An unfinished chronicle of the history of things.
Short essays on single milestones across nineteen 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.
02
Timepieces
From shadow on sand to atomic clocks — humanity's chase of ever-more-precise time.
Latest The aluminum ion clock, or how NIST gave time nineteen decimal places
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 Chenab Rail Bridge, or how to build a record where roads don't exist
04
Locks & Keys
Six thousand years of mechanisms for excluding people, with one of history's best rivalries at its centre.
Latest Apple Home Collection: the lock the protocol grew into
05
Maps
Ten thousand years of humans drawing the world — from Babylonian clay tablets to satellite imagery.
06
Phones
A 150-year story: from Bell shouting at Watson to foldable AI-powered supercomputers in a pocket.
Latest The last 2G tower
07
Money
From cowrie shells to Bitcoin — every century has a moment it redefined what money is.
Latest The genesis block: Satoshi Nakamoto's opening line was a newspaper headline
08
Writing Systems
Every way humans have figured out how to freeze speech onto a surface — cuneiform to Unicode.
Latest Linear Elamite: cracking the script no one could read for four thousand years
09
Video Games
Arcade, console, PC, handheld, mobile — all one medium, from OXO on the EDSAC to the handheld revival.
Latest Baldur's Gate 3, or the sequel that earned its twenty-five-year wait
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.
13
Code Editors
Every program that other programs are written in — TECO to Cursor.
Latest Google Antigravity, 2025: the editor that decides for itself
14
Software Architecture
The evolving answer to 'how do we organize code at scale?' — structured programming to LLM orchestration.
15
Programming Languages
How humans learned to talk to machines — starting with Ada Lovelace writing instructions for a machine that didn't exist yet.
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 The exhaust pipe gets a conscience: the catalytic converter mandate, 1975
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.
Latest Calcio storico: the first printed rulebook for a team ball game
19
Motorcycles
From Roper's steam velocipede to the Honda CB750 superbike — the machine that stayed upright through physics and rewired the freedom of the open road.
Latest Isle of Man TT 1907: the race that Britain couldn't hold