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1,389 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 15 of 24.

841. The freeway is free of crossings, not free of tollsWhen the planner Edward M. Bassett coined the word freeway in February 1930, he was thinking about property law rather than prices. Landowners beside an ordinary highway had right…
842. Switzerland kept soldiers on bicycles until 2003Long after tanks and helicopters arrived, the Swiss army still fielded a regiment that went to war by pedal power. It was the last such unit anywhere, and it was finally disbanded…
843. The first road trip was a secret publicity stunt by Bertha BenzIn August 1888 Bertha Benz loaded her teenage sons Richard and Eugen into an experimental motor car and set off from Mannheim to Pforzheim, 106 kilometres away. She told people sh…
844. The first car ferry crossed the Bosphorus carrying horse carriagesIn 1871 an iron paddle steamer called Suhulet, meaning ease or convenience, started carrying vehicles across the Bosphorus in Istanbul. There were no motor cars yet, so its cargo …
845. The bus got its name from a hat shop sign in NantesIn 1823 a miller near Nantes named Stanislas Baudry opened a spa heated by waste water from his corn mill, then ran horse-drawn coaches from the city centre to attract bathers. Ha…
846. The first chairlift began as a hoist for loading bananasWhen the railway magnate William Averell Harriman needed a way to get skiers up the slopes at Sun Valley, Idaho, a Union Pacific bridge designer named James Curran remembered a ca…
847. How canal builders lifted boats over hills without flooding the valleysWater always runs downhill, yet canals must stay almost perfectly level. Engineers solved the problem with chambers, lifts, bridges and tunnels, and China worked out the double-ga…
848. Canoes carried the first settlers of the Caribbean islandsAround 3500 BC, Amerindian groups paddled out from mainland South America and settled the first Caribbean islands in single-hulled canoes, the only way to get there. Nobody has fo…
849. Why a middleman can ship your pallet cheaper than you canSmall companies booking a truck directly are often offered 5 to 30 percent off a carrier's published rates. A freight broker buying space on the same trucks typically gets 50 to 8…
850. Giant cargo ships are named after the canals and straits they can squeeze throughA freighter's size class is really a map of the bottlenecks it can pass. Panamax, Suezmax, Malaccamax and Seawaymax each describe the biggest ship a particular canal, strait or lo…
851. Your car's dashboard and boot were named on horse-drawn carriagesA dashboard was once a screen of wood or leather at the front of an open carriage, stopping the mud and snow that horses' hooves flung up. The boot began as a box that jutted out …
852. Two wheels beat four for the first animal-drawn vehiclesThe earliest wheeled vehicles were four-wheeled wagons, but the cart soon proved its worth. With only two wheels, it needed roughly 40 percent less pulling force than a wagon of e…
853. The world's first control tower was a wooden hut at CroydonOn 25 February 1920, Croydon Airport near London opened the first air traffic control post anywhere: a wooden hut about 5 metres tall with windows on all four sides. From it, staf…
854. The word aviation was coined forty years before any aeroplane flewIn 1863 Gabriel de La Landelle, a French author who had once served in the navy, published a book titled Aviation, or Aerial Navigation without Balloons. He built the word from th…
855. The first balloon passengers were a sheep, a duck and a roosterOn 19 September 1783 the Montgolfier brothers sent up a hot air balloon with three passengers aboard: a sheep, a duck and a rooster. Only after the animals came through did people…
856. The humble barge gave English the word embark and a famous idiomTo embark literally means to board a barque, a word that traces back through Latin and Greek to an Egyptian term for a basket-shaped boat. Barges gave English another phrase too: …
857. Ball bearings and pneumatic tyres were bicycle parts before cars borrowed themLong before the motor car, bicycle makers had worked out ball bearings, pneumatic tyres, chain-driven sprockets and tension-spoked wheels. All four later proved vital to automobil…
858. The fastest glider ever flown was the Space ShuttleReturning from orbit, the Space Shuttle had no engine thrust to land with. It plunged back into the atmosphere at nearly Mach 25, around 28,200 kilometres per hour, and then glide…
859. Jet engine makers sell their engines at a loss and profit for thirty yearsA new jet engine usually leaves the factory at a loss. Its maker earns the money back over roughly three decades of service, selling maintenance and spare parts, the same logic as…
860. America's first airline passenger paid 400 dollars for a wooden benchOn January 1, 1914, Tony Jannus flew a Benoist flying boat of wood and muslin from St. Petersburg to Tampa, skimming about 15 metres above the bay for 23 minutes. His passenger, a…
861. The word aeroplane first meant only the wing, and predates powered flightEnglish speakers were saying airplane in the late 19th century, before anyone had managed sustained powered flight. The word came from French aéroplane, built from Greek for air p…
862. Santos-Dumont coined the word airport a year before the Wrights flewTalking to The New York Times in 1902, the Brazilian aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont predicted that within about a decade people would fly the Atlantic between New York and…
863. The screw came roughly two thousand years before anyone made a screwdriverThe screw was the last of the six classic simple machines to appear, turning up in Assyria between 911 and 609 BC, where King Sennacherib boasted of casting water-screw pumps weig…
864. A janitor's soap box and his wife's pillowcase gave the world the HooverIn 1907 James Murray Spangler, a department store janitor in Canton, Ohio, rigged an electric fan to blow dust into a soap box fitted with one of his wife's pillowcases, adding a …
865. The oldest valve is a hinged flap that lets the flow do the workPicture a flap hanging on a hinge inside a pipe. Push fluid one way and it swings open; try to send it back and the current slams the flap shut. That ancient design, the check val…
866. The first automatic washing machine had to be bolted down to stop it walkingIn 1937 Bendix Home Appliances launched the first domestic automatic washer, a front-loader that looks familiar even now. It had no drum suspension, so owners anchored it to the f…
867. Why a splitting maul has a fatter head than an axeA thinner wedge multiplies force more, so you might expect a log-splitting maul to be razor-slim. It is the opposite. In springy material such as wood, friction grabs a narrow wed…
868. Ancient Mexico built wheeled toys but never a wheeled cartArchaeologists in Mexico have dug up small wheeled figures, apparently children's toys, some around 3,500 years old. Yet Mesoamerica never put the wheel to practical work before t…
869. A car's wheels actually lose force, and that is the whole pointAs a simple machine, the wheel and axle exists to multiply force: push on the big rim and the slim axle turns with extra strength. A car runs it backwards. Its transmission drives…
870. In 18th-century China, whole fleets of wheelbarrows travelled under sailNear the southern edge of Shandong in 1797, a Dutch East India Company man named Andreas van Braam Houckgeest was astonished to meet a convoy of big wheelbarrows, each carrying a …
871. Spectrometers read what stars and metals are made of from their lightEvery chemical element leaves its own pattern of bright or dark lines when light passes through or comes off it. A spectrometer spreads that light out by wavelength so the pattern…
872. The humble spring runs from Bronze Age tweezers to your tape measureA tape measure snaps back into its case because of a thin steel band that is slightly curved across its width. Rolled up, it lies flat; pulled out, it springs back to its curve, p…
873. In the 1950s an induction cooker boiled water through a sheet of newspaperOn a touring General Motors showcase in the mid-1950s, Frigidaire demonstrated an induction cooker heating a pot of water with a newspaper sandwiched between burner and pan. The s…
874. A coffeemaker, Biosphere 2 and the Universe sort neatly into three kinds of systemYour coffeemaker swaps both matter and energy with its surroundings, which makes it an open system, like a car or planet Earth. A computer or the Biosphere 2 project trades energy…
875. Anders Celsius put boiling at zero and freezing at one hundredWhen Anders Celsius proposed his temperature scale in 1742, water boiled at zero degrees and froze at 100. The scale carrying his name today runs the other way round. That reversa…
876. The water sitting in a toilet bowl is a plug against sewer gasThat pool of water always waiting in a flush toilet has a job. The bowl drains through a pipe bent like an upside-down U, and the lip of that bend sets how high the water can stan…
877. The Sewing Machine War: how a patent tangle gave birth to buying on instalmentsBy the 1850s, America's sewing machine makers spent as much energy suing each other as selling. The fight over needles, shuttles and feeds grew so tangled it became known as the S…
878. Frederick Taylor's 'science of shovelling' demanded a different scoop for every materialAround 1900, efficiency pioneer Frederick Winslow Taylor decided that using one shovel for brown coal on Monday and gravel on Tuesday was wasteful. Match each scoop's size to the …
879. The sickle's jagged edge has survived 15,000 years, all the way into combine harvestersThe first harvesting sickles, around 15,000 years ago, were wooden handles fitted with toothed flint. That serrated edge never went away. It still dominates grain reaping, turns u…
880. Physicists still argue about exactly why a siphon lets water run uphillAnyone who has emptied a fish tank with a hose knows the trick: water climbs up and over the rim with no pump at all. Egyptians were doing it by 1500 BC. Yet how a siphon actually…
881. Long before the word robot, inventors built mechanical waitresses, drummers and a digesting duckThe word robot dates only from a 1920s Czech play, where it meant forced labourer. The machines are far older. A 13th-century engineer built a hydraulic waitress that appeared thr…
882. Teaching robots to walk on two legs turned out harder than making them flyAn airliner is practically a flying robot: its autopilot can handle takeoff, cruise and landing while two humans supervise. Yet engineers still struggle to build a two-legged mach…
883. Rope holds together because every layer is twisted against the one before itPull apart a piece of ordinary three-strand rope and you will find the fibres twisted one way, the yarns the other, and the strands back again. That alternating counter-twist is t…
884. What measures the ruler? A 4,600-year-old bar and a puzzle from WittgensteinEvery metre stick was once checked against a single official bar kept in Paris. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein noticed an odd gap: nothing could prove that the bar itself measure…
885. Cut an eight-foot board into one-foot pieces and you only get sevenTry slicing an eight-foot plank into one-foot lengths with a saw that removes an eighth of an inch per cut. You end up with seven good pieces and an eighth that falls short by sev…
886. Why most 'left-handed' scissors still fight the people who use themMany scissors sold for left-handers only swap the finger grips. The blades still sit the right-handed way, so a lefty ends up prying them apart with the thumb while the upper blad…
887. The metal screw stayed a rarity for centuries, until factories made 16,000 a dayIn the 1780s a Staffordshire wood-screw works turned out 16,000 screws a day with just 30 workers, a staggering output at the time. Before machines like theirs, each metal screw w…
888. Righty-tighty is a convention, and left-handed threads exist for clever reasonsAlmost every screw tightens clockwise, possibly because right-handers turn a screwdriver that way using the arm's stronger muscle. But some threads deliberately run backward: on w…
889. Why a Han Chinese plough needed two oxen while Europe's needed up to eightBefore the 18th century, a European farmer might hitch four, six or even eight draught animals to one plough. In Han China, two usually sufficed, and later just one. The differenc…
890. Most potter's wheels spin counterclockwise, except in Japan, and there may be an ancient reasonWalk into almost any pottery studio and the wheel turns counterclockwise, with the right hand shaping the outside of the pot. Japanese potters traditionally do the reverse. One th…
891. Count the ropes on a pulley block and you know how much it multiplies your strengthPlutarch tells how Archimedes, using a set of compound pulleys, drew a fully loaded ship toward himself as smoothly as if it floated on calm water. The trick behind that feat is a…
892. The humble rake: pig-demon weapon, lucky charm, and slapstick's favourite trapIn Journey to the West, the pig-faced pilgrim Zhu Bajie fights with a nine-toothed rake. Japanese markets sell decorated rakes each November to scoop in good fortune. Russians war…
893. In 1922 a home refrigerator cost more than a brand-new Model T FordOne 1922 refrigerator, with a wooden cold box, a water-cooled compressor and a single ice tray, sold for 714 dollars. A Model T Ford that year went for about 476. Its motor sat in…
894. Red-hot rivets once flew through the air on every steel building siteOld steel frames were stitched together by four-person gangs. One heated rivets until they glowed cherry red, near 900 degrees Celsius, then tossed them with tongs to a catcher ho…
895. The pencil owes its lead to a guarded Cumbrian mine that was never leadAround 1565, people near Seathwaite in Cumbria found a deposit of graphite so pure and solid it could be sawn into sticks. Nobody knew what it was, so they called it plumbago, lea…
896. Measuring brightness once took nothing more than paper and a grease spotPut a spot of oil on a sheet of paper and it turns slightly translucent. Hold it between two lamps and slide it along until the spot seems to vanish from both sides: now each face…
897. Egyptian blue, the first human-made colour, vanished for centuriesMore than five thousand years ago, Egyptian craftsmen heated quartz sand, lime and a copper mineral such as malachite together and created a brilliant blue that nature never suppl…
898. Why a half-inch pipe measures nothing like half an inchMeasure a half-inch iron pipe and you will find no dimension that is actually half an inch. Early pipes of that name did have a half-inch bore, but thick walls. As metal got bette…
899. The woodworker's plane has barely changed since Roman PompeiiThe oldest known woodworking planes come from Pompeii, and a carpenter today would recognise them at once: a body with a slot through the middle, a blade angled down to its sole, …
900. The unpickable lock that sat in a London shop window for 67 yearsFrom 1790, Joseph Bramah kept a lock in his Piccadilly shop window with a standing offer of 200 pounds to anyone who could pick it. Nobody managed it for over six decades. Then, a…

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