1 Oliver Evans and an early American steam powered amphibian

[steamboat, transportation, steam engine, auto, Oructor]



2 The Jacquard loom and the invention of the computer

[weaving, Babbage, cards, textile]



3 The monk who flew in 1005 AD

[flight, medieval, Firnas, glider, Benedictine, airplane]



4 Benjamin Thompson/Count Rumford and the conservation of energy

[heat, American Revolution, Lavoisier, thermodynamics]



5 The pendulum clock escapement and the merger of science and technology

[Bacon, Galileo, Huygens, Hooke, science]



6 Jouffroy: one of the first successful steamboat makers.

[Newcomen, France, d'Auxiron, transportation]



7 Fokker and the machine gun interrupter mechanism

[flight, war, WW-1, airplane]



8 Pittsburgh in 1816

[steamboat, iron, coal, industry, glass]



9 The Cistercian order and power technology

[Benedictines, water wheels, factory, religion, White]



10 The Medieval character of the wild West

[America, saddle, whiskey, log cabin, cowboy, White]



11 Electric lights in the 80 years before Edison

[arc light, incandescent, Grove, Swan, Davy, de la Rue]



12 A definition of the words: science, technology, and engineering

[techni, ingenuity]



13 Dionysius Lardner and early steam power technology

[handbook, conservation, coal, ecology, pyramids, environment]



14 John Fitch and the first commercially successful steamboat

[Fulton, Watt, Rumsey, Philadelphia, Kentucky]



15 Early inventions of the electric telegraph

[Morse, electrostatic, Watson, LeSage]



16 Homo Technologicus

[techni, technology, anthropology, tools]



17 Marc Isambard Brunel and his son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel

[Great Eastern, tunnel, Great Western, materialism]



18 How some contemporary poets saw the Industrial Revolution

[Shelley, Blake, Burns, Scott, literature]



19 The Crystal Palace and the great 1851 exhibition

[Paxton, Queen Victoria, Brunel, design, architecture]



20 Genetic mutations of wheat and the invention of farming

[emmer, anthropology, agriculture, genetics, grain, biology, mutation]



21 Santos-Dumont, Zeppelin, and the great airships

[Giffard, dirigible, balloons, flight, airplane]



22 The first American iron production in Saugus, Mass.

[nails, smelting, mill, forge, wrought iron, Colonial]



23 The light bulb and the vacuum tube

[Edison effect, Fleming, telegraphy, radio tube]



24 The wheel: a very difficult concept

[crank, rotational motion, invention]



25 NASA's "crawler transporter," the world's largest land transportation vehicle

[space, NASA, tracked vehicle]



26 Three-field crop rotation and the origins of Western technology

[agriculture, grain, protein, horse, ox, plow, White]



27 Vannevar Bush and the great Rockefeller Differential Analyzer

[analog, digital, computer]



28 The first American steam engine

[Hornblower, Schuyler, Adams, Colonial America, Franklin]



29 The Windmill: A device that has come, gone, and may come again

[Cervantes, Quixote, power, propeller, Watt]



30 Colonial America, 1776: A new nation of glorious amateurs

[Fitch, Barlow, Jefferson, Monticello, Franklin]



31 The century-long retention of masts and sails on steamships

[Savannah, Great Western, Monitor, Merrimac, transportation]



32 The Wright brothers battle for priority over Langley

[Aerodrome, Walcott, Curtiss, Abott, NASA, flight]



33 Perpetua Mobile and the Medieval mind

[perpetual motion, Bhaskara, power, machine]



34 The Douglas DC-3: an airplane for all seasons

[transportation, flight, Rockne, Fokker triplane, DC-1, DC-2, Shang-Ri-La]



35 Does war influence technological evolution? Some surprising facts

[airplane, speed, production, invention]



36 The Erie Canal

[transportation, Great Lakes, Buffalo, Hudson, Niagara, Jefferson, Gallatin, Clinton]



37 The first twenty years of transatlantic flights

[Zeppelin, Lindbergh, Alcock, Brown, Ortieg, transportation, Ryan]



38 The development of the seemingly uncomplicated window pane

[soda-lime, Alexandria, stained glass, crown glass, plate glass]



39 Balloonist Jean-Pierre Blanchard, the first barnstormer

[flight, Franklin, transportation, Jeffries, Washington, Philadelphia]



40 The invention of money -- an abstraction of goods and services

[talent, trade, coin, notes, computers, exchange, anthropology]



41 Frankenstein — the monster of our obsessiveness

[Shelley, Byron, Lardner, literature, Romantic, Wollstonecraft]



42 Our radar warning of the Pearl Harbor attack

[communications, war, Hulsmeyer]



43 Vespucci and the naming of America

[Columbus, Waldseemuller, exploration, geography, transportation]



44 The invention of the parachute

[Leonardo da Vinci, flight, Lenormand, Renaissance]



45 Fahrenheit and thermometry

[heat, science, Newton]



46 The clock as preparation for modern science

[Baroque, feedback, art]



47 Moment of inertia and satellite stability

[Landon, Sputnik, Explorer, space, NASA, Bracewell, failure, RCA]



48 The lowly, but not-so-simple, dressmaker's pin

[clothing, Cowper, Smith, robot, mass production, machine]



49 Some technology that we don't see when we first look

[horn, gears, 3-M, invention]



50 Mark Twain and the Paige Compositor

[Linotype, design, machine, Merganthaler, production, printing, function]



51 A short discourse on tunneling

[Whittier, aqueduct, canals, railroads, transportation, Hoosac, Brunel]



52 Man the measure — man the meter

[folklore, units, Watt, temperature, power, length]



53 Technology in Alexandria, ca. 200 BC

[Alexander, Euclid, Hellenistic, Archimedes, Ptolemy, feedback, water clock]



54 O'Shaughnessy and the Indian telegraph system

[Morse, Crimean war, Sepoy, communication, electricity]



55 How we name our machines

[flight, airplane, refrigerator, engine, machine, computer, steam engine, automobile]



56 An encounter with Einstein

[science]



57 Ceremony in the manufacture of a Samurai sword

[metallurgy, standards, forging, iron, steel]



58 Crossing the English Channel without ships

[flight, tunnel, Gossamer Albatross, Kremer prize]



59 The transatlantic telegraph cable

[Field, Gisborne, Great Eastern, Queen Victoria, Buchanan, communication]



60 A critique of Bushnell's invention of the submarine

[Turtle, Hopkinson, transportation, war, Colonial America]



61 The skyscraper and the great Chicago fire

[elevator, steel, Chicago, design, iron]



62 Joseph Stalin and Russian aircraft records in the 1930s

[flight, Tupolev, records, war]



63 Some thoughts about engineering systems

[design]



64 Rudolf Diesel and his wonderful engine

[engine, power, priority, internal combustion]



65 Some summary thoughts after the first 64 episodes

[Einstein, Edison, education]



66 Technologies that put an end to record-setting

[speed, aircraft, microwave, transportation]



67 The story of a failed airplane design — the XP-75

[design, Ford, Berlin, General Motors, Loren, flight]



68 A question of size — some notions about scale

[dimensional analysis, similitude]



69 Steam engines in England during the 18th century

[Watt, Savery, Newcomen, power, England]



70 Some thoughts on fame and fortune in technology

[Bible, Quixote, invention, Boelter]



71 The Guillotine and the democratization of death

[execution, France, Rumford, Lavoisier, death]



72 The invisible invention of the clock

[water clock, Honnecourt, di Dondi, time]



73 The tragic tale of Evariste Galois

[Napoleon, Ecole, algebra, group theory, mathematics]



74 Germs and the Broad Street Well

[Snow, Koch, Lister, cholera, medicine, disease]



75 On the rediscovery of lighter-than-air flight

[dirigible, Zeppelin, flight, aircraft, blimp, Hindenburg, transportation]



76 The alchemists and chemistry before the middle 19th century

[Aristotle, caloric, phlogiston, science]



77 Napoleon Bonaparte and iron construction in France

[Ecole, bridges, Eiffel, monuments]



78 The development of the bicycle

[automobile, Macmillan, hobbyhorse, transportation]



79 A horseless carriage offered to Anne Boleyn

[England, automobile, power]



80 On the absence of women in the history of technology

[Cowan, Pursell, Masters, engineering]



81 Two unsinkable ships: the Titanic and the Great Eastern

[Brunel, accidents, safety, invention]



82 Late 18th century competition among roads, canals and railways

[transportation, power, mines, mining]



83 Alfred Ely Beach's secret subway

[Tammany, Scientific American, New York, Tweed, transportation]



84 Thomas Sopwith's hundredth birthday

[flight, von Richtofen, transportation, war, aircraft]



85 The development of the helicopter

[Forlanini, da Vinci, aircraft, flight, transportation, Sikorsky, Cornu, autogyro]



86 The discovery of oxygen and scientific revolution

[Priestley, Lavoisier, Scheele, Kuhn, Dalton, chemistry]



87 John and Washington Roebling, and the Brooklyn Bridge

[Hegel, suspension bridge, construction]



88 A concern about computers and the redefinition of reality

[computer graphics, Torrance, movie]



89 On saying goodbye to lighthouses and cabooses

[obsolete, obsolescence]



90 Georg Cantor, the man who counted beyond infinity

[mathematics, set theory, science, infinity]



91 Liberty ships: an amateur takes over the trade

[transportation, war, construction, design, Kaiser]



92 Occam's razor and engineering design

[Shakers]



93 Teaching the American public to use the telephone

[Bell, telegraph, communication]



94 The Black boxing of technology

[education, invention]



95 On superconductors and steamboats

[Chu, invention, science, electricity, Fulton]



96 Streamlining the American public

[design, automobile, airfoil]



97 Medieval masons and their cathedrals

[medieval, stone, construction]



98 George Everett Hale and BIG telescopes

[Palomar, optical, optics, astronomy]



99 The hourglass: the poor man's clock, the poor man's metaphor

[timekeeping, Renaissance]



100 The invention and selling of the typewriter

[communication, Monaco, Remington, business]



101 Interchangeable parts

[design, manufacture, Franklin, Gutenberg, Whitney, guns, Ford]



102 Lord Byron's daughter, first computer programmer

[Babbage, Ada, analytical engine, literature, women]



103 Covering up Soviet technological disasters

[Russia, flight, safety]



104 Baroque violins, ice cream, and DC-3's

[design, flight, music]



105 Eighteenth century water wheel technology

[power, Pompadour, de Parcieux, turbine, Smeaton]



106 Stability: not always a virtue

[design, flight, aircraft, mechanics]



107 The wind and its technologies in the ancient mind

[literature]



108 Trench warfare and the technology of war

[Tuchman, guns, automatic weapons, Maginot]



109 High-pressure steam engines and transportation

[railroad, Watt, Cugnot, Trevithick, power]



110 Nevil Shute: engineer and author

[literature, airplanes]



111 Topsell's history of four-footed beasts and serpents

[zoology, printing]



112 The failure of the Comet jet-liner, and Nevil Shute's anticipation of it.

[literature, airplanes, safety, design]



113 Galileo, Torricelli, and von Guericke; and the idea of a vacuum

[Savery, Magdeburg, pumps, power, steam engine]



114 The brief day of the great flying boats

[flight, transportation, Martin, Hughes, seaplanes]



115 Guido da Vigevano's handbook for a crusader

[war, medieval, design, invention]



116 Ceredi's re-invention of Archimedes' pump

[invention, Galileo, Aristotle, philosophy]



117 The Korean "Turtle Boat" — the first ironclad

[war, Japan, naval, navy, design]



118 The English and 18th century ballooning

[England, Lunardi, flight, transportation, invention]



119 J. Willard Gibbs, America's greatest scientist

[science, thermodynamics, Yale, physics]



120 Su-Sung's wonderful 11th century water clock

[China, timekeeping, escapement]



121 The Second Law of Thermodynamics and time's arrow

[LaChatelier, Braun, entropy]



122 Diderot's Encyclopedie and the French revolution

[dictionary, encyclopedia, France, literature]



123 Recovering from the Black Death

[disease, medicine, Renaissance, printing, timekeeping]



124 The camera obscura, waiting for someone to provide the film

[photography, France, lithography, Kepler, Niepce]



125 On finding the first internal combustion-engine driven auto

[Benz, de Rochas, Marcus, invention, transportation]



126 Some thoughts on liability and reasonable risk

[safety, Hamurabi, nuclear]



127 Black American inventors before the Civil War

[McCormick, Whitney, cotton gin, reaper, Davis, Blair]



128 The Liberty Bell

[American Revolution, metallurgy, casting]



129 The mad scientist — an unshakable image

[Frankenstein, Faust, Marlowe, Shelley, literature]



130 Urban archaeology provides a window to the past

[anthropology, Brown, Ashton villa, Galveston, mansion]



131 Henry Adams ponders the Virgin and the Dynamo

[science, medieval, Langley, exhibition]



132 The Kansas City, Hyatt-Regency skywalk failure

[safety, design]



133 How the 1903 Cadillac brought American cars to England

[automobile, transportation, interchangeable]



134 A ghostly Japanese navy at the bottom of Truk Lagoon

[war, shipwrecks]



135 On learning to use coal

[power, metallurgy, wood]



136 Herbert Hoover: Humanitarian and Engineer

[Stanford, mining, geology]



137 Music-making: the first human technology

[Bible, art, anthropology, Shakespeare, Stevens]



138 Albrecht Durer: Germany's answer to Leonardo

[printing, perspective, geometry, engraving, art, Renaissance]



139 Herbert and Lou Hoover meet Georgius Agricola

[Stanford, mining, geology, metallurgy, Renaissance, women]



140 Technological half-truths and technical literacy

[heat, thermodynamics]



141 Benjamin Franklin's experiments in heat transfer

[thermodynamics, light, science, radiation]



142 Max Jakob: a breath of fresh air in a new land

[war, Einstein, heat transfer, science, Germany]



143 L.M.K. Boelter: A great engineering educator.

[heat transfer, education]



144 Lord Kelvin's miscalculation of the age of the earth

[Bible, science, heat transfer, Fourier, Darwin, Heaviside]



145 General Electric and the product-driven innovation cycle

[design, manufacturing, Langmuir, electric light bulb]



146 Garrett A. Morgan: a Black American inventor

[traffic, safety]



147 Hydrogen, hot air balloons, 19th century chemistry

[science, Montgolfier, Charles, phlogiston, flight, transportation]



148 Continuous-aim firing: a diagnosis of an ill-received idea

[navy, war, design, invention, guns]



149 Thoughts on the extent of technological change in one generation

[generation, tecnological, change, information revolution]



150 Are we alone in the universe?

[astronomy, Spielberg, Sagan, radio telescopes]



151 Rediscovering the sunken Union Monitor

[Civil War, Merrimack, navy, gun turret, shipwrecks]



152 John Atanasoff's invention of the digital computer

[Sperry, design, Honeywell, Mauchly, ENIAC]



153 Flying the Aegean Sea in Daedalus' slipstream

[flight, transportation, MIT, design, Greece]



154 Charles Richard Drew and the development of blood banks

[Black, plasma, medicine]



155 Some musings on the nature of experimental proofs

[science, Fresnel, Poisson]



156 Robert Fulton's last ship, the Steam Battery catamaran

[navy, war, invention, design, propeller]



157 Thomas Crapper: The man who didn't invent the flush toilet

[valve]



158 Lewis Latimer, a Black pioneer of electric lighting

[Edison, Maxim, Bell]



159 Lowell, Massachusetts: a "Utopian" industrial city

[textile mills]



160 The first Red Cross Ambulance

[medicine, war, Red Cross, Solferino, Dunant, Barton]



161 The Indian canoe — a perfected technology

[design, boat, transportation]



162 Otto Lilienthal and Orville Wright — one died and the other lived

[flight, gliders, Chanute]



163 Numismatics — coins as a historical record

[anthropology, money]



164 Computers and the human mind

[neural network]



165 Changes in hand-tools for wood-working, through the Industrial Revolution

[Industrial Revolution, wood working, hand tools]



166 Galileo's experiment on the Leaning Tower of Pisa

[science, Aristotle, mechanics]



167 The sewing machine in American life

[Singer, Willcox-Gibbs, Saint, design]



168 The Lunar Society and 18th century revolution

[Darwin, Watt, Priestley, Boulton, Wedgwood, Herschel, Smeaton]



169 Some trivia in the history of technology and its implication

[velcro, valves, Joule]



170 Technologies of the Texas Republic

[medicine]



171 Electric power comes to Telluride, Colorado

[generator, Edison, Pelton, mining]



172 Herbert J.L. Hinkler, Australian almost-hero of aviation

[flight, transportation, Australia]



173 On being shaped by a new computer — or by any new technology

[machine, computer, technology]



174 Nikola Tesla — another sort of creative mind

[Yugoslavia, Edison, Westinghouse, electricity, Rayleigh]



175 Some 2500 year old Chinese bells harbor a secret

[music, anthropology, acoustics]



176 On wanting to build my own crystal set

[radio, communication, Marconi]



177 Two wealthy men: Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller

[iron, steel, oil, business, money, industry]



178 Reflections on growing up in the media

[radio, communication, war]



179 On the Invention of the electric chair

[death, Tesla, Edison, Faust, electricity]



180 Figuring out the value of Pi

[mathematics, Bible]



181 The Industrial Revolution comes to America

[Evans, Crystal Palace, millwright, industry]



182 Black and White in pre-revolutionary Virginia

[Jefferson, religion]



183 Robert Hooke, Isaac Newton, and a change in science

[Bacon, Pope, Royal Society]



184 Count von Zeppelin learns about flying in St. Paul, Minnesota

[balloons, dirigible, Hindenburg, flight, transportation]



185 Justus Liebig and the first research laboratory

[Gay-Lussac, dye, chemistry, Edison, benzene, aniline]



186 Fourier, Egypt, and modern applied mathematics

[science, heat transfer, Napoleon, France]



187 In which I learn that technology is communication

[design]



188 We build a dirigible to get to the gold rush

[America, Giffard, balloon, transportation, flight, Porter]



189 The two Eiffel towers

[Statue of Liberty, France, construction, Iron]



190 The secret dome of St. Paul's Cathedral in London

[Wren, construction, design, architecture]



191 Hoover Dam: "Replenish the earth and subdue it."

[water management, mead, power, hydroelectric]



192 John Tyndall: measuring sound without electronics

[Spenser, music, science, flames]



193 A picture of New York Harbor painted in 1852

[artist, Lane, ships, steamboats, transportation, Gold Rush]



194 On being unreasonable: a repudiation of common sense

[Gilbert, invention]



195 Radio Days — a tribute to early radio

[Wells, radio tubes, Hindenburg, communication, media]



196 A visit to the art museum — artists and technology

[Remington, art, sculpture, modern art]



197 The Holland Tunnel — a story you've heard before

[construction, ventilation]



198 Dionysius Lardner looks at a rapidly changing world

[handbooks, power, steam, coal, conservation, water power]



199 Ford's star-crossed Eagle boat

[ship, war, design, navy, production, design, construction]



200 In which we study an old machinist's handbook

[Nicholson, millwright, Industrial Revolution, Dickens]



201 The rush to build the Western riverboats

[safety, steamboats, Pittsburgh, transportation]



202 A look at Edwardian patents: 1901-1902

[perpetual motion, Fleming, radio tube, flight]



203 The Encyclopaedia Britannica from 1768 to now

[dictionary, encyclopedia, Industrial Revolution]



204 Robert A. Millikan, a man who didn't want to be a physicist

[science, Roentgen, Curie, Planck]



205 Cyrus McCormick and the 1876 Centennial Exhibition

[America, machinery, Lincoln, industry, business, invention]



206 Astronomy, the pole star, and the wheel

[Bronowski, Easter Island]



207 George Seldon, Henry Ford, and Clyde Barrow

[automobiles, transportation, Duryea, Gibbs]



208 Technology, art, and the Upper Paleolithic period

[invention, anthropology, archaeology, Neanderthal, Cro Magnon, tools]



209 Joseph Priestley: Ben Franklin's "honest heretic"

[Industrial Revolution, oxygen, Aristotle, Lunar Society, Boulton, Watt, Darwin, Wedgwood, religion]



210 Maxim's airplane

[Ader, flight, transportation, Wright, invention]



211 Anesthesia, another "Who got there first?" question

[medicine, chemistry, Long, Wells, Victoria, Morton]



212 Niepce, Daguerre, and the first 30 years of photography

[camera obscura, chemistry]



213 The Pythagorean "feminist" philosophers

[Theano, Pythagoras, Plato, mathematics, geometry, Greek, women]



214 Cognac grapes growing from Texas rootstocks

[Munson, wine, agriculture, botany]



215 Hypatia's mathematics

[Hellenistic, astrolabe, densitomiter, Alexandria, women]



216 In which we watch books growing old

[library, paper, papyrus, printing, linen, parchment]



217 The saintly Witch of Agnesi

[Newton, Italy, mathematics, women, geometry, calculus]



218 The globe-girdling flight of Voyager

[Rutan, Yeager, transportation, aircraft, materials]



219 Emilie de Breteuil: only a mind in a gilded cage

[Newton, women, Voltaire, France, mathematics]



220 Pride goeth before the fall of the Quebec Bridge

[safety, steel construction, cantilever, Cooper]



221 Caroline Herschel: more than meets the eye

[women, astronomy, mathematics, Uranus, comets, nebulae]



222 A Good Crystal Ball is Hard to Find

[Watt, Edison, transportation, phonograph, communication]



223 Sophie Germain and French applied mechanics

[women, mathematics, LaGrange, Gauss, Eiffel]



224 Mary Fairfax Somerville

[women, mathematics, science, Babbage, Ada Byron]



225 Sonya Corvin-Krukovsky Kovalevsky

[women, mathematics, Weierstrass, mechanics]



226 Emmy Noether, the gentle mathematical powerhouse

[women, mathematics, algebra, Einstein, Weyl, Germany]



227 Some summary thoughts on women in mathematics

[Hroswitha, engineering]



228 The limestone quarries of Northern France

[pyramids, stone, cathedral, safety, construction]



229 Computer systems and railroad track widths

[standardization, design]



230 The round earth: a smaller world than the flat one

[Columbus, Pythagoreans, Aristotle, Eratosthenes, Egypt]



231 The real McCoy

[Black inventor, lubrication, railroads]



232 The ritual origins of technology

[Egypt, balance]



233 Balsa wood and composite materials

[design, construction, composite materials, boats, airplanes]



234 Dolly Shepherd — on parachutes, risk, and technology

[women, balloons, flight, Buffalo Bill, Garnerin, space]



235 Harrison's wonderful watch

[timekeeping, invention, clocks, navigation, Royal Society]



236 Norbert Rillieux and multistage evaporation

[Black inventor, agriculture, thermodynamics, Civil War]



237 Early submarines

[Verne, Turtle, transportation, war, ships, Fulton, Bauer]



238 The Momsen Lung, a technology that needn't have been

[safety, navy, submarines, design, Bauer, war]



239 Chester Carlson and the XeroX machine

[printing, communication, invention]



240 Mathematics is too hard for me to learn!

[education, mathematics, learning]



241 Giordano Bruno and the radicalization of Copernicus

[science, astronomy, religion]



242 The Chinese origin of the bombard

[gunpowder, war]



243 What ever became of Babbage's Analytical Engine?

[computer]



244 Cable cars: the right technology in the right place

[transportation, electric trolley, steam engine]



245 Delaunay Deslandes misses the Industrial Revolution

[plate glass, manufacturing, France]



246 The book on weirs from the Turriano Codex

[da Vinci, dams, water management]



247 Jean Piaget watches children analyze machines

[education, bicycles, psychology]



248 Ninety years before the Golden Gate Bridge

[Gold Rush, Fremont, Strauss, safety]



249 Amy Johnson — an improbable heroine

[Earhart, women, flight, transportation, aircraft]



250 Escalator: the magical stairways

[steam, exhibition, electricity, Otic, Reno]



251 The timber square set: a mining revolution in Virginia City

[invention, construction, Deidesheimer]



252 Archimedes' legendary death ray: Did it exist?

[Greek, war, navy]



253 Gaining a concrete understanding of cement

[Eddystone Lighthouse, plaster, Smeaton, tuff]



254 Charlie Taylor builds the Wright Brother's engine

[flight, invention, design, Ford]



255 The Chrysler Airflow: the Car of the Future

[design, automobile, transportation]



256 Reuleaux's kinematics: the soul of a machine

[kinematics, mechanics]



257 Charles Preuss maps the American West

[surveying, Fremont, Kit Carson, cartography]



258 Hieronymus Bosch's documentary demons

[art, pharmacy, chemistry, medicine, communication]



259 Surveying: a no-longer-recognizable technology

[surveying, surveyors]



260 150 years of the metric system of units

[dimensions, measurement]



261 Aesop's Fables and scientific illustration

[Gilbert, Gheeraerts, science, zoology]



262 Light, Experience, and the rise of 17th century science

[art, Hals, Pope, Newton, medicine]



263 The Garden of Eden in a computer simulation

[science]



264 Oliver Evans — revised version

[transportation, auto, steamboat, oructor amphibolos, vacuum]



265 In which Friederich Kekule sees snakes and the benzene ring

[science, invention, Liebig, architecture, chemistry, crime]



266 Galileo roughs upon the Aristotelian moon

[art, astronomy, Hariot, Donne]



267 An engine to drive the new dynamos

[electric generators, steam engines, steam turbines, Parsons]



268 Diving into an Etruscan shipwreck

[archaeology]



269 Mechanical ears in WW-II

[war, acoustics, sound, radar]



270 The Deep: Diving into the shipwreck of the RMS Rhone

[steamships, packets]



271 Mercer's mad museum of just-abandoned technology

[archaeology, anthropology, tools]



272 The railroads and standard time

[clocks, timekeeping]



273 Ice, diamonds, and the heat pipe

[Trefethen, invention, heat transfer, condensation]



274 The Luddites and thoughts about technological change.

[manufacturing]



275 The form and shape of things — of nature and cities

[nature]



276 Charles Proteus Steinmetz — brilliant engineer and would-be socialist.

[GE, electricity, technocracy]



277 The power output of you and of your favorite machine

[anthropology]



278 Of mummies and the North Pole

[Hellenistic, flight, transportation, invention]



279 The Smithsonian acquires a domestic hydraulic elevator

[Otis]



280 The wreck of the Cairo

[Civil War, ship, steamboat, gunboat, war, anthropology, archaeology]



281 van Rysselberghe's invention of long-distance telephone service

[electricity, communication, Bell, telegraph]



282 The Tacoma Narrows Bridge Failure — the reenactment of an old disaster

[safety, suspension bridge, accidents]



283 An 1869 Harper's article on flight

[transportation, ornithopters, Wright Brothers, internal combustion]



284 The aerial map: a dream that was a long time in coming

[photography, Daguerreotype, balloons, flight, surveying]



285 Oliver Evans: an American original

[millwright, manufacturing, steam engines, handbooks]



286 The musical instrument shop in Colonial Williamsburg

[violin, harpsichord, tools]



287 Some reflections on amateurs, professionals, and invention

[Goddard, Corelli, rockets]



288 Octave Chanute and the wedding of engineering with flight

[gliders, airplanes, engineering, Wright, transportation]



289 In which we watch women join the new technology of flight

[war, transportation, Wright, Curtiss, Scott, Clark, Quimby, Stinson]



290 Mapping the moon

[Galileo, Hevelius, Borman, astronomy]



291 The French horn and the industrial revolution

[music, invention, music, pipe]



292 The Scapa Flow ship cemetery

[war, navy, shipwrecks, Royal Oak]



293 Johann Joachim Becher, mercantilism, phlogiston, and gold

[science, alchemy, chemistry, metallurgy]



294 Hroswitha, Durer, and medieval feminism

[art, mathematics, science, women, literature, printing]



295 Putting a leap second in an elastic year

[timekeeping, cesium clock, calendars, standards, measurement]



296 The Anthropic Principle

[science, philosophy, Anaxagoras, Blake, Wheeler, anthropology]



297 Wieliczka Sol, the great salt treasure

[Poland, mining]



298 A prediction about aerial warfare made in 1909

[flight, transportation, Zeppelin, dirigible, guns]



299 Stereotomy: Mathematics, Masonry, and the trumpet squinch

[Architecture, construction, design, geometry]



300 The Gallerie des Machines and the 1889 Paris Exhibition

[France, Crystal Palace, Adams, Carnot, construction, iron]



301 The marriage of art with medical dissection

[medicine, Aristotle, da Vinci, Dickens, Twain]



302 On the purpose pursued by airplane inventors

[war, Wright]



303 The Battle of Lepanto and the last of galleys

[Cervantes, ships, war, galleasses]



304 In which Robert Fulton tries to build a submarine

[Turtle, Napoleon, steam, Bushnell]



305 Lisa Meitner, the reluctant mother of the atomic bomb

[science, chemistry, physics, radiation, women, war]



306 Mothers of invention: women inventing for women

[liquid paper, Nesmith, Newmar, Lamar, Baker, invention]



307 A visit to a home that was occupied for 230,000 years

[Peking Man, cave, anthropology, tools]



308 The Last of the 7 Wonders of the World, The Great Pyramid

[Colossus, Philon, Hellenistic, Sputnik, computer]



309 Hunter-gatherers turn into farmers in Roseburg, Oregon

[lumber, logging]



310 The Fairmount Waterworks in old Philadelphia

[Twain, turbines, hydraulics, pumps, steam, water wheels, Latrobe, Dickens]



311 The CycloCrane: half helicopter and half blimp

[balloons, dirigibles, flight, logging, invention]



312 Old technology faces new at the Battle of Hastings

[war, England, horse, armor, arrows]



313 We find the history of trolleys in the middle of a forest

[transportation, electric, cable car, railroads]



314 Hippocrates and the oath to do holistic medicine

[Hippocrates, medicine, Greek, human body, cutters]



315 The 1909 Sears-Roebuck catalog and 20th century America

[Montgomery-ward, manufacturing, typewriter, phonograph]



316 John, Washington, and Emily Roebling; and suspension bridges

[construction, wire rope, Lackawaxen]



317 Edwin Armstrong, FM radio, and the superheterodyne

[communication, electricity, radio tubes, Sarnoff]



318 Charles Lindbergh, Alexis Carrel, and the invention of the heart pump

[flight, medicine, artificial organs]



319 Galen, the driven Roman genius of experimental medicine

[Galen, experimental medicine, medical, dissection, Hippocratic]



320 On providing and elevator for the Eiffel Tower in 1889

[construction, Otis, exhibition, buildings]



321 About Galileo, China, and sunspots

[science, telescopes, Japan, astronomy]



322 Marriot's Avitor airship and the California Gold Rush

[transportation, flight, balloons, dirigibles, Porter]



323 Frozen-out wine, burnt wine, and the invention of brandy

[food, alchemy, chemistry, processes, liquor, beer]



324 The Chinese invention of seismography

[instrumentation, science, geophysics, earthquake]



325 Andreas Vesalius, renaissance artists, and experimental anatomy

[medicine, dissection, surgery, art, Shakespeare, da Vinci]



326 Sybilla Masters, the first and last Colonial woman inventor

[America, agriculture, fabric, weaving, patents, women]



327 Ambroise Pare turns butchery into humane surgery

[medicine]



328 We find a 2300 year old model airplane in the Cairo Museum

[Egypt, flight, transportation, Hellenistic]



329 Production and usury: trying to make money without making things

[production, invention, innovation]



330 In which we try not to "yield with grace to reason"

[Frost, Isaacks, Jefferson, desalination, engines, Second Law of Thermodynamics]



331 Greth's California Eagle and Baldwin's California Arrow fly over San Francisco

[flight, transportation, airship, dirigibles]



332 Teaching mechanics and science by involving student in the thought process

[education, Hudson, Casey, MacGyver]



333 Shipwrecks in the Great Lakes. The Northwest Passage

[Arabia, Sweepstakes, Huron, Superior, Michigan, Erie, Ontario, St. Lawrence]



334 Lucretius and modern atomic theory, 1900 years too soon

[science, Rome, physics, poem, poetry, Aristotle]



335 Erasmus Darwin, poet laureate of the Industrial Revolution

[poem, poetry, literature]



336 William Harvey, the doctor who unraveled blood flow

[heart, medicine, anatomy, Padua]



337 On life, death, and riding roller coasters

[Thompson, Astroworld, gravity, Texas Cyclone]



338 The brief bright day of the Clipper Ship

[transportation, steam, sailing]



339 Henry David Thoreau: technologist

[literature, lead pencils, invention, transcendentalists]



340 Unwilling Chinese pioneers of kite flight

[Marco Polo, balloons, Rozier, Montgolfier, Baden-Powell]



341 Scientific literacy: a many-sided problem

[education]



342 Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass": a photograph of America

[literature, camera, poem, poetry]



343 A 6000 year old roadway in neolithic England

[Stone age, construction, highway, transportation, tools]



344 Measuring the distance from Earth to the moon

[space, laser, instrumentation, accuracy]



345 Watching the space shuttle glow in the dark

[telescope, atmosphere, chemistry, kinetic theory, corrosion]



346 America learns consumerism

[advertising, design, retail sales]



347 Shrodinger's metaphysical cat

[physics, quantum, philosphy, reality]



348 The riddle of the camera and reality

[Holmes, Orvell, stereoptican, photography, manufacturing]



349 Morrel's California Ariel: a great forgotten dirigible failure

[flight, transportation, balloon, Zeppelin]



350 Robert Boyle, and his laboratory assistants: Hooke and Papin

[steam engine, pressure cooker, science]



351 Mapping Antarctica

[Amundsen, Byrd, geography, geology, South Pole, exploration]



352 The 15th century origin of the suction pump

[Columbus, sailing ships, mining, drainage, bilge, laboratory]



353 James Porteous and the invention of the Fresno Scraper

[California, American West, earth moving, heavy equipment, agriculture, civil engineering]



354 Thomas Burnet and the scale of geological time

[Newton, cosmology, science, geology, Gould, Earth, religion, Bible]



355 The remarkable level of engineering in the Neolithic stone age

[pyramids, Egypt, archaeology, construction, tools]



356 The folly of naming the first inventor

[light bulb, Edison, Grove, electricity, steamboat, Fitch, Davy, invention, Swan, de la Rue]



357 The 2nd Anniversary of The Engines of Our Ingenuity

[invention]



358 Giovanni Battista Morgagni: Father of anatomical pathology

[medicine, surgery, disease]



359 The Dolni Vestonice Venus: ceramic art of the Upper Paleolithic period in Czechoslovakia

[anthropology, archaeology]



360 Woodland's and Silver's invention of the bar code

[computer, laser, retail, information]



361 Water witching, dowsing, and the psychology of finding water

[Carolyn Kraus, water witching, drowsing, dowsers]



362 Reducing body temperatures for surgery: Hypothermic Circulatory Arrest

[medicine, blood]



363 Mapping the ocean floor

[geography, Magellan, Ross, Bache, Franklin, measurement, instrumentation, geology]



364 Abraham Trembley and the "Hydra" pylop

[botany, biology, zoology, science, reproduction]



365 The U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey measures America

[geography, instrumentation]



366 A.A. Milne's moral fables for an unproductive America

[Christopher Robin, production, literature, trade]



367 Diving into what was once a Minoan shipwreck, 4250 years ago

[archaeology, anthropology, Greece, Bronze age]



368 The size of things: How big or small is the world around us?

[astronomy, stars, science, earth, geology]



369 Civil War ironclads — a lot more of them than you thought

[military, ships, steamboats, guns]



370 Domenico Fontana moves a 327 monolith for Pope Sixtus V

[architecture, civil engineering, Egyptian obelisk, St. Paul's]



371 Martin Luther King shows us how the inventive mind works

[Black, race relations, nonviolence]



372 A sundial honors Kentucky's Viet Nam dead

[war, architecture, astronomy, memorial]



373 Flying like a bird: on mimicking life with machines

[biology, flight, airplane, design, invention, transportation]



374 The Cubitt treadmill: a prison "reform" that failed in America

[power, penology, sociology, mills]



375 On reaching the limits of smallness

[computers, calculators, nanometer, size, laser well, measurement, materials]



376 The inexorable leaning of the Tower of Pisa

[construction, foundation, architecture, masonry]



377 The wheelbarrow, a medieval invention in the West and an ancient one in the East

[Chinese, cathedral, wheel]



378 Women in the Academy

[science, Curie, Poullain, Gozzadini]



379 Hutton's geological theory: A world that neither begins nor ends

[science, religion, cosmology, stratigraphy, Playfair, Scott]



380 The Chinese invention of equal temperament in music

[scales, tuning, Back, Chu, Tartini, Mersenne, Ricci]



381 Using submarines in the Civil War

[Bushnell, Fulton, David, Hunley, Housatonic]



382 Mary Wollstonecraft: feminism and 18th century revolution

[Frankenstein, women, Paine, Blake, Priestley, Godwin]



383 Eli Terry brings wooden clocks to the Midwestern frontier

[Lincoln, sales, medieval, marketing]



384 Samuel Slater reinvents spinning technology in early America

[weaving, textile, cloth, industry, manufacturing, Brown, Quaker, women, patent, invention]



385 The Haya people make carbon steel in ancient Africa

[Black, iron, metallurgy, anthropology, smelting]



386 Some thoughts about invention, inventors, and cooperation

[creative, cooperation]



387 James Nasmyth: an engineer designs heavy machinery with an artist's eye

[Industrial Revolution, Crystal Palace, invention]



388 Towing an iceberg out of the way

[offshore, design, high-pressure, oil, ships, drilling, ocean]



389 The Mayan city of Coba — a story of technology in isolation

[anthropology, agriculture, Yucatan, city, architecture, archaeology]



390 Some thoughts about the origins of writing

[Sumerian, Egyptian, heiroglyph, Africa, Black, invention]



391 Simplicity gives America its 1st jet fighter, the Lulu-Belle

[Skunk Works, airplane, flight, war, invention, design]



392 Margaret Cavendish: a 17th century natural philosopher

[science, women, salon, France, England]



393 Thoughts on the dangers posed by electric fields

[Franklin, lightening, electrostatic, power lines, AC]



394 How did Prometheus really steal fire?

[myth, matches, anthropology, flint, invention]



395 John Herschel, modest inheritor of an "astronomical" legacy

[telescope, science, women, astronomy, Babbage,calculus]



396 Bread, wine, and beer: the origins of fermentation

[alcohol, Bible, vinegar, agriculture, food, chemistry, anthropology]



397 Maria Merian, the mother of entomology

[women, entomology, biology, trades, painting, textiles, anthropology]



398 Taming the beast: in which we forge a relation with animals

[anthropology, zoology, agriculture]



399 How we got from the Stone Age to the Iron Age

[metals, ore, smelting, alloy, Egypt, Greece, furnaces]



400 How the Chinese missed the Industrial Revolution and succumbed to opium

[drugs, tobacco, clocks, Jesuits, China]



401 Herman Hollerith streamlines the 1890 Census and starts IBM

[computer, business, invention]



402 What ever became of solar energy?

[power, nuclear, hydroelectric, dam, wind, tidal, sun]



403 In which we yield to nature and build the Panama Canal

[civil engineering, locks, de Lessups, yellow fever, construction]



404 A night at the opera: The most highly refined technology

[music, theater, Saint-Saens, composition, orchestra, violin, singing, acoustics]



405 Time's Arrow, Times Cycle: Jay Gould talks about time

[Hampton, Black, geology, science, cosmology, Burnett]



406 Why do you and I have legs instead of wheels?

[zoology, design, invention]



407 German women astronomers in the the 17th century

[trades, Germany, Cunitz, science]



408 Measuring the creative genie, and fleeing from him

[invention, Coleridge]



409 The inclined railway on Lookout Mountain at Chattanooga

[Civil War, cable, Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, Indians]



410 Coleridge, Newton: Romantic poets and Victorian science

[Blake, Rationalism, English, England, literature]



411 Unraveling the Mysteries of Stonehenge

[Hoyle, Lockyer, Neolithic, Druids, Aubry, Solstice, astronomy, archaeology]



412 How an old analog computer outlived its species

[design, compressed, compressor, digital, natural gas, SwRI]



413 Edwin Hubble and the 15 billion light year universe

[telescope, NASA, space shuttle, astronomy, nebulae, relativity, Adams]



414 The ancient Chinese South-Pointing Chariot rediscovered

[design, Honda, auto, car, steering, gears, feedback control, China]



415 The chequered history of observation balloons

[Garnerin, Nero, Walpole, France, Franklin, Napoleon, McClellan]



416 The sad story of the Bavarian Polytechnical Society in Nazi Germany

[Hitler, Nazi, von Linde, von Weber]



417 On finding another language to tell what scientists know

[words, Gilbert, fluid flow, teaching, Latin]



418 200 Anniversary of the U.S. Patent and Copyright Office

[famous, law, invention, lawyer, creativity]



419 In which we watch Eliphalet Nott build Union College

[education, university, Hamilton, Burr, Princeton]



420 Leaving domination behind and building the New Jerusalem

[women, Neolithic, Paleolithic, Houston, society, anthropology]



421 William Gibbs and the steamship United States — 30 years too late

[shipping, design, transportation, marine, Queen Mary, flight]



422 The invention of the shot tower: an exercise in perception

[invention, manufacturing, guns, Watts, processes]



423 Frederick Terman, Stanford University, and Silicon Valley

[electronics, electricity, innovation, Klystron, San Jose]



424 So many questions we never thought to ask

[invention, clocks, sundials]



425 Mining cold water to make power and grow food in Hawaii

[OTEC, energy, agriculture, farming]



426 Oliver Heaviside — an electrical sage in solitude

[mathematics, Maxwell, Rayleigh, Hertz, Gibbs, Vector]



427 Printer's marks & devices: brands of the new information age

[Gutenberg, books, Guillard, Fust, Schoeffer, books, symbols]



428 Marie Mitchell: a pioneer of American astronomy

[Annie Jump Cannon, science, Vassar, Nantucket, women]



429 The mismeasure of man: bigotry hides behind numbers

[race, Black, women, Gould, anthropology, Agassiz, Morton]



430 Mining the moon

[metals, metallurgy, space, vacuum]



431 Killing the first person in the search for objectivity

[language, writing, expression]



432 John Montgomery's airplane and its prophet, Victor Loughead

[Lockhead, flight, transportation, Chanute, California, gliders]



433 Kinematic waves in traffic — a social contract

[transportation, automobiles, highways]



434 Fast, cheap, and out of control: the MIT Insect design lab

[robots, artificial intelligence, computers, manufacturing]



435 Hedy Lamarr: The inventor behind the mask of beauty

[women, electronics, control, movies, invention, Antheil]



436 Why bombs can't kill a city

[war, airplanes, sociology, production, WW-II, Viet Nam]



437 An old electricity handbook reminds us that we're smart

[telephone, technology, learning]



438 Redheffer's perpetual motion machine

[science, Philadelphia, power]



439 Building the Great Pyramid and building Chartres Cathedral

[architecture, archaeology, religion, medieval masons, Egypt]



440 The day we threw out the library's card catalog and replaced it with a computer

[information, books, bibliography]



441 Where have all the entomologists gone?

[science, entomology, biology, insects, bugs]



442 Responsibility, accountability, and the design of software

[computers, management, design]



443 The International Date Line: an intellectual teaser

[geography, Pacific, timekeeping, exploration, Magellan]



444 The Royal Geographical Society: science and dreams

[Burton, Speke, exploration, Scott, Amundsen, Livingstone, Hillary]



445 The second American Revolution

[Romantic, literature, Blake, Barlow, Wollstoncraft, Priestley, Franklin, Godwin, invention, Brown, Industrial Revolution]



446 The Mt. Graham red squirrel and the U. of Ariz. observatory

[environmentalists, telescope, biology, regulation, forest]



447 Synthetic and real things in 1910 America

[production, Santayana, manufacturing, Chaplin, society, advertising, environment]



448 High heat flux in Japan: The provenance of an idea

[energy, invention, innovation, research, science, physics]



449 The Shinkansen "Bullet Train"

[transportation, railroad, safety, inventions, innovation, Japan, earthquake, seismology]



450 The fiction of a "Balance of Nature"

[ecology, habitat, pollution, change, environment]



451 Roy Chapman Andrews and his fossils in the Gobi Desert

[exploration, archaeology, dinosaurs, China, Komodo]



452 Diamonds: a fabrication of the mind

[epitaxy, abrasives, heat conduction, materials, crystal, science, invention]



453 The "Man-midwife" usurps a woman's preserve

[birth control, mercantilism, plague, medieval, medicine, birth, sex, women]



454 Arcana of Science and Art: Changing the world in 1832

[Industrial Revolution, vanadium, thermostat, flare, England, America, silk, invention, design, Babbage, Somerville, Blake]



455 In which Rhode Island rum-runners create the U.S. Navy

[military, ships, frigate, Colonial, America, smuggling, Bligh]



456 Synectics: engineering design takes on a more personal face

[invention, psychology]



457 Invicta: on fighting fire ants with fire ants

[science, environment, ecology, entomology]



458 Trebuchet: A story about Rome, China, and Medieval Europe

[military, arms, catapult, slings, bow and arrow, swape, lever, gunpowder, cannons]



459 Tabby and Cob: a construction material for everyman

[masonry, concrete, building, houses, Yeats, Innisfree]



460 Making hotels and prisons out of large building blocks

[construction, concrete, prefabrication, Zachry]



461 The computer joins stage-set design

[theater, Wagner, Bartok, CAD]



462 Fuseli's Nightmare

[Shelley, Wollstonecraft, Byron, art, Frankenstein, Romantic, Gothic, revolution, painting]



463 Chimneys and fireplaces thaw the chill of Northern Europe

[domestic heating, medieval, Wenceslas, smokestacks, Villon, ventilation, cold, heating]



464 Is the Clovis dating of Native Americans Under Attack

[achaeology, anthropology, Indians, radio carbon dating, science, sociology]



465 The Waning of American Science and Engineering Education

[engineering, engineers, science, education]



466 The Iconography of Women and Science: Images and Realities

[art, printing, Rousseau, Kant, Bacon, du Chatelet]



467 The First Steamboat in San Francisco Bay

[Donner, Lienhard, Sacramento, Sitka, California Gold Rush, pioneers]



468 The Man-made Infestation of Starlings in America

[ecology, environment, birds, biology, Darwinian selection]



469 Nicolaus Steno, a sharp observer of nature and possible saint

[Catholic Church, geology, paleontology, science, fossils]



470 The Japanese Zero a airplane with things to teach us

[flight, production, invention, World War Two]



471 Have I really seen technological change in my lifetime?

[technology, icebox, refrigerator, radio]



472 About an old geometry text at the Battle of Charleston

[Civil War, Foster, Legendre, navy, ship, steamboat, gunboat]



473 On making water fit to drink

[civil, environmental, carcinogens, flouride, chlorine, chemistry, Rook, Bellar]



474 John Dee: mathematician, scientist, and sorcerer

[alchemy, Euclid's geometry, England]



475 Are men and women the same or different? An old mischief

[anatomy, du Chatelet, Kant, Rousseau, gender]



476 Lynn White, the stirrup, and the feudal system

[medieval warfare, Martel, horse, Knights in armor]



477 Mary-Claire King and the grandmothers

[Argentina, biochemistry, genetics, women, revolution, Carlton, Wheaton, mathematics]



478 A quiet man in a bow tie: Not as dull as you think

[engineer, design, stereotype, tractor, winch]



479 In which Japan learns Shakespeare and adopts Western culture

[literature, art museum, Macbeth]



480 Parents and children: About the legacy of creativity

[Dunbar, Symons, sanitary engineering, water quality, environment, women, astronaut, civil]



481 The computer earns a grandmaster rating in Chess

[chess, robot, Kasparov, IBM, Deep Thought]



482 The Cornish pump: a wonderfully adaptive technology goes west

[steam engine, mining, Newcomen, Watt, Irish]



483 Dorothea Erxleben, Germany's first woman doctor

[women, science, Halle, medicine]



484 K.G. Englehardt, the Robot Lady, makes humane machines

[design, women, robotics, production, service]



485 Of dinosaurs and dogs: How do our joints work

[zoology, anatomy, biology, science]



486 A look at voting machines

[Edison, vote, politics]



487 The Tollund Man and other bog people of Northern Europe

[archaeology, anthropology, iron age, embalming, Denmark, religion, food]



488 Success, failure, and Biosphere-2 experiment

[ecology, space, NASA, Oracle, Arizona, waste, Bass, greenhouse, Matson]



489 A sonic measurement of the ocean's temperature

[acoustics, global warming, whales, sound, globe, Heard]



490 A countess balloons over Italy's Apennine mountains.

[aviation, flight]



491 Tom Swift: prophetic assembly line stories

[literature, Bobbsey Twins, Rover Boys, invention]



492 Books: more than we thought they were

[literature, Candide, paper, computers]



493 Competition among steam, electricity, and internal combustion cars, in 1900

[engines, automobiles, power, starter, Stanley Steamer, Ford, market driven]



494 Lysenko's mad Marxist evolutionary theory

[genetics, Russia, Soviet, McCarthy, communism, Lamark, Mendel]



495 Srinivas Ramanujan: an inexplicable mathematical genius

[India, Hardy, Hindu, number theory, mathematics]



496 Teilhard de Chardin and Piltdown "conspiracy"

[evolution, theology, Cro-Magnon, archaeology, anthropology, Dawson]



497 The Piper Cub observes its 60th birthday

[airplane, flight, transportation, design, Pullman, Snake River Canyon]



498 Women primatologists close their conference to men

[feminist, anthropology, biology, Santa Cruz, sociology]



499 How old will you get? Writing the longevity equation

[gerontology, Hildebrand, aging, medicine, disease]



500 A Christmas observation of the 500th episode

[creativity, risk, minority]



501 The Maldive Islands: a dream going under water

[environment, global warming, ocean, greenhouse effect, ecology, polution]



502 Flat TV screens: American invention -- Japanese development

[television, computers, electronics, production, innovation, liquid crystals]



503 PCs, electric motors, and more thoughts about change

[computers, factories, steam engines]



504 An Ethiopian shaman uses digital arithematic

[African, Black, mathematics, arithmetic, computers]



505 The shark's tail: better design than we ever thought

[design, screwdriver, zoology, ichthyology, swimming, fish, evolution, hydrodynamics, biology]



506 Unfinished engineering in the state of Washington

[concrete bridges, library, tunnels, design, canals, University of Washington, Seattle]



507 Igor Sikorsky and Sergei Rachmaninoff make airplanes

[helicopters, airplanes, transportation, Pushkin, design, Russia, WW-I, WW-II, seaplanes, amphibians]



508 Ferris' Great Wheel: Thrust out into the sky!

[Chicago World's fair, roller coaster, consciousness, Jaynes, bicameral, Eiffel]



509 The Technological Muse: An art exhibit on technology

[museum, Katonah, techni, Buxtehude, organ, painting]



510 Ben Franklin, electricity, and revolution

[lightning rods, Louis XV]



511 Paracelsus hides real science behind magical alchemy

[chemistry, medicine, Frobenius, Erasmus, Switzerland]



512 The fever thermometer enters medical practice

[medicine, physiology, science]



513 DNA, RNA, and scientific literacy

[biophysics, biology, biochemistry, genetics, genes, science]



514 Tyrannosaurus Rex helps us to understand dinosaurs -- and ourselves.

[zoology, paleontology, extinction, ecology, evolution]



515 Science fiction and German rocketry

[von Braun, Goddard, Oberth, Valier, V2 rocket, Lang, Opel]



516 The Tuskegee Airman help desegregate the Army, and win WW-II

[flight, war, Black, airplane]



517 Sojourner Truth: A slave reshapes America

[Black, women, segregation, slavery, Civil War, Lincoln, Douglas, Garrison, Stowe, King, religion, abolitionist]



518 Colonial slaves teach us about smallpox inoculation

[Cotton Mather, Boston, Black, medicine, Franklin]



519 Benjamin Banneker, The Black "Poor Richard"

[almanacs, Black, Franklin, Jefferson, Washington DC, Rush]



520 Great Zimbabwe: A once great African city state

[Black, Rhodesia, iron age, architecture, masonry, archaeology]



521 Black soldiers in the Civil War: Defining freedom

[war, military]



522 Jan Matzeliger and the first automatic last machine

[shoes, manufacturing, invention, black, Massachussetts]



523 Edison fails and succeeds in converting low grade ore

[iron, steel, electricity, Ogdensburg, Mesabi, taconite]



524 Einstein as an inventor and patent holder

[physics, Szilard, refrigerator, gyrocompass, Mach, manufacturing, special relativity, electricity]



525 Cities and farms: Do cities drive consumption or reduce it?

[environmentalists, ecology, history, mass transit sociology]



526 Should Scientific American have fired Forrest Mims, a Creationist and Fundamentalist?

[Walker, religion, science, science writing]



527 Cox's "perpetual motion machine:" A barometer-driven clock

[Weeks, science, windmills, water wheels, solar energy]



528 Villard de Honnecourt and the decline of Gothic Cathedrals

[Strasbourg, masons, Notre Dame, clock escapements, Reims, invention]



529 Panoramas: The IMAXs of 1800

[theater, movies, art, Barker, Fulton, motion pictures, Reynolds, Constable, painting]



530 Johann Traugott Wandke: Texas' first organ builder

[music, Round Top, Galveston, craftsmanship]



531 John Tyndall fuses practical physics and Romantic poetry

[heat, thermodynamics, philosophy of science, experiment]



532 George Bernard Shaw: Music critic

[theater, literature, Rossini, Parry, reviews, Sullivan, opera]



533 Old cures and superstitions: more effective that we thought

[medicine, science, bleeding, Egypt, malaria mosquitoes, Jenner, fever, Burton, Reed]



534 A cleansing fire in Australia

[ecology, environment, Drake, ethnology, Drake, anthropology, Botany Bay]



535 An evening at a University of Chicago choral concert

[Hassler, Distler, Byrd, Purcell, Poulenc, Vaughn-Williams, Handl, education, music]



536 Edwin Land, polarization, Polaroid, and the Land Camera

[stress analysis, photoelasticity, invention]



537 The Victoria "Dutch" windmill, first windmill in Texas

[power, Witte, grist, turret, Dutch, West]



538 Some facts and reflections on the pace of life

[anthropology, psychology, sociology, tobacco, heart, Watts]



539 The surprise gift of love, invention, and creativity

[DC-3, Wright, flight, aviation, Boeing, B-52]



540 Inventing agriculture: A new look at an old story

[farming, Neolithic, emmer, Natufians, botany, archaeology]



541 Drugs and other modern troubles: a question of scientific literacy

[cocaine, recovery, addiction, AIDS, psychology, neurophysiology]



542 People who knew each other? A question of connectedness.

[Wedgwood, Coleridge, Davy, Watt, Wollstonecraft, Boulton, Godwin, anesthesia, Lunar Society, Rachmaninoff, Sikorsky, Twain, Tesla, Franklin, Small, Priestley, revolution]



543 A program based on a randomly selected date: 584 AD

[Byzantium, Hagia Sofia, Mohammud, Anthemius of Tralles, Greek fire, Bosporus, science, Gothic, Roman arch]



544 Women in medicine, in the ancient classical world

[Hippocratic, Cos, Greece, abortion, Agnodice, Athens]



545 Energy Inventory: On paying environmental costs at the gas pump.

[Boulton, Johnson, Boswell, Watt, Blake, fuel, power, solar, nuclear, economics, tax, Valdez, ozone, pollutants]



546 Trotula and medieval women's medicine

[medieval Europe, Italy, Salerno, childbirth, birth control, gynecology, obstetrics, infertility, Victorian, sex]



547 Bertha E. Jaques and an American school of etching

[Chicago, prints, art, invention, women]



548 A visit to the Taj Mahal and the meaning of technology

[India, architecture, monuments, Moguls]



549 Antonj Leeuwenhoek -- a lesson in simplicity and honesty

[biology, science, microscopes, Hooke, lenses, information]



550 Crossing the Atlantic under steam -- 1819 and 1838

[transportation, steamboat, Brunel, Smith, Lardner, marine, engine, Savannah, Sirius, Great Western]



551 The sounds of silence -- cancelling noise with noise

[acoustics, Simon, active noise control, ANC, MRI]



552 A domestic wind generator, a century before its time

[windmill, solar energy, power, Brush, environment, ecology, electric lights, arc lights, Edison, dynamo]



553 Mulholland waters LA -- and damn the Owens Valley

[Eaton, California, civil engineering, agriculture, ecology, aqueducts, irrigation, construction]



554 Fooling ourselves: great minds against themselves conspire

[Purcell, Dido and Aeneas, simplicity, pipeline, design]



555 Niels Christensen: a combative old man invents the O-ring

[Boeing, seals, gaskets, invention, patents]



556 Melancholy railroad: icon of American growth and change

[steam locomotives, commerce, transportation, Chicago, meat packing, livestock, Whitman, Sandburg]



557 Manufactured sounds: more change than we can bear in music?

[Erard, pianoforte, Mozart, clarinet, organ, synthesizer, Goodman, electric guitar, electronic music, Moog, A. Lienhard]



558 The lost myths and folkways: Bettelheim, Bly, and Revels

[music, psychology, myth, theater]



559 Rates of technological improvement: doubling in a lifetime

[clocks, power plants, transportation, invention, cars, trains]



560 Humankind: one race -- not a thousand subspecies

[biology, evolution, anthropology, Smith, Layton, cichlids, Black, natural selection, zoology, taxonomy]



561 Bad dreams: Engineers worry about their designs

[Wordsworth, Hoover, nuclear safety, depressurization, Hamurabi, creativity, invention, design, Ellis, Golden Gate Bridge]



562 Charles Dupin gets English secrets for France after Waterloo

[French Revolution, Industrial Revolution, Napoleonic Wars, bridges, naval, England, risk, reform, education]



563 Buckminsterfullerene, Bucky balls, or carbon 60

[diamond, graphite, carbon, Smalley, materials, geodesic domes, superconductivity]



564 Various ways to age

[biology, gerontology, rockfish, zoology, salmon, sickle cell, Huntington's, diet, Shakespeare]



565 The first American patent: a process for making potash

[potassium, chemical process, Hopkins, alkalai, Bly]



566 Writing equations for profit, at the cost of the environment

[economics, Hotelling, Peru, ecology, fish, zoology]



567 Chickens, beriberi, and the discovery of vitamins

[Batavia, Eijkman, bacteriology, immunology, Funk, thiamin]



568 A survey of job satisfaction among women engineers

[Baum, Cooper Union, education]



569 Edwin Link's trainer: organs to airplanes to oceanography

[player pianos, trainer, flight, transportation, music, Wurlitzer, diving, war]



570 An urban anthropologist studies New York's crack houses

[dope, sociology, Hamid, narcotics, psychology]



571 The origins of Native North American Agriculture

[farming, anthropology, archaeology, grain, corn, wheat, Indian, Mississipi-Ohio, maize, urbanization]



572 The Boy Scientist: A 1925 book for boys

[technology, education, engineering, Einstein, X-rays]



573 The search for the first naval artillery

[cannons, firearms, gunpowder, war, Renaissance]



574 Cornelius Drebbel invents the 1st modern feedback controller

[Renaissance, alchemist, alchemy, engraving, chemistry, invention, dye, submarine, thermostat, economics]



575 Ancient ziggurats: Was one of them the Tower of Babel?

[Bible, construction, composite materials, civil engineering, archaeology, Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar]



576 Ernst Mach, Einstein, and thought experiments

[Galileo, science, relativity, Aristotle, philosophy]



577 Coming out of the Dark Ages: An old building in Poitiers

[Roman architecture, France, Medieval, Rome, Gothic cathedral]



578 The Ceide Peat Bogs: And old environmental assault

[ecology, Ireland, Irish, fuel, archaeology, anthropology, agriculture]



579 Turning a penal colony in modern Australia

[Sydney, Botany Bay, cathedral, agriculture, water]



580 Vitruvius' ten volumes on technologies of the Roman world

[Rome, architecture, Alexandria, Egypt, siege, war, invention, water organ, Ctsebios, Africa]



581 Anthony Michell, a gentle genius from the Australian bush

[lubrication, invention, rotary engines, bearings]



582 Drilling deep into the Earth

[geology, earthquakes, plate tectonics, well logging, oil wells, Moho]



583 Abelard and Heloise: a parable of creative transcendence

[medieval religion, philosophy, poetry, monastery]



584 Appropriate technology: fitting the machine to the culture

[design, anthropology, third world]



585 The new vision of cities: 1925

[urban sociology, architecture, buildings, construction, modern art]



586 Wilson's vision of an Ibsen play: Death takes a vacation.

[theater, Stevens, art, artist, drama]



587 Alexander Graham Bell invents after the telephone.

[invention, hydrofoil, kites, Keller, electricity, flight, Buckminster Fuller, geodesic dome, tetrahedron]



588 About Mozart, Beaumarchais, and the Marriage of Figaro

[music, opera, theater, France, revolution, Caron, genius clock escapement, invention]



589 Gender and heart attack: medical sexism or medical realism?

[medicine, disease, illness, risk, cholesterol]



590 Frederic Remington, naive maker of the Western American icon

[art, sculpture, Spanish-American War, military, Custer, illustration, painting]



591 In which Virtual Reality takes control of our dreams

[computers]



592 Shaping the Shaker gift of simplicity

[religion, communal, communism, Civil War, architecture, design, buzz saw, table saw, clothespin, weaving, furniture, invention]



593 A 20th century trebuchet in Shropshire, England

[invention, medieval war]



594 George & William Chaffey irrigate Mildura, Australia

[irrigation, agriculture, electricity, California, farming]



595 George Perkins Marsh, a pioneering environmental scholar

[ecology, camel, linguistics, philology, Vermont, pollution]



596 Corbusier invites the airplane to indict the city

[architecture, construction, Milhaud, flight, transportation]



597 Archives in 2001: What's happening to information storage?

[library, books, museums, science education, electronic, Gorman]



598 The Sforza Horse: Leonardo da Vinci's unmakable monument

[art, sculpture, foundry, casting, Renaissance, women]



599 Florence Merriam Bailey: A pioneering American naturalist

[birds, women, conservationist, ecology, ornithology]



600 Walking the Bayou: Thoughts about change and creativity

[health, fitness, exercise, Schweizer, Gibbs]



601 Norman Heatley and the production of penicillin

[Biochemistry, medicine, Fleming, Florey, Oxford, Moberg, antibiotics, chemistry, pharmaceuticals]



602 Blue Planet: IMAX lets us see Earth whole

[art, environment, ecology, space]



603 Ambroise Pare studies birth defects in 1571

[Renaissance, medicine, surgery, biology, science]



604 Chirality: Pasteur learns about left-handed molecules

[chirality, chemistry, science, Biot, light, polarization]



605 Alfred Nobel makes dynamite and wages peace

[blasting gelatin, Kinsky, explosives, war, nitroglycerin, invention, Nobel Prizes, Sweden]



606 Did Newton really see an apple fall?

[Principia, Leibnitz, Voltaire, du Chatelet, De Breteuil, calculus, mathematics, physics, gravity, invention, Candide]



607 Hi-technology windmills come to Kent in 1200 AD

[England, Canterbury, Becket, windmills, water wheels, power generation, King Richard, King John, law, courts, litigation]



608 Collodion: yesterday's Band Aid, and a spur to invention

[medicine, Hyatt, explosives, plastics, chemistry, Nobel, environment, synthetics, nylon, celluloid, Chardonnay, Pasteur, fibers]



609 The parents of invention: Pleasure and Freedom

[prisons, Bunyan, Galois, Archimedes]



610 Paracelsus and Oporinus: The alchemist and the printer

[Froben, Frobenius, Vesalius, magic, science, medicine, anatomy, alchemy, chemistry, books]



611 Drunk on ink: An invention you probably never thought about

[writing, Egypt, chemistry, emulsion, printing, gum Arabic, Shakespeare, writing, books]



612 Godly Play: in which we wiegh the danger of humor

[Berryman, religion, Medieval Church, Benedictine, monastic, reality, creativity, truth]



613 William Gilbert and de Magnetica

[Kepler, Galileo, science, Sullivan, electricity, cosmology, Queen Elizabeth, alchemist, alchemy, electric field, physics]



614 Robert Fludd: the last alchemist

[Paracelsus, Aristotle, Plato, alchemy, Galileo, Bacon, science, perpetual motion, Harvey, blood circulation]



615 Learning to fly: a reflection on learning to fail

[invention, design, Wright Brothers, flight, transportation]



616 19th century engravings tell us about invention and travel

[automobile, car, transportation, flight, railroad, bicycle, engravings, woodcuts, lithography, art, magazines, submarines, ships, airplanes, gunboats, steamers]



617 Darwin: a racist champion of human rights

[evolution, Tahiti, missionary, Lincoln, slavery, science, Black, Gould]



618 Black Americans and salt: a fable about racial superiority

[medicine, heart disease, kidney, metabolism, anatomy, sugar, sickle cell anemia, Darwinian advantage, Diamond]



619 Rattlesnakes and other pit vipers: the Rolls-Royces among Reptiles

[biology, zoology, sensors, invention, fear]



620 Phillis Wheatley: a Colonial slave prodigy writes poetry

[Black women, Hancock, slavery, literature, Colonial America]



621 Alchemists bring magic to the theater and to modern science

[theater, Jones, Jonson, Fludd, Dee, architecture, alchemy, Vitruvius, stagecraft]



622 Ignaz Semmelwies: the unhappy hero of birthing mothers

[Hungary, Hungarian, medicine, germs, antiseptic, obstetrics, childbirth, Lister]



623 Drilling for Heat: Lord Kelvin's energy legacy

[thermodynamics, engines, OTEC, evolution, geothermal energy, geology, science, power production, environment]



624 In which John Tyndall tries to find God in his physics

[science and religion, philosophy of science]



625 The crossbow competes with guns and long bows -- and loses

[military, armament, firearms, gunpowder, Hastings, catapult, long bow, Crecy, Pare, disarmament, arms]



626 Maria Montessori, harded-headed apostle of the child's mind

[education, teaching, creativity, invention, religion, women]



627 The King, his mistress, Flamsteed, and Greenwich Observatory

[astronomy, Columbus, St. Pierre, Wren, Hooke, Charles II]



628 On learning to print music

[Gutenberg, Fust, Schoeffer, block printing, Haultin, musical scores, Ballard, Attaignant, movable type, typesetting]



629 Johann Gregor Mendel: the shy creator of modern genetics

[peas, chromosomes, biology, zoology, Darwin, science]



630 John Joseph Merlin: The Ingenious Mechanick

[Gainsborough, Johnson, Walpole, Bach, clockwork, perpetual motion, roller skate, robots, musical instruments, harpsichord, pianoforte, barrel organ, keyboards, Babbage]



631 In which knowledge flows out through an orifice

[fluid mechanics, viscosity, preservation of knowledge]



632 Joseph Haydn, Primitivus Niemecz, and three barrel organs

[Beethoven, mechanical, clockwork organs, music, revolution, Rationalism, Malzel]



633 The Gentleman's Magazine: the first magazine

[Cave, Johnson, Franklin, journalism, printing, telegraph, submarine, electricity, Bach, Fulton]



634 About using our creative best to heal and influence

[effect, influence]



635 Furnace Town: An old smelter rises out of the rain

[forced draft, steel, smelting, America, Widener, Nassawango, forced draft, iron, Maryland]



636 Gertrude Stein and the invention of the gear shift

[women, Toklas, transmission, Stevens, syncromesh, Bendix, ambulance]



637 Leonardo da Vinci teaches us anatomy and he teaches us how to see

[Harvey, dissection, medicine, art, painting]



638 David Bushnell/Dr. Bush invents the submarine

[naval warfare, Turtle, American Revolution, navy, mines]



639 A Christmas greeting for 1991

[Rodenmeyer, Drake, hydrology, rainfall runoff, thermodynamics]



640 Aslihan Yener finds her tin birthright in ancient Turkey

[tin, lead, silver, copper, bronze, metallurgy, archaeology, women, cuneiform, Yener, chemistry, isotopes, Anatolia, Assyria, art]



641 Visit to a junkyard: a lesson in preservation and prejudice

[ecology, environment, automobile]



642 Tyndall, microbes, and the spontaneous generation of life

[Mary Shelley, microbiology, bacteria, germs, physics, medicine, optics, light]



643 Hall Jackson, Colonial doctor

[medicine, eye surgery, war, digitalis, dropsy, purple foxglove, heart disease]



644 The Peerless gas odorizer: the not-so-sweet smell of success

[New London explosion, Cronkite, disasters, natural gas, industrial safety, accidents, inventions]



645 Sarton and the sensate source of modern experimental science

[Sarton, women, deSolla Price, Lavoisier, Galvani, chemistry, electric battery, steam engine, history of science, poetry, literature, philosophy of science, thermodynamics]



646 Babbage, Ada, and Babbage's 19th century computer legacy

[difference engine, analytical engine, Ada Byron, calculator, mathematics, women]



647 An old magazine still borrows from Europe, but not for long

[magazine, periodical, America, Dickens, diet, car, nutrition, steam automobile, boiler, transportation, technology transfer]



648 Orville Wright and Amelia Earhart try to read flight's future

[transportation, commercial airlines, seaplanes, women]



649 Gertrude Elion, Nobel Prize winning inventor of medicines

[biochemistry, drugs, pharmaceuticals, Hitchings, cancer, chemotherapy, virus, women]



650 Luigi Salvaneschi and the deprofessionalization of business schools

[liberal education, MBA, Forbes]



651 No Furgeson's Rifles to save Furgeson, at King's Mountain

[war, military tactics, American Revolution, South Carolina, guns, invention, Brown Bess muskets]



652 The Butterfly Effect: Edward Lorenz exposes chaos

[Gleick, meteorology, weather, mathematics, initial conditions]



653 The Kronos Quartet teaches us about living in the present

[musical composition, minimilism, invention, postmodern music]



654 X-rays promise infinite possibility in 1896

[Roentgen, cathode ray tubes, futurism, invention, science, medicine, radiation therapy, breast cancer]



655 Matthias Baldwin gives us locomotives, and a better world

[transportation, America, steam power, steamboat, locomotive, Black sufferage, railway, woodblock printing, calico, textiles]



656 Modern medicine begins to take the shaman's herbs seriously

[pharmaceutical, pharmacological, drugs, healing, folk medicine, Brazil rain forests, curare, Pacific Yew, Taxol]



657 Order out of Chaos: The computer takes us where mathematics could not

[Second Law of Thermodynamics, computer, Jupiter, Melville]



658 Albrecht von Haller, troubled genius of 18th C physiology

[anatomy, poetry, literature, medicine, Gottingen]



659 Percy Julian, grandson of a slave, invents pharmaceuticals

[chemistry, Black, drugs, hormones, cortesone, DePauw, Glidden]



660 Inventing the future: a task of both inventor and consumer

[invention, telephone, typewriter, Edison, phonograph, Watt, steam power, electronics, Akahabara]



661 Franz Schubert walks around the post-modernists

[lieder music, German Romantic poetry, Schopper, homosexual, gay, literature, nature, Industrial Revolution, von Schlegel]



662 In which invention pre-empts expectation.

[computer, library, information retrieval, information systems, serendipity, CD-ROM, HARLiC, Wilson]



663 The Zipper teaches us a lesson about design

[Velcro, Judson, invention, clothing, Huxley, fasteners, Sundback]



664 Hezekiah builds a waterworks -- and he builds it well

[Gihon Spring, water supply, Bible, Old Testament, Jerusalem, geology, Karst, Israel, Gill]



665 A walk through the Inventors Hall of Fame

[Edison, Pasteur, Alvarez, Julian, Carver, Matzeliger, Elion, Bell, Wright, Marconi, Morse, McCormick, Whitney, Atanasoff, Carothers, Ford, Fermi, American patent, neoprene, nylon, Otto]



666 Wallace Carothers dies -- giving birth to nylon and neoprene

[rubber, du Pont, organic chemistry, invention]



667 Dog-sledding the Iditarod in Alaska: The Last Great Race

[transportation, athletics, sport]



668 Ivan Veniaminov, priest and engineer among the Aleut people

[religion, Alaska, Russian, instrument making, churches, anthropology, ethnography, Native American, Indians, chess]



669 Baidarka -- Aleut kayak -- a marvel of boat design in bone, driftwood, and sealskin

[Native American, transportation, boats, canoes, ethnography, anthropology, Indian, Dyson]



670 Goe and catche a falling starre: The Tunguska meteorite

[Donne, asteroids, neutron bomb, comets, astronomy, poetry]



671 Your quiet place -- find it or die.

[library, books, Yeats, Sartre, peace, poetry]



672 Why the reckless, or at least recklessNESS, survives

[Darwinian selection, psychology, Konner, creativity, invention]



673 A dream of nuclear power -- overblown and slow in coming

[atomic bomb, atom bomb, nuclear reactor, Hanford, journalism, Hiroshima, Seaborg, Laurence, Weinberg, Oppenheimer]



674 Tournament species or pair bond species: which are we?

[anthropology, zoology, biology, gender, Bakhtiari, sex, Jaynes]



675 Abacus II: A drab little machine changes history

[computer chips, integrated circuits, welding, calculators, Texax Instruments, production, manufacturing, robotics]



676 Alice Liddel and Charles Dodgson in Wonderland

[Alice in Wonderland, photography, mathematics, psychology, literature, fantasy, children, Lewis Carroll]



677 Hero's steam turbine and modern atomic theory

[science, alchemy, power production, steam engine, vacuum, Galileo, Torricelli, Boyle, Leonardo da Vinci, Alexandria]



678 James Watt, Joseph Black, and the separate condenser

[steam engine, power, energy, design, thermodynamics, latent heat, specific heat, invention, Glasgow]



679 In which we build the last Heathkit

[do-it-yourself, model building, Goldwater, Heath Company, computers, electronics]



680 Electronic information media: Swimming in the Ocean of the Stream of Stories

[Rushdie, library science, information, retrieval, journals, computers, books]



681 The Chudnovsky brothers scale the mountains of Pi

[mathematics, computers, number theory, Russia, KGB, Preston]



682 In which Ole Roemer learns the speed of light in 1675

[astronomy, physics, Tyndall]



683 In which we weigh animal life against human life

[vivisection, biology, medicine, insulin, diabetes, blood flow]



684 Midgely invents ethyl gas and Freon -- a Pyhrric triumph

[Lowell, Kettering, Ethyl, Freon, chemistry, periodic table]



685 Vannevar Bush tries to predict our world in 1945

[digital computer, analog computer, analogue, NACA, future, information storage, library, books]



686 In the beginning: On recreating the earth

[environmental, ecology, Copland, Bible, religion, Genesis]



687 A Gift of Books: on scrolls, codices, and Pergamon's Library

[Rome, Egypt, Alexandria, Turkey, parchment, vellum, papyrus, Anthony, Cleopatra, Attalus, Attalid, Eumenes, writing, codex]



688 Willis Carrier wields the witchcraft that conditions our air

[Milam Building, air conditioning, psychrometry, refrigeration, Newcomen Society]



689 Michael Servitus: the blood flow of a martyr

[Tertullian, Galen, Paracelsus, alchemy, alchemists, Calvin, Protestant Reformation, Harvey, anatomy, medicine, religion]



690 Ginaca's machine gives Hawaii independence -- until it stops running

[agriculture, Liliuokalani, food, production, Dole, design, tourism]



691 Francois Arago holds James Watt up as a model for French intellectuals

[Napoleon, Ecole Polytechnique, science, Steam engines, production, Japan, power, productivity, Dickens, social reform]



692 In which the player piano plays counterpoint to our dreams

[music, pianola, phonograph, Clark]



693 Rebuilding a child destroyed by silence: A parable of engineering design

[psychology, linguistics, child abuse, language]



694 Hiram Maxim: a brilliant inventor plays at war

[machine guns, armament, flight, invention, electric lighting, gas illumination]



695 John Ericsson: 19th century agent of creative change

[Monitor and Merrimac, ironclad, steam engines, hot air engine, topographical mapping, solar energy, tidal energy, Sweden, screw propeller, Civil War, navy]



696 Menocchio the miller is caught in the printing revolution

[Italy, Inquisition, religion, books, Decameron, cosmology, Bible, theology, big bang, Koran]



697 Queen Mary: an old old lady who still serves us

[ships, navigation, transportation, ocean liners, Masefield, war, Spruce Goose]



698 Othmar Ammann defines 20th century bridge design

[Verrazano Narrows, architecture, New York, Le Corbusier, functionalism, suspension bridges]



699 The Gaia Hypothesis: Mother Earth wears a human face

[cosmology, ecology, biology, religion, Lovelock, Margulis, intelligence, geology, chemistry, spectroscopy, temperature]



700 In which we learn that life is instability

[Gaia, biology, Wright Brothers, chemistry, thermodynamics, solar system, atmosphere, feedback control, freedom]



701 The Age of the Marvelous: An art exhibit tells of scientific change

[Renaissance, Platonism, Aristotle, science, Pare, Topsell, Galileo, Durer, opera, theater, Leonardo da Vinci, alchemy, printing press]



702 Trompe-l'oeil: in which 17th century artists show us that our eye can't always be trusted

[Rembrandt, painting, Platonic, Aristotle, Zeuxis, alchemy, Leonardo da Vinci, Renaissance]



703 In which Leonardo da Vinci takes up embryology

[anatomy, medicine, art, sex, reproduction, birth, Clark, Fabricius, procreation]



704 Arago, Humboldt, and Gay-Lussac set the course of 19th century science

[astronomy, meteorology, balloons, slavery, geography, atmosphere, Liebig]



705 The ambulance: the spawn of necessity instead of invention

[war, transportation, Larrey, McKinley, medicine, funeral, Barton]



706 A genetic search for the historical Eve

[Gould, anthropology, mitochondria, biology, religion, Gaia]



707 Darwinian individualism, cooperation, and a lost bird

[ecology, biology, zoology, Gaia, electronic communications, Hillel, Gould, competition, Japan, starlings]



708 The end of books? Maybe not.

[library, computers, harpsichords, pianos, change, cars, automobiles, electronic media, information storage]



709 The US Constitution: A mirror of the Iroquois Nation

[American Indians, Native Americans, government, Canassatego, constitution, political science, Franklin]



710 In which Franklin, Lavoisier, and Guillotin debunk Mesmerism

[guillotine, magnetism, electricity, medicine, Mozart, Gould, healing, MRI]



711 In which Old Joe Camel get his nose under the tent

[drugs, DiFranza, cigarettes, advertising, law, legal, courts, scientific method]



712 William James and Nathaniel Shaler: one remembered, one forgotten

[Agassiz, Harvard, paleontology, Darwin, Gould, Kentucky, science, psychology, anthropology]



713 A look below the surface of a technical meeting

[boiling, condensing, condensation, nuclear power, steam power, Japan, America, accidents, cold fusion]



714 The old school tie; interior change catches up with us

[Berkeley, California, biology, sociology]



715 Communication and collaboration -- not the same thing

[Schrage, Edison, Bohr, Franklin, Braque, Picasso, Crick, Watson, Monet, Renoir, trust]



716 Circling about to view Rodin and Rilke

[sculpture, art, poetry, literature]



717 Harry Moseley: Explained the Periodic Tables, then died in war at 27

[military, particle physics, X-ray, WW-I, atom, radioactive, Rutherford, radiation]



718 Of engines, machines, and ingenuity: misunderstood words

[etymology, literature, Chaucer, Scott, Le Corbusier, words]



719 QWERTY: the mindless invention of your computer keyboard

[typewriter, evolution, Gould, invention]



720 Petr Kropotkin: a saintly naturalist and anarchist

[Russia, Darwin, Huxley, biology, sociology, Marx, anarchy, political science]



721 In which Ray Dolby invents more than a hiss suppressor

[electronics, acoustics, Indian music, tape recorders, digital]



722 Julius Robert Mayer: a tale of blood and energy conservation

[medicine, first law of thermodynamics, Joule, physics, heat, energy, Tyndall, Rilke]



723 Computer dating: no prince charming, but a new community

[networks, electronic communications, modem, Sorenson, e-mail]



724 A Swedish conference about creativity and context

[sociology, geography, invention, Sigtuna, Sweden]



725 A second self or a joint self? You and your computer

[Turkle, hacker, Pac-man, sociology]



726 Little yellow Post-its -- a footnote to invention

[3-M, sales, office, merchandising, invention, Silver, Fry]



727 James Black, Joseph Black, upset stomachs, and Tagamet

[medicine, Pharmacology, chemistry, invention, histamine, antihistamine, beta-blockers, cimetidine, antacid]



728 Gould contemplates the severed head of Lavoisier

[France, French Revolution, Marat, Corday, science, chemistry, oxygen, Franklin, Lacepede, Lagrange]



729 Banting, MacLeod, Best, Collip (and more) create insulin

[diabetes, Scott, Paulesco, medicine, pharmacology]



730 Design and visual cues: When words fail us

[signs, button, door, visual, cues]



731 Coming up to speed on wooden race tracks

[Oldfield, transportation, automobile, car, racing, Ford, Stanley Steamer, Prince, Runyan]



732 In which you help me teach a new thermodynamics class

[information theory, entropy]



733 The Bay Psalter: Mrs. Glover and our country's first press

[Colonial America, printing, Daye, Day, Dunster, Green, Indians, Pilgrims, religion, women, Bay Psalm Book]



734 The Discover invention awards: you make the choice

[videophone, tires, recycled polyester plastics, computer]



735 The Peerless Gas Odorizer: a father's legacy to his son

[natural gas leaks, accidents, ASME]



736 Was there a scriptorium at Buildwas Abbey? Probably.

[book writing, scribes, Cistercians, indexing, pagination]



737 Crossing the Bonneville Salt Flats -- in 1846 and 1970

[Walker, pioneers, Lienhard, Salt Lake, racing cars, Gabelich, Campbell, Breedlove, Thompson, stock car, ecology, environment]



738 King Camp Gillette turns his Occam safety razor on human affairs

[Lewis, Chase, Ford, Roosevelt, Metropolis, sociology, Utopian socialism, invention, Nickerson]



739 Benjamin Rush, idiosyncratic founder of American Psychiatry

[medicine, psychology, Franklin, America, Declaration of Independence]



740 Rainbows, curve balls and other wonders of the natural world

[physics, education, physical phenomena, boiling, bubbles]



741 Michael Faraday learns science in a book bindery

[dyslexia, educational psychology, electricity, magnetism, Davy, Marcet, political economics, Africa, Maxwell, Tyndall, religion, Sandemanians]



742 Carlos Prieto: An engineer plays unaccompanied Bach

[design, cello music, den Hartog, aeolian vibrations, MIT, Sarton]



743 The Rev. Mr. Robert Stirling and his hot air engine

[music boxes, nonelectric fan, jet plane, jet engine, turbojet]



744 Mrs. Marcet, alias Mrs. B, teaches chemistry and pedagogy

[Haldimand, thermal radiation, political economics, electrical, teaching, Faraday, women]



745 The lady cujus ingenium huad absurdum: a lesson in feminism

[Sallust, Marcet, Latin, chemistry, political economics, women]



746 Rescuers of the holocaust: a parable about creative risk

[Nazis, Wallenberg, Houseman, genocide, art museum]



747 Watching the Titanic sink: a lesson in objective science

[ships, books, scientific method, psychology]



748 Inventing the telephone: Putting the user in the equation

[telegraphy, Reis, Bell, Webb, monopoly, regulation, economics, communications, Sandburg]



749 Information and twilight of hierarchy

[electronic networks, printing, books, patent and copyright law]



750 Louis Agassiz founders on evolution in the Galapagos

[biology, Gould, James, Lowell, geology, creationism]



751 Actors use art to complete their story-telling

[Caruso, painting, sculpture, Bellamy, Fonda, Laurie, Quinn, Falk, Woronov, Mostel, Winters, theater, movies, creativity, film, Pickins, Beery, Bowie, Warhol, psychology]



752 In which Spanish doctors try to understand Aztec medicine

[Cortez, pharmacology, Hippocrates, Galen, Aristotle, Phillip II, Bravo, sarsaparilla, Lopez de Hinojosis, Farfin, herbs, religion]



753 Gutenberg: borrowing for twenty years to invent movable type

[Gensfliesch, printing, books, Dritzehn, Fust, Schoeffer, books]



754 IF HARMONY IS WHAT YOU CRAVE THEN GET A TUBA BURMA-SHAVE

[advertising, marketing, consumers, shaving, Burma-Shave, tuba]



755 About luck, recognition, and invention

[creativity, Post-its, Watt, chemical processes, steam engines, Pasteur, Burma-Shave]



756 In which Medieval Europe invents Johann Gutenberg

[block printing, movable type, scriptoria, manuscripts, Abelard, Benedictine and Cistercian monks, universities, sheepskin, parchment, vellum, paper, Chinese, books]



757 Semaphore telegraphy: a grand technology, long forgotten

[Western Union, pony express, war, Hooke, France, England, communications, Morse]



758 Railway wheels made of paper: How we lost our nerve

[transportation, railroad trains, composite materials, Pullman]



759 Heloise: logic, passion, and mastering life after Abelard

[religion, philosophy, Catholic Church, Benedictine, women, psychology]



760 Galileo, Newton, and a mathematical smokescreen

[Aristotle, witchcraft, Principia, science, physics, Church]



761 On awe, solar eclipses, and a new metaphor for creativity

[astronomy, Milton, moon]



762 William Kelly doesn't quite get the drop on Henry Bessemer

[iron, steel, metallurgy, Kentucky, Drew]



763 Cyrano de Bergerac, writer of science fiction

[moon, Donne, Galileo, Gassendi, Rostand, astronomy, literature, science]



764 Werner von Braun transcends the heritage of the V-2

[rocketry, Congreve, war, Nazi, Tsiolkovsky, Oberth, Goddard, jet propulsion, moon, spacecraft, military]



765 Gustave Eiffel builds a Tower, a vision, and still more

[architecture, construction, structures, bridges, ironwork, Bloy, deMaupassant, radio, aerodynamics, Wright Brothers]



766 The American farm windmill: hi-tech fruit of 40 years work

[agriculture, power generator, Wheeler, Burnham, Halladay, Perry, Chicago World's Fair]



767 Practical French medicine takes root in the American North

[doctors, nurses, surgeons, Pare, midwives, medical education, Plutarch, Canada, insulin, Osler, Cartier, Colonial]



768 120 years of flight gives birth to the Wright Brothers

[Jeffries, Blanchard{'s balloon}, dirigible, Robertson, Lougheed, Lockheed, airplane, transportation]



769 Paper clips: an adventure in elegance and design simplicity

[Vaaler, Middlebrook, Gem, invention]



770 Christmas Eve 1992 -- the night when the animals speak

[folklore, Ritchie, Revels, American Revolution, music]



771 A tale of two balloons, 188 years apart

[Robertson, dirigible, invention, Newman, design, flight, transportation, Quixote, parachutes]



772 Perry Collins and Cyrus Field race to forge a telegraph link

[Atlantic cable, Alaska, Siberia, Russia, communications]



773 William Godwin's logical lament on the death of Mary Wollstonecraft

[Blake, anarchy, revolution, Paine, Romantic poetry, feminism, women, Shelley, Frankenstein]



774 In which William Beaumont gazes into Alexis St. Martin's stomach

[medicine, surgery, Fulton, physiology, digestion, anatomy]



775 The Throwing Madonna: Reflections on women and technology in pre-history

[archaeology, anthropology, stone age, primate biology]



776 Carbon-14 rearranges history -- especially along the muddy Danube

[archaeology, chemistry, radiocarbon dating, Lepenski Vir]



777 Slide-rules and word processors: Adapting to technological change

[computers, calculators, electronic communications networks, e-mail]



778 Bandar-log and otters: of altruism and community

[Kipling, Darwin, biology, sociology, psychology, India]



779 Balloon-frame houses: the first unique American architecture

[Chicago, construction, Taylor, Snow, houses]



780 Old scientific instruments and modern engineering design

[medicine, surgery, war, wounds, astronomy, microscopes, transits, sundials]



781 In which Josquin des Pres explains the meaning of "error"

[musicology, Chaucer, DNA, Thomas, engineering design, counterpoint, biology, etymology]



782 Audrey Hepburn: Prepared to risk when there's nothing left to lose

[movies, film, hunger, starvation, food, age, women, aging, Africa, Somalia, geriatrics, creativity]



783 Flatland and Hilbert Space: The allegory and the reality

[mathematics, sociology, literature, religion, geometry, relativity, fourth dimension, Einstein]



784 Topiary: Another kind of living animal

[botany, landscape, landscaping, sculpture, art, sculpture]



785 William Caxton takes printing to England -- and to her people

[Margaret Duchess of Burgundy, manuscripts, explicits, scribes, writing, Gutenberg]



786 The Stereoscope: virtual reality in 1851

[Baudelaire, Arago, Wheatstone, Brewster, stereopticans, Daguerreotype, Crystal Palace]



787 Stereotype and fine type: William Ged and William Caslon

[Linotype, fonts, Boyer, printing, France, England]



788 The subterranians: surfing the new computer networks

[communications, electronic media, psychology, sociology]



789 In which an abundance of wood shapes America

[axe, iron, coke, smelting, ship building, interchangeable parts, clocks, railroads, ecology]



790 1,911 Best things Anybody ever Said: The creative lurch

[Chesterton, Rogers, Shaw, Mencken, Robinson, Berra, Lamarr, West, humor, Sheehan, Coward, Thoreau, Edison, Wilde, Goethe, Ghandi, Rockefeller, Green]



791 Alois Senefelder, a laundry list, and lithography

[printing, intaglio, woodcut]



792 Thomas Jefferson, the generous Colonial American engineer

[Franklin, Monticello, plow, library, Fulton, patent, navy]



793 Thomas Edison's season in the sun at Menlo Park

[electric light, phonograph, telegraph, inventions, dynamo, Pearl Street Station, power]



794 In which Ellen Swallow Richards brings women into MIT

[education, home economics, sanitary engineering, chemistry]



795 John Ericsson fails three times, and we all profit

[navy, Civil War, Stirling hot air engine, ship design, screw propeller, heat transfer, invention]



796 A Renaissance church: first fruit of Leonardo's new architectural eye

[architecture, geometry, da Vinci, one-point, perspective, Rhiems, camera obscura, drafting, Villiard de Honnecourt]



797 Alcuin, Charlemagne, and the invention of modern education

[Charlemagne, education, Alcuin]



798 The Ik do not sing: reflections on music and community

[anthropology, sociology, Bartok, Africa, Thomas, Turnbull]



799 In which mimetic architecture speaks to the automobiles

[California, transportation, advertising, communication]



800 A medieval groom teaches his young wife -- and us as well

[household, housewife, plague, diet, food, feminism, hourglass, writing, literacy, sociology, women, domestic]



801 I try to reconcile courtesy and political correctness

[Aztec, racial prejudice, race, feminism, precolumbian, sociology, Native American]



802 Blueprint: the thing in the mind and the thing in the world

[reproduction, design, drafting, Ozalid, mechanical drawing, Herschel, Hoover Dam]



803 Helen Keller: love, language, and self-awareness

[socialism, Carnegie, Sullivan, blind, handicap, deaf, Holmes, Whittier, psychology, women, linguistics]



804 Learning about two kinds of doctor, on the computer nets

[Paracelsus, alchemy, Plato, Aristotle, books, German, medicine]



805 The sky: a most excellent, but most fragile, canopy

[ecology, geophysics, chemistry, atmosphere, Shakespeare]



806 Medicine, the youngest science: recalling what's forgotten

[pharmaceuticals, Osler, Banting, insulin, syphilis, Minot, tuberculosis, heart failure, hospital, psychology]



807 Dromedary camels in Texas, a lost ecological experiment

[Marsh, Jefferson Davis, Smithsonian Institution, military, army, dromedary, Civil War, Mexican American War, cavalry]



808 Medieval furniture: reflections on privacy and comfort

[domestic, household, sociology, etymology]



809 Jan van Eyck: a Dutch master emerges 200 years too soon

[art, painting, Renaissance, Gutenberg, music, Dufay, Okeghem, Josquin, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Medieval, printing, humanism]



810 In which we let our lives be defined in an instant

[Bly, Eichhorn, nuclear power, Lienhard, creativity, pressure]



811 Victorian working women disturb a Victorian gentleman

[Munby, labor, coal mining, servants, psychology, sociology]



812 Running dogs and Thomas Jefferson help us invent comfort

[interior design, domestic, home, Rybczynski, psychology]



813 Thomas Jefferson falls in love, and gives Monticello its dome

[Cosway, painting, art, architecture, invention, America, Williamsburg, France, Colonial, music]



814 Charles and Ray Eames recreate furniture in a child's world

[architecture, art, interior design, sculpture, children's toys, play, furniture, chairs, Saarinen]



815 In which a bag-lady spells out my fears

[Butcher, poverty, sociology, dog sleds, city]



816 Imitating Osage Orange: The story of barbed wire

[farming, agriculture, American West, invention]



817 Thomas Hodgkin's fight against disease and social injustice

[medicine, pathology, slavery, Canadian Indians, Quakers]



818 The porch glider: America looks outward for a season

[interior design, architecture, comfort, motion sickness, inner ear, Frank Lloyd Wright]



819 Inventing the word panvention -- to describe what we all do

[invention, slide rule]



820 The shotgun house: an African technology, more important than you thought

[Black, architecture, sociology, slavery]



821 In which Walker Percy finds a critic he can trust

[literature, Kauffmann, Agee, Conroy, The Moviegoer, Kierkegaard]



822 Medieval armories in late 19th century American cities

[National guard, military, strikes, architecture, armory, castles]



823 The PWA shapes 21st century America -- a different view of government spending

[welfare, socialism, Hoover Dam, Holland Tunnel, music education, architecture, sanatoriums, Chaffey, construction]



825 The Invention of the Gothic cathedral: Suger and St. Denis

[architecture, Cluny, Bernard, theology, religion]



824 The Scopes trial: a sinister cloud behind a comic opera

[anthropolgy, evolution, Bryan, Darrow, creationism, intolerance, Dayton]



826 Muybridge, Marey, and the problem of picturing motion

[motion pictures, medicine, measurement, biomechanics, Stanford, cameras, biomedical, horses]



827 German Zeppelins achieve failure in their success over London

[war, airships, airplanes, flight, bombing, transportation]



828 In which Somerville and Marcet open English science to women

[Babbage, Ada Byron, Arago, Gay-Lussac, Biot, Laplace, celestial mechanics, geology, mathematics]



829 Jurassic Park: The quiet message hidden in the book

[dinosaurs, DNA, mathematics, choas, evolution, movies, ecology, environment, literature]



830 Derelict Japanese junks crossing the Pacific Ocean

[ships, shipping, navy, Perry, Indian, colonization, etymology, survival, navigation]



831 In which the invention of tubes for oil paints changes art

[painting, Van Gogh, cameras, impressionists, alchemy, medicine, pharmacology, impasto, invention]



832 Breaking Frames: About technology and art taking society apart and putting it back together again

[Romanticism, textiles, steam power, Darwin, Wordsworth, information revolution, boiler explosions]



833 Fermat's Last Theorem: Where can we go from the mountaintop?

[mathematics, Pythagoras Theorem, Taniyama, algebra, Wiles]



834 In which we create a bird's eye view of a new land

[lithography, printing, art, perspective, American West]



835 Peter Cooper: Inventor, eqalitarian, rich man, educator, political figure, and still more

[Hewitt, Fulton, Lincoln, slavery, railway, Thom Thumb, Civil War, Cooper Union, library, education]



836 The brief day of the cast iron building

[Haviland, Bogardus, Derby, Coalbrookdale, Chicago Fire, architecture, art, elevators, skyscrapers, Swinbourne, Ruskin]



837 Diocles' parabolic mirror -- in an old Arabic book

[Archimedes, burning mirror, geometry, mathematics, Toomer, solar tower, optics, solar energy]



838 The Armory Art Show and 20th century revolution

[modern painting, sculpture, unions, armory, impressionist]



839 Hooke and Boyle: a parable about appearance and substance

[science, Wren, optics, religion, Aubrey]



840 The cloths of heaven: about a 9000 year old rag

[fabric, textile, neolithic, agriculture, weaving, clothing, Yeats, flax, carbon dating, spinning]



841 The tidal wave of technological change

[electronic revolution, fluid mechanics, tectonics, printing, books, telephone, mechanical calculators, tsunami]



842 In which John James Audubon is redeemed by his birds

[art, painting, ornithology, zoology, biology, nature, Cuvier, France, French Revolution]



843 George Catlin: A Gift, a wound, a historical recored

[Native American Indians, Audubon, art, painting, anthropology]



844 Eugene Goldbeck's panoramas: seeing out the corner of our eye

[photography, optics, art, perspective, peripheral vision]



845 Of wood saws, kerf, and sawdust

[lumber, logging, Shakers, Tabitha, circular saw]



846 Harington's John: in which an Elizabethan poet invents the flush toilet

[Ariosto, sanitary engineering, literature, Elizabeth, Henry VIII, feedback control, plumbing, technology]



847 Mathematics, subtlety, and a world of open questions

[pipeline, stress analysis, chaos, Butterfly Effect, viscous fluid flow, fluid mechanics, Jurassic Park, engineering]



848 Miasma: bad air, night air, fresh air, mosquitoes and disease

[air quality, medicine, Snow, Koch, Pasteur, Lister, Tyndall, malaria, yellow fever, typhoid, cholera, water quality, architecture, porches, James, literature]



849 Tunneling underneath our anger

[Shakespeare, France, England, Chunnel, Tso, Chinese, China, construction, psychology, subways]



850 Underground: a secret world of tunnel and tubes

[Macaul