An unfinished chronicle of the history of things.
Short essays on single milestones across eighteen categories — one new post per category per week. Written, researched, and illustrated end to end, then read aloud.
01
Shoes
Ten thousand years of footwear, from Fort Rock sagebrush sandals to carbon-plate supershoes.
Latest Louis XIV's red heels: when footwear was a court credential
02
Timepieces
From shadow on sand to atomic clocks — humanity's chase of ever-more-precise time.
Latest Galileo's pendulum, or the clock he never lived to build
03
Bridges
Civil engineering's most dramatic form — log across a stream to mile-long cable-stayed mega-structures, with a spectacular collapse or two along the way.
Latest The Rialto Bridge, or how Venice bet on a single arch
04
Locks & Keys
Six thousand years of mechanisms for excluding people, with one of history's best rivalries at its centre.
05
Maps
Ten thousand years of humans drawing the world — from Babylonian clay tablets to satellite imagery.
Latest The Hereford Mappa Mundi: the world as it was meant to be
06
Phones
A 150-year story: from Bell shouting at Watson to foldable AI-powered supercomputers in a pocket.
Latest Joel's handoff patent, or how the cellular network learned to keep a call alive
07
Money
From cowrie shells to Bitcoin — every century has a moment it redefined what money is.
Latest The Arab dinar, or the coin that erased the emperor's face
08
Writing Systems
Every way humans have figured out how to freeze speech onto a surface — cuneiform to Unicode.
Latest The Greek alphabet, or how borrowed consonants became the world's first vowels
09
Video Games
Arcade, console, PC, handheld, mobile — all one medium, from OXO on the EDSAC to the handheld revival.
10
Computing
From pebbles in sand trays to the machines that now hold the world together — told one milestone at a time.
Latest The Atanasoff-Berry Computer, or the basement machine that unmade ENIAC
11
AI
The long road to machines that reason — from Aristotle's syllogisms to today's frontier models.
Latest Shannon's chess paper and the problem it was really solving
12
Cryptography
The long argument between hiding things and finding things — Caesar cipher to post-quantum standards.
Latest Jefferson's wheel cipher, or the invention the army made twice
13
Code Editors
Every program that other programs are written in — TECO to Cursor.
Latest Alice Pascal: the editor that refused to let you make a mistake
14
Software Architecture
The evolving answer to 'how do we organize code at scale?' — structured programming to LLM orchestration.
Latest Three-tier architecture, or how the application server ate the fat client
15
Programming Languages
How humans learned to talk to machines — starting with Ada Lovelace writing instructions for a machine that didn't exist yet.
Latest COBOL, or how a committee invented the world's most durable programming language
16
Cars
From Cugnot's steam fardier to self-driving electric vehicles — two and a half centuries of the machine that reshaped how humans live, work, and move.
Latest De Rivaz's hydrogen carriage: the first internal-combustion automobile
17
Coffee
From wild Ethiopian berries to Yemeni qahveh khanehs to the espresso machine — six centuries of the drink that wired the modern world.
18
Sports
From Neolithic wrestling pits to the modern Olympic stadium — how humans turned play into organised competition, and competition into civilisation.