Intellect Plus

Topics

Technology

1,432 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 6 of 24.

  1. Der Spiegel's editors went to jail and brought down a defence ministerIn 1962 police raided the Hamburg offices of Der Spiegel and arrested its founder on treason charges after a story questioning West Germany's military readiness. The case collapse…
  2. Why nobody can agree which countries count as developingQatar, Singapore and Kuwait rank among the richest places on Earth by almost any economic measure, yet they have been criticised for calling themselves developing countries at the…
  3. How Iowa farmers and hybrid corn explained the spread of every new gadgetThe theory now used to plan smartphone launches began with seed corn. In 1943 two researchers, Ryan and Gross, studied how Iowa farmers took up hybrid corn, and found adoption spr…
  4. The digital camera was cooled with dry ice before it fit in a phoneOne early digital camera, built in 1972 for telescopes by researchers at MIT and Caltech, had its detector chilled with dry ice so it could hold exposures of up to an hour. It sto…
  5. The digital divide keeps reopening every time a faster technology arrivesIt seems obvious that as phones and laptops get cheaper, the gap between the connected and the disconnected should shrink on its own. Measured in bandwidth per person, it does not…
  6. The napkin sketch that made Arthur Laffer's name, and its criticsIn 1974 an economist reportedly grabbed a napkin during an afternoon meeting with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and drew a simple hump. Tax nothing and you raise nothing; tax ev…
  7. The astrolabe, a pocket sky that could tell time, latitude and prayer directionLong before calculators, a brass disc etched with wires and cutouts could find the height of a star, identify planets, tell the hour and work out where on Earth you stood. The Gre…
  8. In radio's infancy, the American phone company tried to rent out the airwavesIn the early 1920s the telephone giant AT&T looked at the new craze for radio and saw a phone line to the masses. It launched a New York station, WEAF, rented out airtime, and wir…
  9. Geologists spent 15 years debating the Anthropocene, then voted it downYou may have heard that we now live in the Anthropocene, a new geological age shaped by humans. Officially we do not. In 2024, after roughly 15 years of argument and a chosen Cana…
  10. Antinatalism, the ancient and unsettling idea that being born is a harmAntinatalism is the philosophical judgment that having children is wrong or cannot be justified. The label is new, probably first used in a 2006 French manifesto, but the thought …
  11. The app store existed long before the iPhone, and Apple couldn't own the nameApple made the phrase famous in 2008, but a program called the Electronic AppWrapper was selling software as a digital catalogue in 1992, and one issue was shown to Steve Jobs at …
  12. Apple's Lisa pioneered the mouse-driven desktop and ended up in a Utah landfillIn 1989 Apple buried roughly 2,700 unsold Lisa computers in a guarded landfill in Logan, Utah, to claim a tax write-off. Six years earlier the Lisa had launched as the first mass-…
  13. Why the line between an app and the operating system once landed in courtIs a web browser part of the operating system or a separate program? That sounds like pedantry, yet it was one of the central questions in the United States antitrust case against…
  14. Archie began as a sidekick to a patriotic superhero and took over the companyIn 1939 a small New York publisher called M.L.J. Magazines was betting on superheroes, including the Shield, the first American patriotic comic-book hero. Then an ordinary redhead…
  15. India's Arjun tank took three decades to go from requirement to regimentIndia authorised its home-grown battle tank in 1974 and hoped for a prototype by 1980. The first prototype arrived in 1989, and the tank only joined a regiment in 2004. Along the …
  16. The arquebus gave firearms their first trigger and took 28 steps to fireBefore the arquebus, a gunner held the weapon against his chest and used his free hand to poke a hot wire into the touch hole. The matchlock arquebus of the late 15th century chan…
  17. Queen Anne, the last Stuart, and the long road to Britain's throneAnne was raised a Protestant on her uncle Charles II's orders, even though her father James was Catholic. When James had a son in 1688, she hinted in letters that the baby might b…
  18. The AD calendar began as a monk's Easter table and has no year zeroIn 525 a monk in Rome named Dionysius Exiguus was drawing up tables to predict Easter. Rather than keep counting years from the reign of Diocletian, an emperor who persecuted Chri…
  19. Lego bricks, clarinets and keyboard keys share one tough three-part plasticSince 1963, Lego bricks have mostly been moulded from ABS, a plastic built from three ingredients that each contribute something different. The same material turns up in drainpipe…
  20. An MTV VJ registered mtv.com himself, then got sued for itIn 1993 Adam Curry, then a presenter on MTV, grabbed the unclaimed domain mtv.com to act as the channel's unofficial internet voice. His bosses approved at the time, but when he l…
  21. Diesel engines ignite fuel by squeezing air too fast for heat to escapeA diesel engine has no spark plugs. It compresses air in its cylinders so quickly that the heat generated has no time to leak away, and the temperature climbs high enough to ignit…
  22. Before inventing the mobile, Alexander Calder trained as a mechanical engineerAlexander Calder's parents, both artists, did not want him to become one. So he studied mechanical engineering, a field he admitted he barely understood, chosen because he liked a…
  23. In 2000, AltaVista had more than twice Google's share of web searchersAltaVista launched in December 1995 as the first full-text searchable index of the web, and by 1997 it was handling over 80 million hits a day. As late as 2000 it served 17.7 perc…
  24. Science fiction described 3D printing decades before a Japanese researcher built oneIn a 1945 short story, Murray Leinster imagined a machine arm that traced drawings in the air while plastic flowed out and hardened. Thirty-five years later, a Nagoya researcher n…
  25. The first phones sold as 4G did not meet the official definition of 4GIn 2008 the international telecoms standards body set targets for 4G, including peak speeds of 1 gigabit per second for stationary users. The first networks carriers marketed as 4…
  26. A dead alkaline AA battery bounces, while a fresh one lands with a thudInside an alkaline AA cell, a zinc gel gradually turns into a ceramic as the battery is used. So a fresh cell dropped on a hard floor barely bounces, while a drained one springs b…
  27. ABC News owes its existence to a government order breaking up NBCIn 1942 American regulators decided NBC had too much grip on radio and ordered it to split its two networks. The spun-off NBC Blue Network became ABC in 1943. For decades its news…
  28. Karl Marx once backed free trade because it would speed up revolutionIn an 1848 speech, Karl Marx called free trade destructive, a force that broke up old nations and pushed workers and owners toward open conflict. Then he voted for it, precisely b…
  29. In 1991 India flew its gold to London to avoid defaultingBy mid-1991 India had enough foreign currency for roughly three weeks of essential imports. So the government quietly loaded tonnes of gold onto chartered planes bound for London …
  30. Civil engineering got its name simply by not being military workEngineers once built fortifications and siege works first; everything else needed its own label. In the 18th century the word civil was attached to all the peaceful building, from…
  31. Four ways to hold back a river, and why each dam shape worksSome dams stay put through sheer weight, while others lean on triangular props or push the water's load sideways into the rock of the valley. The shape engineers choose depends on…
  32. Mechanical engineering's roots run through Kush, Persia, China and the Islamic worldA steam-driven spinning toy in Roman Egypt, a Chinese chariot with differential gears, a clock escapement two centuries ahead of Europe. Long before the Industrial Revolution gave…
  33. The World Bank began by rebuilding postwar Europe and drifted into global developmentIts first loan went to France in 1947, for half of what Paris asked and on strict terms. From that cautious start, the institution born at Bretton Woods became the world's largest…
  34. How a Geneva business professor's management seminar became the Davos summitIn 1971 Klaus Schwab invited 450 European executives to a Swiss ski resort to learn American management methods. Within two decades the gathering had become a place where rival le…
  35. Four-wheel drive and a reckless power era shaped the World Rally ChampionshipWhen rallying's governing body allowed all-wheel drive in 1979, most carmakers shrugged it off as too complicated. Then Audi's Quattro started winning almost at once. What followe…
  36. Philosophers still disagree about what it means for life to go wellWell-being sounds simple: how well someone's life is going for them. Yet thinkers split over whether it comes down to pleasure, to getting what you want, or to a checklist of good…
  37. Wolverhampton grew from a noblewoman's land grant into a Midlands industrial cityIn 985 a king handed land to a woman called Wulfrun, and the settlement that grew there still carries her name. Wolverhampton went on to trade wool, forge locks, build more than 2…
  38. Why Ford once made its own steel: the logic of vertical integrationIn the 1920s Ford's River Rouge complex stopped buying much of its steel and started making it. Owning more links in the chain from raw material to customer can cut costs and guar…
  39. In 1982 arcade quarters out-earned pop music and Hollywood combinedAt the peak of the arcade craze, Americans fed $8 billion in coins into video game cabinets in a single year, more than pop music and Hollywood films earned put together. Then cam…
  40. New car smell, forest haze and bitter coffee share one chemical familyThat pleasant new car smell is a cloud of volatile organic compounds, chemicals that evaporate readily at room temperature. People release plenty of them from paint, fuel and aero…
  41. The Volkswagen Beetle's tangled origins, from Nazi propaganda to 21.5 million carsBuilt for 65 years, longer than any other single generation of car, the Beetle began as a Nazi propaganda promise that every German would own one. Hardly any civilians got theirs …
  42. Dieselgate: how Volkswagen taught its engines to recognise a test and behaveVolkswagen's diesel cars were clean only when they knew someone was watching. Software sensed a laboratory test and switched on full pollution controls, then let nitrogen oxides p…
  43. The Volkswagen ID.3, the hatchback that launched VW's electric reinventionWithin 24 hours of opening pre-orders, Volkswagen had 10,000 reservations for a car nobody had yet seen in final form. The ID.3 was the first passenger model on the group's dedica…
  44. Volkswagen ID.4, the electric SUV pitched at the millions, not millionairesVolkswagen advertised its first fully electric crossover as a car for the millions rather than the millionaires, and one American executive claimed it drove like a GTI with the pu…
  45. The Volkswagen Passat, a trade wind that blew through half a century of namesNamed after the German word for trade winds, Volkswagen's family car has also been sold as the Dasher, Santana, Quantum, Corsar and Carat. With 34 million built since 1973, it ran…
  46. The Volkswagen Scirocco, the sporty coupe that tested the Golf's parts firstVolkswagen launched its sleek Scirocco coupe six months ahead of the Golf, partly so any teething problems would surface on the smaller-volume car first. It also beat the famous G…
  47. Reading the 17-character code that tells a car's whole backstoryStamped on every modern car is a string of 17 letters and digits that quietly records who built it, where, when and in what order. It never contains the letters I, O or Q, and one…
  48. From homemade signs to soybean plates, the odd history of number platesThe first registration plates were so fragile that few survive, and early American drivers often had to make their own. Wartime shortages pushed makers to try copper and even pres…
  49. The V12 engine was born in a London workshop to power racing boatsThe first V12 was not built for a car at all. In 1904 Putney Motor Works in London made one for racing boats, a hefty 18.4 litre design whose camshaft could slide to run the engin…
  50. Every V6 engine hides two unbalanced three-cylinder engines inside itSplit a V6 down the middle and each half is effectively a three-cylinder engine, and an odd number of cylinders in a row can never be perfectly balanced. So no matter how the bank…
  51. The V8's famous burble comes from lopsided firing in each cylinder bankThat deep, rumbling V8 soundtrack is a side effect of geometry. In a typical road-car V8, the cylinders fire in an order that jumps unevenly between the two banks, so each bank's …
  52. Vallejo was California's capital until lawmakers found no capitol buildingIn 1851 the new state of California named Vallejo its capital, and legislators arrived the following year. There was one problem: the promised capitol building had never been buil…
  53. A turboprop is a jet engine that spends almost all its power turning a propellerInside a turboprop, air is squeezed, mixed with jet fuel and burned just as in a jet. But instead of blasting the hot gas out the back for thrust, the turbine squeezes nearly ever…
  54. Chainsaws run on two-stroke engines because they work upside downA four-stroke car engine keeps its oil in a sump and depends on gravity. A two-stroke engine mixes its lubricating oil straight into the fuel, typically about one part oil to 32 o…
  55. America's Department of Energy spends much of its time on nuclear weaponsThe name suggests power plants and petrol prices, but the US Department of Energy also runs the military's nuclear weapons programme and builds reactors for the Navy. It funds mor…
  56. A burning river and a book on pesticides helped create America's EPAIn 1969 the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire, provoking a national outcry and criminal charges against big steel firms. Seven years earlier, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring h…
  57. How cheap mortgages and motorways helped hollow out city centresAfter the Second World War, American policy nudged families out of cities. Government-backed home loans let returning veterans buy detached houses in the suburbs, and the private …
  58. The Australian ute began with a farm wife's letter about church and pigsIn 1932 a farmer's wife wrote to Ford Australia asking for a vehicle she could drive to church on Sunday and use to take the pigs to market on Monday. The designer Lew Bandt answe…
  59. Most of the air through a jetliner's engine never gets burnedIn the engines on most passenger jets, the bulk of the air sucked in at the front never reaches the combustion chamber. It is pushed around the hot core by a big ducted fan. With …
  60. The first jet engine to run refused to stop when its fuel was cutOn 12 April 1937, Frank Whittle's team started the Power Jets WU, the first turbojet ever to run. It promptly sped up out of control, even after the fuel was shut off. Near panic …

Open the feed