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 The straight last: when shoes finally learned left from right
02
Timepieces
From shadow on sand to atomic clocks — humanity's chase of ever-more-precise time.
Latest Huygens's pendulum clock: fifteen minutes become fifteen seconds
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.
04
Locks & Keys
Six thousand years of mechanisms for excluding people, with one of history's best rivalries at its centre.
Latest Yale's cylinder lock, or how the portrait painter solved the front door
05
Maps
Ten thousand years of humans drawing the world — from Babylonian clay tablets to satellite imagery.
Latest The map that named America
06
Phones
A 150-year story: from Bell shouting at Watson to foldable AI-powered supercomputers in a pocket.
Latest The DynaTAC 8000X, or the phone that finally left the car
07
Money
From cowrie shells to Bitcoin — every century has a moment it redefined what money is.
Latest The jiaozi, or what happens when your money needs its own ox cart
08
Writing Systems
Every way humans have figured out how to freeze speech onto a surface — cuneiform to Unicode.
Latest Latin alphabet: how a borrowed script conquered the world
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.
11
AI
The long road to machines that reason — from Aristotle's syllogisms to today's frontier models.
12
Cryptography
The long argument between hiding things and finding things — Caesar cipher to post-quantum standards.
Latest The Playfair cipher, or the one the Foreign Office refused
13
Code Editors
Every program that other programs are written in — TECO to Cursor.
Latest Brief, or the keyboard that other editors had to imitate
14
Software Architecture
The evolving answer to 'how do we organize code at scale?' — structured programming to LLM orchestration.
Latest Design Patterns: the catalog that gave software a common language
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 ALGOL 60: an improvement on nearly all its successors
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 Hancock's Enterprise: London's first scheduled motor bus
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.