In 1863, an eager young inventor in New York City spotted a newspaper advertisement that would change the course of material history. The notice offered a $10,000 prize to anyone who could invent a substitute...

» Call for Papers: The 12th Tensions of Europe Conference, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, 8-10 July, 2026 | Research network on history, technology and Europe

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PART 2

Nokia was once the undisputed leader of the mobile phone market. So much so that even failures like the N-GAGE didn’t matter to them. But…

> If you are a viewer in Canada you are very likely to own a type of screwdriver that viewers outside of Canada are very likely to have never seen or even heard of in their life.

The Transformative Journey of Communication Technologies

> ‘The wheel and axle’ revolutionized human technological history by transforming linear to rotary motion and causing parts of devices to move. > While its ancient origins are commonly associated with the appearance of carts during the Bronze Age, we focus on much earlier wheel-shaped find: an exceptional assemblage of over a hundred perforated pebbles from the 12,000-year-old Natufian village of Nahal Ein-Gev II, Israel. > We analyze the assemblage using 3D methodologies, incorporating novel study applications to both the pebbles and their perforations and explore the functional implications. > We conclude that these items could have served as spindle whorls to spin fibres. > In a cumulative evolutionary trend, they manifest early phases of the development of rotational technologies by laying the mechanical principle of the wheel and axle.

The wheel changed the course of history for all of humanity. But its invention is shrouded in mystery. Imagine you’re a copper miner in southeastern Europe in the year 3900 BCE. Day after day, you haul...

How media technologies made themselves at home in one of the most private spaces of modern life.

Harold Evans, the late author of "They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators," talks about how A.P. Giannini helped change the banking industry by expanding services to the middle-class, and also speaks on what he did for the San Francisco Bay Area.  The full interview from a 2004 episode of "Conversations On The Coast with Jim Foster" can be heard now wherever you get your podcasts.  

YouTube video by ElectronicsNotes

A different origin than we thought.

Computational design reveals a plausible path from primitive rollers to the first wheel-and-axle—born not from tinkerers in open fields, but from ore-hauling Neolithic miners deep in the Carpathians

In 1959, physics legend Richard Feynman bet $1,000 that no one could build a motor smaller than a rice grain. A year later, Bill McLellan showed up with a microscope and the impossible—a working motor...