Inventions
Machines, ideas and accidents that quietly changed everything.
8 articles
INVENTIONSTesla's New Roadster Can Jump Over Traffic. Here Is the Catch
Tesla's new Roadster climbed a wall almost upside down and jumped over parked cars on air jets. Here is what is real, what is hype, and when it comes.
INVENTIONSThis robot was designed over 500 years ago, and it works
A knight in armor that sat up, waved its arms and turned its head, with nobody inside. Leonardo sketched it in the 1490s, and modern engineers who rebuilt it found that the idea holds up.
INVENTIONSThe first powered flight in history covered less distance than the wingspan of a modern jumbo jet.
On a freezing, windy morning at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, two bicycle makers from Ohio built a machine that no human had ever flown before. It stayed in the air for less time than it takes to read this sentence out loud twice.
INVENTIONSIn eighteen forty seven, a doctor discovered handwashing could save lives, and doctors hated him for it.
A young doctor in Vienna noticed that mothers were dying on one hospital ward far more often than on another, just a few doors away. When he figured out why, almost nobody wanted to believe him.
INVENTIONSThey made ice in the desert with no electricity.
Nobody had a freezer. Nobody had electricity. Yet in the middle of a scorching desert, people found a way to make solid ice appear overnight, using nothing but mud walls, wind, and the cold night sky.
INVENTIONSThe blast was roughly as powerful as the initial explosion at Chernobyl's reactor.
When a Blue Origin rocket stage exploded on its pad in Florida, scientists measured the shockwave traveling over sixteen hundred kilometers, all the way into Texas, as sound too low for human ears.
INVENTIONSNobody Understood Why the Workers Were Dying Until the Bridge Was Almost Done
Men dug the Brooklyn Bridge foundations in pressurised boxes under the river, and coming back up crippled them. One of the victims was the chief engineer.
INVENTIONSOnly One Company on the Planet Knows How to Build This Machine
Every leading-edge chip on Earth is printed with light made by blasting 50,000 droplets of molten tin every second. Here is how the machine works, and why nobody else builds it.