Category: Stories & Inspiration
Stories of science, technology, startup journeys and lessons from history.
Base 256, Stream I/O, and Bureaucracy: The Engineering Behind the Forgotten Grundy NewBrain
How a state-funded British microcomputer with base-256 floating point and stream I/O lost out to supply bottlenecks and administrative chaos.
Ken Thompson Showed How a Compiler Could Hide a Backdoor From Its Own Source Code
You inspect a program’s source code line by line. The dangerous code is not there. You rebuild it from that clean source. The dangerous behavior…
Barbara Liskov Made Data Abstraction a Language Feature Before Object-Oriented Programming Went Mainstream
Most programmers today take a basic capability for granted: define a new kind of value, expose the operations that users are allowed to perform on…
Cecilia Payne Used Starlight to Show That Stars Are Mostly Hydrogen and Helium
For a long time, astronomers could look at the dark lines in a star’s spectrum and identify elements without knowing how much of each element…
Granville Woods Patented a Railway Telegraph That Let Moving Trains Communicate
In the 1880s, a railway could move faster than the messages meant to keep it safe. Stations could telegraph one another, but a train already…
Explorer 1’s Missing Counts Helped James Van Allen Find a Radiation Belt Around Earth
The first clue looked like a broken instrument. After Explorer 1 launched on January 31, 1958, its cosmic-ray detector sometimes reported unexpectedly low counts. In…
Elizabeth Magie Designed The Landlord’s Game to Show What Happens When Rent Compounds
Before Monopoly became a game about bankrupting everyone else, Elizabeth Magie designed a board game to make players notice what rent and land ownership were…
Alice Hamilton Went Into Dangerous Factories to Find the Evidence Others Were Missing
When Alice Hamilton began investigating industrial disease in the United States, she was told that European warnings about factory poisoning did not really apply to…
George Carruthers Put an Ultraviolet Observatory on the Moon — and Gave Earth a New View
On Apollo 16, astronauts carried a 50-pound, gold-plated ultraviolet camera to the Moon and set it up in the shadow of the lunar module. The…
Elizebeth Friedman Turned Rum-Runner Radio Traffic Into Evidence
During Prohibition, smugglers had a technology problem that looked like an advantage. Radio let rum-running ships and shore stations coordinate across long distances. Codes and…
SIGNAL TITANS