History

Continental drift is as fundamental to geology as natural selection is to biology. Why did it take us hundreds of years to discover it?

Large swaths of America’s cities were originally underwater. We stopped half a century ago, but there is plenty more land left to take.

Childbirth may be the most painful thing a person can experience, but we have the technology to numb the pain.

In 1688, England swept away the encrusted vetocracy that had held back economic growth for centuries. Could we do the same today?

Rats have conquered nearly every place on earth where humans live. Only Alberta soldiers on.

Most flags used to be ugly. They were probably better that way.

For three hundred years, Japan enjoyed enviable stability and peace. All it took was locking up its warlike samurai elite in the world’s least efficient city.

In the 1940s, scientists made a discovery now fundamental to biology: genes are encoded in DNA. The story involves bacteria, dead mice, and a kitchen cream separator.

How a grasshopper caused the 1873 panic, and why recessions are usually just bad luck.

What Americans take to be a borrowed European tradition turns out to be a national style all of their own.

The traditional European apartment city has declined almost everywhere. There is one big exception.

‘Artificial’ didn’t scare Americans in the 19th century. Why does it scare them now?

Benjamin Spock told mothers in the mid-twentieth century to buy six dozen cloth diapers and a covered pail. Within a decade, both were obsolete.

Most ancient architectural traditions have withered, but one is enjoying a golden age: Hindu temple architecture.

Wheeled vehicles existed for 5,000 years before someone thought of running a bus service.

By betting on extreme ultraviolet lithography long before it worked, ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips.

Britain gave an elite group of engineers sweeping power and massive resources to deliver a nuclear power revolution. But their nuclear dreams crumbled.

Instant coffee seems unremarkable. It’s just powder and hot water. But making it work took decades.

In 1918, fifty systems supplied London’s electricity. Turning these into a grid required war, nationalization, and an act of engineering insubordination.

Sports solved a problem that nearly killed television.

How a single unappetizing shrub became dozens of different vegetables.

Communism had reforming optimists too. Understanding why they failed can help today’s reformers to avoid the same fate.

No person should get excited about a blank wall. But your wall at home is a reminder that most advancements are almost entirely invisible.

Many Victorian cities grew by tenfold in a century. Could ours ever do the same?

The scientific and technological battle against bad bread had a role in women’s liberation.

The first vaccine was a lucky accident. Now we can design new vaccines in weeks, atom by atom.

Long before modern science, Europeans learned to see their own time as an age of invention rather than decline.

It is often suggested that modern viewers dislike painted reconstructions of Greek and Roman statues because our taste differs from that of the ancients. This essay proposes an alternative.

Quartz helped Japan’s watchmakers nearly drive Switzerland’s watch industry out of business. But the Swiss fought back.

English prose has become much easier to read. But shorter sentences had little to do with it.

It was once legal to build almost anything, everywhere. Then, in the space of a few decades, nearly every city in the Western world banned densification. What happened?

For centuries it was a poison. Then colchicine rewrote treatment for gout, heart disease, and later, the debate over drug exclusivity.

In 1965, married American women did 34 hours of housework weekly. By 2010, that had fallen to 18 hours. The dishwasher wasn’t the only cause, but it certainly helped.

Lead paint was banned in the late twentieth century. Before that, it was outcompeted by a cheap and safe alternative.

Antibody therapies are four of the world’s ten best selling drugs. If they were cheaper, they could prevent millions of deaths from rabies, malaria, and dengue.

France built 40 nuclear reactors in a decade. Here’s how they did it, and how the world can follow their lead today.

Commuter trains often stop at the edge of cities. Short tunnels can link them up, creating metro networks for a fraction of the cost of building them from scratch.

Inflation targeting is now standard in central banking. But it began with an offhand comment and a political gamble in New Zealand – long before economists took it seriously.

Lead has been all but eliminated in most of the developed world. Doing the same for the rest of the world might not be difficult.

Ordinary yellow pineapples were once so precious they were rented for display at dinner parties, but centuries of innovation made them commonplace.

Land value taxes are once again becoming a popular all-purpose solution to housing issues. But implementing them in early 1900s Britain destroyed the then-dominant Liberal Party.

Life in the state of nature was less violent than you might think. Most of our ancestors avoided conflict. But this made them vulnerable to a few psychopaths.

The Hanseatic League united merchants to bargain with kings, blockade cities, and even win wars. But when technology changed, defections began and the coalition fell apart.

New York’s skyscrapers soar above a century-old steam network that still warms the city. While the rest of the world moved to hot water, Manhattanites still buy steam by the megapound.

When the future arrived, it felt… ordinary. What happened to the glamour of tomorrow?

Horses bled for antivenom, crabs drained for endotoxin tests, and silkworms boiled for silk. Science can now replace these practices with synthetic alternatives — but we need to find ways to scale them.

Airports and cities may face delays and rising costs, but cruise ships keep breaking records. They show what can still be built.

Buildings are not just art – they are the places people live in, work in, and experience every day. True functionalism combines utility and beauty for the people who use it most.

Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and vastly cheaper than mined diamonds. Beating nature took decades of hard graft and millions of pounds of pressure.

How we calculate inflation has always been a subject of debate. Small changes that might seem trivial can lead to enormous changes in how well-off we think we are.

We may be close to rediscovering thousands of texts that had been lost for millennia. Their contents may reshape how we understand the Ancient World.

It has taken almost 60 years to bring traffic congestion pricing to New York. This is the story of how politicians and advocates built the coalition it needed to finally happen.

Britain had its fastest ever house price growth not in the 2020s but in the 1970s. Houses then were also getting smaller and worse. The problem was a lack of supply.

Unwinding Russian serfdom took half a century. To eventually do it in the face of powerful opposition took a remarkable approach that let peasants vote themselves into freedom.

We used to dig up roads to put trains underneath – cheaply. Ever-better tunnel boring machines have made the disruption this causes unnecessary.

Asbestos was a miracle material, virtually impervious to fire. But as we fixed city fires in other ways, we came to learn about its horrific downsides.

War is hell. But by allowing more effective states to rule productive regions, it may have been a catalyst for Europe’s early modern advancement.

Mathematics was the cornerstone of the Industrial Revolution. A new paradigm of measurement and calculation, more than scientific discovery, built industry, modernity, and the world we inhabit today.

Today’s world requires vastly more copper than you could imagine, and the world of electric vehicles will require even more. That means finding new ways to find and extract copper from the earth.

Building a state is not a matter of copying first world institutions. It is a tough process of deals and compromises. 19th century Mexico is a good example.

The West has been below replacement fertility once before. Then came the Baby Boom. Understanding that boom may help us deal with today’s bust.

The history of attempts to reform planning in Britain is proof that political willpower is not enough: you need to be smart, not just brave.

Thomas Edison is often accused of not having invented the things he gets credit for. He did something even harder: he built the systems needed to get them to market.

Cheap, safe nuclear power is possible, but is all but prohibited in most Western countries. A regulatory sandbox for fission could shake us out of our regulatory sclerosis.

As climate change threatens crop yields, we need a second Green Revolution – one that, this time, is driven by genetic engineering.

France was once Europe’s superpower, thanks above all to its enormous population. Its decline coincided with a collapse in its birth rate – now we know why.

We have learned to fear plutonium – one of the world’s most useful materials. But as long as you don’t eat it, you’re probably safe.

Though we tend to see history as just one political event after another, it’s technology and ideas, not politics, that change our lives the most. History should reflect that.

Americans famously love to sue one another. Are out of control product liability lawsuits the to blame for the crash of the personal aviation industry?

When America’s economy overtook Britain’s a century ago, it remade the world order. How it happened is still debated.

The world’s first round-the-world solo yacht race was a thrilling and, for some, deadly contest. Its contestants’ efforts can teach us about the art of maintenance.

Outdated forms of peer review create bottlenecks that slow science. But in a world where research can now circulate rapidly on the Internet, we need to develop new ways to do science in public.

Until recently, roads were shared between a messy mix of cyclists, stagecoaches, carts, horses, and pedestrians, with no dominant user.

History’s most famous innovation prize—the longitude rewards—is misunderstood. Innovation prizes are best at promoting refinements, not revolutions.

A monstrous plan to build major motorways through some of London’s greatest neighborhoods fell apart. But the price was the birth of the NIMBY movement, and a permanent ceiling on Britain’s infrastructure ambitions.

Polyester went from being the world’s most hated fabrics to one of its favorites. It’s so successful that many people don’t even realize they’re wearing polyester today.

Duels can be brutal and even lethal. But duels emerged in societies around the world for an important reason: to control and manage violence, not just to celebrate it.

The story behind humanity’s greatest environmental success is too rarely told and too often taken for granted. This is how humanity fixed the ozone layer and why it matters.

Electrical interference has restricted what humans can observe with telescopes. To make leaps as a species, now’s the time for us to build a telescope on the far side of the moon.

Before grinding mills were invented, the preparation of flour for food was an arduous task largely carried out by women for hours every day. How did it affect their lives and why does it remain a tradition in some places even today?

Throughout history, states struggled to maintain power, having to rely on private agents and enforcers to fund themselves and govern their citizens.

For a time in recent history, R&D labs seemed to exist in a golden age of innovation and productivity. But this period vanished as swiftly as it came to be.

Although Viktor Zhdanov’s name is little known today, he spearheaded one of the greatest projects in history. Who was he and what did he do?