Technology
Discover facts about technology. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Technology
Zuse built a programmable computer in his parents’ home
While American and British labs were pouring massive government funding into early computers, a stubborn German engineer named Konrad Zuse was casually…
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The Victorian machine that played Chopin from paper
Long before Spotify or Napster, the Phonola was automating your living room using literal breath. These pre-digital marvels ran on perforated paper rolls that…
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The billion-dollar bombsight that missed its mark
The US military spent $1.5 billion on the Norden bombsight during WWII, firmly believing this mechanical marvel could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from…
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The 1910 search engine built from 12 million cards
Imagine trying to build a search engine, but your only technology is dead trees and sheer neuroticism. In 1910, the Mundaneum was launched as a massive…
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Why every Zune 30 froze on the same day
On December 31, 2008, Microsoft's answer to the iPod universally committed mass suicide. Every single Zune 30 device on the planet froze at exactly the same…
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Before VR, 24 people shared one wooden panorama
Imagine if your VR headset weighed a ton and required you to sit in a circle with 24 strangers staring into wooden eyeholes. That was the Kaiser Panorama, a…
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When submarines communicated with underwater bells
Decades before sonar became a slick Hollywood movie staple, early submarine communication relied on the highly sophisticated method of ringing underwater…
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The robot typewriters that billed Memphis for trash
If you think municipal government tech is hilariously outdated now, you should have seen it in the 1930s. Long before software could automate mass mailings,…
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The man who claimed to invent the floppy disk
Dr. Yoshiro Nakamatsu—a man who famously dives underwater to starve his brain of oxygen for 'inspiration'—firmly insists he invented the floppy disk in 1952…
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The early monitors that let nurses track hearts remotely
Long before we had smartwatches nagging us about our heart rates, the Victoreen Instrument Company patented early remote cardiac telemetry purely because…
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The mechanical machine that cracked Enigma
Bletchley Park didn't rely on elegant software to crack the Enigma code; they built loud, terrifying, room-sized electromechanical beasts. The Bombe lineage,…
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Percy Ludgate designed a rival analytical engine in 1909
An Irish accountant completely missed the memo about Charles Babbage and independently invented a Victorian mechanical computer. In 1909, Percy Ludgate…
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Radar began as a way to track thunderstorms
The revolutionary radar interface that saved Britain in WWII was originally just a tool meant to help pilots dodge bad weather. Robert Watson-Watt wasn't…
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The humble resistor that made pacemakers possible
The man who revolutionized the pacemaker and countless guided missiles did it by obsessively perfecting the most boring component in electronics. Otis Boykin…
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The internet report named after an office room
The foundational rulebook for how early internet nodes talked to each other was creatively named after a random office door. When building the ARPANET,…
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How a nuclear blast damaged the first live-TV satellite
The satellite that brought live television to the world was unceremoniously murdered by the US military's obsession with nuclear fireworks. Launched in 1962,…
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The student worm that crashed 10% of the internet
The first major internet apocalypse wasn't a malicious cyberattack; it was a grad student’s research project with zero chill. Robert Tappan Morris just wanted…
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How a computer error buzzer became a musical instrument
Early computer scientists were given an auditory warning system for machine errors and immediately used it to pirate music. The Ferranti Mark 1, a massive…
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Chile once ran its economy from a sci-fi control room
In the early 1970s, the Chilean government attempted to manage their entire socialist economy using telex machines, mainframe computers, and a control room…
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GeoCities hosted a theory that the Middle Ages never happened
Imagine being so contrarian you delete 300 years of history. Heribert Illig’s Phantom Time Hypothesis—which argued the years 614 to 911 AD were entirely…
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The calculator designed in a concentration camp
The Curta Type I mechanical calculator looks like a tiny, metallic pepper grinder, but twisting its crank actually performs complex mathematical wizardry.…
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Hellschreiber hacked bad radio signals with dot matrix
German inventor Rudolf Hell essentially created the unholy offspring of a fax machine and a teleprinter in 1929, appropriately named the Hellschreiber.…
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The fire that knocked out 170,000 New York phones
You think a localized AWS server outage is chaotic? Try losing all communication for an entire massive borough. In 1977, a disastrous fire ripped through a…
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The forgotten computer built in an Iowa basement
If you ask someone who invented the computer, they will probably mumble something about Alan Turing or ENIAC. They will definitely not mention a physics…
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