Industry

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.

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

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

It’s incredibly hard to deliver drugs to the right organ, especially to reach the brain. Tiny gas-filled spheres that burst on command could change that.

Sports solved a problem that nearly killed television.

Europe’s cutting edge firms are falling far behind the American frontier because of restrictive labor laws.

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

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

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

If we ever want to live in space, we need to work out a way of creating artificial gravity.

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.

Airbus is an example of successful industrial policy and the rare European company that is better than its American rival. Could its success be copied elsewhere?

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

Keeping the grid stable requires overbuilding generating capacity, driving up costs. Batteries fix that.

Radiology combines digital images, clear benchmarks, and repeatable tasks. But replacing humans with AI is harder than it seems.

We disinfect water before we drink it. Germicidal ultraviolet could make airborne disease as rare as those carried by water.

Brain implants are letting people move, speak, and interact with machines using only their thoughts. The first FDA approvals may arrive within five years.

What do cryogenics, butterfat tests, and genetic data have in common? They’re some of the reasons behind the world’s most productive dairy cows. Here’s how it all started.

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

Pour-over coffee has long been popular with coffee enthusiasts, but it frustrated coffee shops because it takes so long to make. That’s changing.

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.

Libraries contain books, yes. But they also contain latex rubber, carbon fiber fabrics, and graphene aerogel. And in some materials libraries you can cut, cast, drill, sand, scrape, and sculpt too.

Inventing new materials is only the first step. Getting them into mass production and use is just as hard.

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

Silk is stronger than steel or kevlar. We are already using it to transport vaccines without cold chains and make automatically dissolving stitches. What else could it be used for?

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.

The earth’s core is hot. So hot, that if we drilled deep enough, we could power the world millions of times over with cheap, clean energy, supporting renewables when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. But getting there is tough.

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.

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.

Plastic is eating the roads. It might be a cleaner, quieter, ready-made alternative to asphalt for the next generation of paving.

Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence are forcing skeptics to eat their words. We should take its risks seriously too.

Nanotechnology sometimes sounds as much like science fiction as artificial intelligence once did. But the problems holding it back seem solvable, and some of the answers may lie inside our own bodies.

We may not have flying cars but we do have incredible information technology. We’re mismeasuring the huge benefits it is bringing.

A documentary from Stripe Press that follows the evolution of a rudimentary gaming network between friends in Cuba into a DIY internet that serviced most of the island.

Gas heating is bad for the environment. But home-built heat pumps aren’t perfect either.

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.

Could an asteroid wipe out human civilisation like it may have eliminated the dinosaurs? Big asteroids come along extremely rarely and our monitoring systems are effective and well funded.

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.

Many have argued that innovation develops in a simple linear fashion – from research to experimentation to engineering.

New technologies can be dangerous, threatening the very survival of humanity. Is economic growth inherently risky, and how do we maximize the chances of a flourishing future?

In spite of major technological progress, tech is often envisioned in the media with pessimism and dread.

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?

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.