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Every post on the site, newest first.
53 posts
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The barbed-spring padlock
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The Pont du Gard, or how Rome moved a river across a gorge
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Ctesibius's clepsydra, or the water clock that fixed itself
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The wheel that replaced the operator
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Roman caligae, or why the empire marched on hobnails
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Plankalkül, or how to invent a programming language during an air raid
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Boole's algebra of thought
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Cuneiform: the script that could say your name
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What the flowchart hides
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QED, or how fifteen years of mathematics became a search command
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Ada Lovelace's Notes on an engine that never ran
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Spacewar!, or the game no one thought to sell
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The Caesar cipher, or how a shift of three kept Rome's orders from Gallic hands
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The shell that circled the world
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The Roman warded lock
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Anaximander's world map, or how a philosopher drew the whole earth
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The Arkadiko bridge, or the oldest arch still standing
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The undertaker who put telephone operators out of a job
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Babbage's Difference Engine, or the most expensive one-seventh of a calculator
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Leibniz's calculus ratiocinator, or let us calculate who is right
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The scytale, or how Sparta encrypted its orders
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Greek krepis and kothornos — the shoe as theater
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The Babylonian world map, or how an empire drew the edge of everything
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The Egyptian clepsydra, or how priests told time without the sun
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The bridge at Girsu, or the world's oldest crossing
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The Mesopotamian shekel, or how a weight became money
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Structured programming: sequence, selection, iteration
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The letter that killed the goto
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TECO, or the editor that was also a programming language
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Tennis for Two, or the physicist who didn't notice what he'd done
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OXO, or the video game that Cambridge kept to itself
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The New Haven exchange, or how a switchboard made from teapot lids wired a city
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Bell's telephone, or how nine words traveled down a wire
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Ada Lovelace's Note G, or the first program for a machine that didn't exist
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The Jacquard loom, or how a silk weaver programmed a machine
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Leibniz's Stepped Reckoner, or what a pedometer started
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Pascal's Pascaline, or how a teenager tried to spare his father from arithmetic
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The slide rule, or how a clergyman's shortcut ran the world for three centuries
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Napier's bones, or how a Scottish laird made multiplication optional
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Llull's Ars Magna, or how a troubadour built the first reasoning machine
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Al-Jazari's musicians, or the first machine you could reprogram
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Al-Khwarizmi, or how a name became a word
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The Antikythera mechanism, or the computer the sea kept
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The Prior Analytics, or the first argument written in letters
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Egyptian papyrus sandals — footwear as social code, c. 1500 BCE
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The abacus, or how humanity learned to compute with pebbles
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Ötzi's shoes, or the engineering in a glacier
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The Areni-1 shoe, and the art of making leather last
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The shadow clock, or how Egypt turned sunlight into hours
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Proto-cuneiform tokens: the first writing was a receipt
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The wooden lock, or the first machine for keeping people out
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Fort Rock sandals, the oldest shoes in the world
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The Abauntz map, or how a hunter scratched the world onto a stone