What Archimedes Did Two Thousand Years Before Newton
He used balance points to discover the volumes of curved solids, then proved them with strict geometry. The Greeks called it forbidden. He called it the Method.
Read the story →A theme
Invention
Things made, often by accident, that changed how the world worked.
5 stories in this theme.
The Decade Chicago Lifted Itself Out of the Mud
In the 1850s the central business district of Chicago was raised four to fourteen feet on jackscrews while continuing to operate. People kept eating at the hotels.
Read the story →The Greek Computer at the Bottom of the Sea
Sponge divers found a corroded lump of bronze in 1901. It took a hundred and twenty years to admit what it actually was.
Read the story →The Smell That Built a City
London's sewer system was funded in eighteen days. It took a heatwave, a river of feces, and a Parliament that could not breathe.
Read the story →The Lighthouse That Outlived Its Own Civilization
For sixteen hundred years the Pharos of Alexandria threw light over a sea. Three earthquakes finished what nothing else could.
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