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1,432 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 8 of 24.

  1. The Ford Focus nearly lost its name to a German magazineFord meant to keep calling its new small family car the Escort, settling on Focus only in early 1998. That July a Cologne court, acting for the publisher Burda, told Ford it could…
  2. Ford's centenary supercar couldn't be called GT40 because someone else owned the nameFord built the GT to celebrate its 100th birthday in 2003, and the left headlight cluster was even shaped to read 100. It was meant to revive the GT40, winner at Le Mans four year…
  3. Ford's electric F-150 drew 200,000 reservations, then production stoppedWhen Ford revealed the battery-powered F-150 Lightning in May 2021, 69,500 people put down deposits within four days, and reservations passed 200,000 by year's end. One dealer eve…
  4. The Ferrari 488 takes its name from the volume of each cylinderEach of the eight cylinders in the Ferrari 488's engine displaces roughly 488 cc, hence the name. It was the first mid-engine Ferrari since the F40 to use a turbocharged V8, and i…
  5. Only three Ferrari Californias were ever built with a manual gearboxAcross ten years and 17,349 cars, Ferrari's California was sold almost entirely with a dual-clutch automatic; just three buyers, one of them in Britain, ordered a manual. The car …
  6. The original Fiat 500 moved Italy on just 13 horsepowerThe 1957 Nuova 500 was under three metres long, carried a two-cylinder air-cooled engine in its tail and produced a mere 13 horsepower. It still became one of the first cars desig…
  7. Mass-produced glass fibre began with an accidental blast of airIn 1932 Games Slayter, a researcher at Owens-Illinois, aimed compressed air at a stream of molten glass and found he had made fibres. That accident launched mass production of gla…
  8. Marcus Aurelius funded the first endowed professorships in AD 176In AD 176 the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius paid for permanent teaching chairs in Athens, one each for the Platonist, Aristotelian, Stoic and Epicurean schoo…
  9. London trades more dollars than New York and more euros than EuropeIn 2009 London handled 36.7 percent of the world's currency trading, an average of $1.85 trillion a day. More US dollars changed hands there than in New York, and more euros than …
  10. Flemish settlers once filled the Azores and half of an English portFrom 1460 about 2,000 Flemings settled the newly found Azores, which became known as the Flemish Islands, and the city of Horta takes its name from a Flemish explorer. Back in Eur…
  11. Ford built the Capri as Europe's own answer to the MustangFord wanted to repeat its Mustang triumph in Europe, so it hired the Mustang designer Philip T. Clark to shape a sleek fastback on humble Cortina parts. It was meant to be called …
  12. Too much fertiliser can suffocate a lake from the top downFeed a lake too well and it can die. Fertiliser washing off fields, sewage and exhaust fumes load water with nutrients, algae explode across the surface, and when they rot, bacter…
  13. Evelyn Waugh spent his Oxford years feuding, drinking and barely studyingBefore Decline and Fall and Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh was an Oxford undergraduate who boasted he did no work, joined a hard-drinking avant-garde set and started a feud wi…
  14. China's first carmaker was built with Soviet help in ChangchunChina's car industry began with a truck. In 1953, as Beijing launched its opening five-year economic plan, First Automotive Works broke ground in Changchun, a city reportedly pick…
  15. Ferdinand Porsche built a petrol-electric hybrid car back in 1901More than a century before hybrids became fashionable, a young Austrian engineer bolted a Daimler petrol engine to a generator feeding electric motors in the wheel hubs. Ferdinand…
  16. The Ferrari 250 GTO went from $18,000 to $70 millionWhen new, a Ferrari 250 GTO cost $18,000, and Enzo Ferrari personally vetted who could buy one. Only 36 were built. In June 2018 a 1963 example changed hands privately for $70 mil…
  17. Ferrari's 288 GTO was built for a racing series that vanishedFerrari developed a turbocharged racing version of its 288 GTO, then watched the championship it was aimed at get cancelled before the car ever competed. The road car survived any…
  18. The first Ferrari 308s had bodies made of fibreglassFerrari's 308 GTB arrived at the 1975 Paris Motor Show with a surprise under the red paint: its body was glass-reinforced plastic, keeping weight to about 1,050 kg. Barely two yea…
  19. Engineers spend more than half their working hours handling informationPicture an engineer and you might imagine someone bent over drawings or machinery. Studies of how engineers actually use their time tell a different story: more than half of it go…
  20. Planetary gears borrowed their layout from ancient models of the heavensInside many gearboxes, small planet gears circle a central sun gear while meshing with a ring around the outside. The arrangement is named after epicycles, the circles on circles …
  21. Astronomers pin their star maps to noon on January 1, 2000The sky's coordinate grid slowly drifts, because Earth's axis wobbles. So astronomers anchor their numbers to a fixed moment, an epoch. Most catalogues today use noon on January 1…
  22. The ebook's inventor is disputed, with rival claims from a Jesuit to a Spanish schoolteacherAsk who invented the ebook and you get a crowded answer. A Jesuit priest digitising Thomas Aquinas in 1946, a Spanish teacher with an air-powered reading machine in 1949, and an I…
  23. The Edwardian golden age was largely invented afterwards by nostalgic survivorsPicture hats, garden parties and endless summer afternoons: that image of Edwardian Britain took shape mostly in the 1920s, as people looked back at their childhoods across the gu…
  24. Electric cars ruled the roads once before, until the electric starter killed themAround 1900 electricity was a favoured way to power a car: quiet, clean and free of crank handles. Electric cabs carried London's first motorised fares, and in 1899 an electric ca…
  25. Norway's roads went electric years before the rest of the world noticedIn 2021, 86.2 percent of new cars sold in Norway were plug-ins, the highest share anywhere. Worldwide, plug-ins took just 9 percent of new car sales that year. Where people buy el…
  26. GM built over a thousand electric EV1s in the 1990s, then took them backBetween 1996 and 1998 General Motors made 1,117 EV1 electric cars, leasing 800 of them to California drivers. When the leases ran out in 2003, GM recalled and discontinued the car…
  27. Nearly every microprocessor ever made hides inside a machine rather than a computerIn 2009 an estimated 98 percent of all microprocessors produced went into embedded systems, not desktops or laptops. These are small dedicated computers buried in washing machines…
  28. Government testers once got fake gadgets from made-up firms certified by Energy StarIn March 2010 government auditors submitted invented products from fictitious companies to Energy Star, and the scheme approved them. It was mostly self-certification at the time.…
  29. Two clutches, one gearbox: how a dual-clutch transmission shifts without a pauseA dual-clutch gearbox splits its gears into two teams. One clutch looks after the odd gears, the other the even ones, so while you accelerate in third, fourth is already waiting. …
  30. Duesenberg built America's most powerful car, then vanished in the DepressionIn 1929 a Duesenberg Model J put out 265 horsepower, more than any other car of its day, and reached 116 mph. Buyers got only a chassis and engine and hired coachbuilders for the …
  31. The dynamo bootstraps itself using leftover magnetism in its own ironEarly generators relied on permanent magnets, which capped how much power they could make. The dynamo replaced them with electromagnets fed by the machine's own output. A faint tr…
  32. Earth Day got its name from an ad man whose birthday was April 22Organisers of a 1970 environmental campaign had a problem: the word teach-in felt stale. Julian Koenig, the advertising writer behind Volkswagen's Think Small, came back a week la…
  33. Dry cleaning is wet after all, just with a liquid that isn't waterDry-cleaned clothes do get soaked, only in an organic solvent rather than water. The trade supposedly began after a French dye-works owner noticed in 1825 that lamp oil spilled on…
  34. The De Tomaso Pantera married Italian styling to a Ford V8 and sold through Lincoln-MercuryAn Argentine-born carmaker in Modena, an American designer at Ghia and Ford's dealer network came together in 1970 to make the Pantera. Most of the roughly 7,000 built were sold i…
  35. Beam weapons never run out of ammunition, but physics keeps blurring their aimA directed-energy weapon hits with focused energy instead of a bullet, whether that means laser light, microwaves, particle beams or sound. Its appeal is simple arithmetic: a Brit…
  36. Before building their own cars, the Dodge brothers built most of Henry Ford'sHorace and John Dodge started in 1900 as a Detroit machine shop, and for Ford's original Model A they supplied the whole chassis, leaving Ford to bolt on a body and wheels. A $10,…
  37. The Dodge Caravan was designed to fit in a garage and ended up introducing cup holdersWhen Chrysler started sketching a family van in 1977, one requirement was modest: it had to fit inside an ordinary garage. The result, launched in November 1983, rode low like a c…
  38. Chrysler's modern Cobra had no door handles, no airbags and a V10 shaped by LamborghiniIn 1989 Bob Lutz asked Chrysler's designers what a modern AC Cobra might look like. The answer was a two-seater with zip-up vinyl windows, no exterior door handles and an eight-li…
  39. Dongfeng began as a truck works hidden among forty valleys, safe from air raidsChina's planners wanted a military truck factory that bombers could not easily find. In 1969 they settled on a village of 100 people in Hubei, tucked among more than 40 shallow va…
  40. Daimler Truck builds more heavy commercial vehicles than any rivalFreightliner rigs on American highways, FUSO trucks in Japan, BharatBenz in India and Thomas Built school buses all answer to one German headquarters in Leinfelden-Echterdingen. D…
  41. Car dashboards are named after boards that stopped mud splashing carriage driversDrive a gig through a puddle and the horse's hooves fling muck straight at you. Carriage builders fitted a splash-board to stop it, a term recorded from 1826, and Americans soon c…
  42. Decatur, Illinois, once processed a third of the world's soybeansFor much of the 20th century a mid-sized city on the Sangamon River proudly called itself the Soybean Capital of the World. The grain processor A. E. Staley popularised soy oil, m…
  43. Deloitte grew from one London accountant into the world's largest professional services networkWhen the Great Western Railway needed someone to check its books, William Welch Deloitte became the first person appointed as an independent auditor of a public company. He had op…
  44. Humid air weighs less than dry air, despite how muggy days feelA cubic metre of air at sea level and 15 °C has a mass of about 1.225 kilograms under the International Standard Atmosphere, roughly one eight-hundredth of the same volume of wate…
  45. Denza began as a BYD and Daimler partnership before BYD took full controlIn 2010 a Chinese battery specialist and a German carmaker with more than 125 years of history set up an equal joint venture to build electric cars. Sales disappointed for years. …
  46. London's Pall Mall hosted the first reliably dated department store in 1796Behind glazed partitions on Pall Mall, shoppers in 1809 could move from furs and fans to silks and lace, then jewellery, French clocks, perfume and finally dresses. Harding, Howel…
  47. Depleted uranium is the dense leftover from enriching nuclear fuelMaking one kilogram of reactor fuel enriched to 5 per cent uranium-235 takes 11.8 kilograms of natural uranium and leaves around 10.8 kilograms behind. That residue, depleted uran…
  48. The Daily Mail once paid aviators to cross the Channel and the AtlanticPunch thought the offer was absurd and mocked it with a £10,000 prize for flying to Mars. Yet by 1910 both of the Daily Mail's early aviation prizes, for London to Manchester and …
  49. Britain's Daimler began in a disused Coventry cotton millAn engineer building a cableway at the 1889 Bremen Exhibition spotted tiny railcars driven by Gottlieb Daimler's motors. Frederick Simms befriended the German inventor, secured Br…
  50. Citroën began with a cheap patent for fishbone-shaped gears spotted in PolandShortly after graduating in 1900, André Citroën travelled to Poland, his late mother's homeland, and watched a carpenter cutting gears with a fishbone pattern that ran quieter and…
  51. The Citroën DS drew 12,000 orders on its first day in 1955Citroën spent 18 years secretly developing a successor to the Traction Avant. When the DS 19 appeared at the Paris Motor Show on 6 October 1955, buyers placed 743 orders within 15…
  52. Class action lawsuits descend from medieval English villages suing as oneFrom about 1200, English courts routinely let whole villages, parishes and guilds sue or be sued as a single body, and nobody questioned it. Roads, messengers and royal officials …
  53. How deep a coal seam lies decides whether miners dig a pit or a tunnelCoal lying less than about 61 metres down is usually stripped from the surface, while seams below 90 metres generally mean going underground. Thickness can override depth, though:…
  54. A British bid for red dye left Australia smothered in prickly pearIn 1788 Captain Arthur Phillip picked up cactus plants crawling with cochineal insects in Brazil, hoping to break the Spanish and Portuguese grip on red dye for British uniforms. …
  55. Mussels anchor themselves with glue threads and can starve attackers in themA marine mussel squeezes a liquid into a groove on its foot that hardens in seawater into tough, elastic threads. Those threads, the beard cooks pull off, hold it on wave-battered…
  56. The Chevrolet Vega won Car of the Year and then became a cautionary taleMotor Trend named the Chevrolet Vega its 1971 Car of the Year. Within a few years the same subcompact was notorious for rust, overheating engines and a stream of recalls, all trac…
  57. The Chevrolet Volt used only half its battery so the battery would lastEngineers at General Motors gave the first Volt a 16 kWh battery and then deliberately locked away half of it, never charging above 80% or draining below 30%. The sacrifice was me…
  58. The safe refrigerant gas that turned out to be eating the ozone layerIn 1930 Thomas Midgley Jr. inhaled a lungful of his new refrigerant gas before the American Chemical Society and blew out a candle with it, proving it was neither toxic nor flamma…
  59. Chrysler once handed its entire European business to Peugeot for a single dollarWalter Chrysler built his company in 1925 from a failing carmaker, and within about a decade it was America's second-biggest seller. Since then it has pioneered hydraulic brakes a…
  60. Studebaker built wagons for decades before it trusted the carIn 1937 Studebaker planted 5,000 pine trees on its Indiana test track so that pilots overhead could read the company name. By then the firm had spent most of a century making hors…

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