That's the way progress works: the more we build up these vast repertoires of scientific and technological understanding, the more we conceal them.
It is extraordinary how safe flying has become. You are now statistically more likely to be elected president of the United States in your lifetime than you are to die in a plane crash. What an amazin...
Innovations usually begin life with an attempt to solve a specific problem, but once they get into circulation, they end up triggering other changes that would have been extremely difficult to predict...
Berners-Lee was supremely lucky in the work environment he had settled into, the Swiss particle physics lab CERN. It took him ten years to nurture his slow hunch about a hypertext information platform...
We are strangely biased, as individuals and media institutions, to focus on big sudden changes, whether good or bad - amazing breakthroughs, such as a new gadget that gets released, or catastrophic fa...
A vertical movement toward market incentives is noticeable, nonetheless. As industrial capitalism arises in England in the eighteenth century, new economic structures raise the stakes for commercial v...
…let winged Fancy wander Through the thought still spread beyond her: Open wide the mind’s cage-door… —KEATS
Silicon-based life may be impossible for one other reason: silicon bonds readily dissolve in water.
The garage is the space for the hacker, the tinkerer, the maker. The garage is not defined by a single field or industry; instead, it is defined by the eclectic interests of its inhabitants. It is a s...
The contamination of drinking water in dense urban settlements did not merely affect the number of V. cholerae circulating through the small intestines of mankind. It also greatly increased the lethal...
Today there are more than three billion people around the world who lack access to clean drinking water and basic sanitation systems. In absolute numbers, we have gone backward as a species.
The first transatlantic line that enabled ordinary citizens to call between North America and Europe was laid only in 1956.
Babbage had most of this system sketched out by 1837, but the first true computer to use this programmable architecture didn’t appear for more than a hundred years.
Aided by the young George Pullman, who would later make a fortune building railway cars, Chesbrough launched one of the most ambitious engineering projects of the nineteenth century. Building by build...
What you end up seeing when you look at history is that people who have been good at pushing the boundaries of possibility, and exploring those frontiers of good ideas and innovations, have rarely don...
The wealthiest cities of the world will follow Venice’s lead and simply try to engineer their way around the problem. The poorest cities will follow New Orleans’ lead—at least so far—and just move to...
The time travelers are usually adapt at intercrossing different fields of expertise. That's the beauty of the hobbyist: it's generally easier to mix different intellectual fields when you have a whole...
The observers of the time were detecting a phenomenon that we now largely take for granted: that mass behavior can often diverge strikingly from the desires of the individuals that make up the mass.
Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders. They want to complete each other as much as they want...
But despite the Secret Service–like behavior, and the regal nomenclature, there’s nothing hierarchical about the way an ant colony does its thinking. Although queen is a term that reminds us of human...