789. The word van is simply a shortened caravan, and means different things everywhereVan began as a clipped form of caravan, first recorded for a covered goods wagon in 1829. Today an American might mean a minivan or a box trailer, a Briton means something that ca…
790. Formula One cars carry wings too, only mounted upside downAn aircraft wing is shaped and angled to push air downward, so the air pushes the wing up. Flip that same device over and bolt it to a racing car, and it presses the tyres into th…
791. In San Francisco, three right turns make a leftAt many busy San Francisco junctions, turning left across oncoming cars is banned, so drivers circle the block with three right turns, a move locals call a San Francisco left. Tai…
792. Walking for fun was once a sign of poverty, until the Romantics changed thatFor most of history, travelling on foot marked you as poor or a vagrant, unless you were a pilgrim. Only in 18th-century Europe, as Romantic attitudes to nature spread, did follow…
793. Rail uses about a twelfth of the energy of cars and planes per passengerAccording to the International Energy Agency, moving a passenger one kilometre by rail takes roughly 12 times less energy than by private car or plane, and emits 7 to 11 times les…
794. The world's oldest station for steam trains spent decades as a pubHeighington station in north-east England opened in 1827 on George Stephenson's Stockton and Darlington line, served by Locomotion No. 1. After trains stopped using it in the 1970…
795. Two British-built icebreakers once carried the Trans-Siberian across Lake BaikalBefore tracks wrapped around Lake Baikal, the railway simply stopped at each shore. An icebreaking train ferry, designed by a Russian admiral, built in Newcastle, taken apart into…
796. Shanghai's commercial maglev outruns even the fastest high-speed trainsSpecially built high-speed rail lines let trains reach about 350 kilometres an hour. Shanghai's commercial maglev, floating on magnets, runs at 460. Only aircraft and rockets are …
797. Travel and travail may share a root in a Roman torture deviceThe word travel came into English in the 14th century from Old French travailler, to toil. Simon Winchester traces both travel and travail further back to the tripalium, a Roman i…
798. Electric trucks are older than petrol ones, and are now making a comebackBattery-powered goods vehicles have been on sale continuously since the mid-19th century, before Karl Benz built the first combustion-engined truck in 1895. Liquid fuels, packing …
799. A Hollywood actor who loved model planes helped launch the drone industryReginald Denny was a film star with a passion for model aircraft. In 1935 he built the first scaled remotely piloted vehicle, and in 1940 he founded the Radioplane Company, whose …
800. A grieving railroad tycoon built Stanford in memory of his teenage sonWhen Leland Stanford Jr. died of typhoid in 1884 at just 15, his parents, the railroad magnate and senator Leland Stanford and his wife Jane, decided to found a university in his …
801. Why the humble screw propeller, not the paddlewheel, made ocean steamers workEarly steamships churned the sea with paddlewheels, which lost much of their power whenever cargo made the hull sit deeper. Swapping them for a fully submerged screw propeller, wh…
802. Oil spills from tankers fell by 99.8 percent between 1979 and 2020In 1979, tanker accidents dumped about 636,000 tonnes of oil into the sea across 92 incidents. By 2020 the figure had shrunk to around 1,000 tonnes from just three, an all-time lo…
803. Before Henry Ford's Fordson, farm tractors were heavy steam giants that sank in English mudThe first tractors were steam engines worked in pairs at opposite edges of a field, winching a plough back and forth on a wire cable. Direct-ploughing steam machines struggled in …
804. Shipping Roman grain across the Mediterranean beat carting it 15 milesBy one estimate, a Roman merchant ship could carry grain the full length of the Mediterranean for less than it cost to haul the same load 15 miles by road. That arithmetic fed the…
805. Commercial sailing ships kept hauling cargo until around 1960Steam did not sweep sail off the oceans overnight. Early steamers burned so much fuel that they mostly towed sailing ships or carried mail on short, pricey routes. Only in the 188…
806. The man who pushed through Japan's bullet train resigned before it openedIn the 1950s many in Japan assumed railways were finished, as America turned to planes and highways. Shinji Sogō, president of Japanese National Railways, argued the opposite and …
807. A Navy rule of thumb says ships and boats lean opposite waysNo agreed line separates a ship from a boat, but sailors have tests. One says a ship can carry a boat and never the reverse. A US Navy rule of thumb says that in a sharp turn a sh…
808. On an Australian desert railway, half of every steam train's load was waterThe Trans-Australian Railway crosses no permanent freshwater stream anywhere along its route. Steam engines there drank bore water loaded with magnesium chloride, which wrecked th…
809. Blaise Pascal, the mathematician, helped launch the first city bus in 1662The first organised public transit within a city seems to have run in Paris in 1662, and one of the minds behind it was Blaise Pascal, better known for probability and his calcula…
810. Early American rails sometimes curled up and punched through carriage floorsTo save money, early North American railroads nailed thin iron strips on top of wooden rails. The iron worked loose, curled upward and could spear into the floors of passing coach…
811. The New York subway runs above ground for 40 percent of its lengthNew Yorkers call their whole system the subway, yet around 40 percent of it runs above street level. The name itself was borrowed from London, where a line opening in 1890 was goi…
812. Paris had rickshaws called vinaigrettes nearly two centuries before TokyoWhen the first horse-drawn omnibus in Paris stopped running in 1679, the city filled the gap with small enclosed two-wheeled carts for a single rider. People called them vinaigret…
813. American river steamers were said to float on a heavy dewPaddle steamers on the Mississippi, Ohio and Missouri in the early 1800s were built to sit so high in the water that they could work in channels less than two metres deep. People …
814. A wooden trackway in Somerset can be dated to a single winterThe Sweet Track, a timber causeway across English wetland, was built in the winter of 3807 BC or the spring after. Tree rings in its wood let archaeologists pin the date that prec…
815. McAdam's road workers checked stone size by putting it in their mouthsJohn Loudon McAdam insisted the top layer of his roads use stones no bigger than about 20 millimetres. Supervisors carried scales to check, but a labourer had a quicker test: if a…
816. The oldest known saddle, patched cowhide, lay in a woman's grave in XinjiangIn a tomb in the Turpan basin of western China, archaeologists found a cushioned cowhide saddle dated to between 727 and 396 BC, the earliest yet discovered. It had clearly been r…
817. The triangular lateen sail won out by being cheaper, not fasterMaritime historians long assumed the triangular lateen sail beat the old square sail at performance. Studies of voyages described in period accounts, and trials with replica ships…
818. Umbrella-jumping entertainers in Siam helped inspire the modern parachuteA French envoy reported in 1691 that at the Siamese court of King Narai, a performer would leap from a height holding two large umbrellas, drifting down into trees, onto roofs or …
819. Cars sit still most of their lives, and cities pay for it in landA typical car spends around 95 percent of its time parked. Storing all those idle vehicles swallows enormous amounts of ground: in many North American downtowns, half or more of t…
820. Why a giant cruise ship weighs far less than its tonnage suggestsTitanic had a gross register tonnage of 46,328 and weighed a little over 52,000 tons, so the two figures roughly matched. Oasis of the Seas, completed in 2009, measures over 225,0…
821. Before 1914, you could cross most of Europe without a passportFor roughly thirty years before the First World War, most European borders could be crossed without papers. Railways moved so many people so quickly across so many frontiers that …
822. Robots called pigs crawl through oil pipelines to scrape and inspect themCrude oil carries paraffin wax, and in cold climates it builds up inside pipelines. Operators clear it by launching devices called pigs, also known as scrapers or go-devils, which…
823. Liners, tramps and slow steaming: life aboard the world's merchant fleetAs of December 2018, one in four merchant sailors on Earth had been born in the Philippines. They crew a fleet that grew from about 30,900 large ships in 2005 to nearly 39,000 in …
824. The biggest ship ever built proved too big to pay its wayThe supertanker Seawise Giant, later renamed Knock Nevis, stretched about 458 metres and could carry 565,000 tonnes. Yet ships that size rarely sailed full, which made them money-…
825. The world's oldest working monorail has hung over Wuppertal since 1901Since 1901, trains in the German city of Wuppertal have dangled beneath a single overhead rail, making the Schwebebahn the oldest monorail still carrying passengers. The idea is o…
826. The first motorcycle needed training wheels and was really an engine testIn 1885 Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach built the Reitwagen, or riding car, in Bad Cannstatt to try out their new petrol engine. It ignored decades of bicycle steering know-h…
827. New York's first subway was a 95-metre tube pushed by airIn February 1870 Alfred Ely Beach opened a demonstration line under Broadway: a single car blown along a 95-metre tunnel by air pressure. Politics and money killed any extension, …
828. Gliders fly engine-free for hundreds of kilometres on rising airAround 1005 an English monk named Eilmer strapped on wings, leapt from Malmesbury Abbey and reportedly covered about 200 metres before crashing. He blamed the missing tail. Today'…
829. The helicopter's name means spiral wing, not heli plus copterThe Frenchman Gustave Ponton d'Amécourt coined hélicoptère in 1861 from the Greek helix, meaning spiral, and pteron, meaning wing. English speakers split it the wrong way, which i…
830. Electric trains passed 200 km/h in 1903, sixty years before bullet trainsIn October 1903 two experimental electric railcars raced along a military line south of Berlin, one reaching 206.7 km/h and the other 210.2 km/h. They proved fast electric rail co…
831. The king wanted convicts aboard the first free balloon flightLouis XVI originally decreed that condemned criminals should be the first people to fly free beneath a Montgolfier balloon. Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d'Arlan…
832. A coffee tin, a cat food can and a hairdryer made the hovercraftIn the early 1950s the British engineer Christopher Cockerell blew air from a hairdryer into the gap between a coffee tin and a cat food can. The fast-moving ring of air acted lik…
833. Two inventors, working apart, raced to build the first jet engineFrank Whittle, an RAF officer, started designing a practical jet engine in 1928. In Germany Hans von Ohain was independently chasing the same idea a few years later. Von Ohain's e…
834. Beer pipelines, sleepers and ballast: how things really move over landPipelines are a form of land transport, and not only for oil and gas. Short systems carry sewage, slurry, water and even beer, while pneumatic tubes shoot solid capsules along on …
835. Grain thieves in Song China prompted the invention of the pound lockIn the 10th century a Chinese tax official named Qiao Weiyue kept losing grain barges on the West River near Huai'an. He found soldiers at a double slipway were colluding with ban…
836. The Tube began with steam engines, gaslit carriages and bearded staffWhen the world's first underground railway opened between Paddington and Farringdon in January 1863, steam locomotives hauled gas-lit wooden carriages through the tunnels. Smoke a…
837. The first filling station was a small-town German pharmacyIn 1888 Bertha Benz took the world's first automobile on its maiden long trip from Mannheim to Pforzheim and ran low on fuel. She topped up at the city pharmacy in Wiesloch, which…
838. From dugout canoes to steam trawlers: how fishing boats evolvedThe oldest boats ever dug up are Neolithic canoes, hollowed from conifer logs with stone tools 7,000 to 9,000 years ago. They could barely leave the shore, but they were built to …
839. Kites came first: the long road to the fixed-wing airplaneThe humble kite counts as a fixed-wing aircraft, and it flew in China roughly 2,800 years ago. By 549 AD a paper kite was carrying a message in a rescue mission. Chinese armies la…
840. Why ships still carry almost all the world's freightIn 2015 the world moved 108 trillion tonne-kilometres of cargo, and about 70 percent of it went by sea. Roads handled 18 percent, rail 9 percent, and air under a quarter of one pe…

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