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1,389 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 18 of 24.

1021. Battle axes were lighter than you think and cheaper than swordsPicture a war axe and you may imagine something huge and heavy. Real battle axes usually weighed between about half a kilo and three kilos, far lighter than a modern wood-splittin…
1022. One British ship in 1906 made every battleship afloat obsoleteIn 1906 Britain launched HMS Dreadnought, armed with ten big guns of one size and none of the usual medium weapons. Overnight every earlier battleship looked outdated, and navies …
1023. The first bayonets plugged the barrel, so muskets could not fireEarly bayonets simply jammed into the muzzle of a musket, turning it into a spear but making it impossible to shoot. Soldiers had to wait until the last moment to fix them. At Kil…
1024. Divers found medieval Mongol bombs in a shipwreck off JapanWhen Mongol fleets attacked Japan in the 13th century, they brought thunder-crash bombs: iron shells packed with gunpowder. Centuries later, underwater archaeologists recovered so…
1025. The first air-dropped bombs were hand grenades nicknamed ballerinasOn 1 November 1911, over Libya, Italian second lieutenant Giulio Gavotti leaned out of a plane never meant for bombing and dropped four specially made grenades on Ottoman position…
1026. The oldest known boomerang was carved from mammoth tusk in PolandBoomerangs are icons of Australia, yet the oldest certain find comes from a cave in Poland's Carpathian Mountains. Carved from mammoth tusk, it is thought to be around 40,000 year…
1027. Arrowheads from an Uzbek cave push archery back 80,000 yearsIn Obi-Rakhmat Grotto in Uzbekistan, researchers found tiny stone points about 80,000 years old. They are too small for spears and too big for blowgun darts, yet just right for ar…
1028. A silk handkerchief in Tombstone inspired the first bulletproof fabricIn 1881 a Tombstone, Arizona doctor named George Goodfellow noticed something odd about a gunshot victim: one bullet had been stopped by a silk handkerchief in his breast pocket. …
1029. From tethered balloons to floating airbases: the aircraft carrier's riseThe first ships to carry aircraft were wooden vessels lofting single tethered observation balloons. A little over a century later, nuclear-powered supercarriers each hold dozens o…
1030. Why French and Belgian farmers still dig up First World War shellsMore than a century after the guns fell silent, farmers in France and Belgium keep turning up unexploded First World War ammunition in their fields, and it occasionally still kill…
1031. The Black Death helped make plate armour cheaper than chain mailFull plate armour looks like the luxury option, yet by the 15th century it cost less than mail. Linking thousands of iron rings by hand took enormous labour, and after the Black D…
1032. From Roman catapult to battleship gun, artillery's energy grew 20,000-foldA Roman catapult of the 1st century BC hurled a 6.55-kilogram stone with about 16 kilojoules of energy. A mid-19th-century 12-pounder cannon delivered around 240. The main guns of…
1033. Only one plane in the US Air Force wears a pure A for attackAmerican military aircraft carry letter codes, and A stands for attack. Yet only a single type in the current US Air Force inventory has a plain, unmixed A: the A-10 Thunderbolt I…
1034. The ballista stored its punch in twisted ropes, not a bowA crossbow gets its power from a bent bow. The ancient ballista worked differently: two separate arms slotted into tightly twisted bundles of rope made from animal sinew. Cranking…
1035. Why battering rams worked: stone walls crack under repeated blowsA battering ram is basically a heavy log with momentum, yet it toppled city walls for thousands of years. The secret lay in the walls themselves. Stone and brick resist being sque…
1036. A paraplegic watchmaker built the first self-propelled wheelchair in 1655In 1655 Stephan Farffler, a 22-year-old watchmaker who could not walk, built himself a three-wheeled chair driven by hand cranks and cogwheels. It looked more like a hand-cycle th…
1037. A wooden toe from Egyptian Thebes shows prosthetics are ancientIn 2000, pathologists examining a mummy from a cemetery near ancient Thebes found an artificial big toe of wood and leather, worn from use and dated to between 950 and 710 BC. Whe…
1038. The first X-ray of a human hand made its owner say she saw her deathSoon after discovering X-rays in November 1895, Wilhelm Rontgen placed his wife's hand in front of a photographic plate. The result, bones and a ring floating in faint flesh, was …
1039. The humble syringe is really a tiny pump named after a fluteStrip away the needle and a syringe is simply a pump: a piston sliding inside a tube, pulling fluid in and pushing it out. Its name comes from the Greek syrinx, the panpipe. Versi…
1040. Ultrasound images rest on a guess about the speed of soundAn ultrasound machine never measures depth directly. It times how long each echo takes to come back and converts that into distance by assuming sound always travels at 1,540 metre…
1041. The word ambulance first meant a hospital that walked along behind an armyAmbulance comes from the Latin ambulare, to walk about, and originally named a mobile hospital following troops on the march. Spanish forces first used ambulancias to carry casual…
1042. Why a dialysis machine does not count as an artificial kidneyA dialysis machine does nearly all of a failing kidney's work, yet by the usual definition it is not an artificial organ. To qualify, a device must live with the body and not stay…
1043. How surgeons stop a heart for hours and keep the patient aliveDuring many heart operations the organ is deliberately brought to a halt while a machine outside the body does its job and the lungs' job at once. A specialist called a perfusioni…
1044. George Washington's false teeth were never wooden, but Japan's really wereGeorge Washington lost his first adult tooth at 22 and had one left when he became president. Contrary to legend, none of his false teeth contained wood; his presidential set was …
1045. A standard twelve-lead heart tracing uses only ten electrodesThe classic hospital heart tracing is called a 12-lead ECG, yet only ten sticky pads go on the limbs and chest. A lead is not a wire but a viewpoint: the machine compares pairs of…
1046. The CT scanner was invented by an engineer at a British music companyIn 1972 Godfrey Hounsfield, an engineer at the British firm EMI, unveiled a machine that fired X-rays through a slice of the head and let a computer rebuild a cross-section. Three…
1047. Many of the earliest typewriters were built so blind people could writeAround 1802 in Italy, Pellegrino Turri built a writing machine for his blind friend, Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano. It was far from alone. Inventors in Britain and Americ…
1048. Digital video quietly discards most of its colour information, and you never noticeHuman eyes pick up fine detail in brightness far better than in colour, and video engineers exploit that. A common trick keeps the brightness of every pixel but shares one colour …
1049. John Logie Baird recorded television in 1927 that nobody could watch for decadesIn 1927 John Logie Baird captured television pictures on discs he called Phonovision, the first somewhat successful attempt to record video at all. No machine of the day could pla…
1050. The inventor of holography fought a years-long patent war over flat TV screensIn 1958 Dennis Gabor, later famous for holography, patented a flat cathode-ray tube so similar to William Aiken's design that the two spent years in court. By the time the rulings…
1051. Persistence of vision does not explain movies, despite what you were taughtFilms run at 24 still frames a second, a standard fixed when talking pictures arrived in the late 1920s. The popular explanation, that each picture lingers on the retina, is not s…
1052. The first image scanned into a computer was a photo of a babyIn 1957 Russell Kirsch and his team at the US National Bureau of Standards built a drum scanner that fed pictures into the SEAC computer. They tested it on a snapshot of Walden, K…
1053. Before magnets got cheap, some loudspeakers were powered by compressed airAround 1900 a few record players pushed sound out with blasts of compressed air. Horace Short patented the idea in 1898 and sold it to Charles Parsons, and companies like Pathé bu…
1054. The famous postal motto on a New York post office is PersianCarved across the James Farley Post Office in New York is a line about couriers undeterred by snow, rain, heat or gloom of night. It comes from Herodotus, who was describing Persi…
1055. Radio hobbyists proudly call themselves hams, a word that began as a telegraph insultIn 19th-century wired telegraphy, professionals mocked clumsy Morse senders as ham-fisted, or simply hams. When hobbyists started tinkering with wireless, professional operators o…
1056. Assembly language speaks almost directly to the processor, one instruction at a timeBeneath every app sits machine code, raw numbers a processor understands. Assembly language is the thinnest human-readable layer over those numbers, usually one written line per m…
1057. An infamous art forger's son faked his father's paintings, complete with certificatesHan van Meegeren became notorious for forging art. Then his son went one layer deeper, producing fakes of his father's own work and supplying provenance certificates to go with th…
1058. Broadcasting borrowed its name from farmers flinging seed across a fieldLong before radio, to broadcast meant sowing seed by scattering it widely by hand. The word later stretched to cover spreading news through print and telegraph, and by 1898 it des…
1059. Cable television began with antennas on hilltops feeding towns that mountains cut offIn 1948, rural American communities hidden behind hills could barely pull in a television picture. The fix was blunt: raise one enormous antenna on high ground, taller than anyone…
1060. Retro gamers still hunt old tube televisions because light guns refuse to work without themFlat screens replaced bulky picture tubes years ago, yet some players still haul the old sets home. Light guns in classic games work only with cathode ray tubes, because they depe…
1061. Every letter you type is secretly a number, and agreeing on which number was hardA computer cannot store the letter g, only numbers. Character encoding is the agreement about which number stands for which symbol. Getting everyone to share one scheme proved sur…
1062. Engineers once scattered 350 million copper needles in orbit to bounce radio signalsBefore satellites could reliably amplify signals, engineers tried simply reflecting them off something up high. The Moon served as one mirror. Another experiment, Project West For…
1063. Calculator salesmen reportedly fled Russia after watching skilled abacus operators at workAccording to the writer Yakov Perelman, some businessmen who tried to sell mechanical calculators in the Russian Empire gave up in despair once they saw how fast a practised abacu…
1064. The world's most used operating system began as software for digital camerasWhen Andy Rubin and Chris White founded Android Inc. in Palo Alto in October 2003, they were building an operating system for digital cameras. Investors were unimpressed, the offi…
1065. Early AI mastered logic puzzles but stumbled over everyday common senseThe first researchers in artificial intelligence taught machines to reason step by step, the way people work through a puzzle. It turned out humans rarely think that way. Most of …
1066. Brewing beer counts as one of humanity's oldest biotechnologiesLong before anyone spliced a gene, people in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and India were putting microbes to work. Malted grain turned starch into sugar, and added yeast turn…
1067. Nature was cloning organisms hundreds of millions of years before DollyDolly the sheep made headlines in 1996 as the first mammal cloned from an adult body cell, but cloning itself is ancient. Bacteria splitting in two, plants sprouting from runners …
1068. Scientists sort DNA by size using a slab of jelly made from seaweedOne of molecular biology's workhorse tools is basically a race through jelly. Load DNA into a slab of gel, switch on an electric field, and fragments crawl toward the positive end…
1069. A 1951 science fiction novel used the phrase genetic engineering before DNA was understoodJack Williamson's novel Dragon's Island talked about genetic engineering in 1951, a year before Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase confirmed DNA's role in heredity and two years befo…
1070. Thirty rounds of heating and cooling turn one DNA fragment into a billionStart with a single stretch of DNA, warm it, cool it and warm it again, and each lap roughly doubles the number of copies. Run thirty laps and the arithmetic reaches about a billi…
1071. Computer networking began in 1940 with a teletype and a very long cableIn 1940 George Stibitz sat a teletype at Dartmouth and had it drive his calculator at Bell Labs in New York, the first time anyone used a computer remotely in real time. From that…
1072. Programmers spend more time reading code than writing itProgramming sounds like writing, but most of a programmer's day goes to reading: working out what existing code does, reusing it and changing it. That is why readability matters s…
1073. Even a sealed-off computer can leak secrets through faint radio emissionsCutting a machine off from every network does not make it private. Its circuits give off weak electromagnetic signals, and a listener nearby can reconstruct what it is doing. The …
1074. The first big computer simulation modelled a nuclear blast with 12 spheresDuring the Manhattan Project, scientists wanted to model how a nuclear detonation unfolds, a problem no neat equation could solve. So they ran a Monte Carlo calculation of just 12…
1075. The transistor was imagined in 1925, two decades before anyone built oneJulius Lilienfeld described a field-effect transistor in 1925, but the device that finally worked came from Bell Labs in 1947, and the silicon version that made modern chips possi…
1076. Before the 1970s, every secret message relied on a shared keyFor thousands of years, sender and receiver had to agree a secret beforehand, and anyone who stole it could read everything. Then asymmetric systems let people publish one key ope…
1077. C began as a tweak to a failed language so two men could rewrite UnixHalf a century after Dennis Ritchie created it at Bell Labs, C still runs underneath much of computing, in operating system kernels, device drivers and tiny embedded chips. It beg…
1078. Computer architecture borrowed its name from building design, and its logic tooIn 1959 an IBM researcher writing about the Stretch supercomputer decided that machine organization sounded too dull, and called his subject system architecture instead. The label…
1079. Deleting a file usually just cuts a thread that points to itOn Unix-like systems, the command to remove a file does not erase any data. It snips one named link to the file; only when every link is gone does the system mark that space as fr…
1080. Heat, not cleverness, now sets the limit on how fast computers getFor nearly two decades, from 1986 to 2003, computer hardware got more than 50 percent faster every year. Then the gains slowed. The binding constraint became getting power into ch…

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