• Tech History of the Internet In 1993 the internet carried just 1% of the world's two-way telecommunications traffic. By 2007, that number had… 4 min read · 8 facts
• Tech World Wide Web In 1993, the entire World Wide Web fit inside about 50 websites. Here's the tiny design trick that let it explode into… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Enigma Machine Germany believed its unbreakable code kept every secret safe. Poland had already read it years before the first shot… 3 min read · 9 facts
• Tech Stuxnet A piece of malware that never once touched the internet still managed to physically wreck machinery inside a guarded… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Tech ARPANET Decades before the modern internet, a defense-funded experiment tried to send one small command between two computers… 4 min read · 9 facts
• Tech Transistor A tiny crystal, two gold wires, and six weeks of tinkering in a New Jersey lab quietly launched the most-copied object… 3 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Integrated Circuit A sliver of silicon smaller than your fingernail can hold billions of tiny switches — and it all began with one… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Moore's Law In 1965, one engineer made a casual guess about computer chips that the entire tech industry spent 60 years turning… 4 min read · 8 facts
• Tech Global Positioning System (GPS) A weapons system built to guide nuclear missiles now rides quietly in your pocket - and it only works because… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Public-Key Cryptography Two total strangers can agree on a secret code out in the open, with the whole world watching, and cracking it is… 5 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Unix It started as a joke aimed at the operating system its own creators had just walked away from — then quietly outlasted… 4 min read · 9 facts
• Tech Linux In 1991, a college student in Helsinki uploaded a hobby kernel he swore was nothing 'big and professional.' Today it… 3 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Bluetooth The tech inside your earbuds is named after a 10th-century Viking king — and its logo is literally his initials carved… 3 min read · 9 facts
• Tech Wi-Fi The technology connecting billions of devices got its name from a branding agency, and it does not actually stand for… 3 min read · 8 facts
• Tech QR code It was invented to track car parts in a Japanese factory, and its maker gave the patents away for free. Now those… 3 min read · 8 facts
• Tech Email The first network email was sent years before the Internet existed, and one engineer's keyboard choice in 1971 still… 3 min read · 8 facts
• Tech Submarine Communications Cable Almost everything you do online travels through a garden-hose-thick tube lying in the dark on the seabed — not through… 3 min read · 9 facts
• Tech Radar A German inventor patented it in 1904 and nobody cared. Thirty years later, a rushed experiment aimed at a BBC… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Morse Code The letter E is a single dot because E is the most common letter in English — the code was optimised for speed 180… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Refrigeration Houston and Las Vegas exist as big cities partly because someone worked out how to move heat backwards — the single… 3 min read · 9 facts
• Tech Emoji The whole thing started with 176 tiny pictures drawn on a 12-by-12 pixel grid in 1999. They now hang in the Museum of… 3 min read · 9 facts
• Tech Barcode It was invented in 1952 by extending Morse code into thick and thin bars — then waited more than twenty years for… 3 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Velcro A Swiss engineer walked his dog in 1941, came home covered in burrs, and put one under a microscope. The result held… 3 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Large Language Model One 2017 paper called "Attention Is All You Need" set off everything that followed. Five years later a chatbot built… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Smartphone It replaced the camera, the map, the music player, the calculator and the phone book. By 2020, three quarters of… 3 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Artificial Intelligence The field is seventy years old, and twice the money and the excitement vanished completely. What restarted it in 2012… 3 min read · 8 facts
• Tech The Printing Press: The Machine That Mass-Produced Ideas One workshop in Mainz turned into 270 cities and 20 million books in a single lifetime. Meet the machine that broke… 3 min read · 8 facts
• Tech Docker (software) It started as a side project inside a struggling hosting company, and it ended the sentence "but it works on my… 5 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Lithium-ion battery The thing powering the device in your hand won a Nobel Prize in 2019, nearly thirty years after it went on sale, and… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Password A capital letter, a number, a symbol, changed every 90 days. Those rules came from one government document in 2003… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Video game The video game industry is now three times the size of global music and four times the size of film. It started with a… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Tech 3D printing In the 1980s, owning a 3D printer cost more than 300,000 dollars. By 2020 a decent one cost under 200, and doctors… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Robot The word robot comes from a Czech word for forced labour, and it first appeared in a 1920 play about factory-made… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Television The first moving face ever shown on television belonged to a ventriloquist's dummy, because real human faces did not… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Elevator Elevators existed for centuries before anyone trusted them. What changed everything was not the box that goes up, but… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Printing press Movable type existed in China four centuries before Gutenberg. What made his version spread was an alphabet small… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Air conditioning The first modern air conditioner was not built for comfort. It was built to stop humidity from warping paper at a… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Computer For over three centuries, a computer was a person, usually a woman, doing arithmetic by hand. The machine stole the… 3 min read · 8 facts
• Tech Car The first self-propelled road vehicle ran on steam and was built for the French army. Today more than 1.6 billion cars… 3 min read · 9 facts
• Tech Concorde It crossed the Atlantic in under three hours, stretched about 30 centimetres in flight, and only 20 were ever built… 3 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Bicycle There are more than a billion of them, and they are the most efficient way a human has ever found to travel. They even… 3 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Telescope The oldest record of a telescope is not a star map but a 1608 patent from a Dutch spectacle maker. Here is how a few… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Steam engine Steam-powered gadgets were known in the first century AD, yet it took until 1712 for an engine to do steady, useful… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Hot air balloon In 1783, two men floated over Paris on nothing but hot air, after the king had wanted criminals to go first. How does… 5 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Laser When it was invented, the laser was called "a solution looking for a problem." Today it scans barcodes and carries… 5 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Jet engine In the 1950s a jetliner engine pushed with about 5,000 pounds of force. By the 1990s one engine managed 115,000. Here… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Maglev A train with no wheels touching the track once hit 603 km/h. Yet after more than a century of work, only six of these… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Hovercraft The hovercraft was born from a coffee tin, a cat food tin and a hairdryer. Then the Navy, the Air Force and the Army… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Instagram It started life as a failed check-in app called Burbn. Two years later it sold for a billion dollars with thirteen… 3 min read · 9 facts
• Tech Holography Cut a photo in half and you lose half the picture. Cut a hologram in half and you still see the whole scene. Here is… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Jet pack Classic rocket belts run out of fuel after about 30 seconds. Then a Swiss pilot strapped jet engines to a pair of… 5 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Escalator England's first moving staircase opened at Harrods in 1898, and the ride was so unnerving that staff at the top… 5 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Airship In 1923, a single American airship held most of the world's helium. Ten years later, airships were carrying fighter… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Submarine Bend a submarine's hull just one inch out of round and it can lose over 30 percent of the load it can take, which is… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Typewriter When typewriters were new, some people who got a typed letter felt insulted, as if the sender thought they couldn't… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Shinkansen In 2016, the average Japanese bullet train ran just 24 seconds late, natural disasters included. Its strangely long… 5 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Fresnel lens It has been called "the invention that saved a million ships", and its first big test was watched by a king from 32… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Lighthouse Some lighthouse lenses once floated on pools of liquid mercury, and a few radioactive-powered lighthouses in Russia… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Wind turbine One blade on the biggest offshore wind turbines can stretch 153 meters, and when ice builds up on turbine blades… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Sewing machine Sewing a man's shirt by hand took about 14 and a half hours. A machine did it in roughly one, and the fight over who… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Camera obscura Poke a tiny hole in the wall of a dark room and the sunny world outside appears on the opposite wall, upside down and… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Tech Solar panel The first solar cells, in 1839, were too weak to power anything, so people used them to measure light. Between 1970… 4 min read · 10 facts