Technology
Discover facts about technology. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Technology
The WWII gun attachment that destroyed its own bullets
Shooting around corners sounds like a brilliant video game mechanic, but the real-world physics are an absolute nightmare. In WWII, desperate German engineers…
Discover more
IBM fought a genius for his memory patent
Corporate extortion is practically an American pastime, especially when it involves bleeding-edge tech. In the 1940s, Dr. An Wang invented the pulse transfer…
Discover more
The woman who taught search engines which words matter
Every time you Google a bizarre question at 3 AM and actually find the answer, you owe a debt to Karen Spärck Jones. In 1972, this British computer scientist…
Discover more
The room-sized machine that secured Churchill's calls
What started as a boring way to cram more phone calls onto expensive copper wires ended up securing the most sensitive conversations of World War II. Homer…
Discover more
The brain tumor survivor building a brain-scanning hat
Nothing motivates innovation quite like having your skull cut open. After surviving a brain tumor, display engineering genius Mary Lou Jepsen didn't just…
Discover more
People once hunted for Wi-Fi from moving cars
Back in the wild west of the early 2000s, finding free internet meant awkwardly cruising through residential neighborhoods with a Pringles can antenna…
Discover more
STACKY FOR IPHONEA bigger world.
One discovery
at a time.
Keep discovering with Stacky. Interesting facts in an app that is always within reach.
The drum machine that became famous after failing
The Roland TR-808 was a massive commercial flop when it dropped in 1980 because it sounded absolutely nothing like a real drum kit. The iconic,…
Discover more
The IBM firing that couldn't stop Lynn Conway
Lynn Conway was doing groundbreaking work at IBM in the 60s, but they unceremoniously fired her when she announced her gender transition. In an act of…
Discover more
MIT's flight simulator project helped invent computer memory
Back when computers were essentially giant, slow calculators fed by punch cards, MIT's Whirlwind project decided waiting was for losers. Funded by the US Navy…
Discover more
The first answering machine recorded sound on wire
Long before voicemail or even cassette tapes, a Danish engineer named Valdemar Poulsen decided the best way to capture a voice was to magnetically abuse a…
Discover more
How France accidentally subsidized sex chatrooms
Long before AOL chat rooms, the French government gave out free Minitel terminals to kill the printed phonebook. What they actually built was a horny…
Discover more
How Stuxnet escaped a supposedly sealed network
Stuxnet was a masterpiece of geopolitical sabotage, likely built by the US and Israel to secretly spin Iran's uranium centrifuges to death while feeding fake…
Discover more
The robot built from a living woman's memories
Rather than just buying a nice anniversary gift, a tech billionaire commissioned an incredibly uncanny robotic head filled with her spouse's downloaded…
Discover more
AT&T spent a fortune on a phone nobody wanted to use
Decades before we all learned to hate turning our webcams on for morning meetings, AT&T incinerated a fortune learning that people actually prefer…
Discover more
The computer standard Japan embraced—and America ignored
While the West was drowning in incompatible floppy disks, Kazuhiko Nishi strong-armed Microsoft into backing a utopian standardized computer platform that…
Discover more
The internet project that took 50 years to arrive
Ted Nelson invented the concept of hypertext in the sixties but hated the World Wide Web so much he spent half a century building a beautifully…
Discover more
How a software bug made a radiation machine deadly
Software engineers love assuming their code is flawless, but in the 1980s, that arrogance literally vaporized people. The makers of the Therac-25 radiation…
Discover more
French engineer elegantly solved the color transition
Upgrading the entire world to color television was almost a colossal disaster because nobody wanted their expensive black-and-white sets to become instantly…
Discover more
The plastic terminal that shaped modern PCs
You are likely reading this on a direct descendant of a glorified 1970s calculator. The Datapoint 2200 was designed merely as a 'dumb terminal' to connect to…
Discover more
The Engineer Behind Early Electronic Music
Every time you hear a heavily autotuned pop star or a robot voice in an EDM track, you owe a begrudging nod to Harald Bode. Long before synthesizers were…
Discover more
We sent aliens a pixelated message in 1974
If intelligent alien life ever judges our species, it will be based on a 1,679-bit text message that looks like an incredibly sad game of Space Invaders. In…
Discover more
The synthesizer you play by blowing into it
If you ever looked at a complex synthesizer and thought, 'I really wish I had to blow into this to make a sound,' the Akai EWI was made specifically for you.…
Discover more
The 1940s computer that beat humans at Nim
Decades before we were losing to AI in video games, an electromechanical bully called the Nimatron was humiliating humans at the 1940 World's Fair. Designed…
Discover more
The inaudible sound that can jam hidden microphones
Paranoia is a lucrative industry, especially when you can sell people a gadget that screams at frequencies only dogs can hear. Ultrasonic scramblers,…
Discover more