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 Peter Henlein's pocket watch, or how time learned to travel
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 Sydney's Iron Lung
04
Locks & Keys
Six thousand years of mechanisms for excluding people, with one of history's best rivalries at its centre.
Latest No springs: Emil Henriksson's disc detainer lock, Helsinki, 1907
05
Maps
Ten thousand years of humans drawing the world — from Babylonian clay tablets to satellite imagery.
Latest Al-Idrisi's silver map, or how a Norman king bought the world
06
Phones
A 150-year story: from Bell shouting at Watson to foldable AI-powered supercomputers in a pocket.
Latest Apple Intelligence, or the phone that learned to write back
07
Money
From cowrie shells to Bitcoin — every century has a moment it redefined what money is.
Latest The Federal Reserve, or the duck hunt that never happened
08
Writing Systems
Every way humans have figured out how to freeze speech onto a surface — cuneiform to Unicode.
09
Video Games
Arcade, console, PC, handheld, mobile — all one medium, from OXO on the EDSAC to the handheld revival.
Latest Half-Life, or how Valve put the story inside the corridors
10
Computing
From pebbles in sand trays to the machines that now hold the world together — told one milestone at a time.
Latest The Mother of All Demos, or the ninety minutes nobody was quite ready for
11
AI
The long road to machines that reason — from Aristotle's syllogisms to today's frontier models.
Latest Backpropagation, 1986: the algorithm that revived neural networks
12
Cryptography
The long argument between hiding things and finding things — Caesar cipher to post-quantum standards.
13
Code Editors
Every program that other programs are written in — TECO to Cursor.
Latest Visual Studio Code: how a failing browser editor became the one everyone uses
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 Ford's moving assembly line: 12.5 hours to 93 minutes
17
Coffee
From wild Ethiopian berries to Yemeni qahveh khanehs to the espresso machine — six centuries of the drink that wired the modern world.
Latest A large shop in Tahtakale: Istanbul's first coffeehouse
18
Sports
From Neolithic wrestling pits to the modern Olympic stadium — how humans turned play into organised competition, and competition into civilisation.
Latest The last Olympiad, 393 CE
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.