An unfinished chronicle of the history of things.
Short essays on single milestones across nineteen categories — one new post per category per week. Written, researched, and illustrated end to end, then read aloud.
01
Shoes
Ten thousand years of footwear, from Fort Rock sagebrush sandals to carbon-plate supershoes.
02
Timepieces
From shadow on sand to atomic clocks — humanity's chase of ever-more-precise time.
Latest Breguet's wristwatch, or the timepiece that arrived fifty years too soon
03
Bridges
Civil engineering's most dramatic form — log across a stream to mile-long cable-stayed mega-structures, with a spectacular collapse or two along the way.
Latest The Iron Bridge, or how a Shropshire gorge became the template for everything that followed
04
Locks & Keys
Six thousand years of mechanisms for excluding people, with one of history's best rivalries at its centre.
Latest Soref's laminated padlock, or how a Milwaukee workshop closed the security gap
05
Maps
Ten thousand years of humans drawing the world — from Babylonian clay tablets to satellite imagery.
Latest The Cassini survey: four generations to map a kingdom
06
Phones
A 150-year story: from Bell shouting at Watson to foldable AI-powered supercomputers in a pocket.
08
Writing Systems
Every way humans have figured out how to freeze speech onto a surface — cuneiform to Unicode.
Latest One script for all China: the Qin standardization, 221 BCE
09
Video Games
Arcade, console, PC, handheld, mobile — all one medium, from OXO on the EDSAC to the handheld revival.
Latest Sega Genesis and the console wars: how a hedgehog took half the market from Nintendo
10
Computing
From pebbles in sand trays to the machines that now hold the world together — told one milestone at a time.
11
AI
The long road to machines that reason — from Aristotle's syllogisms to today's frontier models.
Latest Samuel's checkers player: the program that coined machine learning
12
Cryptography
The long argument between hiding things and finding things — Caesar cipher to post-quantum standards.
Latest The Zimmermann Telegram, or how a decoded cable brought America into the war
14
Software Architecture
The evolving answer to 'how do we organize code at scale?' — structured programming to LLM orchestration.
15
Programming Languages
How humans learned to talk to machines — starting with Ada Lovelace writing instructions for a machine that didn't exist yet.
16
Cars
From Cugnot's steam fardier to self-driving electric vehicles — two and a half centuries of the machine that reshaped how humans live, work, and move.
Latest Benz Patent-Motorwagen: a wall in Mannheim and the birth certificate of the automobile
17
Coffee
From wild Ethiopian berries to Yemeni qahveh khanehs to the espresso machine — six centuries of the drink that wired the modern world.
18
Sports
From Neolithic wrestling pits to the modern Olympic stadium — how humans turned play into organised competition, and competition into civilisation.
Latest Beni Hasan's wall of wrestlers: Egypt's oldest sports record
19
Motorcycles
From Roper's steam velocipede to the Honda CB750 superbike — the machine that stayed upright through physics and rewired the freedom of the open road.
Latest Perreaux's steam velocipede