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1,432 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 9 of 24.

  1. Why the Subaru badge shows six stars of the Seven SistersSubaru is the Japanese name for the Pleiades, the cluster also called the Seven Sisters. Tradition holds that one sister cannot be seen, which is why the badge carries six stars. …
  2. The carmaker behind Subaru also builds the middle of Boeing's wingsSubaru Corporation is known for cars, yet its aerospace arm makes the centre wing sections of Boeing 777 and 787 airliners, plus military helicopters and trainer aircraft for Japa…
  3. The gas behind the smell of a burnt match also guards wineStrike a match and the sharp whiff that follows is sulfur dioxide. Volcanoes pour it out by the million tons, it fills the thin air of Jupiter's moon Io, and Roman winemakers burn…
  4. An online diary site invented the comment box and friends-only postsTwo features now baked into every social network, the reader comment and posts visible only to friends, were first dreamed up by Open Diary, a late-1990s community of people keepi…
  5. Every speck of soot hides tiny grains of diamond and graphiteThe black grime from a candle flame or a diesel exhaust carries a surprise: soot always contains nanoparticles of graphite and diamond, a quirk chemists call gemmy soot. It forms …
  6. Springfield, Massachusetts gave America basketball and its first dictionaryIn 1891 a Canadian teacher named James Naismith invented basketball in Springfield, Massachusetts, which is why the city calls itself Hoop City. It has another nickname too, the C…
  7. A Scottish clergyman's 1816 engine now runs silent submarinesIn 1816 a Scottish minister, Robert Stirling, patented an engine meant to rival steam. It needed no boiler, burned nothing inside and made almost no noise. For a century it mostly…
  8. Stoichiometry is chemistry's bookkeeping, and atoms never go missingA chemical reaction can rearrange atoms but never create, destroy or transform them. Every atom of carbon, hydrogen or oxygen that goes in must come out. That strict accounting, c…
  9. Stone once raised twelve-storey homes, and builders are teaching it new tricksIn the 1690s people lived in stone apartment blocks twelve storeys high. Today stone mostly hangs as a thin decorative skin on concrete frames, even though many kinds outperform c…
  10. Sintering fuses powders into solid parts without ever melting themSqueeze loose snow into a hard snowball and you have performed sintering. The same principle, where particles bond under heat or pressure while staying solid, lets factories shape…
  11. The Smart car began as a Swatch boss's dream of a watch on wheelsIn 1982 Nicolas Hayek, head of the company behind Swatch, imagined a tiny, stylish two-seater that buyers could personalise like his watches. Volkswagen signed up and then backed …
  12. The word scientist was invented in 1833 and met a cool receptionNewton, Galileo and Galvani never called themselves scientists, because the word did not exist. William Whewell coined it in 1833, modelled on artist, after members of a British s…
  13. A self-driving car can change its automation level mid-journeyOne car might count as Level 3 while keeping its lane on a highway below 100 km/h, then drop to Level 2 as it speeds up. SAE's widely used scale rates who carries responsibility i…
  14. Chip sales hit a record 791.7 billion dollars in 2025Bell Labs licensed the transistor for just 25,000 dollars after its 1948 invention. By 2025 global chip sales had reached a record 791.7 billion dollars, up 25.6 percent in a year…
  15. A heart condition ended Carroll Shelby's driving and launched the CobraCarroll Shelby won Le Mans in 1959, then angina from a congenital heart defect forced him out of the cockpit after 1960. Within two years he was fitting Ford V8 engines into light…
  16. Old 78 rpm records were pressed from a resin made by insectsBetween 1921 and 1928, Europe's record industry used 18,000 tons of shellac to press 260 million discs. That resin comes from a tiny female insect, the lac bug, which leaves it on…
  17. Sikkim climbs from 280 metres to the world's third-highest summitIndia's second-smallest state rises from 280 metres on its southern border to 8,586 metres at the top of Kangchenjunga, the third-highest mountain on Earth. Sikkim packs 28 peaks,…
  18. The Morris Minor was sawn in half lengthways and widened by four inchesIn late 1947, with the factory already tooling up, Alec Issigonis decided his new small Morris looked wrong. He had the prototype cut down the middle and the halves pushed apart u…
  19. The world now has over 1.5 billion motor vehicles, up from 250 million in 1970In 1970 the world had about 250 million motor vehicles. By 1986 the count topped 500 million, and by 2023 it had reached around 1.55 billion, with growth now driven by rising owne…
  20. The Oldsmobile Rocket 88 set the muscle car formula back in 1949The idea was simple: drop a maker's biggest engine into a smaller, lighter, cheaper car. Oldsmobile did it in 1949, fitting the 303-cubic-inch Rocket V8 from its luxury 98 into th…
  21. Saab named its first car after the aircraft that came before itSaab's first car was called the 92 because the company's previous product, the Saab 91, was a single-engine training aircraft. Founded in 1937 to build warplanes for neutral Swede…
  22. SAIC's Volkswagen Santana went from three local parts to over 90 percentIn 1987 the only Shanghai-made parts in a Volkswagen Santana were the tyres, radio and antenna. By 1998 more than 90 percent of its components came from local suppliers. That tran…
  23. Salar de Uyuni is flat enough to calibrate satellites from spaceAcross roughly 10,582 square kilometres, the surface of Bolivia's Salar de Uyuni varies in height by less than a metre. That extreme flatness, a bright surface and clear skies mak…
  24. Scania began as a bicycle maker, and its griffin logo sat on a chainsetScania's griffin comes from the coat of arms of the Swedish province of Skåne, and it once sat at the centre of a three-spoke bicycle chainset, a nod to the Malmö firm's beginning…
  25. Was the Mitsubishi Starion named after a star, a horse, or a mispronounced stallion?Mitsubishi insisted Starion joined star and Arion, the horse of Greek myth linked to Hercules. Others claimed Japanese engineers simply stumbled over the word stallion, and an ear…
  26. Why the Montreal Protocol won ratification from all 198 partiesAgreed on 16 September 1987, the Montreal Protocol set out to phase out the chemicals eating away at the ozone layer. Every one of its 198 parties, 197 states plus the European Un…
  27. The word moped came from a Swedish journalist, not motor-velocipedeIn 1952 the Swedish journalist Harald Nielsen blended motor and pedaler into moped. The popular story that it comes from motor-velocipede is wrong. Early mopeds genuinely needed t…
  28. The same cheap oil fills transformers, glosses Swedish Fish and ages poker chipsMineral oil is a clear, odourless by-product of refining crude oil into petrol. Because it neither conducts electricity nor absorbs water and has almost no taste, it turns up in s…
  29. Minerva sprang fully armed from a split skullRoman myth says Jupiter swallowed the Titaness Metis to stop a prophesied child from overthrowing him. Inside him she gave birth and forged armour, and the hammering gave him such…
  30. Early minivans were deliberately sized to fit through a garage doorIn the late 1970s Chrysler set out to build a small, affordable van that drove like a car. Its 1984 Plymouth Voyager and Dodge Caravan stood six feet tall or less so they would fi…
  31. Mitsubishi's 3000GT came with spoilers that moved by themselvesAt speed, the 1990s Mitsubishi 3000GT automatically extended its front and rear spoilers, part of a package that also included four-wheel steering, all-wheel drive, adjustable sus…
  32. The MGB hid a 1947 engine inside a thoroughly modern bodyWhen MG unveiled the MGB in September 1962, its body was built as a single stressed shell rather than bolted to a separate chassis, a modern approach its Triumph rivals had not ad…
  33. Michael Dukakis rode the subway to work as governor of MassachusettsThroughout his second spell as governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis took the subway to his office every day, and Bostonians still credit him with renovating the city's train…
  34. Car tyres, fleece jackets and tea bags all shed microplasticsMicroplastics are plastic particles between a thousandth of a millimetre and 5 millimetres across. Some are made small on purpose, like the microbeads in face scrubs. Most come fr…
  35. The Mercedes 300 SL got gullwing doors because ordinary ones would not fitThe famous upward-swinging doors of the Mercedes-Benz 300 SL were not a styling gimmick. Its lightweight tubular frame ran so high along the cabin that the top tube sat level with…
  36. Mercedes-Benz is named after a racing enthusiast's daughter, not a founderNeither Gottlieb Daimler nor Carl Benz was called Mercedes. The name came from the daughter of Emil Jellinek, a director of Daimler's firm who ordered racing cars built to his own…
  37. The Mercedes S-Class letter simply meant special, and the meaning kept driftingBefore Mercedes-Benz ranked its cars into tidy classes, an S after a model number just meant special, from the German Sonderklasse. It was stuck on whatever seemed upmarket at the…
  38. The Mercedes W124's single wiper stretched to reach the windscreen's cornersA normal wiper sweeps a simple arc and misses the top corners of the glass. The Mercedes W124, built from 1984 to 1997, used one blade on an off-centre mechanism that pushed it ou…
  39. Mercury climbs the food chain, concentrating most in the biggest predatory fishSmall organisms absorb a little mercury, the fish that eat them store more, and the hunters at the top carry the most. This build-up, called biomagnification, is why tuna and swor…
  40. Buying a company can mean buying its shares, its assets, or a shellWhen one firm swallows another, the deal's legal shape matters as much as its price. Buy the shares and you inherit every old liability. Buy only the assets and you can leave the …
  41. The Me 163 Komet remains the only rocket fighter ever flown operationallyIn 1941 a tailless German rocket plane descended from glider designs became the first piloted aircraft to top 1,000 km/h in level flight. Yet the Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet could …
  42. McDonnell Douglas joined a cash-poor airliner maker with a military jet specialistBy 1967 Douglas Aircraft had order books full of airliners yet was reckoned to be under a year from bankruptcy, with its jets months behind schedule. McDonnell, a fighter maker wi…
  43. The McLaren F1 began as a sketch drawn at an airport gateWaiting for a flight home from the 1988 Italian Grand Prix, Gordon Murray sketched a three-seat sports car with the driver sitting dead centre. He pitched it to McLaren boss Ron D…
  44. McLaren's P1 hybrid used an electric motor to erase turbo lagTurbocharged engines hesitate for a moment before the boost arrives. McLaren's P1 solved that by letting an electric motor fill the gap instantly, giving a combined 903 horsepower…
  45. Chios built its mastic villages with no street-level doors to guard a tree resinUnder Ottoman rule, a sticky resin from a shrub on the Greek island of Chios was worth its weight in gold. Villages that produced it were walled like fortresses, hidden from the s…
  46. A journalist's offhand wish in 1976 became the best-selling two-seat roadster everIn 1976 a Motor Trend writer named Bob Hall told Mazda's research chief that nobody built the cheap, wind-in-your-hair British sports car anymore, and somebody should. The executi…
  47. The first Miata revived the small roadster by stripping out almost every luxuryWhen Mazda showed the MX-5 in Chicago in February 1989, the cheapest version had no power steering, no power windows, no stereo and no air conditioning. That spartan approach kept…
  48. The fourth MX-5 went smaller and lighter while rivals kept growingMost new car generations put on weight. Mazda went the other way with the fourth MX-5, cutting 100 kg and 105 mm from its predecessor so the roadster weighed roughly a tonne again…
  49. The first RX-7 was so smooth it needed a buzzer to warn of redlineA piston engine shakes and roars as it nears its limit. The rotary engine in Mazda's first RX-7 spun so smoothly that drivers could hit 7,000 rpm without noticing, so Mazda fitted…
  50. A hidden cockroach car kept Mazda's rotary engine alive into the RX-8In the late 1990s Mazda had shelved its rotary sports car plans. A small team kept working anyway, cramming the engine into a stretched MX-5 they nicknamed the cockroach car. Thei…
  51. Mazda had to tame the devil's fingernails before its rotary engine could workWhen Mazda first tested a Wankel rotary in the early 1960s, the seals at the rotor tips vibrated so hard they gouged ripples into the housing. Engineers called the scars devil's f…
  52. One litre of maple syrup starts as 20 to 50 litres of sapA maple tree gives only about seven percent of its sap in a season, and that sap is mostly water, around two to five percent sugar. Producers boil away the rest until the liquid r…
  53. Martha's Vineyard once threatened to leave Massachusetts and join HawaiiIn 1977, angry at losing their guaranteed seat in the state legislature, residents of Martha's Vineyard talked seriously about seceding. Vermont and Hawaii both offered to take th…
  54. Maserati's trident comes from the Neptune statue in Bologna's main squareThe trident on every Maserati grille was borrowed from the Fountain of Neptune in Bologna's Piazza Maggiore, a nod to the city where five brothers started the firm in 1914. Since …
  55. The oil-shock agency: how the IEA grew from crisis response to clean energyThe International Energy Agency was founded on November 18, 1974, in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis, to keep oil flowing through emergencies. Its members must still hold 90 days …
  56. International Harvester: from McCormick's reaper to Farmall tractors and Navistar trucksCyrus McCormick showed off his horse-drawn reaper in 1831. Seven decades later his family firm joined Deering and three smaller rivals in a merger financed by J. P. Morgan, creati…
  57. Navistar to International Motors: the truck maker left standing after Harvester's breakupWhen International Harvester sold its farm machinery business in 1985, what remained was a truck and engine maker renamed Navistar on February 20, 1986. Over the following decades…
  58. ISO is not an acronym: the Greek-rooted name behind 25,000 global standardsPlenty of people assume ISO stands for International Standardization Organization. It doesn't. Because the full title would shorten differently in each language, the founders sett…
  59. What makes a car luxury, and why the segment's leaders keep changingNo hard line separates a luxury car from a premium one; the label rests as much on a badge's image as on fine materials and careful assembly. Over a century, leadership has swung …
  60. Madison, Wisconsin: a capital chosen on paper and sold with buffalo robesIn 1836 Wisconsin's territorial lawmakers chose a capital that existed only as a surveyor's plan on an isthmus between two lakes. James Duane Doty had lobbied hard, handing out bu…

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