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1,432 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 19 of 24.

1081. 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 …
1082. 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…
1083. 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…
1084. 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…
1085. 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…
1086. 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…
1087. 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 …
1088. 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…
1089. 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…
1090. 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…
1091. 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 …
1092. 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…
1093. 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…
1094. 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…
1095. 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…
1096. 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…
1097. 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…
1098. 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…
1099. 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…
1100. 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…
1101. 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…
1102. 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…
1103. 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…
1104. 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…
1105. 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…
1106. 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…
1107. 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…
1108. 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 …
1109. 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…
1110. 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 …
1111. 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…
1112. 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…
1113. 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…
1114. 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…
1115. 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…
1116. 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 …
1117. 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…
1118. 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…
1119. 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…
1120. 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…
1121. 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…
1122. 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…
1123. 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…
1124. Your keyboard's ancestors sent stock prices down telegraph wiresThe keyboard on your desk descends less from the typewriter than from two workhorses of the telegraph and census era: the teleprinter, which relayed stock prices as early as the 1…
1125. The first computer monitor was a panel of light bulbsEngineers on early computers watched rows of bulbs, each showing whether one bit inside the machine was on or off. That panel let them monitor the computer, and the name stuck to …
1126. The mouse was nearly beaten by a knee pedal and a bowling ballBefore settling on the mouse, Douglas Engelbart's lab tried pointers worked by the chin, the nose and a knee under the desk. An earlier Canadian navy tracker rolled a standard fiv…
1127. The word digital began with fingers and an anti-aircraft gunDigital shares its root with digit and the Latin digitus, finger, because people counted on their hands. Its modern sense arrived in 1942, when George Stibitz of Bell Telephone La…
1128. From an Egyptian tomb to the internet: four thousand years of secret writingAround 1900 BC, the tomb of an Egyptian named Khnumhotep II used inscriptions that swapped ordinary symbols for unusual ones, one of the earliest known examples of encryption. The…
1129. Ethernet is named after a substance physicists no longer believe existsIn a memo dated 22 May 1973, Robert Metcalfe of Xerox PARC called his new office network The Ether Network. The name recalled the old idea of a luminiferous aether filling space a…
1130. File system meant a way of organising paper long before computersAround 1900, a file system was a method for arranging paper documents in an office. By 1961 the phrase was being borrowed for computers, and by 1964 it was everyday jargon. The jo…
1131. A 1930s theory of pure functions became a whole way of programmingDuring the 1930s Alonzo Church devised a formal system of computation built from nothing but functions and their application. Alan Turing showed in 1937 that it was as powerful as…
1132. The first hard drive was as big as two refrigerators and held under four megabytesIBM's first production hard disk, the 350, shipped in 1957 as part of the 305 RAMAC computer. Roughly the size of two large fridges, it spun a stack of 52 platters to hold five mi…
1133. The first public guide to HTML listed only eighteen tagsWhen Tim Berners-Lee first mentioned a document called HTML Tags online in late 1991, it described a mere 18 elements. Most were borrowed from an in-house documentation format use…
1134. The internet began as two linked computers in California in 1969On 29 October 1969, a computer at the University of California, Los Angeles was connected to one at the Stanford Research Institute. That two-node link was the first piece of ARPA…
1135. CSS let web pages change their whole look by editing one fileEarly web pages carried their fonts, colours and borders inside the markup, repeated wherever they appeared. Want every heading blue instead of red? You hunted down each one. Casc…
1136. The first electrical data links were digital long before computers existedIt is tempting to think digital communication began with computers. Yet the electrical telegraph of 1809 and the teletypewriter of 1906 both sent discrete, digital signals, and th…
1137. In 1986 barely one percent of stored information was digitalWithin about two decades, the world flipped from storing its information mostly on paper, film and tape to storing almost all of it digitally. Around one percent of global storage…
1138. Before Edgar Codd, finding data meant following a trail of pointersEarly databases worked like a maze: to reach a record, programs followed links from one entry to the next, often via physical disk addresses. In 1970 an IBM researcher named Edgar…
1139. Early memory cards cost 100 dollars per megabyte and needed batteriesSome of the first PCMCIA memory cards held just 1 to 5 megabytes at around 100 dollars per megabyte, and many relied on a lithium battery to keep their contents alive. In 1992 San…
1140. Your smartphone isn't really mobile; you areStrictly speaking, a smartphone is not a mobile device at all. It goes nowhere on its own; the person carrying it does the moving. Truly mobile computers move themselves, like rob…

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