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 Xi'an joins the timekeepers
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 1915 Çanakkale Bridge, or the span whose length was chosen on purpose
04
Locks & Keys
Six thousand years of mechanisms for excluding people, with one of history's best rivalries at its centre.
05
Maps
Ten thousand years of humans drawing the world — from Babylonian clay tablets to satellite imagery.
06
Phones
A 150-year story: from Bell shouting at Watson to foldable AI-powered supercomputers in a pocket.
Latest 400 MHz and the birth of 6G
08
Writing Systems
Every way humans have figured out how to freeze speech onto a surface — cuneiform to Unicode.
Latest Nüshu: the script women kept
09
Video Games
Arcade, console, PC, handheld, mobile — all one medium, from OXO on the EDSAC to the handheld revival.
Latest The Steam Deck, or how Valve put thirty years of PC gaming in a jacket pocket
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 Generative adversarial networks: invented overnight in a Montreal brasserie
12
Cryptography
The long argument between hiding things and finding things — Caesar cipher to post-quantum standards.
Latest RFC 10024: the TLS handshake that runs two hard problems at once
14
Software Architecture
The evolving answer to 'how do we organize code at scale?' — structured programming to LLM orchestration.
Latest The ground beneath the agent
15
Programming Languages
How humans learned to talk to machines — starting with Ada Lovelace writing instructions for a machine that didn't exist yet.
Latest Swift: Apple's secret language, four years in the making
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.
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 Calcio storico: the first printed rulebook for a team ball game
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 Isle of Man TT 1907: the race that Britain couldn't hold